Stand, like mountain,
Bend, like reed.
Surge, like fountain,
Wait, like seed.

Give, like sunshine,
Melt, like snow.
Live, like springtime . . .
Come and go.

All that I am is revealed... wordlessly
In the great court of Now,
For without need of a single image
I am seen just as I am.

There is a gentle, but thorough, judgment here...
Balanced in a perfect act of justice without prosecution.
Whatever the case in question -- it is quietly put to rest
So no defense is necessary.

Time served is the sentence before this deliberation...

And only by stepping up to take the stand
Is it possible to hear the great verdict read aloud:
The sentence of fear is forever stayed
In a tender pardon already granted long, long ago.

We're coming into a time of the year when certain conditions of the human consciousness glare. This time of the year is intended to be the happiest time of the year according to popular culture, but for most it's not only not the happiest time of the year, it's often the most conflicted time of the year. All of the unattended-to things relative to family and friends -- all of the shortcomings that one has lived out for eleven months -- suddenly pop up to the forefront when it's time to make amends, buy gifts, have family meals, and enjoy the happy tidings. If you're going to become a different kind of human being, gradually you will need to see what I'm going to speak of.

There are all kinds of movements. This room -- as relatively still as it is -- is filled with movements, but they're invisible movements. There is the movement of the person sitting next to you, however subtle that may be; there is the movement of the air around us caused by breathing, caused by the fireplace; there is the movement of thoughts and feelings, and the movement of invisible energies that these thoughts and feelings produce that emanate, radiate from the body; and there is the interaction of those radiations of two different people sitting next to each other and having the experience of whatever it is that energy brings out. But all of these movements, by and large, are almost completely ignored. They're ignored, not because we choose to ignore them, but because we live from a nature that is isolated, cut off from any awareness of these movements. Not only are we not aware of these movements, we're not aware of the movements inside of ourselves.

If I was to ask how many of you have been aware three times in the last ten minutes of the movement of your own thoughts and feelings, I can virtually guarantee that a small number of you might raise your hands, and amongst those, maybe one or two actually saw the movement of something. Being identified with something is not seeing the movement of something.

There are levels and scale of movement in this room, even as I'm talking with you, even as my words may move you one way or the other. There is the movement of the world, and there is the movement of spirit. They are two different things. One precludes the possibility of a human being ever understanding anything about compassion, about love, and the latter (the movement of spirit) is itself the embodiment of things that are compassionate, true, good, and loving.

The world that you are in now -- when you're not aware of the movement of virtually anything -- is the world in which you are part and parcel, fully a part of the movement of the world. The movement of this world is completely governed by the movement of desires that have nothing that oversees them except for whatever dominates the particular individual in whom that desire manifests itself in the moment.

Therefore, a person is virtually blind, deaf, and dumb relative to the degree to which he or she is identified with these movements inside of themselves, and cannot see at large the movement of themselves in the world because they are the world that is moving. Now, maybe that doesn't mean much to you, but I'll tell you something about it -- something that I saw recently.

My wife and I had gone to Costco [a giant warehouse store] in order to pick up some supplies for the Foundation. Costco is a perfect microcosm of the human brain. It is loaded with more things than one needs, set out in attractive aisles for the purpose of catching one's eye (just as thoughts, desires, and feelings are), and it's filled with individuals -- not one of whom even knows they're in the store, who knows the movement of their own thoughts and feelings.

Relative to that picture, imagine all of these thoughts and feelings running around the mind (just like in Costco), trying to get their hands on what they want to get their hands on -- lots of discounted deals, lots of bright things for the future to make one happier -- with thoughts bumping into each other, carts running each other over. Someone sees something and you see it at the same time, and you want the pasta before they get it. Have you ever run into your own thought?

Here are a thousand people in a giant store, and the purpose of that store (of desire) is to bring one to the desired object. If the store wants something to stand out, someone must actually make it stand out, so (particularly at this time of year) there are always a half a dozen or so people standing in front of little carts with microwaves and skillets, preparing tasty morsels for human beings to sample.

