ED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. I'm here with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley, and today we're going to talk about uncovering the secret treasure of our True Self.

Guy, everybody loves the idea of a secret treasure. It brings up images of Indiana Jones finding a chest of gold doubloons... and of course, we think if we get those gold doubloons, it will make us feel stronger and better about ourselves. But every great teaching tells us that the treasure is within. So, the first question is: Why is it that we can't see something that is as close as our own heart?

GF: It's a good question, and I'll answer it with an idea to help you, and everyone else, start to see why it is that we can't see what is right in front of us, what is right within us.

Every one of us lives in a world that is no larger and no smaller than our understanding. That is really the world that I'm living in right now while I'm talking to you and that you're living in while you're talking to me. We share a common space, we breathe a common air, we're in a common building, yet our understanding isn't in common. Your understanding gives you the experience of this moment just as my understanding gives me my experience of the moment.

According to the size of our understanding, we are afforded the pleasure, the power, or the pain of living in whatever it is that our mind is telling us that we're experiencing at the moment. So when we can't understand that simple idea, Ellen, then our mind naturally gravitates to an image, something that we can understand.

My mind just thought of those little gold doubloons with chocolate in them. Remember those? When you think of a treasure, you think of something relative to an image that is in your mind that is stored out of what you have known, what you have seen, what has pleasured you. So when we think of a treasure of our True Self, we have a tendency to refer immediately to our own past, these ideas that are very much the foundation of our present life.

The key here is to start understanding that that which I imagine as being my true nature, that which I imagine as being a true pleasure, a true kindness, a true love, is not the same as the Real Treasure. Understanding that is the beginning of changing the way in which we relate to the world, and of course, finding ourselves as we actually are.

ED: So what we need to do is enlarge our understanding.

GF: Yes. There is the idea of enlarging our understanding, but do you need to enlarge the amount of air you can breathe? I don't need to enlarge the amount of sunlight that streams down that warms me and nourishes me. All that I can use is there. This is always the problem with the size of our present understanding, because our mind only knows to look for things that it is familiar with and that define it.

Our True Nature is not defined by anything. Who we are does not think about itself in order to know itself. Is there anything you can think about that doesn't require you going into the past? When we think about things, the thoughts that we have -- the experience of them, the content of them -- is all connected to things we have known.

ED: Yes, and often there is a negative connotation with them.

GF: Of course. There can be a negative connotation, but in this instance, I'm telling you that just to go into thought at all about myself is negative to the possibility of me living from my True Self.

We are not meant to live in time. When we think about ourselves, when we think about things we want -- that we call that which will fulfill us -- even when we imagine something we think we've never had, we are still looking at images that our mind has picked up from TV, or a book, or from someone else. We have simply ascribed ourselves to what we imagine it would be like to have that. I imagine the pleasure and I experience the pleasure as I have stored in those images. As I live that pleasure, I think: "This is what I have to have to be my True Self, because now I feel confident. Now I feel strong."

Any time a person goes into thought in order to define themselves in any way, they have appropriately, because of that, confined themselves. As we define ourselves, we confine ourselves. There is a golden rule if you ever want to think of these things relative to your True Nature. That's all we know to do is to define ourselves.

ED: Right. And all of those things that we define ourselves by are things in the world that are transitory. They pass, and so they are not a lasting treasure.

GF: They're not only not a lasting treasure, but for the point of our conversation, yes, those things appear out in the world. There is that fine automobile. There is that beautiful home. There is that job where I'm recognized as an authority of some kind. There are those places and positions, but they only exist out there as an important thing to us because of the idea that we hold of them in our mind.

The idea of the possession, the idea of the position gives me a sense of myself, of being real and secure, having a bright future, and being worthwhile. But because this image is connected to conditions outside of myself, as soon as any of that even starts to change, the whole way in which I've known myself starts to rattle and roll, and now I've become afraid because unless I can keep the world the way I want it to be -- control people and positions -- I'm going to lose who I have taken myself to be. Our True Self cannot get lost that way because it never finds itself in anything that it defines itself by.

ED: This all reminds me of a story you tell in Let Go and Live in the Now about a little princess, Celeste. Her mother, the queen, tells her that she is going to receive a great gift, and Celeste is very excited about this. The next day, the mother says, "OK, get in the carriage, we're going to go on a trip." They go for day after day, and Celeste never sees her gift. She gets angrier and angrier until she finally explodes. She says to her mother, "Why are you tormenting me? When are you going to give me my gift?" Her mother says, "We've been driving through it all these days." It was a gift too large for Celeste to see with her limited understanding.

GF: Exactly. We live in a world the size of our understanding. The queen mother was showing her that Celeste was the proper inheritor of this entire kingdom, but Celeste was looking for gold, or ponies, or a carriage, or her own palace as she understood what it meant to have something great.

It's so hard to explain to people that real greatness has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anything that you can ever think about. It has nothing to do with any way in which you will ever imagine yourself. True greatness is a relationship with Greatness, and when you're in true relationship with Greatness, with God, with Life, the very fact of that relationship places you in proper order in the relationship. You understand your role as a participant in this perfecting, perfected life.

You are the literal recipient of an influx of life that doesn't think about itself. It is itself, and its life is your life. We don't see the magnificence of it because we only know to look at life through eyes that can only see the content of a mind that is looking through the eyes. In other words, when we look out at the world, we don't look and see the world that's there, even at the most elementary level. We look out and see the objects, the behaviors, and the persons that our mind tells us are there because when it sees what it says is there, then it is the see-er. It knows itself as being apart from -- either abused by or uplifted by -- those things that it has named as being outside of itself. Reality just isn't like that, but our experience is that way because that's our present level of understanding. We need to change it, Ellen.

ED: What is it that we need to see? How do we open up our eyes to what is really there?

GF: It starts with simple things. A person can spend twenty, thirty, forty years of his or her life -- I see people like this all of the time -- and for the longest time, fear makes sense to the person. Fear makes sense to you. It makes sense for you to be afraid of what he just did, of what they may take from you, of what could happen tomorrow. That makes sense to a human being whose world of understanding is defined by this relationship that the mind has with its own objects. That makes sense because if something happens with that, I'm going to lose something, something bad is going to happen to me. Fear makes sense because I'm vested in something that my mind says is crucial to my very existence.

ED: So what I call the treasure I want actually closes me off from finding a true treasure, because it puts me in fear that closes me up even tighter.

GF: Do you see that Ellen? That's the thing. It is so important not just to talk about these things, but to see it for yourself. You're going out on a job interview or you have to go to a business meeting, or you're going to travel someplace, or you just have to sit down with your children, or maybe discipline your dog -- the simplest relationship. If one is attentive, you can see in a moment like that, that fear sweeps into you. And when fear sweeps into you, it sweeps into you with all of the reasons why it's necessary for you to protect whatever it is that's telling you is vital to your continuity, to your existence.

Here's the problem: All of you are so complacent. You have no idea how complacent you are. If you had the smallest inkling what you are complacent to inside of yourselves and the way it's stealing your life from you, and how you walk around drained and defeated because you've been trying to protect something that can't be protected even if you managed to do it, then this would be the start of the simple thing that I'm talking about: the simple need -- which is natural, inherent, and deeply spiritual (meaning backed by Reality, God itself) -- to no longer be afraid.

ED: We have to stop making deals with our own inner tormentor.

GF: Yes, but it's so simple to say. Can I do it right now? Can I be sitting in my home or driving my car, and catch that thought that says, "What's the use?" The True Self never asks, "What's the use?" The True Self never complains about anything, because that nature is in a relationship that is continually completing itself anew every instant. It doesn't carry with it any of these ideas, images, icons, ideologies with it by which to know itself. It's living in a vast, dynamic relationship with Life itself. That Life itself is fulfilling itself, and when one is living like that, it isn't a question of "What am I going to get?" or "What might someone take from me?" or "What does he mean by that?" and all of the things that the mind occupies itself with to make what is essentially meaningless into something highly meaningful. Because then I know what to do with myself again. I'm going to re-establish my kingdom so that I can go through the whole fear cycle one more time! A person has to get weary of that.

A person has to absolutely see the impossibility of pleasing fear, and how as long as we do that, we're living from a nature that has defined itself by things outside of itself, by relationships exterior to itself, and that it fears will change. As long as you fear change, you'll resist it. As long as you resist it, you'll never learn from it. As long as you never learn, you'll never grow. As long as you never grow, your understanding will never be a part of this vast treasure of your True Self.

ED: I think one of the keys here is that we don't understand True Self. When I think of self, all I know is what I've been protecting all these years. And if I don't protect that, what will I be?

GF: What am I? What will become of me? That's right.

There has to come this critical moment in everyone's life where they see the sheer futility of continuing to follow the same path, of behaving the same way, of calling upon fear as a guide, of complaining about life when it isn't the way they want it to be -- not because they're wise, not because they have some great spiritual strength or courage or anything like that, but just because of their wish to participate in a broader life -- then that Broader Life gives them a broader understanding.

The Broader Understanding, Ellen, always comes first to us as a kind of darkness. When I live by an imagined light and then I keep falling on the ground from it, I can only know one thing. I get up and I say to myself, "Well that wasn't right!" and now I'm the light again, and now I proceed according to this light that I call myself. The True Self doesn't think in terms like that. This nature we're speaking about understands that at any given moment, it is exactly where it needs to be -- just as you are right now if you were to be awake. You are exactly where you need to be in terms of being awake and aware of yourself. When you're awake, when you're aware, you are participating in a world that is larger than your knowledge of it.

The true pursuit of a human being is to continually enter into a world larger than his or her knowledge of it because it is innate in us to want to be part of this expansive movement of Light, to grow, to understand. But at a certain point, all that we know is not to enter into a world larger than my knowledge, but to take my knowledge and use it to crush the world into some little ball that I can put in my pocket so I can maintain the way it orbits. Can you see how that has to go in two different directions?

ED: Right. As you're always quoting Paul, we have to have hope in things unseen.

GF: That's right. Look how beautiful the idea is, and what futility there is to think that a person can know the world that they're in. I can't know the world that I'm in apart from my awareness of it. And if I'm truly aware in the present moment -- which is my True Self -- then it doesn't matter that "I don't know" because I'm being given what I need to know in the moment. And if I'll receive that, then in order to receive it, I have to let go of this self that's got everything crunched into a little ball, because he's no longer needed. And so I die. But I live. Over and over -- meaning not in a series of cause and effect events, but as an actual dynamic of being alive the way we're intended to be alive.

ED: You've talked about how we're made of the stuff of stars. We're meant to be part of this whole universal process of transformation.

GF: Yes. Your True Self is made in the image of God, and the image of God is not Ellen, or Guy, or anyone else -- no matter how profound or chiseled their body may be. The image of God is the matrix and the workings of the sustenance and the source of the universe itself. That is the image of God. And each and every one of us is a living expression of that Life, the Ruach Adonai, the True Spirit. That is what we are invited to live in, and instead we live in a tiny little cottage made up of conflict and fear, produced by trying to control a world that we'll never control according to the nature that wants that. We have to learn to let go and live in the Now.

ED: Thank you, Guy. This has been a Fireside Chat with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.

ED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Welcome to a Fireside Chat with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley.

Guy, in your new book, Let Go and Live in the Now, you relate a special idea that really deserves deeper attention. You tell a short story whose moral is expressed by this short poem: "The feel is real, but the why is a lie." So many of us would say we feel the pain of suffering, but we don't really understand why we suffer as we do, do we?

GF: No. Our problem is, by and large (and it has been for as long as humans have walked on his planet), that we have dozens of reasons why we ache the way we do, but we fail to see that for all of the answers that we've given ourselves, our fundamental problem still exists -- meaning that we still hurt -- and the conundrum of this pain is compounded with each passing generation, as each subsequent generation believes that it will finally "get it right."

What we fail to see is that not only are future generations (including our own present one) not getting it right, but for all of our actions to try to bring an end to our suffering as individuals and societies, the actions themselves are depleting the planet of resources, bringing us to war with other human beings -- not only in a familial sense but in a global sense -- and turning everything faster and faster in the wrong direction.

ED: So you're saying that we find an explanation for our suffering and then do something in order to ameliorate it, but we're not really going after the real cause.

GF: When your stomach aches, what is the purpose of it?

ED: To warn me that I've been doing something bad.

GF: It's a sign, a symptom of the body that is revealing that something has been done to it that is against its balance. When we have a stomach ache, we say, "OK. I should have only eaten four cookies, not the dozen that I ate!"

Why don't we see our psychological pain and suffering as fundamentally as that? The reason is that we human beings are more than the sum of our experience, but we think and believe that all we are is our experience. Let's look at this idea.

Life has produced a series of experiences -- the kind of person we are, the kind of family we were raised in, the environment that family took part in, the social conditions -- all of which have formed an essential experience that we take as being who we are. But we are more than that. We are more than the sum of our experience. Within each of us there is a nature that is being acted on by forces greater than itself. These forces act upon these essential elements of ourselves, of our life, and they turn and produce conditions that we then call our experience. But what happens is that we are ignorant of the fact that we have in us something more than the sum of our experiences because we measure ourselves by these experiences. So that then, when natural changes take place in life, we meet those movements from the mistaken idea that who we are is limited to who we already know ourselves to be through all that we've experienced. And, as such, anything in our new experience that challenges this past sense of self is seen as a threat.

ED: We try to understand our present experience of life in terms of what we already know.

GF: Yes -- not just try to understand it -- we try to control it. More accurately stated, there are parts of us that want power over what is perceived as an attacker, not recognizing that what's happening isn't the real cause of what's punishing us. Our stress is the negative effect of a false self that clings to "what was" in order to hold on to what it imagines itself as being.

We are more than the sum of our experience, but every time someone walks up to us and they don't show us the respect we want, or something that we've worked towards falls away, in that split second, we think, "Oh no!" And the pain starts! Why? Because we measure such moments -- and ourselves, accordingly -- through the images that live in us created by all our past experiences.

ED: So I resist an experience that could actually pull me into a larger world, and I stay trapped in a small world of suffering.

GF: Yes. The inner attitude is: "Just leave me alone!" Followed, of course, by finding someone or something to blame for the way we feel. But, Ellen, even in the most devastating moments there isn't one of these events, taken rightly, that isn't a secret invitation asking us to let go of and transcend the self we've been. But in order to do that, we have to release ourselves from this body of experience by which we presently know ourselves.

ED: So, we can meet these events in a different way. What is this different way in which we can meet events?

GF: This goes back to what was said at the beginning. When it comes to our unhappiness, our negative states, our suffering, the feel is real but the why is a lie.

Here's a child lying in bed at night, and something takes place in his bedroom that scares him. A shadow runs across the wall. The instant the shadow runs across his wall, the mind -- loaded with his experience of seeing horrible images on TV or at the movies -- instantly imagines the monster hiding in the corner behind the chair. In his mind he sees that monster! It's there, hiding in the corner. So, his heart starts to race because his adrenals have kicked in; he is sure he must protect himself from what his mind "sees" as being there. All these feelings he has are quite real, and they are perfectly logical to the self that is stimulated by such fearful negative images stored in the mind.

ED: The mind that has defined why.

GF: Yes, the mind defines why the feel is real, but we can look at the child and see that his why is a lie. We know that the reason that child is in pain and suffering is because of having become unconsciously identified with some negative image… so the feel is real, but the why is a lie.

ED: One can more or less understand how this happens with a child's mind, but what about us? Why would our "self" rather suffer and hang onto its feeling of being real than to let it go?

GF: It doesn't even occur to us that there is actually a beautiful purpose behind whatever it is that happens to us, always inviting us to discover within ourselves a higher self, a truer self. But we must choose our path as each moment unfolds, because to live by the default state of letting darkness define us when things don't go as we wish, is to slowly lose the chance of ever transforming our lives. And we know what happens to people who cling to their suffering, who become professional martyrs, because we have seen their destitute fate.

ED: Then everything that happens to us can be for our benefit... if we use it properly?

GF: Absolutely. But, it begins with becoming individuals who are willing to ask themselves the tough questions, and then be honest with their answers. For instance: Tell me what it prospers any human being to sit and think about their pain and who is to blame for it? The only thing that comes out of this kind of thinking is the confirmation of a conflicted nature that always comes up with a new plan to rescue itself with; and we never rescue ourselves from that suffering because the suffering we're trying to escape is coming from our experience.

Such futile actions are not a part of what we're intended to do in such moments. Such flailing around prohibits us from realizing the real lesson -- which is to see that "I am unable to go past myself here." What could be more beautiful, more stress-releasing than admitting the truth? But the catch here, and why we don't let go as we should, is that because we can't go past ourselves by ourselves. If the sum of my experience, to date, is actually what is producing this unwanted experience I am having, then what's the point of clinging to the notion that I can rescue myself with what I know? The whole of that moment is telling me one thing: it's time to let go!

ED: I found in my own work that when I'm in a negative state, my thoughts will just obsess over whatever it is that is disturbing me, but when I remember to watch what is going on and "sit with the feeling" as you tell us to do, and don't concentrate on what I blame for the way I feel, it dissipates.

GF: We have to learn to let go, to go consciously silent in the face of our suffering. To go silent in the face of our suffering means that we no longer allow our own suffering to tell us what we must do with it. There is nothing that lives that does not want to go on living, and that includes these negative thoughts and feelings that are slowly killing us. Everything wants to keep going. It's the exact same thing with our suffering. We think that because we hate our suffering that we don't want it, that such pain is the proof that this nature is somehow different than the suffering it resists. But we come to find out -- once we've done a little bit of honest self-observation -- that the self that is sitting and resisting the suffering is actually producing the suffering that it's resisting.

The key point is that when I start to recognize the truth of these findings, then I understand that if I give this suffering a voice -- meaning if I talk to myself about it, if I talk to others about it, if I hate life because of what it tells me I have to do and be in order to be free, etc, -- then all that's happening is I actually become the tool of this nature.

ED: So the suffering is almost a force of its own.

GF: It is a force of its own. We can see that. The child in the bedroom -- heart pounding, sweating, afraid -- is experiencing a force. These things have great force. But the beauty of what we're talking about is that these great forces are as of no force in the light of understanding their actuality, their reality. We can begin to work with these natural conditions inside of ourselves. Then, our relationship with our suffering (or whatever the condition may be) is not to suffer it as it would have us serve it, but rather to use it to serve the greater principle that is at work inside of us that produced it to begin with. That's a complete turnaround.

