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.