The human beings standing there, waiting to get their tasty morsel, are irritated by the fact that they have to wait in line to get it, or that the woman preparing it is too slow – because they're part of a movement that can't see anything except for the desire in front of their own eyes. They can't see that 75-year-old woman, skin like tissue, thin and worn, hands old, eyes bleached (from the same kind of life that we've lived, I might add, that we've all been a part of). Hardly anyone says "thank you." Not one person there thinks to themselves, "How is it that I'm in relationship with this poor old woman, irritating me because she's not giving me my pleasure fast enough?"

There is a monster at large. It is in our body. There is a monster at large that doesn't care about anything other than what it needs in order to feel about itself what it has named as being primary for that moment. That's all.

There is in me -- just as there is in all human beings -- a nature who has a vested interest in keeping out any impression whatsoever that makes me see that the world I am walking through is how it is because of what that nature is. No one wants to suffer the fact that the world they see is what it is because of the way they are. Why? Because then I'm going to have to meet this thing that doesn't see but just wants. I have to meet this thing that doesn't consider anything outside of itself other than what is necessary to support whatever it is feeling about itself in the moment.

Here is all of this movement, and part of that body of human beings is all moving towards a poor old woman who is moving to satisfy that movement, and not one part of any of that movement has consciousness of any other part. That's what it means to be dead and blind.

Until a person begins to separate from this incessant movement in themselves, there's no chance for them to ever know a life that isn't part of the denigration of the spirit because of that incessant movement. It's impossible.

But what a suffering is involved. I have to stop feeding myself. I have to stop having enemies. I have to stop thinking about people. And most important, I have to stop putting myself at the center of the universe because all the things I think about, even those I think I care about, still put me at the center of the universe.

All of this movement that I'm talking about, which we absolutely don't see because we're swept away in it, precludes us from seeing anything else that's in that movement.

To be blinded means to be out of relationship with what's around you. And the point of spirit, as opposed to the movement of the world, is that spirit (what is true) is always in relationship with what is around it. It's never not conscious of its relationship to life because gradually a human being begins to recognize that it's mandatory to become still. Without stillness there is no hope for transformation.

You have to examine yourself and see how stimulated you are by movement that you come up with that has to do with the plans by which your spiritual works are going to change you. All your plans and knowledge, your gabbing and convincing one another of what you have and how things ought to be, doesn't change anything – it just makes you part of the "Costco consciousness" of spiritual beings.

True spirituality has its root in a very, very dear payment that begins with an individual becoming conscious of himself, in the world, as he is, and as the word is. Then because of that, by the very consciousness that he has of the condition inside of himself and its relationship to the world that condition has produced as a result of his unconsciousness of it, then change becomes necessary. It's not a question anymore that a person wants to change. They're staggered by the fact of what they are. You're not staggered at all by what you are. You're quite pleased with what you are because presently what you are is filled with your plans to become something different. All plans to become something different are garbage. If you have a spiritual future, you have nothing but the repetition of what you have been.

Be different this year by being different now. Try to see past the movement of your own mind. The only way to see past the movement that is generated by desire and the mind is for there to be something still in you. If there is nothing still in you, then you are part of all of that movement.

You go out to the supermarket, the shopping centers, the mall. By and large you waste your money, trying to find a way to feel good about what you've been and done over the year by making it up to someone at this time. You want to know how to make it up to someone? Don't hurt them. Don't take from them. Don't stand in front of them and wait for them to give you what you want so that your appetite can be satisfied. Give them something. Give them your attention. Find out where you can be a little bit of light instead of a stone around somebody's neck.

I know that it doesn't sound like much, but I can assure you that one person standing in a crowd of five, ten, or fifteen people, recognizing the fact and the actuality of the condition they're in, coming wide awake and bearing some of the pain that's inherent wherever human beings are gathered for the purpose of satisfying themselves, that such a tiny act not only changes that moment but changes the whole of the world that you and I have been a part of.

This is what the holidays are about, as far as I'm concerned: Where is it possible for me to step out of the worldly movement and into the stillness of spirit that can be a part of the world but is not in it in the way that I am when I am part of that blind movement to satisfy myself?

When the shoe fits, change the foot... it's not easy to change one's foot, meaning to change one's psychology, but I can assure you, if you don't do that work, you will be part of a blind force that is consumed by a blind force, and that ends in a blind force.