ED: This idea that the suffering is not us will be new for some people. The suffering is something that comes into us and we identify with it.

GF: It becomes us because we literally incorporate it by giving it a body -- our body of thought, emotion, etc.

ED: But we can be in a completely different relationship with it.

GF: Oh yes. But only to the degree that we realize that these unwanted moments of ours are not there to take something away from us, but are there to bring us the opportunity of allowing something completely new to work its way within us, to change us in a way we cannot do for ourselves. Then we become willing to let this Greater Life work upon us through the light of our awareness of it, through what we now understand about its ways.

A lot of this inner work must be done with a kind of inner silence towards what then unfolds within us -- which is a real relationship with Life itself. We watch. We learn. We grow. We are changed not by trying to change what has happened, but by not letting our reactions to it define us. We allow the whole thing -- whatever the nature of the event -- to come as it naturally comes, go through what it goes through naturally, and then we are on the other side, seeing it depart.

As the event goes, which it will naturally, goes with it the self that was resisting, and a new "me" is there that isn't afraid anymore the way it used to be, that doesn't suffer the same way over the same things. Gradually we find ourselves having become part of a much greater, more beautiful process of Life; we enter a real spiritual paradox which is to be a part of Perfection perfecting itself.

ED: So just this little poem, if we can remember it: "The feel is real, but the why is a lie," shows us, in the moment we remember it, that we can be in a whole different relationship with the moment and with what is going through us.

GF: Yes. And it begins by becoming awake, aware, understanding, choosing new, and then watching Newness itself being born within you. It's a miracle.

ED: Thank you Guy. This has been a Fireside Chat with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.

ED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein, and I'm here with inner life author, Guy Finley. We're going to be talking about letting go of negative states.

Guy, I was thinking about this topic today and I actually had to laugh, because I thought you'd never expect to hear two people talking about letting go of a hot pot handle. There seems to be a wisdom of the body that knows if something is causing you pain, you're going to let it go. Yet, at least with most human beings, that parallel wisdom doesn't seem to be informing our ability to meet negative states properly. We just want to hang on to them.

GF: It's a short circuit in our consciousness, isn't it? Negativity runs so terribly deep, Ellen. Most people would argue, but the truth is that the very foundation of our present nature is based in that dark state where one thinks about himself or herself in negative terms, but doesn't even know that one is doing that. It's so elusive.

Sometimes I think to myself, thank God -- somehow or other in the midst of this dark brew of desires and ways in which people are trying to deal with this darkness by coming up with plans, new paths to happiness -- some light actually got through. One must really wish to have some light get through, and I'm not speaking metaphorically. I'm talking about the light of understanding. Negative thoughts can be so pervasive in our mind that, because they have been there all that time, we don't even recognize them for what they are.

For instance, most people don't recognize that those moments in which you wake up in the morning and wish you didn't have to get out of bed, when the phone rings and irritation comes because someone is interrupting your meal when it's still hot, you're in your car and for some reason five hundred people didn't know you were going out, and they're in your way... that kind of wishing that what was happening wasn't happening is negativity. That negativity becomes a core, but the core of that negative self is a self that is in conflict with the world that it blames for those persistent negative states. It's a vicious circle, because the more we blame the world for the way we feel the more that negativity is justified by having an enemy outside of ourselves. The more we find reasons outside of ourselves for why we feel angry, the more we come up with ways to free ourselves from this negativity. But if we could examine it for a split second and see clearly, we'd recognize that the parts of us that come up with a wish to escape the trouble are born of the trouble. So we seed ourselves with this seed of negativity, believing that somehow the steps we're taking to free ourselves from the condition are actually going to change the consciousness in which this negativity has become rooted.

ED: When really what they do, because they're born in negativity, they lead to another state of negativity.

GF: Yes. But again, it's so persistent that we just don't see it. Let's say you have a bad day. Maybe you're an accountant or a carpenter... you know that there are some days you're just better at doing what you're doing than other days. Some days you can just "nail" it, your mind is sharp, your tools are accurate. Other days are nothing like that.

ED: Some days you're sharp as a tack and other days you're just tacky!

GF: Yes, and when that happens, you tell me, what's the cycle? What happens normally when you don't have the resources that you want? The mind is occupied with what it doesn't want, what it wishes weren't happening, with its concern for what this position, this pain means tomorrow to it. So literally, our eyes are fashioned on a certain kind of negative image, a negative feeling. Our mind is locked onto it, believing that somehow not wanting what we're going through is the same thing as changing the nature that's going through that. In other words, I must be different than what I don't want. "I" who wishes this weren't the way it is must be different than that which I'm blaming for the pain.

What we see, when we look closely, is that the me who is feeling the misery of this condition that it blames the pain on, is part and parcel with that pain. There is no difference between the two. I wasn't "miserable" until a condition came up that I didn't want. The "I" who doesn't want that condition doesn't exist as someone opposed to the condition. The opposition to the condition is a creation of the condition opposed. It's so important to understand that, because until we see it, we just play along. We're just part of that flow of negativity, those negative thoughts and feelings that actually provide us with a very familiar sense of our self.

If we want to be free of negativity, we need to make it simple: it's no fun to be negative. It's no fun to be anxious. It's no fun to be thinking about ourselves, wondering what other people think about us. There is absolutely no fun in that. There's a future in such negative considerations that is born out of the hope of escaping the pain that the negativity has produced. But in the moment itself, having someone that you're thinking about that hurt you, going over what you didn't get because someone didn't give it to you, or you didn't get a fair shake that someone else did... you can make a list of things that the mind is all too eager to embrace. But if the mind that is embracing these negative images could in that moment become conscious of what that relationship was actually producing in the being in whom that was going on, that would be the end of negativity. Not by finding powers to push away the conditions, but by changing the actual consciousness that believes there is value in being negative. We do find value in negativity. Can you see that, Ellen?

ED: Yes!

GF: Well, can you explain to me or anybody else what the value is? If I get depressed, frightened, worried, anxious, there must be a value in it, and I'd love someone to tell me what the value is in being negative.

ED: Obviously it's a false value, but I know a lot about being negative -- when you're in the situation, you don't see the value in it. You're just fully identified with it.

GF: So that's the value in it, isn't it?

ED: The identification. If I can pull myself away enough to watch what's going on -- maybe afterwards -- I realize that when I'm in that state, I feel more real. The emotions surging through me, negative as they are, are kind of thrilling. They make me feel like the center of the universe... and solid.

GF: I'll give you another word for solid: a lump. A lump of darkness. Does anybody here want to be a lump of darkness? "Let's see. Should I be a lump of darkness, or should I be light and happy? I'm going to go for the lump!"

ED: But that's what is so amazing. We do that, thinking it's the light.

GF: Let's examine that, because we're talking about how we free ourselves from negative states. If you examine that idea, something in me sees that I hate what happened to me. I hate what she said. I wish they hadn't have done that. So here is a negative state, considering this condition outside of myself. And it is clearly a darkness, something unenlightened (not something inherently evil), something I am absolutely unconscious to that somehow produces the effect of being conscious. If I was actually conscious, I wouldn't be embracing what puts me in conflict.

ED: Right. I would be dropping the hot pot handle. Somehow in our distorted thinking, we think that what we're doing is trying to resolve the situation and protecting ourselves "If I can understand this, I'll never let this happen again." "I'm not responsible for this. It's that awful person. So I must really be a good person." So with all this thinking, thinking, thinking, we're trying to convince ourselves that we're right and everybody else is wrong.

GF: This is where it is difficult to understand, because if we look at what we've been talking about, is there really a "me" that's doing that thinking? Is there really a "me" that is actually sitting and trying to resolve this negativity by coming up with a plan by which I can perfect another person or condition? Is that "me" really me? The point is that it can't be, because who you are, your true nature -- and this is something so difficult to convey, that it may take a person a lifetime to even begin to understand it -- simply has no relationship with negativity.

We can see things in life, and it's helpful to do it. I like to talk about being able to see the celestial in the common. You don't see butterflies hanging out with spiders unless they're in trouble, because the nature of the butterfly knows to avoid the nature of a spider. It doesn't have to think to itself, "Uh oh. Should I? He's not a bad looking spider, so maybe he's OK." Have you ever done that with another human being? "Well, he's not that bad looking, so what's the worst that can happen?"

That light, goodness, kindness, love, true eternal principles, true character does not lend itself to or embrace that which compromises its essence. This is the secret. People want to know what to do about their anger, how to get over their depression, what they need to change in order to get past their constant fear of being with people. The whole mindset of approaching a negative condition, born out of figuring out a way to resolve or overpower the negative condition, is produced by a mind or a nature that believes in the condition it's trying to overcome, that believes there is reality to what is wrecking them. I'm saying there is something in us that doesn't have to overcome what wrecks us on a daily basis because it just won't associate with it in the first place. So the power is a non-power because it doesn't get involved in trying to find power to overcome that which essentially has no power to start with -- which is a negative state.

You tell me the power that negativity has, and I'll tell you that its sole power is to cause inside of a person a series of searing sensations -- dark, cold sensations, whatever they may be -- that tell us that without us doing something to get rid of these things and reconcile them, we will be lost forever inside of this terrible condition. And like lemmings being led off the edge of a cliff into the sea, we allow those negative states to seep into us, we resist them, the resistance defines us, and as we're defined by them, we find ourselves trying to change them.

We will not try to change a negative state. We will see the fact that the negative state does not belong in our consciousness. The way we know that it doesn't belong in our consciousness isn't by coming up with a series of ideas and beliefs about ourselves, but by being present enough to that condition so that our awareness of the negative state produces the exact same reaction spiritually that physically we have when we hold onto something and the body recognizes that it's harming itself.

ED: You often talk about resistance and a different kind of relationship that we can have with these negative states. The negativity comes up in us. It's natural, and we can't really prevent these energies from coming through us.

GF: The stirring is natural. The suffering born of self-induced imagery and resisting it is not natural.

ED: So that's the order of things. The stirring occurs and then there's a resistance that comes up, and that's what makes the whole thing dark and negative, and hanging onto it keeps it evolving.

GF: Not evolving, but becoming more of a lump really.

ED: Yes. Growing larger. And it's in that moment, instead of just going unconsciously with that resistance, if we could become aware of this energy coursing through us, and have a different kind of relationship with it, an awareness of it, instead of getting involved with it and just being a part of it, then something completely different happens in that moment.

GF: That's right. The cycle of conflict, the cycle of negative states, generates a certain order of ourselves having to do with our conditioned beliefs, our certainty that life must be a certain way. Once those conditions are engaged, then they begin to resist anything that doesn't confirm that imagery, those ideas, that self. And in resisting that, that self becomes identified. That self becomes a "life." It's an un-life really. Then, as it's there, it produces desires based on its own past conditioning in order to deal with the conditions blamed for its existence, and the thing just spirals.

The work to free ourselves from negative states begins with understanding the necessity of paying the price for interrupting that cycle -- daring to catch ourselves falling into darkness -- which is always connected with thinking about ourselves, thinking about others and what they did that makes us feel the way we do. We interrupt the cycle. The moment that we feel that surge, that first stirring inside of us, in that split second we use it as a springboard to come wide awake to the present moment, because the power of the present moment, the awareness and the intelligence that is the basis of that moment, is our advocate. It is our ally. It produces in us the ability to recognize, through that awareness, that this negativity isn't right. The awareness of the negative state is the end of the relationship with it when we stay there and we are willing to pay that price.

ED: And the price is that when we see the memory self coming up, trying to make a connection with that stirring and give it a meaning, we have to voluntarily cut off that identification.

GF: I like those words a lot. You can find any moment in your life to begin with the same principle: stay awake. If I can actually come awake in the moment where I feel that stirring, the stress or the pressure begin, and refuse to go along with giving it meaning, then the real meaning of the moment will be revealed to me, and I will be given in the new meaning that power which allows me to put that negative state where it belongs, which is behind me.

ED: And the energy that was associated with the stirring can actually be used to transform us.

GF: It becomes a positive force for the fulfillment of ourselves as opposed to a draining power because we've allowed darkness to step in and define us.

ED: Yes. Thank you, Guy.

This has been a Fireside Chat with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.

ED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. I'm here with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley. Today we're going to talk about how to use inner storms to find perfect peace.

Guy, it seems like there are a lot of paradoxes in the spiritual life, but I think they are paradoxes just because we don't see the big picture. One of them that you talk about quite frequently is that we can use inner storms, negative states -- things like anger, depression, fear -- to find peace. But when we're in one of those negative states, it doesn't seem possible. So how can we use these states to find the peace that we want?

GF: Have you ever been to a lake or been around a big pond? A lake or pond, by definition, is a pool of water, and as a rule it is concave, like a bowl. I think everybody has seen it who has been up in the mountains or anyplace natural, and as the earth part dropped away, there were certain things you could see in the water. And the clearer the water was, the deeper you could see. What you can't see with your eyes when you look at something like that is that usually the deeper the water is, the more still it runs.

The reason that I'm calling on this picture for our minds to look at is because the storms that we can't figure out how it would be possible for us to use remain unusable to us because of where we approximate ourselves in the moment of the storm. In other words, in the storm I'm the cork bobbing on the water. Here's all this turbulence, and I'm being tossed around. When I'm being tossed around by negative thoughts and feelings, the "me" that is being tossed around by them must have something similar in its substance to those very states that are causing that disturbance. If you throw paint into the air, the air doesn't get painted, does it? Because the air and the paint are different natures. Shine a spotlight from a beautiful lighthouse, and it goes right out into that deep ocean storm water with waves crashing, and everything passes through it.

So the first lesson about storms is that if I'm in a storm and I'm fighting with the storm, there is no way I'm going to be able to use what I'm fighting with if I'm a part of that disturbance, meaning if I am myself identified with the condition -- that angry, fearful worry. If I'm caught up in thinking about the condition, there is no way I can do anything other than be its opposite. There is the storm and there is "me." Commonly we think that the "me" that is in the storm is different than the storm I'm in. This is the big spiritual lesson that we all have to learn, and we do, gradually, but it takes time.

A crisis is a storm, isn't it? When does the crisis pass?

ED: When I no longer see the situation the way I did before.

GF: Exactly. The crisis ends when whatever the lessons were behind it become evident to me, and therefore I'm no longer a fighter of the condition but I transcend it by my understanding of it, so that the storm of that crisis actually gives birth to something new.

ED: Somehow being in that crisis transforms the individual that is in relationship with that crisis.

GF: When the individual knows how to use the storm, which is what we are talking about.

Let's back up a little bit. First of all, real life is a storm of creative energies. That is what real life is. Real life is not your magazines stacked up perfectly on your coffee table. That is not real life. Real life is not the butler and the maid and everybody standing in perfect service waiting to handle things. That is not real life.

Real life is a vibrant flux, a storm of these energies that are themselves always reconciling themselves. Now we're talking about a storm so we're going to draw a parallel here and then we'll come back to how we can use the moment of a storm in our life.

First, Ellie, when you think of an innocent child, what makes the child innocent?

ED: They seem to be open to everything. They aren't judging. They're curious about everything.

GF: They're not apart from what they're in, so whatever there is in the moment becomes a world, and they have a deep fascination with it.

ED: They give themselves to it.

GF: Yes. A child doesn't relate to the world around it through something -- an idea about itself or a belief about itself. The child is just in a relationship with life as a natural energy in response to a series of energies transpiring.

Then something happens, and the mind begins to formulate images in order for that child to navigate, to reconcile, to know where it is, who is what, and what is taking place. Images are formed in the child's mind that it then begins to take as being the thing. So when it thinks of mom, if she's a good mom, then the thought of mom brings a smile to her face. The mom is not there, but the thought is, and the child takes the thought for being the same thing as mom.

If the child has a bad moment with Aunt Mary, and then fashions an image of Aunt Mary, every time someone looks like Aunt Mary, the child has a negative reaction because the image is formed in the child's mind.

The point here is that the child doesn't have storms born out of collisions with life until images are formed in that child's mind that then collide with what that child thinks it wants in order to have more of that image or to get away from it to save themselves from that content.

ED: It's really a process of comparison.

GF: Yes, and the point that I'm trying to make is that the first thing we need to understand about these storms is that they're produced by what we'll call "unnatural" opposing forces.

First we're going to talk about natural opposing forces. When there is a big storm, the reconciliation of those forces which are opposing systems cause them to be resolved through releasing their energies. The reconciliation of a storm is caused by those systems colliding and those systems being reconciled/resolved through the natural release of their energies.

The beauty of the natural release of those energies is that it is all positive. Everything that comes out of the natural reconciliation of those energetic forces that cause the storm in the world produce a new life, a new form, a new possibility. They clear the ground. They add purity. They wipe clean.

Here is how we can see that storms in real life are beneficial. You can't find a bad storm (unless you're an insurance company!). Now, as above, so below. Why on earth aren't storms welcomed by human beings? When someone doesn't agree with the image we have of ourselves, that person is an idiot of course. We know immediately they're an idiot because they don't see our glory.

ED: And they don't appreciate us.

GF: Right. Is the person really an idiot, or did they just not get clued into the fact that in your mind you're seated on a throne, and they're supposed to bow down in front of you? So the image collides with the behavior. Do you know these moments, Ellie?

ED: Yes. Quite well.

GF: That's a storm, isn't it? Now with human beings, these opposing forces don't get reconciled. They do release a host of energies, but everything is worse. Somebody doesn't approve of me and I try to prove that I am what I am. If I'm not trying to punish them, then I'm punishing myself.

ED: And then I remember everybody who ever said anything to me who made me feel not right about myself.

GF: So all this material inside of us, this content floods in, and creates more of an opposite. Now, incidentally, it's opposing the thoughts about itself. The mind is actually dividing and colliding with itself. But still, here's a storm… why doesn't that storm in the human heart, in the human mind, produce exactly the same outcome as does nature in her life when she brings these forces together and produces clarity, purity, niceness, freshness, something that wasn't there before that is there now because these energies have been reconciled? This is a beautiful question to ask, because if we can even intuit the idea in a small way, then we can see a certain amount of hope. Most people are so beat up by storms that they think the only way they can get past the storm is to go on vacation, to do something towards the situation that is causing them pain.

ED: So the answer to the question is that in nature, the reconciling force comes through and everything clears up in preparation for the next storm that will come through, whereas in a human being, because of this thought structure that you've described, we don't allow a reconciling force to come through. Instead we just keep brewing further storms inside of us.

GF: Yes. That's exactly right. See, the thing that is hard for us to understand is that if we ever want to be really new, that newness can't be created. Peace cannot be created. Love is not a creation of human beings. These essential elements are eternal. They are revealed by the qualities of these energies and interactions, but they are not subject to it. We are subject to these storms because there is a part of us that has to do with imagination, with a part of ourselves that forms these ideas, forms these images, and believes that unless these images are held intact, that anything that threatens them is attacking them. That's the storm.

Anything by which I measure my worth, that I consider myself to be of X, Y, or Z value, that very thing itself turns out to be the seed of conflict. I can see that I hold myself in a certain esteem, and nobody is going to be talking to me like this, and everybody should just do whatever. Those are the very things that over a period of years we may have thought to ourselves that life is about. "I'm going to make a certain name for myself." "I'm going to do certain things and acquire an education." "People are going to respect me, by God." That may have been the best we understood, and we went and did those things. But what we do in the moment by which we define ourselves confines us if we don't let life release us from the identity that those images have formed.

ED: So the very things that we think are propping us up, that we think are valuable and make life valuable, are the very things that are preventing us from living a true and valuable life.

GF: Yes, and the "paradox" isn't that there is anything wrong with this work to achieve, to be excellent, to want to develop my mind. There is this natural upwelling inside of a human being to pursue excellence. It's natural to want to be known, meaning how can I know myself if not through the world around me? But at a point in our lives we can start to see that there is an inherent limitation in wanting to know myself by that which is outside of myself. And with that, the limitation begins to become clear because of all the storms connected with it. Then one realizes that the way in which I've known myself outside of myself is through these images, these thoughts that I have about myself. So a storm isn't coming to take something from us. It's the evidence of a moment in which it's possible to transcend the very nature that was the seed of that storm.

This storm of life and these creative energies are always producing forms. We can see that, can't we? All this energy producing form after form. All that same energy is then taking forms apart. And when these forms are taken apart naturally by life, then the energy is released to become a new form, only a higher level because of the way in which the universe is expanding and, by the way, becoming by a certain action of Light (potentially for human beings) more intelligent, more compassionate. Everything is under those laws if we understand that and put ourselves under them.

ED: So, when we begin to see that we limit ourselves and put ourselves in a position where we suffer from these storms because of all these ideas about ourselves, and we realize that being in a storm, if we deal with it properly, can actually begin to wash away these images and give us something new -- not our own images but a self that life wants to give us -- then we can actually begin to welcome storms.

GF: Yes. Here's a strange sentence: It takes two to thunder. What does that mean? How many of us know what it's like to be sitting at home, or doing our work at the office, or driving a car, and all of a sudden (and it's quite literal), someone says or does something and we can actually feel a kind of crash? Something slams into us. What we do incorrectly now is that in the moment of that slam, we blame the person or the thing that we say has caused that crash. That part of us that defines us in that moment separates us out from the storm and says "I'm not part of this storm." What we are learning is that those moments where opposing forces run into one another are produced because of what life brings us and that touches what has been formed in us. We are not meant to live from a solid state.

You've heard that passage: "I live and die daily," moment to moment… all of these things point to a completely different order of relationship with life, where instead of fighting with the storms and solidifying that self that was the object it ran into, we begin to wake up in the moment. Instead of solidifying that self, we expose the whole of the self to the whole of the storm, and then let the natural, beautiful Intelligence that actually produces these storms, do what it was intending to do with us, which is to let us go through a process of transformation and change us so that we come out a new creature… and that is quite literal.

ED: You've said that every storm passes, and it's true. Even in the unconscious person, eventually they get worn out and the anger goes away (until it comes back again). The real issue is, what am I doing in that moment of the storm to allow it to do its work of transformation?

GF: That's the whole thing, Ellen. If we can learn to be storm watchers instead of storm fighters, we have a chance to let that storm do in our soul what it was always intended to do, which is to produce inside of us a whole new life.

ED: Thank you, Guy.

You've been watching a Fireside Chat with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.

ED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein, and I'm here with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley. Today we're going to talk about making a fresh start in life.

Guy, most of us have made drastic changes trying to make a fresh start in life, and yet no matter what we do, we always end up feeling the same way. The outer conditions may be different, but inside we're still the same. So we know that changing the outside condition isn't really going to give us the fresh start we want. Where does a genuine fresh start begin?

GF: It's a good question. We could break down the idea of making a fresh start into four separate and yet united ideas -- the first, and perhaps the most important, being the knowledge that it's possible to make a fresh start and the simultaneous discovery of what it is that is prohibiting making a fresh start. Everybody wants to make a fresh start. We can do it right now, by the way, sitting here. At home you can actually make a fresh start, just sitting there. And if you don't understand that, you will by the time we're done talking. The knowledge that it's possible, coupled with understanding what prohibits it -- let's start there, and then we'll go on to the other steps.

First, so many of us -- as you were accurate in saying -- have tried so many ways to make a fresh start: get rid of the relationship that is dragging me down, find a more fulfilling career path, move to a different part of the country, change my body in any one of the zillion ways in which a person can do that today, travel… and eventually, every one of the paths we take that we plan from the beginning very carefully what we're going to do, prove themselves to be incapable of producing what we imagined we would have when we achieved what we had envisioned.

So there's a good beginning, the first fact that we need to understand, because it runs completely contrary to our idea of starting over: you can't plan to do it.

ED: Because then you're just bringing your old self into what you think is going to be new.

GF: That's right. If I plan a new start, then in my mind I've envisioned this new position, this new power, this new possession by which I will have a sense of newness to myself. But what I can't see is that everything that I imagine is a part of my past. The more I think about what I want to do with my life, I can only think through what I wish to do or become according to variations on a theme of past experiences. This didn't work out so I'm going to change it and it will become different in my future. But everything that the mind projects, it pulls from its past, and anything that I pull from my past is not a fresh start, but a reconfiguration of a self and a life that didn't produce what the new start was. So that's the first thing, and it throws people off. Because you think, "Well, if I can't plan a fresh start, what do I do? Just sit here and be stupid?" So there is what prohibits a fresh start: we have in our minds a certain feature that tells us what it means to be a new human being.

Let's now equate a fresh start with what we're really after, which is a sense of myself that isn't burdened by my own life. When we really examine it, when I talk about making a fresh start, I get this wonderful feeling, don't I? "Yahoo!" I can feel all that new energy pumping through me based on just this wonderful idea of a fresh start. Because when I'm really starting to think about this, it's not in conflict yet. It hasn't run into the obstacles. It's not being punished by what didn't work out according to the plan. It's just a stream of what seems to be new energy that gives me the energy to set out on this path to the new life.

The fact is, Ellen, this new life (which is really what we're after in a fresh start) doesn't belong to a person. It's not a possession. Anything that we possess in our mind, by the very nature of having first created the idea, the image, and then getting our hands on it by manifesting it in life, eventually turns out to be part of a past for us, part of a problem for us. Not that the thing itself is a problem, but that it ceases to provide us what we originally envisioned it would give us, what we originally felt it would give us.

So the whole idea of a new life really has its root inside of understanding a completely different relationship with life itself -- and now to the point -- that relationship is not to be a planner of it but a participant in it. Look out on a spring day and you know that everything is changing. There is nothing that is not continually renewing itself, but that constant renewal is out of the ground of what no longer is. So you've got this flowering taking place, and this flowering is newness itself. In the end and in the beginning -- one thing continually taking place. And if we want to make a fresh start in life, we have to put ourselves where a fresh start actually takes place, and it doesn't take place in our minds.

ED: So, we can't give ourselves a fresh start. What happens is that we enter into the place where fresh starts are happening every moment.

GF: Yes, and how do we do that?

ED: To do that, we have to drop away, we have to lose everything that is holding us back in our old life.

GF: I can see this great gulf that exists for human beings between this idealized life that we would have -- which is filled with fresh starts, becoming a new person -- and our present life in which we are already borrowers. We've already taken something when we imagine a fresh start. We're already borrowers. And how do you explain to an individual that inside him or her there is a nature that never borrows anything but that rather is a constant participant in something? Then if you could explain that, what do you say is that nature that is the participant in this broader life? All we can do is approximate.

For instance, who hasn't been outside on a day when maybe it's rainy and cloudy, and then for some reason the weather pattern shifts, and here comes the first streak of sunlight, the clouds break, and suddenly there are little balls of water hanging on everything, and it's glorious outside. You don't need anything more than that in that moment. It is filling to be a participant in this fresh moment. What is it in us that participates in that fresh moment? My awareness of it. The fact that I can actually look out in a split second and see something that is so breath-taking, so beautiful, that for that instant, my mind and its usual operation is suspended. I'm not thinking about a way to become new, making my plans to change this or control that. I've actually entered into newness itself as it is dawning through my awareness of it.

When I speak of the necessity of a relationship that is different in life -- not as a planner but as a participant -- this is what I'm talking about. But the leap, the gulf, is this gradual change that has to take place within us in what we give our attention to, because presently our attention is commanded by every passing thought and feeling that is either in allegiance with the plan, that is working towards it, or that feels that the plan is breaking down and now I've got to go and re-imagine myself.

ED: So we're constantly being distracted from the present moment.

GF: Constantly being taken out of that moment in which everything is new already. God's life is newness itself. It is changeless in its newness, even though all these changes are taking place in it. And it's only here, now (regardless of whether I'm aware of it or not), but my relationship with it is what has to be understood. And before I can have that relationship with being in the present moment, I really have to understand that unattended, my mind gives itself to every vagrant image and its object that passes through it.

ED: Which promises that it's going to give us a fresh start.

GF: Which promises the fresh start. So it isn't the object -- the new job, the new relationship, the new person -- that is the illusion, because we can obtain those. The illusion is the freshness and the newness in it, and it's "I," this part of me that attributes this, and that continues to find out that wasn't it.

At a certain point -- which brings us to what would be the next step in how do we really make a fresh start -- is the idea that a person gradually has to have a real wish for that. A real wish. Now I'll translate that: I see the necessity for it. See, there's a big difference between the desire for a new start vs. the necessity to be a new man. The desire for a fresh start -- I'm like bumble bees lining up on my cherry tree to get into the blossom. I've got one desire after another, and each desire gives me the feeling of a fresh start, a new beginning, only to find out that I'm chained to a nature whose very existence depends upon this chain. Now I don't want that anymore, so this necessity to become present to myself is critical.

ED: I have to want real newness in which I can't find myself, and want that more than my idea of what may be new.

GF: I think that's a fair way of saying it: a newness in which I can't find myself. See, when we go back to that former illustration, did I need to find myself in that moment where I saw that beautiful change in the day? Did I need to find myself? Was I looking for myself?

ED: No. You just felt completely part of the moment. You were fulfilled without any thought of yourself.

GF: So that's the next point, that this fulfillment exists independent of the self that seeks it. This fulfillment that we're looking for, this fresh start, exists independent of the self that seeks it. It's one of these great drive-you-crazy paradoxes in the spiritual life. People say, "Wait a minute! How am I supposed to find it if I don't seek it?" We find our place in this eternal fresh spring of life by gradually understanding that we are taking ourselves out of it. So I don't need to create it; I simply need to cease bringing myself away from its presence inside of myself. That's the necessity part.

How many times are you going to get depressed? How many times are you going to sit in your house, wherever you are, and feel that wave of sadness come over you, and let it produce in you the same thing it always produces? When the negative state passes into you, can you see that the very presence of it produces in you the sudden wish for a fresh start? What is it that then guides you to this fresh start other than trying to get away from whatever it is that is defining you in that moment that seems so dark?

ED: Right. So it already has a negative beginning.

GF: Negativity seeds itself, and I sit there and say, "Oh yummy. Let me plant this," believing that I can continue to plant the seeds that come from not wanting my life at the moment, and by not wanting it, coming up with the life that I will. Eventually one has to see that this goes nowhere. Now if that means that I have to go nowhere relative to my idea of a fresh start, then that's what I'm going to do. It becomes a necessity at that point when I see that all I do is re-incarnate, repeat myself, and that's all I do. Every time the state appears in me, it brings with it that which it says will bring an end to itself, and now I see -- even though I don't get it yet (but one day you will if you work hard enough) -- I can't produce the change I'm seeking.

ED: But then of course, as soon as we say we're not going to go along with the old, our old mind comes in and warns us: "If you don't go the way I'm telling you to go, you'll really be in trouble."

GF: Which brings us to the next step in this process of truly starting fresh. We said new knowledge and the understanding of what prohibits it, then the real wish (which is the necessity), and now the willingness to risk. Risk what? Here I am and my mind is telling me that if I don't think along the lines it is handing me (which is really nothing but a noose), something terrible is going to happen to me. There is a pit! "My God. Look at the size of this pit. You're going to go into this void. You're going to disappear forever if you don't take some immediate action to give yourself a fresh start." And you go there, and every time you say, "OK. I was just kidding." Then you do one of two things: you either sit in the depression, in this unsolvable miasma of thought, or you start to think about how to get out of the condition you're in and what caused it.

At a certain point, the Light and your own work has made it evident to you: I'm not going to do anything in this moment other than become a participant in it, in watching it. That's all I'm going to do. Why? Because the fresh start that I long for cannot be produced by the pain that is producing that longing. The fresh start is not the extension of that pain. It is the entrance into that moment of thinking "I'm nothing without my plan, without this fresh idea. What's going to happen to me?" It's the entrance into what we call nothingness. It's not nothing, but the part of us that only knows itself by what it perceives as being a new pleasure and a new beginning, looks at this idea of not producing more of ourselves, and it says: "Look at this emptiness. My God, it's a bottomless pit. If you don't do something, something is going to happen to you." So there is a willingness to risk what your own thoughts and feelings are doing to you. And the more you're willing to watch this, you'll see, "Why would I want to do anything that my present nature is telling me?" It's obviously trying to seed itself into further suffering.

ED: OK. So we take the leap of faith?

GF: It is a bit of a leap of faith, but when we've seen the fact of what we're talking about, there is really no choice in it, and I'm willing to take this risk to see what happens. Then comes the last of these steps, which is the interior resolve to persist. We're a spiritual fast food world today. Whatever it is, I want my gratification, and that nature that seeks gratification always seeks it in something that it creates in its own image without knowing it. At a certain point, we have to be willing to cease this ridiculous kind of continual gratifying of ourselves through what appears to be empty food, meaning empty life. So the resolve to persist. I can tell you that moment in which you refuse to participate in a false start, the new start that has just taken place isn't going to feel to you like a new start.

ED: It's going to feel very empty.

GF: But you see, the awareness that allows you that is fullness itself. And this is where we go back to the beginning, where we talk about this shift in our attention. To what do I give myself? Gradually as we work like that, the whole process of time as we've known it -- the whole idea of "I'm here, I need to get there, I need to become that" -- begins to finally collapse in on itself, because awareness allows the recognition of what is real and what is not. Out of that a person has born in them through the willingness to give themselves up, not a fresh start in life, but they become part of a life that is always fresh.

ED: The opportunity for that is always there, and we must do it moment to moment to moment.

GF: All the time. We're sitting in it. We're breathing it. It allows us to talk to each other. The understanding of that leads to a fearless life, because if I don't have to protect a plan that I've made, what do I have to be afraid of relative to its loss or trying to enlarge it? I don't. I'm free.

ED: I can just drop whatever the past moment has been, and start over and over again.

GF: Yes. Yes. But one must be an example unto oneself. This is not about other people seeing you do something. This is about you. Right in the root of that moment of life, seeing it clearly, and then taking the action that you know is true.

ED: Thank you, Guy.

You've been watching a Fireside Chat with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.

ED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Welcome to a fireside chat with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley.

Today I thought we would talk about a topic that you actually gave a whole series of talks on, and something that you mention quite often: the "turning point." Now, most people when they use the expression "turning point," think of a unique moment in time when maybe they had to make a big decision or they saw something that changed them. But you use the expression in a much broader sense that has to do with the whole movement of life. So I thought a good place to begin would be to have you explain what you mean by the "turning point," and what the significance of that is.

GF: To begin with, when we sit down to think about such things, I recommend that we always place what we want to talk about in the context of something. Without context, meaning without a true background behind what it is that you are looking at, you can wander everywhere. It's the absence of having a background, a true context, that lets people fight.

As you said, most of us view turning points as those moments in our lives where either some crisis comes along that demands a change on our part, or something finally aligns itself with our wishes and we reach a turning point by which suddenly we think we're going up in life. So for us, the way we are now, we think of these turning points as being places that are demarcations where we're either headed down because we don't want what happened, or we're headed up because life has finally said that we're good to go.

The problem with a simple look like that is, what is it that produces these moments in our lives? Why is there a point in my life where suddenly I'm headed down or headed up? What is it that is going down, and what is it that is going up?

What I'm trying to say, as simply as I know how to say it, is that we have to begin to understand why we're alive, what the purpose of this life is, if I really want to understand how to make the best use of those seemingly critical, pivotal moments in my life when they come. Then, is there a way that I can use my life so that I don't have to wait for those moments where life knocks me down -- or for that matter, I finally feel that I'm headed up because things have gone well?

I was driving home today, and I saw a cloud. I'm 50-some years old, and I've watched clouds and loved them since I was a boy. I used to like to lie down on the grass, and if I could get as still as I could -- especially if it was a very quiet day -- I loved to see clouds move. Sometimes you can't see clouds moving, and the reason you can't (as a rule) is that inwardly you are moving too fast to recognize the movement. But the fact is, the clouds are basically always moving, and I have always loved to watch them.