On the other hand, this time of the year, you do what you can, wherever you can, and suffer what you must consciously. Cease to be a part of what is destroying this earth and the soul inside of you, and you become part of the creation of a new world that begins within you and is finally expressed in a Light that dawns and is born upon the earth.

Have you seen
the perfect stillness
Of falling leaves
Through the air

...And beheld
The Ocean's silence
As it breathes
In waves there?

A battle is waged
In the deep of me,
An epic struggle
'Tween sand and sea,
Where one resists
The other, so free...
Yet, no loss or gain
Marks Eternity.

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.

Who struggles to find a way "in"
Without a sense of being left "out?"
Who searches for new confidence,
That isn't filled with lingering doubt?

Who could resent another's joy
That doesn't feel unjustly denied?
And who chases what glitters in life,
That isn't dull or tarnished inside?

If we wish to find peace we must understand something of its life. Here are a few such facts: Peace is the natural radiation of a living Now; it is one with that Light whose life is the eternal present itself, even as the emanations of light and warmth are one with the sun from which they radiate. If our intuition can perceive that the above ideas are based in truth, then we should be naturally moved to ask the following question: If this peace we long for is inherent in this perfectly present moment we call the "Now," what is it that keeps us from knowing the fulfillment of its promise within us? Let's look.

Through even casual observation, we can see that the primary governing body of our present self seems to be a mental and emotional construct whose sole occupation in life seems to be an ongoing consideration of what was and what will be. This activity amounts to what we experiences as an endless weighing of our past and subsequent planning of our future. Stated in another way, our lives are currently made up of what we name for ourselves as being good days or bad days. Of course these "good" and "bad" days are labeled as such based on how they measure up to our desired expectations. Good days "happen" when we get what we desire, and bad days are... well, you know!

Now, one of the strange features about this present nature of ours is that even on "good" days -- when we manage to achieve what we desire and feel a sense of satisfaction -- this conditional peace often turns against us; triumph becomes a kind of torment as we end up fearing we will lose the thing just gained. Poof goes our peace! There is no profit in it, and its promises are equally empty.

We have another nature, one whose life and whose peace are the same character. This order of Self, and the Now that is the backdrop of its being, are as the branch is to the life-giving vine. No true peace can survive apart from this relationship. Any other form of peace is its earthly expression. But to make the point: No order, no peace. Order is peace.

This peace confounds the lower level of mind that only knows stillness by what it imagines its qualities to be. The mind asleep to itself -- and hence to the reality of the stillness spoken of earlier upon which life is seen dancing -- cannot conceive how its own images of winning in life deny it the victory over life for which it longs. In order to know peace and its promise, we must release ourselves from this sleeping self that is always struggling to put pieces of peace together in the vain hope they will stay united!

We have all tried sewing pieces of peace together, thinking through what we must do to rid ourselves of whatever nags at us. You know the dialogue one is ever having with oneself.

"Hopefully this career change will make things better; maybe going to the gym will get my love life going; once I make him understand my point of view..." "As soon as" becomes the chant and the source of our confidence. We all know how this goes. The chattering is as endless as one's fear of feeling empty. And the more of these "pieces of peace" we juggle, the more anxious we become, all the while hoping that life won't break up what we would assemble. Even through this approach has proven itself fruitless, still we cling to the hope that next time things will be different. What we must see is that our lives cannot change until we do -- from the inside out.

To succeed in our quest, we need a new and higher understanding of our own being. For this peace that we seek resides within us; it is not to be found anywhere else, which leads us to the next step in our search. To enter the silent world of peace requires that we learn the secret of being still. We must discover and enter into our own still being.

The task before us is not an easy one, and anyone who tells you differently lies; but we are not asked to make this journey without a guide. Before us goes the Light of Truth. It reveals the Way by opening our eyes to see among other truths, that the peace we seek is not a thing created by us. We learn that admission into its celestial kingdom is by mutual consent only, even though this peace agrees to no terms other than its own. It makes the rules, not us. Yet we are eventually made grateful for these unyielding laws, for whatever soul agrees to bend its will to these terms of eternal peace not only finds God's peace revealed, but also that this providence has now become a permanent presence within his or her heart.

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.

Cammy (chat host): Hello everyone! Tonight we are so honored to have back with us a truly inspirational guest speaker... self-realization author, Guy Finley. Welcome back Guy!