Today when I was coming home, I saw a cloud that I've never seen before in my whole life. It was a rainbow cloud. That's the best way I can say it. It was as though Great Nature, God had taken this large cloud and poured all the colors of the rainbow in it, and then stirred it so that all the colors were in this cloud. I actually pulled over on the freeway because I thought to myself, "Are my eyes deceiving me?" It wasn't just fantastic in its appearance, but it was evocative, beautiful, a phenomenon. I sat there, safely off to the side of the freeway, and five hundred cars flew by. I have no idea what I was seeing other than it was a truly unique event, but I remember thinking as these cars went by: "Look what they're missing."

What does that have to do with a turning point in one's life? You don't know what you're missing. When an unwanted event comes, something that frightens you because it seems like it's going to take something away from you... do you know what you're missing in those moments?

Let's define turning point: a point at which I become different in my nature for the event that spun me vs. a turning point in which I'm simply made to turn by a reaction or a resistance to the unwanted moment. Most of our lives are spent absolutely being made to turn -- made to turn by negative reactions, negative thoughts and feelings, made to turn by desires that we have inside of us to escape the possibility of having a negative turning point. Such a life is wasted. It never gets to see the kinds of things that I'm talking about. And if it does, it is so rare that a person begins to think, "What I need to do is go make a lot of money so I can go on a vacation and see these things more frequently."

What if it was possible for us, on a moment to moment basis, as we work to be awake to ourselves... what if inwardly with our inner vision, with awareness, we were capable of watching not only clouds, but the sunrise, the sunsets, the storms coming and going -- all of that -- if we were witness to our own inner lives, Ellen? Then we would take our place in the very movement of all these things in a way in which instead of being moved by life, we would have life move through us. The true turning point would not be this idea of a downward or an upward movement, but it would be of an expansive kind of new awareness, new consciousness that a person is created to have, where they recognize that all of this movement that is going on is indeed a perpetual turning point of life itself, and that all these things that are moving through us are intended for their movement to produce new energies. Our relationship to all that moves inside of us is to be something that aides in the transformation of these energies as they go through these turnings -- and we don't do that. Instead, we ourselves are turned into things by these moments, and then spend our lives being against this or that instead of being open and fluid-like within ourselves and capable of relating to life at a completely different level.

The bottom line is that life is presently for us an odd moment here and there where life either knocks us down and we get up and think to ourselves that we did good, or it picks us up and gives us something good, and then we spend our lives trying to protect what we thought has made us better. Or (and everyone has had this), a turning point came where I realized I couldn't continue being the same kind of man I've been, or it was impossible to continue being the same kind of woman, and life showed it to me enough times that finally a true turning point took place so that it became a transformational point where I'm changed by life, in life. That is what we're after -- not accidentally, but in a moment-to-moment, day to day basis. That is the interior life of a true turning point.

ED: I noticed the clouds today as well because they were spectacular, and you always say to "see the celestial in the common." Everywhere we look we see proofs and examples of what goes on at different levels, and I think one of the things that makes clouds and their movement so wonderful is that they seem to embody constant movement; they're always changing. In the past when you've talked about the turning point, you also talked about life constantly moving, and that we don't notice the movement. We only see life in distinct moments of "now this has happened" and "now that has happened." So while things are constantly turning and we're meant to turn with them, instead we get caught by these sudden happenings. We don't understand where they came from; we don't know how to handle them. We're shocked by things all the time.

GF: Part of our education as men and women who have in their hearts at least the hope of becoming a different order of human being includes the gradual realization through self-knowledge and self-observation -- learning to watch ourselves just like we've been talking about -- that my mind and sense of self that is derived from that mind is only really comfortable, only knows itself when it sets itself up as being apart from what it's looking at. So we are basically always in a process of measuring ourselves by what is going on around us. When people go out in life and try to be successful, they never think to themselves how strange it is that their success can be wiped out just by the casual glance or the snarl someone gives them. And the reason for that is very simple, Ellen. We are all the time measuring who we are by comparing ourselves to the world around which we see ourselves, and when we do that, I must create something by which I can compare myself.

If I'm looking out at an audience of people, my usual mind will fashion an idea of what it would mean to be a successful person in this moment. Having fashioned that idea, it will find a parallel of associated thought and images in itself by which it would say, "A successful person in this moment is one that has the people sitting on the edge of their chairs." And the mind that develops that idea is separating me out from the people that I'm speaking to or with. The stronger the impression becomes of what it means to be successful, the more one is moved to try to accomplish what that image has said it means to be successful. This is across the board in everything: the more one is moved to try to accomplish that, the more one is troubled by what is going on, and then anxiety sets in.

We could talk about a whole trip-lever series of things that takes place, but the bottom line is that the real success we want has nothing to do with trying to find ourselves as successful in the world outside of us. Real success is a kind of conscious participation in a life that is already successful in itself. Call that life what you want -- God's life, the Light, Living Light, Intelligence, Conscious Energy -- it is present in this room while I'm talking to you. A person either participates in that success that gives you all the substantiation that you need, that never leaves you afraid of being without it, or you try to find substantiation from the people or places around you to confirm yourself as you think you are.

So look at what is happening: In order to be confirmed, I have to have a confirming party. To have a confirming party, there is always a process of my own mind, my own imagination. The more I set up what I need to confirm me, the more afraid I am that it won't. So there's this endless separation between myself and what my mind generates as being the world. The more I'm separated from it, the more I'm dependent and frightened at the same time. That can't go anywhere. So the bottom line is that the person starts to recognize that this is how my present mind works: It separates me. There is something in me that is always producing in myself these feelings, thoughts, images that are always trying to find safety.

I don't have to find safety, Ellen. I'm already safe. But not as long as I'm identified with the turning of my mind and the turning of the emotions that come and substantiate those thoughts. One has to see the fact of something like this and let the world turn as it will. It doesn't mean that my mind doesn't generate thoughts or feelings. It just means that a person starts to live in a world in which all that turning is going on, but he is not being turned. One is not really the center of these things. One is all of these things, and yet none of them are really who he is. There's an immense sense of well-being inside of that, because nothing can touch you, and yet, you are touching everything.

ED: We want so much to feel safe, and we feel ourselves being turned, and we don't like that. So we try to fix certain things -- like looking for somebody's approval -- and then that person or relationship must never change. Yet, in the universe around us, we can see that change is the essence of it. We get pictures back from the Hubble telescope of the universe, of one galaxy eating another galaxy. Things are always moving and changing. We want to be fixed, and so we make an enemy of life.

GF: Again though, why? One must understand what it is inside me that doesn't want people to change. What I want is things to change only according to how I want them to change. That kind of change is OK. Change that is not part of what I want is not OK-change. Why? Because I exist in my mind relative to what I'm holding in my mind. So if I think the only way I'm a good person is if someone looks at me as if I'm a good person, I'm going to sell my soul to them to make them look at me like that. I'm afraid they won't look at me like that. Until a person sees very clearly that all I've done my whole life is a fancy dance to try to make life stay in place according to my best ideas of what my purpose and happiness is -- until I see that doesn't work, I can't do anything. That's where what we talk abut comes in because the true turning point is the recognition that who we are is not dependent on these things outside of ourselves.

Words are so cheap, Ellen. This planet is packed with people who can espouse these lofty principles. But show me someone who recognizes the truth of something and then will work at the truth of it. Show me someone who says, "That's right. We should be part of the movement of all things and not caught up and isolated in being identified." Show me someone who spends their days working to understand that better instead of just learning to say that better in order to impress people, then I'll show you something that's special. It's so easy to be a spiritual know-it-all. It's very tough to take the smallest step outside of yourself, to risk in the smallest way this automated chain of thoughts and feelings that drive a person and try to produce for them contentment, security, and safety. Show me one person who is willing to do as Vernon Howard used to say: "Throw a toothpick in front of a runaway trick." Show me one person, and I'll show you someone who is on their way to a new kind of greatness, because that person will begin to realize that their true nature -- who they really are -- is not a creature of condition. Yes, this body is a creature of condition. The mind, even thought itself is a form of conditioning. But who we are, Ellen, in essence cannot be touched by anything that can negatively impact it. Nothing can touch it.

When we understand that, not intellectually, but because we've gone out into life, we say: "You know Life, I've always tried to avoid these moments. I've been trying to avoid the moment where I see that I'm a liar, that I sell my soul to people to get them to like me. I've been trying to avoid seeing how frightened I am that something is going to happen to me and take away what I've got. My whole life is dedicated to trying to keep all this at bay, but I'm not keeping it at bay anymore!" That man or woman has found the door to freedom, because they've found in themselves something that is already where they want to be. All they have to be willing to do is test the water -- find out for themselves whether or not they have to spend their lives trying to turn things according to the way they want them or whether there is a greater turning taking place in which there is no more torment out of trying to control life.

ED: But a person then has to be willing to risk everything.

GF: And here again I say, risk what? Please tell me. I want one of you to tell me what you have to risk. Risk what? This is so important that you learn to ask yourself this question. When you're moved to do things against yourself, when you're moved to do things against other people, and you're unconscious of doing it... do you know that every time you fawn in front of another person, every time you act like you're a nice person for the sake of getting someone to approve of you and help you through life, do you know that you're a liar and a plague on the face of the earth? Do you know why human beings do that, Ellen? Because they live with a constant shadow behind them that is always standing there with a shadow sword saying, "If you don't, I'm going to drop this sword on you, and you're going to lose something." I'm telling you, lose it. Lose it. You better lose it, because if you don't lose it, you will lose -- just like we lose every day, each and every one of us, every time a negative thought or feeling comes into us, every time something unwanted gets us to move against someone else or life itself in order to re-secure our position. That's not a turning point; that's a tormenting point. If a person gets tired enough of that, they can bring an end to that tormenting nature as not the world doing it to them, but something that was formed in them at an early age. It's actually archetypal, racial; it runs very deep. That person can begin, little by little by little, to bring into themselves this awareness, this Light, this understanding, and it's the life, the understanding, that dismantles that darkness. Then a person has something.

ED: You said something recently: "When are you going to stop making deals with your pain?" That's what we do, isn't it? We're so afraid of what we're going to lose that we put up with this constant negativity.

GF: That's exactly right. I'm so afraid of what I'm going to lose that I put up with this negative state. I comfort negative states. I comfort negative people around me so that they'll keep me in their family circle. Lose what, Ellen? Lose what?

ED: That's a great question, because I'm sitting here thinking, what am I going to lose, and the deeper I try to look into that, I can't put my finger on it.

GF: This is the problem. When the negative thought or feeling... when that turning point comes in life and crisis is looming, and one is caught up in trying to figure out how to put everything back together again, it's all predicated on the mind revealing to itself some kind of image, some content that says, "If you don't do this, you will lose that." And when one thinks they're going to lose something, they don't have what they think they're going to lose. They have an imagined thing they're going to lose. That's what the darkness does. It produces a kind of pseudo-light that says "this will be gone if you don't do what I say to do."

You need to see the fact of it. This is urgent to understand: I'm afraid I'm going to lose something... my God, who could be a bigger loser than me right now? Someone who's trying to figure out how to hurt somebody so that I can be free of a pain, somebody who's trying to figure out how to take advantage of another human being or the planet itself so that I can have a pleasure. Who is a bigger loser than that?

ED: No one.

GF: But that nature will tell me I'm going to lose something. This is where your spiritual work comes into it -- to begin to recognize in such moments that I'm being confronted with an illusion. I'm actually seeing a lie that all my life I have not understood as being a lie. I believe that my life as it is has value, that there is something good in this nature that will follow without question these negative states towards what those negative states say will free them. When a person gets to that point, Ellen, they simply stop doing it. Then there is nothing to win. You've stopped losing.

ED: You've talked about the fact that with everything changing, we don't want anything to end. I think it all comes back to this image we have that there is somebody here that can end, so we're constantly trying to bring things back, and we won't go with change. We won't let our lives change if we're hanging on to something.

GF: Nothing begins that something doesn't end. Something must truly end for something to begin. Until things truly end, not even the beginnings we have are real, but they are merely re-configurations of trying to avoid places in our lives. Don't be afraid, Ellen. But see, things will not end by themselves. You have to bring an end to it, meaning "I'm going to bring an end to my relationship with this fear, but I don't even know what that means." You won't. "I'm going to bring an end to this hatred I have for someone. I'm going to bring an end to this worry." Don't think to yourself, "How do I do it?" Just do it.

ED: Then you're on the constant turning point.

GF: You'll learn.

ED: Thank you, Guy.

GF: You're welcome.

ED: This has been a Fireside Chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.

ED: Hi. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein, and I'm here with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. Today we're going to talk about finding freedom from painful attachments.

Guy, I think all of us know what it is to have a painful attachment. Throughout our lives, we develop attachments to people and to objects. Maybe we even have dreams that we're attached to, and then we find that they don't fulfill us. Maybe they even break our hearts, and yet we just can't let them go. We keep carrying them with us. What is it that we're hanging onto? Why can't we let go of them?

GF: It's a deep question that requires a certain amount of detachment to even begin looking into it, because the real root of attachment is a very invisible adversary to the possibility of a person being present to themselves -- to living, and being in the moment.

The real nature of attachment is a nature, a self within us that is always wanting continuity. It wants the sense of itself to always be intact. The way that nature keeps everything intact is by clinging, not to the objects or the people (because those things are incidental), but to the images of these things. When a person thinks about who he once had dinner with twenty-two years ago where he dropped the ball or he could have been president of a basketball company... the revisitation is the action of a nature that only knows itself through these images, through these thoughts. What it seeks is the sense of security that is inherent in being able to move mechanically in the mind from thought to thought to thought, from event to event, from person to person, from excitement to disappointment -- all visiting a very deeply stored set of ideas about ourselves that when we are able to look at them (whether we hate what we see or love what we see), gives us this sense of: "I exist," "I'm real," and "Not only am I real, but I'm going forward. This is who I was. This is what I will be." That nature is the attachment nature.

ED: So it feels a benefit even in pain. It puts itself first, even above the well-being of the individual.

GF: Yes. The mind -- that brain and the way that it works -- is literally unconscious of all the relationships that it has (just as an organ in the body), with what it does to the whole of the system when, for instance, it will cling to an identity, a particular thought: "I'm someone who," or "I do this," or "I don't do that," or "I'm never going to take part in this," or "I want to one day have this." It makes no difference what it attaches itself to. It seems to that nature that what it is thinking about has to do with a world outside of itself in which it is able to move about and interact, but the fact is, it's all in the mind. It's all inside of us.

The attachment, again, is the sense of myself connected to what I'm able to withdraw from, borrow from, those images as I relive them. The continuity of the self is that sense of security that comes from always knowing that I always have myself to draw on, even if it's in depression, even if it's in despair. I can always go to me, and that sense of myself will be there.

ED: And as long as I am depending on something outside of myself -- which isn't even outside of myself because it's the image, as you said, that we have of the thing -- as long as I'm depending on something like that to make me feel right about myself, then I'm constantly in danger, because the world can always be disrupting what I see as my desired connection with that thing.

GF: We as creatures, no different than the deer and the antelope, have an inherent need for security. It's deep. It runs much deeper than people know. It really pretty much governs everything that we do, and it governs most of what we think about because that search for security is the product of thought.

Let's say you're sitting in your office, and somebody comes up to you and says, "Hey, there's a meeting that wasn't planned for." All of us have had moments like this. Maybe it's not at the office. Maybe you're just at home and something happens that is not something you planned for. You are going to go into a situation in which you're not certain at all about the outcome (which by the way, defines life). The minute that happens, if we could see ourselves, what we would see is that there is an instantaneous default process that takes place. My mind will rush back into itself and look for a life boat.

ED: Right... trying to find protection.

GF: It will find something by which it can define itself, meaning that even though I'm going into this unknown moment, I'm not really going in by myself. I'm taking this thing with me that either blames you for causing this or that is protecting me from it by walking in and having an assumed attitude -- or whatever it is -- so that I'm never without that nature that is always trying to shield itself from this unknown moment.

But see, real life is nothing but an unknown moment. That's what is so extraordinary. Even the simplest examination -- if we could do it (that's why I said it takes a little bit of detachment to see it): you tell me something in life that's known before it happens. It's never known before it happens. What's that passage? "I go before thee to make the crooked places straight." We have a nature that goes before us and makes the crooks in the thing!

ED: It's our very desire to protect ourselves (whatever that self is) that puts us in a position of feeling unsafe.

GF: I want to touch something as deeply as possible. You know the story of the "Ugly Duckling"? Here's a creature who falls into a world with creatures not of its own kind -- a swan falls in with ducklings. It only knows the ducks' behavior. It only has the ducks to mold itself into. That's all it knows. Here are these creatures whose nature, relative to the story, doesn't have the elegance of the swan. Ducks don't carry themselves the same way that swans do.

We don't know that we're living in a world of ducks. You look at your mother, your father, your husband, your wife, the political leaders, the religious figures... you look at all these people, and you think somewhere amongst them there is a swan. They're ducks. Why are they ducks? Because all they can do is think.

The only sense of self that human beings have at this level of existence that we're on -- where we're unawakened to ourselves -- is a nature that knows itself through an instantaneous reflection of itself and its own mind, only it doesn't know that it's looking at itself. This is Narcissus and all of those marvelous stories where a person discovers what he didn't know, that all the time he was deriving the very sense of himself from a process that is internalized, that by its very nature is unconscious to its own action. What it gives the individual that it's active in -- all in the dark of oneself, all asleep like Plato's allegory, all shadows -- is duck life.

Real life belongs to a completely different order of energy that belongs to a nature that we have inside of us the capacity for, the potential to live in, that doesn't look out and see what it's thinking about. It doesn't see what it's thinking about at all because it's not thinking. It's present. The energy that is present is completely different than the energy that participates in moments that are defined by its own thought action. This is the difference between ducks and swans, metaphorically speaking, between being a sleeping human being and someone awakening or coming into a life in spirit, a real life -- which is what we talk about.

That nature that's present to itself doesn't carry anything over with itself. It's not interested in reflecting upon what was and what could have been so that therefore it can diagnose what will be and how to make it better for itself. It doesn't think like that because it's not thinking. Its sense of security, its sense of value, of goodness, is all given to it by something greater than itself. The self that thinks about itself actually thinks it's greater than what it thinks about, if you can see it.

Every time you look at yourself and you don't like yourself, aren't you greater than the self you don't like? Every time we judge ourselves or judge others -- all of that is an indication of a divided mind that is merely giving itself the momentary security blanket of hanging onto a bitterness or a sense of betrayal, or a sense of belated whatever -- all for the purpose of staying asleep. That's what that nature wants, and that is the root of attachments. We live in a world within ourselves that is given to us by an order of ourselves that we need no longer live in.

ED: So these unconscious attachments keep re-creating the same painful life. It's a form of reincarnation.

GF: Exactly. They seed themselves, and seed themselves, and seed themselves... and each time that they seed themselves, in other words, each time I feel like I've been a victim of something, each time I find an anger or hatred that's justified towards something or someone, every time that fire rages in me, every time that sense of myself is re-planted, not only does it grow stronger, but my sense of self becomes more validated by it. I actually become further dependent upon that attachment for the definition of myself, which is why we become touchier. God forbid anybody should question our belief, whatever it may be! You want to find a spiritually asleep person? Find someone who, when you question their belief, goes ballistic on you. They'll tell you "love" and this, that, and the other while they have nothing but an image. "Thou shall have no graven images." They are a nameless god. These things have been given to us, all through history. Little by little, this incipient, insidious nature slips in and finds things that it can form pictures of, finds conditioned sensations from, and then always refers to that for who we are... which is why there is war in the name of love, and other monstrosities.

ED: One of the things I love about the way you talk about these things is that you always seem to put everything on its head. When people think of painful attachments, they think: "Poor me. I wasn't fulfilled, and this is why I'm feeling pain," when in fact, it's the attachment itself that is causing the pain.

GF: Exactly.

ED: So, is it just becoming aware of this that can break that cycle?

GF: Yes. That's why I said that a certain level of detachment is necessary. Life gives us ample opportunities for that. Who of us hasn't had a moment where someone or something that was pivotal to our purpose, to our persona… suddenly the whole house of cards starts shaking, and because we can't help ourselves (literally, because it's compulsive), for fear of losing ourselves, we will try to re-create or build that thing back up so that it just sits still! "Stop it! Don't move, life!" Think about that: I want life not to move. Once I get it to where I want it, I don't want it to move, and if it moves, it has to move according to my ideas of improvement.

When we have that life relationship, then everything that takes place in it is seen as being either an advocate of that which I'm attached to it, or (and this is critical) that which threatens me, threatens my sense of self.

I put the question to you, what value does anything have -- no matter how great the image is in my mind -- if as it is placed there and I derive my sense of self from it, instead of becoming the ruler of that image, I become ruled by it? You tell me what value there is in such things.

Here are some examples: I'm attached to a certain position in life or that people treat me a certain way, or I'm attached to possessions that I either have or hope to acquire, because when I do, I won't be the footstool of whatever it is that I imagine myself to be (which by the way, is also an attachment). Now, as I vest myself in these images, I give myself to them, because as I imagine myself having them or actually on the way to them, I feel free. "I'm on my way!" or "I've got it!" Then the very thing by which I have found the sense of my freedom turns out to be a very cruel master and dictator to me, because anything that threatens the condition threatens my idea and my images that are associated with that, and by proxy I'm punished, I'm in pain.

So when I see that I'm not finding freedom but I'm further enslaving myself, by this process of allowing this nature in its sleep state (which is all the time: "quack, quack, quack, quack"; think, think, think, think) doing what? Seeing the system stays in place. When you understand that, then you're willing to begin this process of natural detachment, because no man or woman is going to consciously take part in what compromises them.

ED: Right. We're cooperating with the very thing that is causing the death of ourselves.

GF: Yes, and that's a beginning of dissolution, but not like "annihilation of ego" in certain schools... it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with a natural transformation that was always intended to take place with this darkness of ourselves in which desire forms an object and then pursues it. It's all in the sleep of ourselves. It's intended to bring the light of awareness into that whole process so that the whole thing can become used so that a person then increasingly has the energy to be present to himself, to be in the moment. It becomes a beautiful spiral upwards towards more freedom, to a more enlightened life, as opposed to this continual constriction, denigration, and downward slope that occurs when I'm identified and attached to everything that I am and don't want anything to change. We don't want one thing to change. Somebody says, "You can't have two sugars; you can only have one," and we come undone! "What will happen to me?" (I'm talking personally now!)

ED: This brings up the role of our relationship with the world and what happens to us. As long as we've got this need to protect ourselves, things happen as they will, and we see the whole world as our enemy because it destroys our dream. From what you're saying, that's the wake-up call. That's the shock that gives us the opportunity to see that our dream never had anything behind it and that we can leave that behind and find a real life outside of that.

GF: Yes. It seems like our dreams are stuffed with the hopes of a brighter and broader life, but the truth is, our dreams are stuffed with the stuff of ourselves. It's not until we see that the stuff of ourselves is merely a re-configuration of what didn't make us happy the first time we dreamed it, that then we can begin to let it go. Not because we're brave and forthright spiritual people, but because we recognize that what I have been doing with my life -- every time I return to thought about what someone did, every time I sit and worry about how I'm going to handle tomorrow (and I'm not talking about practical things... no fear belongs in practical thought) -- every time I do that, I need to understand and recognize in such moments that I need to drop it right there. That's what we use as an exercise. Any time you catch yourself feeling any stress at all, the stress is born out of a sense of fear connected with the idea of the loss of something critical to yourself. Who you really are cannot lose anything real. When you know that, you find your real self in proportion to that discovery.

ED: Yes. And the only way we can know that is to enter the unknown.

GF: Risk it.

ED: Go out without the protection we think we need to face the moment, completely open, and let it reveal itself to us and reveal ourselves to ourselves.

GF: Yes. Let us be willing to see ourselves as we are, and let the very moment of that kind of clarity produce in us (and it will) a certain kind of understanding that we don't have when we're leading ourselves through these moments. There is something in us that is intended to lead us, or rather to lift us, to change us into men and women who no longer harm ourselves or the world we're in.

ED: Yes, and this reminds me of what you always say, that "all things good come for those to whom the good is all things."

GF: Yes.

ED: Thank you, Guy.

This has been a Fireside Chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.

ED: Hi. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein, and I'm here with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley.

Guy, I thought that today we would talk about the present moment. It's becoming more and more popular these days for people to talk about living in the present moment, but you've been talking about this for 25 years, so let's start at the beginning: Why is the present moment so important?

GF: If we could understand -- even in a small way -- what the present moment is, we would be so far ahead in our work to become a different kind of human being, that words fail it.

The problem that we face is that when we sit here and talk about the present moment, and people are watching and listening to us, we think about the present moment, and thought can't get into the present moment. Thought belongs to something that is occurring in the present, but the self that thinks about its own thoughts is watching a reflection -- something that has passed down the stream and is no longer a part of the actual moment. So there's the first problem, if you will, that the present moment is actually a world. It is actually a place, a condition, and the condition the present moment represents and that it is in its factuality cannot be entered into by our thinking nature, by our nature that analyzes and wants to approach it. So there's the first problem: With what do I approach it?

Now, the next thing is... in our particular part of the world, we're coming into spring. I was mowing some pastures today and the locust trees were starting to bloom. So every time I would drive underneath these trees with my tractor mower, it would rain this perfumed scent on me. Here's the grass growing, these blossoms opening, me on my trusty mower, and all this is taking place at once. The blossoms open because they are part of a whole movement of forces that are active in the present moment. Take any one of those forces away from the whole of that springtime blossoming, and you don't have a blossom. You have something other than a blossom. Maybe you have something that doesn't blossom. It's the same thing with the human being. We don't blossom as human beings the way we're intended to, because we're not part of the unison of life, of this present moment with all of its active forces that are intended to produce, in the world outside of us and in the world inside of us, this constant change -- and not just change in the way we think of it, but in terms of its forwarding, perfection, development. Everything continues to develop that's part of the present moment because it is being fed by a stream of forces that are the ground of that present moment.

So, why is it important? Because nothing changes in us in a positive, upward manner until we ourselves become attuned to the present moment. Then we get it.

One more example: If you've had a problem that you've struggled with, and then come to the end of the struggle, there is always this semi-barren moment. For one thing, you can't go any further; you don't know what to do. It's out of that semi-barren moment that there is a blossoming of a new understanding. The semi-barren moment represents that instant in us in which our thought nature can no longer find itself. In essence, it has to be put aside. The mind sees its own inability to solve the problem. In that split second, we have a minute example of where a certain unifying process takes place in us, and for that moment of integrity of all of our parts, suddenly a light goes on. I see it. "Ah, now I understand." That's what is supposed to happen to us all the time. Our lives are intended to be rooted in a completely different order of reality wherein it isn't change that we're trying to effect in order to get a different sense of ourselves, but rather the actual sense of our self is being born present moment to present moment to present moment. And it's good, true, and rich enough in itself that we don't need to try to control events.

ED: It sounds as though being in the present moment should be the most natural thing in the world, but anybody who has ever tried to keep attention focused in the now, knows it is almost impossible. Why is it so difficult for us to come into the present moment and stay there?

GF: Let's make a little aim for ourselves that the whole time we're talking, we're going to do the very best we can to remain awake and aware of ourselves in the moment. Now, does that mean that I have to stop talking?

ED: I hope not!

GF: You know why you hope not? Because you flashed into time, because a part of you immediately jumped out, in a manner of speaking, and evaluated what this moment would be like without me doing the talking, and you'd be left doing whatever it is you would be doing... and there was fear in it, wasn't there?

ED: Yes.

GF: So we can see that fear and living in time (meaning being in a thought nature that evaluates its conditions by considering its environment through associative powers of the mind) always produces a fear.

So, back to the question of why it is so difficult to remain in the present moment. It's because we're just not used to the food of it. We're not used to the kind of energy that, by the way, we flower under and with... we're not used to that. We're used to a certain kind of sensation that thought produces as it jumps back and forth and all around, into the fear, into trying to find controls for that fear, or whatever it may be. We're used to a nature that is self-stimulating by its own thought process.

We are not intended to be self-stimulating creatures. We're intended to be men and women who are part of a process in which, through our awareness, we are able to see all of the kinds of thoughts and feelings that are coming up in us. That's in the present moment. My awareness of these things is the present moment. There is no difference in reality between awareness of the present moment and the present moment that one is aware of. They're actually one thing. It's not like there is this place called the present moment. There is our awareness, and that awareness in this moment of ourselves includes everything that is taking place.

I think of a river, and in my mind, I look slightly upriver and think, "Oh, there's something coming [good or bad]," and that sets me up. I'm now separate from what I'm looking at, and I think, "Oh, here it comes. It's getting better. It's getting closer. Wait. Stop! Don't go." Now it's bad. So that's how we see things, because our mind always relates to the world around us through thoughts about things. Real life doesn't have thoughts about things in it; it has the expression of life that those thoughts describe. We are intended to be in relationship with that life, that energy -- not the words that we have become addicted to using for the purpose of describing that.

For all intents and purposes, we have become not only conditioned by our own words, but the words we use, in turn tend to be self-conditioning. We rarely have a moment in which we're just with ourselves, in the present moment, because our mind is caught with trying to get a sense of security and well-being out of whatever it's holding in its mind.

That's why it's so hard. It's hard because I'm habituated to a sense of self brought about by thinking about myself. Now, how would one ever even begin to give that up? By beginning to see some of the things we're talking about.

Every human being is born with an imperative, and the imperative is to be a part of the process of the development and perfection of consciousness. It's an imperative. It's part of why we explore, seek, and want to discover. It's part of the whole process of human movement out towards technological advancement. It was never to get quite the way it did, because it was intended inwardly to become a self-searching mechanism. That self-searching mechanism, that imperative is only fulfilled when (back to what I said in the beginning) we are part of all of the forces in the present moment. The awareness that I have that is the same as the present moment is capable of recognizing, being conscious of, all the aspects of myself simultaneously. That constant turning with that light of awareness transforms what is turning -- transforms me. I transcend myself, but only when I can be in the present moment.

ED: This all reminds me of something you said recently that was so remarkable. You said that the present moment is the same present moment now as it was five hundred years ago. There is just one present moment. That is so comforting, because it's like what you were saying about the river -- I don't have to be part of all these things coming and going down the river. If I'm in the present moment now, I'm part of an eternal moment through which everything passes.

GF: And the only way that I can know that eternity of now (because it's true) is how? Not by thinking about it, but by being in relationship with it. And how do I come into relationship with the present moment other than through my awareness, which is a window into, or which is an aspect of it?

When I can be awake and aware (and everybody has done this) -- I go out into nature and see some panorama, a starlit night, the cerulean blue sky when the sun is going down -- and because of my awareness of it, I experience something of the timelessness of it. Now, if we could "amplify" that idea, we'd start to recognize that the more I'm capable of being present to myself in this moment, the more potential there is for me to share in what is a limitless possibility, because this present moment has no constraints!

Look, what am I limited by? If you examine yourself in the moment, you'll see that when you run into problems, the problems you run into have to do with things your mind has projected as being real, unassailable, unchangeable. But if you live in the pure possibility of the present moment, then the very presence of yourself in that ends that part of you that looks at life and says "it can't be done." The only thing that can't be done is because there's a you in the past that is measuring a you in the present and says "there's no point to it."

So there are so many reasons why it's critical for us to understand what it means to live in the present moment. It's where things are refreshed. It's where things are reborn. It's where things die.

ED: Looking at it from the point of view of how do we do that work, you gave a talk the other day where you likened the mind to a horse that keeps going off into the wrong pasture and eating loco weed. You said that we have to watch this horse of our mind and make sure that it goes into the right pasture where it gets the nourishing food, which is the food of the present moment.

GF: Yes. And it's confusing to people, so it would be good to clear it up. You can bring your awareness into the present moment by becoming aware of what's happening to you, in you, in the present moment. What does that mean? You can sense your own body. Do it. You can sense your own body, your own emotional state, your thoughts. That sensing is a certain kind of energy, and that certain kind of energy is a present energy because it relates to a present state of consciousness. So when I can be present to myself, it means that I am sensing myself presently. That energy is what allows us a window into my body. Is there tension in my right leg because I've got it propped up underneath the chair? Is my throat dry? I can sense all of myself, and if I'm willing to do it, then I am in the present moment because that's where the sensing is taking place.

Now, a person says, "Well, that's fine, but I have a responsibility. I've got to do this, that or the other... " Let's examine that. What do you have to do other than be wholly present to yourself in the moment? Because if I'm not aware of these thoughts and feelings -- and let's go back to what we said about how awareness lets us be in relationship with it -- then a thought that comes into my mind that I'm not present to, that tells me I have to do certain things or otherwise this is going to happen, now what? I'm not in the present moment anymore. I'm in time with that thought, and I'm being convinced by it's content (which is fear-filled) that if I don't do what it tells me to do, something bad is going to happen to me. Well, what worse can happen to me than to not be in the present moment where I can change, and instead be in the past, being changed by a conditioned aspect of myself?

ED: Yes. It makes you wonder, if I'm not paying attention to what's going on, what is running my life in this moment?

GF: This is such a valuable question, Ellen. If we were willing to ask this of ourselves, over and over again, simply to come back and notice, "Wow. I got so carried away when I was talking to so and so that I said things I didn't want to say. Who said that? I know I didn't want to." So we work at bringing ourselves back, and bringing ourselves back, and bringing ourselves back. Why? Because it is by being present to ourselves that we begin to tap into a kind of power that makes it impossible for us to turn ourselves over to what has made us powerless.

These thoughts and feelings... they don't have power of their own, Ellen... the things that punish us are really quite powerless. It's our relationship with these things that gives them authority over us. We can take the authority back by bringing ourselves back, again and again, into the present moment, where I actually see the quality and character of these things. Then I can begin to change because I'm present where change takes place.

ED: You've talked about being a "message catcher," that there is constantly help coming to us, and if we're not in the present moment, we can't be a message catcher.

GF: Doesn't that locust tree that's blossoming catch the message from the sun? And doesn't the energy from the sun give that tree, in combination with all the elements in the ground and the water and air, give it all it needs to flower? In a very similar fashion, as human beings we are created to catch impressions, to catch the world around us all the time and its relationship within us producing this constant change. Our recognition and willingness to watch and realize all of that produces the very thing that we've been after all of our lives, which is the peace that is found in the present moment, and again, the end of being powerless because we haven't been in right relationship with that.

ED: Speaking of a practice that can put us there, you've talked about the importance of "ceaseless prayer" as a way of keeping ourselves from wandering off like the horse.

GF: It's difficult to answer in such a short time, but an unattended mind is the breeding ground of self-defeat, and the more we're willing to attend to ourselves -- if we just give ourselves a simple ceaseless prayer, if we work at something -- then our mind can't go off on its own merry jaunts. When it starts to go away, because I have a singular intention, now I become conscious of that intention, and I can bring myself back to the present moment. Ceaseless prayer or mantra in themselves are valueless. They are a means to being able to see ourselves and stay with ourselves in the present.

ED: Thank you, Guy.

This has been a Fireside Chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.

ED: Hi. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein, and I'm here with bestselling inner-life author, Guy Finley. Guy, today I'd like to discuss a topic that you talk about quite often, which is the liberation of consciousness. Implied in the idea that consciousness must be liberated is the idea that we must be held captive by something. So, let's begin there: What is it that holds our consciousness captive?

GF: You tell me!

ED: Well, I can tell you individual things. I'm held captive by self-concern, being intimidated by other people, worrying about things that are going to happen, recriminations over past events... a lot of it circulating around my ideas about myself.

GF: The point is that what is the difference between what you're held captive by and everybody else in the world that you know?

ED: We're all held captive by the same kind of thing that each of us as individuals identify as being particular to us, but it seems like it's the same underlying, dark state.

GF: I think we need to transpose what you're saying. To get to the root of this idea of what holds us captive -- what is a captive consciousness -- the first thing we have to do is free ourselves from the idea of this separate self with these seemingly separate concerns that is a victim of a world acting separately upon us. Because I think at the root of the captivity of ourselves is the whole idea of this individual who faces these individual burdens, these giants that are always crushing him or her.

The fact of the matter is, I'm compromised by my own desires. I'm an imminently selfish human being. I'm also a captive of wanting not to appear like all the things that I fear that I am. The real list runs to the heart of what holds a human being captive, but so does what liberates that consciousness run right to the heart of all human beings.