GF: Thank you so much. Glad to be with everyone.

Cammy: Last March, Guy Finley spoke with us on "Freedom from Grief." Tonight, Guy will share with us a seminar on lessons only love can teach... based on his newest book, Apprentice of the Heart.

Guy is the best-selling author of more than 20 other books and audio albums that have sold over a million copies in 12 languages worldwide. Guy is also the director of Life of Learning Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping individuals realize their true relationships with life through higher self-studies.

He speaks three times each week at the Foundation headquarters in Merlin, Oregon, and now is seen each Sunday, worldwide, on the Wisdom Television Network. And now... I give to you, the incredible Guy Finley...

GF: Welcome everyone. It's my hope that this evening we can all discover some of the important truths that Love is always trying to reach us with, and teach us about, so that we can become happier and more whole human beings.

I suppose before we start taking questions I should outline a little bit about what I have brought to the chat this evening in the form of a few ideas for discussion. Seeded in the center of the heart, as surely as the essence of a tiny seed holds the promise of a towering tree, lives within us the Presence of a Power that can dispel any gathering darkness and change what is unkind into conscious compassion.

What is this Presence and Power lying latent within us? It is Love.

The question before all of us is how do we learn to welcome and embrace this kind of Higher Love -- under every condition of our lives -- that can lead us higher and make us better and brighter for having followed that way.

One last thought and then I'm glad to open up the room and begin our discussion...

We must never reach the conclusion that whatever love we may have known in our lives is the same as Love's Summit. There is always something higher, sweeter, truer awaiting us within ourselves and our relationships... if we only know how to receive it.

Let's work towards making ourselves more and more receptive to the true and positive transformative influences of Higher Love. Now it's up to you....

Pamatu: How do we work towards making ourselves more and more receptive to the true and positive transformative influences of Higher Love?

GF: It begins with recognizing in ourselves those qualities that at once draw us to the object of our love, and at the same time awakening to those qualities in ourselves that obstruct the love that we would grow and know. There are, for the sake of this chat, four levels, four kinds of love.

The first is one we're all aware of. We desire whatever it may be... maybe another person, or even a pizza. We just want what we want. It's an appetite really. This level of love, expressed through desire, is often very selfish in its nature as all it seeks is the fulfillment of itself through the object of the desired.

The next level of love has to do with what happens when a person falls in love with another human being, or perhaps even with Nature, and for that love finds in himself (or herself) the need to change the kind of being they are. We all have known this kind of love as well.

It's the kind of love that makes us want to be better people, better wives, husbands, friends, and lovers. Here, love's action upon us is to help us see, through others, what we have yet to see about ourselves that stands in our way of a rich and whole relationship. These two loves are principally the ones we know, but they are not the only kinds of love there are.

Just as there is the love that makes us want to change ourselves for the sake of someone who has helped us see the need for this change in ourselves, there is yet another love -- a more rare love -- that comes when we have awakened to the earlier forms of it.

And that love that I'm talking about is a love that guides us to want to serve others at the cost of ourselves. This is a far more elevated form of love because slowly the one who loves -- and those that are the object of that love -- begin to merge.

Lastly, the final form of love -- at least as best I've come to understand this process -- is where the action of love in a human being so transforms that person's nature that the distinction between what one loves and the love that grants him or her this grace all but disappears.

We could call this divine Love, and it is the root of all other loves. It is that which makes all of us who are willing to be so, an "Apprentice of the Heart."

kath: After the death of my mother, and a divorce, I'm not sure I can love again. I feel like all the love within me is drained, and I'm afraid I'll never get it back. Can I?

GF: Oh, yes! Let me tell you something wonderful. But you must be prepared to let what I say fall on an open heart, and not one closed out of fear.

The truth is, pain and fear and loneliness are not aspects of Love. They do not belong to Love, but rather are expressions of our having become identified with someone or something for our very sense of self.

Then having lost this object of our affection that once gave us all of these powerful pleasurable feelings, we feel that we have lost ourselves. We have not. This is one of Love's many wonderful lessons if we're willing to receive it.

The end of a relationship is no more the end of Love than leaves falling from a tree in the autumn spells the end of the tree. Love will prepare any human being who is willing for its deft hand to work upon their heart to be more open and receptive, more spontaneously kind and loving, but we must do our part.