If we want to understand what it means to be a free human being, it doesn't start by imagining what freedom is. It begins with recognizing, not out of a series of mandates or other kinds of spiritual ideas, but the fact of myself as I am. Am I a free human being, or am I someone who explains to himself all the time why he does what he does, and believes that his explanations are the same thing as freedom of choice? I say that it's not. I say that if I have to explain to myself one thing, if I talk to myself, that the very fact that I am in a constant interior dialog about my life – why I'm doing what I'm doing, who I am, why things are the way they are – the fact that I live with a constant set of explanations hanging over me proves I'm not a free human being.

Now, if we can get to that, then we can start to talk about what it means to become free. When we recognize what holds us captive in common, what it is about consciousness itself that is held captive by its own condition, then we have the beginning of something that may be meaningful.

ED: OK. So, how does that condition take us over?

GF: I'm asking you, who is independent of that condition?

ED: Everybody seems to be taken over by it.

GF: "Taken over" means that there is a me that is different than the condition. Somebody says something and I get angry, as though there is a me that is somehow free of anger until somebody does something. I'm saying that's not freedom from anger, just because you're not angry. That's not freedom! Am I free because I'm not angry at the moment, or do I live in a potential state of self-punishing energies that only need a catalyst of some kind to come along and trigger them? And if that is true that anything can trigger something that torments me, how free am I?

ED: I'm not.

GF: So therefore, something doesn't just take me over, does it?

ED: Something reveals.

GF: In that split second, I have the possibility of an insight into something that I don't even suspect about myself.

ED: And then, to add to the captivity in that moment that I see it, instead of just seeing it purely, I resist seeing it.

GF: And isn't resistance to seeing the truth of something a form of a dialog with that which is itself a captive of the condition it's trying to explain away?

ED: Yes. So I just get deeper and deeper into this divided self.

GF: You know what we can't imagine, Ellen? We can't imagine that in us lives a nature that has absolutely nothing in common whatsoever with everything that we think about and all of the things that we try to do. We can't even imagine that we are in our heart of hearts a creature that is not created to serve its own purposes -- which by the way is exactly what turns out to be what holds that consciousness captive.

"I" set up an ideal. "I" set up something that I'm going to be and become, and the "I" that says I'm going to do this, I believe is me. I feel it. But one can see, even if they'll just look a little bit, that this "I" that determines what it is going to do and be has its roots in a series of social conditions, its environment, its family, with what is popular at the time, with what it doesn't want to be when it looks out and sees things that displease it.

So this "I" isn't really an "I" at all, but is just a kind of an idea that circulates around inside of a consciousness that is common to every other human being that makes it possible for that person to feel that he's special because he, in that thought, is distinguished by it. The thought defines the human being. That's right to the root of the whole thing, because can't you see that as long as I'm "someone" who is defined by thought, then that means thought is greater than "I"? And if thought is greater than "I," then I'm always going to be serving thought, and since thought belongs to a culture, and a conditioned time and space, that means that I am perpetually a victim of the world that I live in without knowing it.

This comes back to what I was saying. We can't yet (but we will) understand that a human being is an altogether different creature than those things that presently define its consciousness. We aren't meant, as we are at present, to do nothing but think about ourselves... and that's essentially what we do.

If you examine your life, you are never not thinking about yourself unless you're dreaming about something -- which even though you may not be dreaming about yourself, you're the principle recipient of the sensations in that dream, or you're supposedly doing things for other people, when the fact is, the reason you're doing what you're doing for other people, 99% of the time, you're making sure that you don't lose what you imagine you have through those relationships.

ED: So that they'll see you a certain way and then that will let you see yourself that way.

GF: I've been doing this a long time, and you will never be able in a million years to sell a human soul on the idea that only when it recognizes its complete nothingness does it at last become free and gain everything that it was entitled to gain when it was created. You'll never sell it. Because the only way that level of consciousness (and now we bring a new idea in) that we presently live from can ever begin to see how its actions produce the antithesis of what it believes is that the experience of all that becomes less and less meaningful. For us, when things get empty, what is the first thing we do?

ED: We try to fill it.

GF: We fill it. Now is that not common to every human being? So that means that is a common characteristic of consciousness, isn't it? A level of consciousness is always finding itself looking out and feeling a certain emptiness, seeing a certain emptiness, and that same level then envisions what it needs in order to fill it. That is one of the levels of consciousness. Now, that level of consciousness is in Ellen, it's in Guy, it's in everyone listening here. There are levels beneath that – worse levels, if you will – levels that are sure you don't deserve anything. A level of consciousness can look out at the world, and it can see someone it hates just because skin is the color that it is. There's another level of consciousness beneath that that says, "That person is a danger to me," so fear runs that level... and all that is in us too. Then there is also, above that, levels of consciousness that can recognize how terribly limiting and empty it is to live like that level of consciousness... and that's inside of Ellen, and inside of Guy.

ED: So the possibility for the liberation of consciousness is built into this system of levels.

GF: The possibility of the liberation of consciousness simply means that consciousness awakened to its entire content cannot be a captive of any of its parts. We have all those parts, but they don't want to acknowledge their own existence. I don't want to see I'm a greedy, compulsive whatever it is that I am. That doesn't fit my idea of what I need to be free.

All that darkness, all those qualities of that level of consciousness – which are in the earth, Ellen, it's not like it's a mystery -- that comprise the entire existence that we are a part of, live right inside of us, and every one of those things has active and passive parts that are always being stirred by life.

To be awake, to have a liberated consciousness, there is not someone who is liberated, it is a consciousness that has come full-circle and understands its own content entirely. It is not separate from any of its parts. That is a liberated consciousness, because it has discovered all about itself, itself.

What can hold someone who knows everything there is to know about himself? What can hold a person like that? Is there anything? No. There's nothing.

ED: So you're saying that once a person operates as a whole being, a unified being -- which means he's not even a separate individual because in that unification he has an awareness of everything -- then he's no longer a captive of all these little voices inside that are pulling him this way or that way, or trying to explain things.

GF: He becomes a citizen of another world. What do you think the "kingdom of heaven" means? Do you think it means a place where you've got your own house, no mortgage payments, Berber carpet, and gardeners? That's what people think the kingdom of heaven is! The kingdom of heaven has nothing whatsoever to do with anything like that, which is why so few people ever come close to understanding what it means to give themselves up, because we have parts of us that are as tenacious as a piece of grass growing through asphalt.

Everything wants its life... including the darkest parts of humanity. But inside of that humanity, inside of Consciousness, inside of Christ, is a Light -- a quality of being, of character -- and it's as common as the darkness is to all of us. It is what animates us relative to being able to see into and understand those things that compromise us.

So here we have the essential dynamic forces, don't we? We've got this darkness that we can see inside of us, all of these self-wrecking things that are not personal. Neither the Light nor the darkness are personal qualities. In our present undeveloped state, we only have the capacity to identify with everything inside of ourselves. We literally derive a certain sense of ourselves from every one of these passing states of consciousness, and for being a derivative of these passing states, we become defined by them.

The world at large, defined by these larger states, then sets out purposes and ways in which to deal with these things that themselves have no real right to be determining the destiny of anything on the planet – not any more than a leaf falling from a tree is meant to determine how the grass grows. It's just a part of the process.

ED: They all exist, and they must be seen, not resisted.

GF: And serve each other... and serve each other... and serve each other. The most distasteful thing in the end to a human being is to understand at last that he or she is here to serve – not serve themselves, not serve others for the purpose of serving themselves, but for the purpose of serving that which they have come to see as true as the foundation of their own consciousness. Then that person begins to take on a different quality of life, and I'm not going to try to define or describe it. I'm not setting myself up as being such an individual. I'm only telling you that there is this matrix, and we are ourselves in it, and it is possible to have within us the light to understand it so fully that we are no longer a captive of those laws. Instead, they serve us as we are intended to be served by them.

ED: Otherwise, we serve the darkness when we're meant to, through our consciousness, serve Light.

GF: Across the board. In the end, darkness serves Light. It's not like master and slave. It's quite a natural process. But for us, it's become very unnatural, where not only do we not serve Light, we see what is dark. But something in us says that it's Light, and then we wind up being the slaves of that which was supposed to set us free. That's indicative of our present consciousness.

The discovery of that, if we're willing to see the fact of these things, and not hide and not run, and not get hateful, is the beginning of freedom. Hatefulness towards our condition is what hate does in us in order to keep us from seeing our actual condition, because the more I hate something, the more I'm separate from it. The liberation of consciousness is not about separation, but integration.

ED: In this process of discovery, you made a distinction recently that I think is important here, and that is the distinction between willfulness and watchfulness. Could you go into that a little?

GF: These various levels, this consciousness that we're talking about, the root of it has to do with all these various ways in which we're going to bring to ourselves that which will free us. So there's willfulness. But the willfulness isn't my willfulness. There is something in me that feels empty, incomplete, afraid -- a certain order of energy -- and it imagines, desires what will free it. Opposites always try to complete themselves, but opposites can't complete themselves. They are eternal opposites -- the Yin and the Yang, the yes and the no, darkness and Light -- and they cannot do it.

Watchfulness is the beginning of understanding the inherent emptiness in trying to find myself and free myself through those things. Then I don't have to do anything anymore. I begin to recognize the futility of it, and then begin to agree, by a sort of conscious consent, to be a watcher, to learn to watch life instead of trying to will my way through it.

Watchfulness contains higher will, whereas lower will has no watchfulness in it at all. The difference is the difference between the Light and the dark, being captive of our own imagination vs. free -- with the ability to use our imagination for the purpose that we're given it, which is to make our lives and the lives of others around us a better and brighter place.

ED: Thank you, Guy. This has been a Fireside Chat with bestselling inner-life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.

ED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein and this is a Fireside Chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. I thought that today we would explore the topic of regret. Most people have things in their life that they regret. Memories come up of embarrassing experiences or lost opportunities, or maybe mistakes that they made or things that they're sorry over... and these things that may have happened years and years ago still torment people, and actually poison their lives today. Why is it that we can't let these things go?

GF: The real reason is because we are bankrupt as human beings, only we don't know that we're bankrupt. A bankrupt human being is someone who the only way that he or she has to know themselves is through thinking about themselves. And when the only way a person has to know themselves is to think about themselves, then the nature that is satisfied with deriving sensation from such kinds of thoughts -- be they the most sorrowful, regretful, ugly thoughts one can possibly imagine -- doesn't care one iota. Not a split second does it think to itself: "Look at the suffering that I'm causing this poor being that is taking my part." So that man or woman who can't shake off their regrets, first and foremost has been subject to a kind of ignorance, Ellen. That's why the work that we do at the Life of Learning Foundation, what we're trying to disseminate into the world, is so critical, because how can I help myself if I don't know any better? Most men and women do not know any better.

ED: I have memories like this that are little time bombs. There will be an association with something and these memories will come up periodically... I know that they're always lurking, just waiting to come out and get me.

GF: Self-knowledge is crucial. Let's say something painful happens. The root of my regret is that there is something that took place at some point in my life where I did something terrible or someone did something terrible to me. I know that I hurt someone or that someone hurt me. There's no question in my mind. I know that I didn't grab the golden ring at the moment when I could have grabbed it, and now look at me.

ED: I could have been a contender.

GF: The first week, or the first six months, the "pain," the strength of that impression by which I felt myself to have failed in some measure, is pretty deep and strong. It doesn't take a lot. I look and I see the person that I had the dealing with, or I see someone who looks like the person I had the dealing with. I see some cereal like Wheaties on television and it reminds me that "I could have been champ."

The point is that the first set of associations is very easy to strike me because I'm still very sensitive. But unbeknownst to me is that the more that these associations set off the reminder of the sensation that is a derivative of the image, that nightmare picture that is stored in my mind, that association takes place, and the split second the association takes place, the whole animation is brought to life. Suddenly I am completely a captive of believing that there is no choice but for me to think about what my mind has put on the screen, what I've remembered that has been brought by whatever it is that takes place. When a man or a woman does that enough, they don't need associations anymore.

ED: These things take on a life of their own.

GF: Not only that, but in a certain sense, the body itself becomes addicted to the need for a chemical release caused by either resisting the sensation or finding some kind of thrill in it (and both are actually fairly synonymous), so that at a certain point, a person doesn't need any association at all. They can just sit at home and call up all the regret, fear, loathing, all the negative states. They can simply sit and bathe in those things and they don't need one thing outside of them anymore by which to associate. All of us understand this.

I want to say this because I can feel certain things when I say things like that... if you're reading this, don't you think for a moment that there is such a thing as being too far gone. A person thinks, "God, he just described me. I've hated that man for so many years, I don't have to think about him. I just feel the hate whenever I see anyone with a mustache." I'm saying that what happens to us has happened to us because we didn't understand ourselves, so that the real seed of our sorrow had to do with unawareness of the workings of our own hearts and minds. Therefore, new awareness is what remedies that. It is what heals us. Not just the knowledge itself, but what begins to happen to me when at last I recognize, "God. I'm sitting at home, and I just watched the news and I saw that business about Liberia, or I saw that deal about Lady Liberty, or I saw something about a Liberty dollar... it doesn't take much... and wow, suddenly I start to feel all these feelings again."

Most of us don't have any idea where these feelings come from, Ellen... none. We're sure that it has something to do with an uncaring world, with a condition way outside of our control. There is no such thing as a condition that is outside of our control -- not that we can control the conditions that stimulate that remembrance, but that we can be conscious in the moment of that association and recognize it as being a bum at the door, something that has no right to enter into us, and that can't stay in us if we don't agree to remember it -- which is one other important point.

You and I have the power to choose what we remember. Nothing can stay in our mind that we don't want to stay in our mind. Nothing. In one sense, these things that we can begin to recognize are so simple, but because of our bankrupt soul, our bankrupt spiritual life, it sounds like it is too far fetched. Most men and women don't know anything about attention, what they do with their attention. Attention animates. I give my attention to an image of something that hurt me, and the very attention I give to it re-animates it. The re-animation pours the aching that is associated with that image through me, and I don't know that I unconsciously gave my attention to it and that I can consciously withdraw my attention from it. This is what we're interested in.

ED: So if the memory comes up, it is actually possible to remember the event without reliving the emotion of it.

GF: Why would one want to remember a painful event?

ED: One wouldn't, but sometimes -- maybe as you said -- we have an association come up and the thing is there, but then we give life to it.

GF: That's the point. The remembrance that way is mechanical, Ellen. And what is mechanical is not intended to rule our life. We are created to be conscious creatures. So yes, all kinds of mechanical associations take place, but in the instant of that mechanical remembrance, we can use the jolt, the awareness of the pain that comes from being caught in those sensations to bring ourselves back and realize, "You know what? Something just got into my house that doesn't belong in there." And that's the end of it... instead of going along with remembering those painful images because that is so familiar as we do it that the sensations give us our familiar sense of ourselves.

ED: That's just it. We actually get a strange kind of pleasure out of the pain of reliving it, and until we see that there is something inside of us that is against us...

GF: But we can't see that, Ellen, until we recognize that we are voluntarily agreeing to this process that is producing the ache in us. This is what almost no one understands – that you cannot sit at home (or wherever you are) and suffer over something that happened to you in the past that you are not suffering because you have agreed to suffer with it. That is unconscious suffering that provides a very definite sense of ourselves that we don't know we're a conspirator in. We need to become conscious of the fact that it's our own mind.

Do you have things in your house that you don't want in there? That's ludicrous. You wouldn't keep a bear in your house. The point is simple. This is my house, and what created me has given me the authority to keep out of that house what doesn't belong in it. Does that mean that the errant bumble bee, that biting, stinging thought or feeling, that terrible image, doesn't come in? No, but the second that it comes in, it is recognized as being something that is not intended to be in there, and that's the end of it. Which means, that's the end of regret, because regret is always a form of resistance to something that one has remembered against their own will.

Frankly, the problem is, we care about the wrong things. That's about as simple as it can be said. We care more about what people think about us than how much pain it causes inside of us to want approval. And what is it one regrets if it isn't some relationship, some involvement, something that happened to them, that they were at least the co-creator of, that they at least had some involvement in? Nothing just happens to a person.

It isn't until a person begins to recognize: "My whole life has been spent trying to escape the past that isn't perfect with some hope and aspiration to arrive somewhere where I won't feel like I do, and wherever I go, there I am. I don't escape my regrets no matter what I'm able to realize. I bring them with me, and they spoil everything." And the reason they spoil everything is because they belong to a negative imagination, a negative nature, a part of us that has no right to dwell in us and rule us the way that it does.

ED: This reminds me of a talk you gave a couple of weeks ago about regret and how somehow we think that by living over this awful experience in our minds, we'll be able to correct it, but it's futile because the thing happened back then; we can't correct it now. The only thing that can make any kind of correction is to change the nature that we're living with now that caused the event to happen.

GF: That's exactly right.

ED: And when we put all our attention on this past event, we're not doing the work to change the nature now, and so as you said, we keep reliving the same thing.

GF: That's exactly right, and I'll even strengthen it. "Let us never forget"... you've heard that a thousand times... let us never forget Hitler, Mussolini, 9/11... let us never forget these terrible events in life. There are stadiums and temples built so that we don't forget ever again, and I'm telling you it's pure psychopathery. It's pure self-worship. All of those things are pure self-love. How can a person ever forget something like that? It isn't that we can forget it; it's that we don't want to forget it, meaning that inside of us, every time I can call up that horrible thing that he did to my family, that those people did, that this situation produced, every time I can relive that, I can relive all of the fury, the anger, and the grief that I have, and I exist one more time unto myself as something separate from the rest of the world, and no one understands my pain. Trash. Why? Because if I see something and I recognize it -- my God, what kind of world could produce a condition under which a person believes there is a benefit in hating another human being, that something as terrible as what happened on 9/11 for instance could repeat itself again? – then I don't need to remember that. If I have to try to remember that, then it hasn't changed me, and the point of events in our lives is to change us in the instant that they happen, and if we're not changed in the instant that event transpires, then we don't change. A memory is formed of it by which we relive the event and keep the conditions alive under which that event will take place again.

ED: The change we want -- for a better life -- is constantly occurring, but by thinking that I'm going to change it by reliving this past event, I'm interfering with the process that could actually bring about the better world that I say I want.

GF: Sorrow sows the seed of sorrow. Fear sows the seed of fear. Hatred sows the seed of hatred. Christ himself said, "As ye reap, ye sow." When something happens and I remember it, I recall it, and I go through the bitterness connected with it. I actually believe that my bitterness is somehow going to better the condition when all it does is provide a condition in myself that keeps alive the very bitterness that I blame on the event. Most of the things that are terrible that happen to us, Ellen, wouldn't happen to us if we were awake and changing moment to moment to begin with, because we wouldn't be caught in the kind of identifications that we are at present.

ED: It reminds me of something Vernon Howard used to say: If you apologize and say you're sorry for something, you'll do it again.

GF: Not that we don't apologize if we're genuinely sorry.

ED: Right. We're talking about internally.

GF: That's right, Ellen. That's all we do. A man hurts a woman, a woman hurts her children: "I'm sorry. I'll never do it again." And nothing changes except for the way in which we hurt each other again. Why? Because we don't learn. We think we pay our dues with regret. Regret is not a way in which one pays their dues. The way in which one pays their dues is to consciously suffer the nature that errs in the moment, to become conscious of the thing that is at conflict with life around it. Then I don't have to worry about how I'm going to fix this a moment later because I'm beginning to let go of the part of me that causes others to suffer.

I tell you, it just isn't clear enough, and it probably will never be in this world. The greatest thing that could happen to any human being, Ellen, is to catch themselves right in the middle of making someone else suffer because of the nature that they're living in, in that moment. Then they don't have to say "I'm sorry" (though they might). They have seen something at the quick of themselves by which they can no longer be that man or woman anymore. And if I make the change now, I don't have to worry about making a change later. If I change now, I don't have to be concerned about what once happened, because the self that produced it begins to disappear.

ED: If I have a regret over it, then I'm saying that there is this part of me that knows better than the other part of me. There's a smart part of me that knows more than the stupid part that made that mistake, and it's not really facing the fact that it's one nature that has the flaw in it.

GF: Not a flaw... an incomplete understanding. It's a very tough sell, because by and large, most of us only know how to regret a lot of what we did with our relationships. You tell somebody that there is no value in the regret and they feel as though you are actually stealing something from them, when regret is always a self-wrecking emotion. The issue isn't that there isn't value in regret. The issue is that what one regrets now is merely an image that has been formed in their mind that is not connected to anything real other than the sense of real pain it produces when one visits it. So it's actually wasted. It doesn't produce change. It cements in that man or woman the sense of identity they have as being the person who did that, when the whole act of really regretting something would be the wish to transcend the self that produced the pain to begin with. So it is against us to live like that, which is why there is no substitute for self-knowledge, the beginning of understanding these ideas. Know thyself.

ED: So, I can undergo a change now. In a way, I change my past. I change the way I remember it, the relationship I have with it.

GF: That's exactly right. I change the relationship. Now my relationship with my own past is a set of mechanical reactions that produce misery that I then blame on the images that then cause me to feel that way. That's what happens to me. A mechanical set of associations produce pain. When I become conscious of that, and I don't allow that kind of activity to take place in my house, I have a new relationship, not only with those mechanical associations, but with the actual outcome of that new relationship, because now I can see this is taking place. My sense of being is no longer purely derived from the pain that used to come with that. I'm conscious now of the fact that there is something in me that actually likes re-visiting my past. I never was conscious of the fact that there was something that re-visited for the sense of making me a victim. I never knew the relationship. I was asleep to myself spiritually, psychologically.

So the instant that I become conscious of that relationship, in that moment that consciousness produces a way in which there is still that feeling (because one doesn't just get rid of that instantaneously), but now instead of unconsciously suffering it – which drives that cycle of conflict – I begin to consciously awaken to it. I become aware of it, and I see it as being the intruder that it is instead of a guide. I recognize it as being something false instead of something necessary. My interior understanding changes my relationship with the dynamic. Changing the relationship with the dynamic changes what drives me through the moment, and I begin to act differently towards myself and the images that normally drive me.

ED: In case somebody might think, "Well, don't we have responsibility for things?", this actually makes you more responsible... in the right way.

GF: It's the only responsibility. Look. What is real responsibility? How can I say I want to act responsibly when by reliving what I relive, I drag myself into some pit, cover myself with mud, then walk out and visit with my family? That's not responsible. Responsibility is responsibility across the board. The real responsibility is to the Light, to understanding, to the Truth, to Love. And if one really wants those things, then we have to understand all of these forces active in us that are driving us into being the most irresponsible human beings in the world. When I stop acting irresponsibly, then I begin to become responsible -- as everyone can do right now. Come awake to yourself. Be present to yourself. In that kind of awakedness, in that kind of awareness, I have a new relationship with all of the life both "outside" and inside, and that relationship delivers me from all that I once regretted, and gives me a way in which to live where I don't have to have regrets anymore, because I just don't make the mistakes.

ED: So the ultimate responsibility is self-responsibility, to be awake in the moment, and that's where the healing is, isn't it?

GF: Yes, exactly. Because that's where it's whole. Another part of regret is that I'm always divided up between myself, the thing I did wrong, and the one I did wrong to. Real healing is a unification, and self-responsibility is a form of awareness in the moment. Healing takes place not by me trying to do anything, but because of my willingness to see the truth. Know the truth and it sets you free.

ED: It's not me trying to heal myself, which I can't do, but allowing the Light to heal me.

GF: Allowing a natural understanding to produce a natural healing.

ED: Thank you, Guy.

GF: You're welcome.

ED: This has been a Fireside Chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.

ED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein and I'm here with inner life author, Guy Finley, to talk about letting go. Guy, some years ago you wrote a bestseller called The Secret of Letting Go that had a tremendous response all over the world, and you've just come out with a new book, Let Go and Live in the Now. There must be a lot of people all over the world who sense that they're hanging on to something that is hurting them, but they may not even be aware of what it is that they're hanging onto, what it is they need to let go of.

GF: It's true. We don't know. We think to ourselves, "When the time comes, I really need to let go of this person," "I need to let go of this career path that I've been on," "I need to let go of this pain that I've been carrying around." But those are always one step short of the real solution.

A nice feature of our spiritual work, of real interior work, is that gradually we begin to recognize that the experience we have of life outside of us is first and foremost a reflection and a result of an interior life, of something that is going on inside of us. We begin to recognize that the condition we blame for our unhappiness is never the cause of the unhappiness, but merely something that shows us a more persistent misunderstanding, a more persistent problem.

How many times have you let go of things, thinking that "when I get rid of this, I'm going to be different"? It's almost endless, isn't it? But the fact remains that we don't free ourselves. If I let go of you, then I get someone else.

ED: I let go of something and somehow I end up holding on to something else.

GF: That's right, and it's indicative of something that we need to understand at the root of letting go. The reason letting go is so hard, Ellen, is because what we have to let go of is not the person, the place, the position, the possession, but the sense of ourselves that is derived from thinking about that person, place, possession, or position. That's the real nut of it. I think my life depends upon something.

When I first meet the man or woman of my dreams, the new job -- whatever it is -- I'm glad that my life depends upon it. "This is the greatest thing that ever happened to me!"

ED: It gives meaning to my life.

GF: I have meaning now. I'm going to be a full, contented human being. But it isn't terribly long (and all of us know this very well), the person that we vest ourselves in, the sensation that we derive that was once full of happiness, begins to change and starts to become not so full of happiness. I start to become a little critical of the person. And gradually, the sensation of thinking they're super turns into a sensation of they're stupid. And, if you're honest about it, from super to stupid doesn't take that long, does it? Now I want to let you go, because it's too painful for me.

So finally that person goes away, but nothing changes, because it wasn't the person that was the issue. The issue is that the way our minds and our hearts work, this nature requires something outside of itself by which to know itself, believing that if it can find the right thing to know, my certainty, my confidence will be set, only to find out that I can't control the person or the thing outside of myself. As it changes, my sense of self is threatened, and now I want to let go, and I'm going to find someone better.

Real letting go begins with a kind of unraveling, a kind of uncovering where I begin to recognize that what I need to let go of is not the person or the place or the position, but this rather deep and pernicious sense of myself that believes without that person, without that condition, I will lose who I am.

You cannot lose who you are other than through thinking you're going to find yourself in someone or something outside of yourself. That's how we lose ourselves, which is the antithesis of the way the mind thinks about it. Can you see that? It's crazy.

ED: What you're saying is that what we have to let go of, on one level, is the identification we have with things outside of us, but on a deeper level, what we have to do is deal with this self that thinks it has to have something to identify with.

GF: Yes, It's so simple in some ways. If I had in my hand a porcupine, and I said, "Ellen, here's a porcupine." Would you reach out and grab the porcupine?

ED: Not if I saw what it was.

GF: Why?

ED: Because I know that it would hurt me.

GF: Because it would hurt me. I wouldn't have to think towards it. The nature of the porcupine is essentially to loose its quills on anything that touches it. Our nature tends to grab onto things that hurt us, believing it's how to heal us.

ED: We don't see it as something painful.

GF: I don't see it as something painful because I'm totally enamored with the sensation that I'm deriving from considering that person or that position.

If we could see how often it is that we pick up in our hand the thing that we say we wish we could let go of, and then when it's in our hand, we say "What's this doing in my hand?," if we could recognize that fact about our present nature, then we'd know that the self that picks up the problem, the worry, the grief, is not the same self that sits and goes, "No, no, no!"

So we need to connect that in our mind, and then we can begin to do the real interior work of letting go, because invariably it means that I'm going to have to be new, fresh, without a past... and in that moment, I am indeed starting over, because letting go and being new are the same thing.

And again, the reason is because within ourselves, there is a part of our nature that derives a very distinct sense of self from the attachments that it forms, so that the more in my mind I can see myself as belonging to a certain group, a certain school of thinking, or whatever it may be, then when that changes (naturally), I am at a loss, not because it's changed, but because I don't know who I am without what I was attached to that was secretly defining my sense of self and my purpose.

So from this attachment, we have to begin to recognize the process and realize, if I'm going to really learn to let go, it's going to require me understanding that I have to give up something of myself if I want to actually give up this pain, this problem that I have.

ED: We understand in our minds that it is wrong to hold on to things that are hurting us, but how do we translate this knowledge in our heads into actually doing it? How does it get from our head to our heart?

GF: I love that. How do we go from head to heart? When I was a boy, I had a pair of tennis shoes that I loved. My tennis shoes were the end of the world to me. They had died about a year before, but I still kept them. My mother couldn't stand these tennis shoes, and one day when I came home, they were gone...

The point is, when you're a child, you're attached to childish things. But we don't know that as adults, we're meant to outgrow childish things. The problem is that we don't recognize yet what it means to outgrow childish things. For instance, it's childish to be concerned about what anybody thinks about you. It's childish to be unhappy that you don't live in the kind of home that you think you're supposed to. It's not necessarily childish to want to live in a nice home, but it is childish to believe that who you are, the measure of your wealth, is determined by how you live and what people see you with. That's childish. It's childish to hold a grudge. I don't care what anybody on the earth ever did to you, it's childish to hate a human being. It's childish to fear.

"It's childish" means that we're intended to outgrow ourselves, all the time. What a nice thought it is. Every day it's possible that a person can see that what he or she formerly valued is no longer valuable to them, and it's a great process. It's a great purification process that this Intelligence that we live in has set up for us, because if we're awake and aware of ourselves, what we can't help but see is that to the degree that we're identified and attached to something is the degree to which we're punished by it.

We think to ourselves sometimes that the reason I'm in this pain is because I'm not attached enough, I'm not identified enough, meaning I need more of this image that I have of myself to make me happy, so I increase my efforts to get hold of what turns out to be a painful condition for myself.

So when we talk about these ideas, we talk about what it means to be aware of ourselves, to work on ourselves, to watch ourselves. And in that, we can do the wonderful work of starting to notice that if I'm suffering over something, the thing that I'm suffering over is not the thing but the sense of self that I am attached to through my imagined relationship with it. I know that's a lot of words, so I'll say it one more time simply: All we need to do to let go of something, Ellen, is to begin to realize that if I'm suffering from holding on to it, squeezing it tighter isn't going to help.

ED: When we really understand this, there isn't that struggle.

GF: To be aware of ourselves means in any given moment that we are conscious of our thoughts. Let's say I'm thinking, "Boy, I hope this interview comes out good." Whatever it is... the thought that comes along and tells you, "I hope this" or "I want that," promises in the very appearance in your mind that if you do what you picture, you're going to be in great shape. But what we can't see about ourselves in that moment is that the more we hold the idea of how things should be, the more we struggle with events as they are, and then wreck everything for the sake of what we wanted to take place around us.

So awareness of the moment includes awareness of the kind of thoughts that are going through me, the kind of emotions that I'm having, even my bodily sensations. All of that is what it means to watch and be aware of myself. And in that, I can learn to start valuing something else, because the part of me that is conscious of conflict in me is always greater than the conflict it's conscious of. So I need to place being conscious of myself above trying to prove myself to get rid of the fear I have of failing, of falling.

Letting go is a very whole movement. If it's not whole, it's not letting go; it's just substituting one desire for another.

ED: You said something earlier that I want to go into more deeply. You said that letting go is really the same as starting over.

GF: Let's do it right now. We have a little shadow following us that is unseen by us. We have something in us that's acting, and then we have something in us that's sitting there saying, "Cut! No good! Reschedule. Rewrite. Change the make-up." Something is always judging us, measuring us, so that our attention is never in the moment to what we're doing, but listening to these subtle off-stage hints and clues and poundings that come from this part of us that is always trying to decide how we did and what we need to do as a result of how we did. What a mess!

Starting over means I'm aware of that. It doesn't mean that I try to stop that. It means that I'm conscious of both this shadow -- this part of me that is measuring me -- and as I'm watching it, by the very fact that I'm aware of it, I'm letting go of it because I'm not identifying with its findings. So that's starting over, isn't it? It's fresh. I don't have to carry one thing with me.

ED: When we're looking at what we did and going over those findings, then we're not going forward at all. We're just continually living over and over in our past.

GF: If you had a suitcase, Ellen, and everywhere you went, you took your suitcase, and wherever you sat that suitcase down, it unzipped itself and out popped a large hammer and hit you on the head...

ED: I have that suitcase!

GF: I rest my case. That's what human beings do. A part of us we carry with us, everywhere we go. We're always thinking back on it, looking upon it, asking it, being measured by it, and all the time, whatever we do, without exception, we get a clop on the head by the content of our own past. The point is that a person doesn't have a painful problem without the past that they consult in order to find their future or define their present.

Now, a person says, "Well, what am I supposed to do?" Be in the present moment. Work to bring yourself back to now. What is now? Now is the awareness of the fact of that suitcase. Look, there's nothing wrong with that suitcase, because I need to know how to get home for instance. I need to know how many beans go in the casserole. These are practical things. But when what is practical turns out to be something that punishes me, it ceases to be practical and becomes personal. Our true life of letting go is not personal; it is an impersonal relationship with the present moment.

ED: There is something that you say over and over again in your book, The Secret of Letting Go, and that is "You are not your problem. You are not the event. You are not the fear." What does that mean?

GF: Did you know that since we sat down here, neither one of us have in us the same things that we did when we sat down? Not the same air, not even the same cells. The same blood isn't in the same place. Not one thing is the same. Even this chair. Everything, Ellen, is in constant change. We don't see constant change because our mind only knows itself and ourselves through images it creates, static images by which I measure myself and know myself.

When I say that you are not these things, what it really means is that your true nature is not contained or confined by any quality that our mind (that is part of that nature) defines us by.

Here is the problem with letting go. To truly let go, one has to become no one, and we don't want to be no one. We want to be someone who is no one. That's the fact. To be no one like I'm talking about is to be all things, is to be one with that which is all -- not as an intellectual exercise, not as a fantasy, but as a true reflection of our work, of dropping what comes up inside of us to be in the present moment. And when you're part of the present moment, you're part of the whole of the movement of the present moment, and there's no pain in that movement. There's change, but that change only becomes pain when one identifies with something in that movement that runs against their suitcase that is sitting at their feet.

ED: This reminds me of something you said in a recent talk about starting over. You said that starting over is to enter the unknown.

GF: Yes. That's what it is. To be new means to live in an unknown moment. The beauty of that, in its truth, is that the unknown moment does not mean scary, bad, empty, lonely. It means newly becoming.

ED: Why are we so afraid?

GF: Because there is a part of us that names that unknown moment. If I'm afraid of an unknown moment, is it unknown to me? I've filled it with something, haven't I? It's like a bad donut with an evil cream in it. I take a bite of it and think, "How did that get there?" And I stuffed it!

ED: So, would you say that a big part of letting go is to realize that there was never anything real to let go of?

GF: In one respect, yes. I'd say that part of our journey, part of the discovery process, part of our awakening is intimately connected with the idea of realizing that who we are, our true nature, can't be defined. And if it can't be defined, then that means anything in me that searches for myself or a sense of it through something that I've defined as being necessary, promising, powerful (or debilitating for that matter), that anything like that belongs to a surreptitious nature in me, a false self whose purpose is to produce a kind of constant pain that in turn gets me to search for pleasure that becomes the new attachment, the new identification that drives that circle of self through that pain. We see all of that for what it is and then drop it. Let it go. Then we begin to live as we're intended to.

This is the point of all the work that I do, in essence. I believe that the whole of life is a preparation for letting go. Said differently, that the whole of life is a preparation for Love, because when we finally begin to let go, what we discover is that we have always had a nature of love in us that didn't need something outside of us by which to give us our sense of self. Not that we don't have a relationship with another human being -- we learn about ourselves and this true nature and this false nature through relationships with one another. But when I name something outside of myself as being the secret source of myself, I have set myself up to suffer, no matter how else I cut it.

ED: So this has really taken us into a new place, because in order to let go, from what you said, I have to have a real self-honesty and a willingness to look inside myself.

GF: That certainly is part of it. Real letting go comes with reaching the point where I just can't hold on anymore. Anybody who has ever been through any kind of crisis and finally lets go, realizes it wasn't the thing that they let go of, it was their attachment to it, and the sense of themselves they felt they would lose forever by such a change. Again, why do I cling to begin with?