Catch the fear before it fills the space left for the entrance of a new love. Catch the negative states that want your attention on their conflict and concerns as opposed to being awake and open to the new moment and the new relationships unfolding within it.

katpat: Can negative energies or spirits prevent us from reaching this higher love, and if so, how can we overcome this negative?

GF: The only power that darkness has is in the absence of the Light. The only power that negative states have is when we give them our attention by mistake and so unknowingly nullify the possibilities of a Higher Relationship in that moment.

As human beings, we alone have the right and the power to choose what we are in relationship with in any given moment. This means that as we work to be aware of ourselves, it is the same as preparing ourselves for both the lessons and the education that Love intends for us. It is when we get captured by the dark contents of our own unconscious mind that we find ourselves captives of conditions that prohibit love.

katpat: No matter how hard I try to stay positive, sometimes I feel that so many negative energies are working against me.

GF: It isn't a question of trying to be positive! It's understanding that your mind, awakened to itself, will not embrace what compromises it, and that you have the choice in that awakened state of yourself to detect and reject any self-wrecking states that want to draw you into their considerations.

katpat: Also, I am still grieving for the love of my life who passed away two years ago.

GF: Yes... this takes work. Again, I trust you will at least consider my words before discounting them because they run counter to popular ideas. Grief has a natural place in our lives. The heart is a beautiful and eternal creature whose wisdom transcends the mind that tries to work its way out of sorrow.

Just as there are seasons on this earth that include the repose and rest of winter, so is there a natural winter of the heart. It is our responsibility to become self-knowing enough -- self aware enough -- not only to recognize the beauty of these seasons of the heart, but to embrace them for the naturally healing, naturally renewing seasons that they are.

katpat: So is this sorrow the winter?

GF: Yes. Sorrow is one of the seasons that we must let run its course.

serenitysonya: When trying to teach others how to enrich their own lives, what is the best way to make them feel enough love for themselves that they will, in turn, feel that they deserve to enrich their lives and become their dreams?

GF: There is no better teaching, and no better way to teach, than by what we are. Love is not something to be created by human beings, any more than stillness is simply the absence of noise.

The more we each become that which we believe is right, bright, and true, the more others are naturally drawn by the same qualities in themselves to want to reflect these characteristics of Love. Our task is always to lead by example, which necessarily includes not being concerned with who may or may not be following us.

lottie: Where does self-love sit in regards to the four levels of love, please?

GF: We can find the idea of self-love, as you've asked, in all four levels. First, there is the little shallow self with its tiny selfish heart, seeking nothing other than its own satisfaction. It loves itself, in a manner of speaking, and nothing else, which of course means it loves nothing in reality.

When we begin to want to be a better human being for the sake of Love, then another kind of self-love is born -- one that includes a bit of the idea of giving up some of oneself for the sake of winning back something better.

In the two higher forms, self-love takes on new meaning. To love thy neighbor as thyself is far more difficult than simply putting on a smiley face and pretending to care for their concerns. Real Love, at this level, means one begins to put one's own desires aside. He "lays down his life for his brother."

Lastly, the highest form of Love, can also be thought of as self-love in that now there is no true distinction between Self and the Eternal Love that is its ground.

Inergi: Why is it that so many fall in love with people who are unable or unwilling to share love in return?

GF: There are many reasons for such unfulfilled relationships. Here's one... at the lower levels of Love, the principal concern of ours is not so much that we have the experience of Love as imagined, but rather that we simply can go on loving our experience, whatever that may be. Sometimes we get into bad relationships with others and stay in them because we love to resent.

Inergi: So it's the "misery loves misery" type of love?

GF: ...or perhaps we remain attached to individuals who have hurt us because our mind is fascinated by reliving the regrets we have for having made the mistakes we did. Many people call such relationships "love." So yes, misery loves misery. It's a truth few understand, but those who come to learn it are on the stairway to the next level of love.

omlove1111: What are good steps to letting go of people who you love dearly? I have a hard time letting go of the past, and I know that can be unhealthy. What can I do?

GF: Try to see that it isn't the people that you are having a hard time letting go of... rather what is so difficult to release is the "feeling" you have of yourself when you consider yourself in those relationships.

The thing that's good to understand about such a transforming self-truth -- as difficult as it may be for our ego that loves to think it knows what love is -- is that there is great power in such interior discoveries.

For one, it means that we are not the victim of anyone. No one owns us. Nothing can compromise us. We are the slave of nothing and no one -- unless we remain unconscious to those parts of ourselves that would have us believe we are only as valuable as our relationships lend us the feeling of being.

Lady: How can we be sure to have a healthy balance of all four levels of love?

GF: Just as the sun has in it all of the qualities of the radiant energy that animates and warms our planet and ourselves upon it, so does the Higher Love that we are being prepared for in this life contain in it all levels without being compromised by any of the lesser levels. In the end, so to speak, this is the great lesson that Love would have all of us learn.

Elizabeth: I long so much for a guy to love me, but it's hard because the fact is, I don't even love myself. I have social anxiety disorder and depression. Although things are better for me now that I'm on medication, I still feel so lonely. I have few friends and not a guy in the world. I am only 17, but how do I overcome my shyness to find love?

GF: I have a promise for you, but you must do your part to fulfill it.

Elizabeth: OK...

GF: First, never mind what this stupid world tells you beauty is about. You, and all of us, are created to know Love. The problem is (and it's a deep one), we believe we know what that means, so therefore we literally have become victims of trying to prove to ourselves that we are worth loving by first measuring ourselves according to a set of ridiculous, unenlightened standards.

It is this set of conditioned ideas that sits behind the anxiety and fear you feel around others. This means, if you want to be free to find the love your heart longs for, you must gain the knowledge, and then the will, to challenge the parts of your own consciousness that are presently confining you to this suffering you feel.

I have a book entitled, The Secret of Letting Go. Go online and get it. It will start you on the road to discovering that you are not only a unique creation, but that there is nothing else on this planet like you -- once you understand how to drop these defeating, socially constructed ideas that are compromising your life now. God, the Truth itself, wants you to know Love. With a friend like that, you can't lose if you'll enter the battle.

Heidi_Girl: It feels as if I have an ocean of love to give, yet in most moments, fear or my imagination inhibits any real interaction with another. How can I open my heart to give and receive what only Real relationships can offer?

GF: The feelings you have are a wonderful place to begin. But they are just the beginning... not the end they seem to be. We are each created with an infinite capacity to explore our own hearts through the relationships that the level of our heart draws us to.

When it's time to let go and move on, we must not allow the "wrong" parts of us to convince us that there is value in what they once taught us, in those lessons that we have now moved beyond.

It isn't until we realize that the object -- person, possession, or natural gift -- that we would give our love to actually stands in the way of fulfilling that endless love we feel, that we are now willing to allow that part of ourselves to come to an end.

This is known as "dying to oneself" in order to experience a true rebirth in a higher order of that Love that led us to such moments.

Cammy: Guy, we are out of time for tonight. Thank you for once again sharing a very special chat seminar with us. We have a lot of Love to take away with us!

GF: It's been my great pleasure to spend this time with you. I will hold the thought for everyone that our wish and work to realize higher levels of Love in our life all come true. Good night and thanks so much.

We who aspire to a life of Truth . . . in order to unite ourselves within the guiding Light of its silent providence, and to secure the blessings of a freedom that only its presence can provide, hereby establish within and amongst ourselves, for all of posterity, these Articles of Higher Consciousness as set forth in this Bill of Lights.

Article I
You have the Light to detect, dismiss, and to transcend the limiting influences of painful negative states such as doubt, worry, hatred, anger, and fear.

Article II
You have the Light to do your unique part in perfecting any moment within which you are willing to come awake to yourself.

Article III
You have the Light to help each person you meet realize that he or she has the inalienable right to live within and from the same Bill of Lights as do you.

Article IV
You have the Light to live in a peaceful world within yourself that is spontaneously creative and quietly confident at all times.

Article V
You have the Light to act with compassion towards all other beings regardless of how challenging your personal circumstances may be in any given moment.

Article VI
You have the Light to always remember that the Goodness responsible for your creation wants only what is true and good for you.

Article VII
You have the Light to realize that all things pass except for that Light living within you by whose eternal presence alone it becomes possible to see the soul-consoling beauty of this Truth.