ED: Because I don't think I will have anything without that.

GF: That's right. I want to be someone. I want to feel like I'm someone. I want to fill myself with something. But when I finally (however long it takes) recognize that I keep putting things into this basket called myself, and no matter what I put in this basket, the bottom line is that the basket doesn't seem to hold anything, then I've got to go find something new to put in the basket.

It's that gradual recognition of how absolutely wasteful its been, how many enemies I've made, how many people I've hurt, and how much damage I've done to the planet itself, that begins to form in a person -- not an intelligence or strength by which they take an act of letting go, but a certain kind of understanding that it's impossible to continue being someone who believes that I can hold my life by holding something in my hand. It doesn't work. And one dies to the sense of self that is born out of blaming, judging, hoping... the whole process relative to divided thinking begins to fade when one sees that what one is vesting oneself in is not real but is merely an image or a projection of himself.

When those opposites begin to collapse, when one sees all of that, Ellen, one realizes, "I thought something terrible would happen to me, but it didn't. I thought I was going to die, but I didn't." And in that experience, as accidental as it is for most of us, begins the seed of something new where I am willing to go through that maybe a little sooner, test the waters a little bit earlier to see what will happen if I don't do what I've always done. Then a person grows in understanding. That wisdom grows, and it is that wisdom in the long run that actually helps a person through all of this.

ED: So this implies that if we let go of the small life that we have created with our thoughts, there is a larger life that we enter.

GF: Exactly. Let's say that I have someone hurt me badly and I have a resentment. As long as I hold that resentment and believe that the answer to the pain I feel has to do with getting you to do something or letting go of a situation that I believe you're somehow involved in and that will change the way I feel, what I'm really living in is the world of that little thought, that negative state. When I live inside of a negative state, that negative state tells me who I am, what I can do, what my choices are, how to handle things.

Little by little, we recognize that I'm not intended to be a captive of this condition. I know I'm not intended to be a captive of this relationship. No one sets out to be a captive of a relationship, but we wind up a captive of relationships. No one sets out to be a captive of their best ambitions, but we wind up captives of our best ambitions. Why? Because the content, all of the things that are vested in that idea that I have, I become dependent on for my sense of myself. As I see that, I want nothing to do with it. I'm willing to let go of that, and I'm willing to suffer the sense of loss of myself that comes with that. Then things change. We change nothing by changing our exterior circumstances.

ED: When I was thinking about the topic of letting go, I came upon this quote from a recent talk that you gave, and I saw a connection. You said, "You cannot be safe and have a spiritual life," which means that we have to let go if we want to have the deeper spiritual life that we long for.

GF: Yes. The sense of safety that we presently have is always connected to an idea, a condition outside of ourselves. I am this condition as long as that condition persists. I will fight to keep that condition in place, because by keeping that condition in place, I stay secure. The self that stays secure because of keeping a condition in place, itself not only isn't secure, but is a captive of the condition that it's trying to keep that way, so that while a person may be safe, they're dying, because they're cut off from life. They live in a little world of opposites, of me and the image that I hold in my mind. And while it seems safe, it strangles the spirit.

So we have to recognize the fact of something like that and then based on our understanding, Ellen, as spiritual aspirants, men and women who want to have a different life, a life centered in God, in Truth, we have to be willing to risk everything for the purpose of discovering what is true and what is not. You find a person who will not risk things for the purpose of discovering what is true, and you find a person who will be ringed in for the rest of their life by the falsehoods that are connected with the idea they have to have certain things to be who they are, and they're as good as dead.

ED: We want the familiar. That's what makes us feel safe, even though it could be something terribly painful.

GF: It's such a paradox, Ellen. It's so contradictory. Here's what you're saying, "I've gotta be me."

ED: Even if it kills me.

GF: "I've gotta be me," but I want to do everything I can to change me because I hate me... but I don't want to change anything about me unless what I'm changing turns out to be what I want to be me! Well, that's nuts, isn't it?

ED: Yes. So we're just hanging on to thoughts about ourselves, and in that we are preventing ourselves from experiencing the full life that we're supposed to know.

GF: Right here, right now, come back to yourself. The present moment, the Now is God's life, the life of Truth, the life of Light. Everything that ever was, or ever will be, everything that is wonderful, and everything that is dark, all is in this moment. I cannot know my true nature apart from knowing this moment. And as long as I live outside of this moment, which is all thought does by creating what was, what will be, I am isolated, and not only isolated, but connected to all of the objects that I form in my mind in that time. It's hard for a person to understand. That's why we have to go through so much suffering, it seems, to finally begin to recognize, "You know what? It's all right just to be here. I don't have to find a sense of myself anywhere outside of what this moment provides as it shows me what I need to see."

ED: I can actually start the process of letting go right now.

GF: This very moment. Learn to watch, be as awake as you can, and letting go comes naturally.

ED: Thank you, Guy. This has been a Fireside Chat with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.

ED: Welcome to a fireside chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. Today I would like us to talk about being in the world but not of it. We live in a world that is always screaming for our attention. We are bombarded by all kinds of temptations, stimulation, scary news... and I think we all ask, what is the proper relationship that we're supposed to have with the world?

GF: No one can have a proper relationship with anything they meet fixed, rigid, scared. So, before one can ask what is one's proper relationship with the world, one has to understand what the proper relationship is they are to have in the world of themselves that has fixed this outer world as something to go into, get something from, and become something in. I believe there's a passage in the New Testament where Christ said that one should be "in the world but not of it," but the real question isn't how to be in this world but not of it. I'm afraid that we're not really present to the world in us that causes us to see the world the way that we do.

Vernon Howard, a great man and author that I knew, said one time that it would be silly to try to change a misspelled word on a piece of paper that a man typed by tinkering with the typewriter. Before he could stop it from showing up misspelled on the paper, he would have to change the way the letters were arranged in his mind. It makes no sense to tinker with the world to try to make it come out right until something has changed in us that teaches us that the relationship we have with the world is an actual expression of our own lives.

We cannot change the world that we see until something changes in us the way we see it. All spiritual studies, everything esoteric down through the ages, has had to do with re-orienting a human being's life. Even the word "repent" in the Bible had to do with the idea of turning around. We have to turn around so that our interior life becomes what we are interested in, what we watch, what we live from -- instead of, as we presently do, using everything about our exterior life to somehow try to support this idea we have of who we're supposed to be.

ED: At present we look to the world to tell us who we are, which it cannot do, and yet we live in a world, and we can use our experiences in that world to help us understand ourselves, can't we?

GF: Ellen, if we really lived in this world as it is, there would be no war. If I really lived with the person that I was married to, if I really lived with the children that I have... if I really lived with something, it would be impossible to punish it. It would be impossible to be cruel to it. So we do not live in this world. This is what is so difficult to express. We live with our ideas about the world. I don't see you as you are; I see you as I need you to be for me to receive from this moment what I hope to take from it.

We don't see anything, because we're literally standing in front of a kind of mirror, made up of our own mind and the images that are inside of it. It's insane. A person looks out at the world and everything makes sense in this great train that pushes its way through life. But the fact of the matter is that a person looks out at life and if they could see, for instance, the horror of hurting another human being, they would never do it. We don't see the horror of hurting another human being. What we see is what we have to do to someone to protect our interests, and our interests really aren't even in this world. My interests have to do with living up to certain ideas, beliefs, conditioned images inside of myself that tell me without them being in place that something bad is going to happen to me. This is something that everyone can understand. The spiritual life is not complicated.

We do not see; we think. Seeing has risk in it. One of the critical things is that we don't want to be vulnerable. I want everything to go the way I want it to go. I don't want the world to go left if I think it's supposed to go right. I don't want you to not like what I'm saying. I don't want to be vulnerable in the smallest way, and because of that fear of being vulnerable, of being hurt, I produce a labyrinth of elaborate images which are slowly inculcated and developed to become fortresses, temples, and churches... all the things that we hold as icons to keep us from being hurt.

No one who is afraid of being hurt, can live, Ellen. That's just a fact, because I keep everything at bay. I can't risk seeing what is there, because if I really see what is there, I am going to have a relationship with it, and it's going to show me things about myself that I don't know, and I'm afraid of that too. I want everything locked up. I want it in place. I want to be sure that what I feel about myself is what is true about myself, which is why I limit the people around me. You can see all of this going on.

It takes a certain spiritual weariness. Sometimes people ask me what it takes to help awaken a person, what gets a person started to be in the world and not of it, and it's just being weary of feeling alone, of being frightened. I think more than anything else, weary of being frightened of everything, because protecting ourselves doesn't work. All we do is come up with new ways in which to keep safe, and every new way we name for ourselves to be safe just turns out to be the next thing we are afraid of losing.

At a certain point, a person just gets tired of trying to do to themselves what it takes to make themselves free and safe. "Do unto me what you need to do unto me so that I can at last be free of this fear, of this isolation that is caused by my sense of being always vulnerable." Then a person begins to shear off some of this ice that has formed around him, and little by little, life begins to impress itself. Then you find out that nothing bad can happen to you. That's when you begin to answer the question. You begin to be in this world, because now you're interacting with it and you're not cut off from any part of it. But you're no longer of it because you're no longer part of that chain of negative reactions that comes up when the world doesn't confirm you.

ED: All of the difficulties we have with one another are really due to the fact that each person is trying to protect himself. It seems like in the very process of trying to keep myself safe, I actually create the enemies out there who are threatening me.

GF: Ellen, tell me, who is the self in you or me that needs to be safe? Let's examine it. What is the nature of this self that not only feels like it has to be protected, but that is always coming up with different ways to do it?

ED: It seems to me it must be a thought.

GF: It's the past. You tell me. Who is there in this moment, sitting here with me, that has anything to fear if it's not something dragged over from yesterday or twenty years ago when you won an award, or you thought people should never talk to you in a certain tone? You tell me. I know the answer. You free an individual from his or her past, and you free their future from fear. I know that. Why? Because that past doesn't exist. It doesn't exist except for a content-laden image, fully conditioned, that sits in the mind, that is accessed when events transpire, and referred to as what should or shouldn't be. Then comes up agreement or resistance according to that relationship, and a person spends their life worshipping that nature through their relationship with what they call the present moment. And again, we come full circle, because they're never in the present moment. They're always busy looking at themselves to make sure that what is happening confirms the self that they have mistaken themselves to be -- this identification with an image.

ED: Where does it all start? It seems like I was born in the center of it, and it seems like there is no way out of it, and yet, your whole work is to show people that if we can get tired enough of it, then maybe something else can happen.

GF: I'm not sure how else to say this, because I know a number of people react to the word (and not necessarily wrongly, because there are other cultures and religions and traditions), but the fact of the matter is, Ellen, that whatever word we give it -- be it God, this Great Intelligence that created the universe, the Living Light, the Christ -- we were created with something in us that by its very nature of being in us is intended to be a constant source of dissatisfaction, a constant source of disturbance in it, so that even in the moments when the world lines up and gives us what we want, there is still something that sits in the back of us and realizes, "no." Because this moment has provided me with a sense of myself and a freedom in that sense of self, but now when this moment changes, goes with it my freedom and sense of self. So only something that is unconditional could be conscious of the relative incompleteness of something that is conditional.

This is something that is not much examined in us because we are not really self-examining human beings yet. But as we grow, we start to understand that we could never see something that was inadequate in our own lives if it weren't for something that was present to us that by its very nature was not judging that but revealing, "Ah. That's not it. That won't work. That won't get me there. That doesn't answer my heartache." Then little by little, by the grace of this Intelligence that we're born in and with, a man or woman begins to let go, and let go, and let go.

ED: So this disturbance is really our best friend.

GF: Yes, it is.

ED: It's the light. It's the bell ringing in the distance. But I think for most of us, we don't know how to interpret that disturbance, and we actually run away from it. When we get that feeling, many of us run out and do more to cover it up, or to get more things -- anything to keep us from having to face that feeling.

GF: Right. Which to put in the context of what we're talking about, is a kind of viscious circle. Because we talk about how we don't see the world, but we see the images we have of it, and what we want from those images. And when one lives like that, seeing only what one wants (or the opposite -- which is no different -- what one doesn't want), then that kind of relationship that we have with those thoughts and feelings is a never-ending sense of dissatisfaction in itself. It has to be, because we can't control the world.

It seems so obvious in some ways. A person will spend a day or a lifetime trying to figure out how to manipulate things so that something that they want will stay in place. We do that endlessly, endlessly refusing to see that the best we can hope for is a kind of truce with changing time. It never occurs to us that maybe, just maybe, we have a nature that isn't intended to be at war with changing time, but is actually superior to it, actually sits above it and contains changing time so that in containing this world that is always changing on us, we're no longer afraid of those changes.

When you go to a movie, you watch all that action on the screen, and if you watch yourself, you understand that you're watching a movie. You know that when you leave the theater, you're walking out of the conditions that produced all those sensations in you. But when you walk down the street and you see that dress, or a man sees that car, or someone walks into your office and lays a bombshell on you, you don't think to yourself that you're seeing something that's going to change when you walk away. You see something that is an integral part of your life and that needs to be addressed as the emergency that it is. I say that's hogwash.

ED: It seems that it's almost a blessing to have your life shaken up again and again, because that's the only way that we seem to be willing to see that, in spite of all our efforts to fix things a certain way, that they'll always change, and that the decisions we make that seem to make so much sense at one time turn out, with the turn of events, to be not necessarily the best decision. But if a person is working on himself or herself when that happens, it's almost as though at some point you just have to laugh and realize that you do the best you can, but you cannot control the world.

GF: Let's expand that idea, because it is something that everyone can work with.

I'll never forget a meal my wife and I had once with the actor, Robert Young, who was interested in these ideas. Here is Mr. "Father Knows Best", one of the great American icons, and he said to me, "You know. I never went to the studio that I didn't think it would be the last day I was going to work. Because I kept thinking that everybody was going to see what a big fake I was." I'll never forget that. It was very poignant. The reason being that we never think to ourselves, I wonder if I could have another kind of relationship with this fear? I wonder if I could have another kind of relationship with this worry? I wonder if I could have another kind of relationship with this pain that I have over what I lost, or what I fear I'm not going to get?

The reason it never occurs to us that it's possible for us to have another kind of relationship, to be in it (meaning doing it, but not of it; meaning not punished by it), is that when a condition comes over us and we feel fear or pain, we're not aware of the fact, Ellen, that the "me," this "I," this sense of myself that rises up to meet that fearful moment, is itself a projection of it. We don't "get" the idea that there is no fearful me until a fearful image comes into my mind. It's the onset of that fearful film that's running in front of me that produces a fearful participant trying to figure out what to do with the movie.

The first thing that has to happen is that we have to just get so weary with being some kind of victim who says, "Why is this happening to me?" I'll tell you why it's happening. In this brain of ours, we have this conditioned set of thoughts and feelings -- all for the purpose of perpetuating this plan that I'm going to be safe, that I won't be vulnerable when I get all of these things lined up -- and it's the world itself that gives us these ideas.

I start to wonder, what other relationship is there with this moment of fear? I'm not going to think from my fear anymore. I'm not going to let my thoughts and feelings be guided towards working to solutions to free me from suffering. That doesn't work. Instead, I'm going to approach this from a different viewpoint. What can I do here? Well, I know what doesn't work. I know the relationship of trying to resist this doesn't change anything. So, for the first part, I'm not going to resist this fear. I'm not going to resist this worry. I'm just not going to do it. It has to get like that, because everything inside of you will be saying, "Oh, you better worry..." I'm just not going to do it. Then, a person will sit in their chair, and maybe for the first time in his or her life, will actually hear their own thoughts and feelings. They will actually see this whirlwind of emotions trying to suck them in to considering life through their twisted view of life.

I promise you this. The question of whether there is another relationship I can have with reality comes to us from higher Reality itself. We're never introduced to an interior question like that -- a willingness to risk something based on the wish for a new relationship -- until at last something begins to speak to us that is in this world but not of it. It draws us into its life, into a different order of our own being that just doesn't participate with punishing us the way we punish ourselves trying to make life fit our images of it.

ED: As you said earlier, when we are trying to make everything conform to our ideas, we just have this rigid structure that will crack under the pressure, but when we let that go, we really can be spontaneous. Then, instead of life being this wall that we beat against, it's bringing us possibilities that are not necessarily our enemies.

GF: Life really is never-endingly offering us conditions under which to explore the full potentiality of ourselves, and the full potentiality of ourselves cannot be thought. You can go to seminars about realizing your full potential, but it's nothing like that. The potential of a human being is revealed moment to moment in that human being by his or her willingness to explore the full moment, without any ideas about it. Then a dialog takes place. A real life starts to happen where a person knows, for maybe the first time, that they aren't vulnerable the way they feared they were vulnerable. They were vulnerable in the idea that they can be permeated, that something can come into them, something can talk to them, something can wipe away that radical fear they're always facing. That's the kind of vulnerability, and that's where Love begins. Love does not begin where someone wants to be invulnerable to being hurt. That's the antithesis of Love. Love begins when a person is willing to be vulnerable and let life show them what it wants to show them for the purpose of their evolution, for the purpose of their development.

ED: So, what one might see is that basically everything is good. Isn't that true?

GF: Yes.

ED: But you can't convince yourself of that. You have to let go and see that there is something that can grow.

GF: Don't trust that everything is OK. Don't walk around saying that everything is good. That is psychopathic. Be there. Just let life talk to you -- not the chattering of the mind, but the true communion with it. Because in that, the beginning is the ending and the ending is the beginning, Ellen. Every moment completes itself. Everything is full. Even in the worst moments, a person's life is a delicious exploration of the beginning and the end of things that are all wrapped up inside of themselves, and it never stops.

ED: If we could be curious instead of self-protective...

GF: Yes, curious -- not how to resolve the pain, but curious enough to be in relationship with it. Curious in that you say, "Tell me all about yourself" when you meet the fear. "Tell me all about yourself" when you meet that worry. Here you are and you're worried that something bad is going to happen. You can feel that all the world is coming unglued, and instead of trying to figure out how to protect yourself from it inwardly, your attitude is "Tell me all about yourself. I want to know."

ED: Thank you, Guy.

GF: You bet.

ED: You've been watching a Fireside Chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.