This rough draft generated by Otter.ai contains errors. If you would like to correct them, or join our team of volunteer proofreaders, please contact me.
Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guest today is Guy Finley, Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually Awakening people. And we’ve passed the 300 thresholds. So there are many to listen to. And if you’d like to listen to others, go to batgap.com. And check out the past interviews menu and you’ll see them categorized in about five different ways. Also, this whole operation, this whole program depends upon the generous support of appreciative listeners. So if you feel like supporting it, there’s a Donate button there. So guy is very prolific man, and very well organized among the most best organized of the people. I’ve interviewed all kinds of nice orderly notes and details and press information, and so on which I appreciate it. He’s written a lot of books, about 40 altogether, and a lot of audio and audio albums. Plus over 1000 unique audio programs that have sold millions of copies and 24 languages worldwide. His most recent book is called letting go. The excuse me not letting go the secret of your immortal self. And I’ve been reading that doing it. And I also listened to about 100 of his YouTube videos in preparation for this. And they’re short, just a few minutes each. So if you feel like checking some of those out, I’ll be linking to his YouTube channel. Now one thing guy. Oh, actually, let me say one more thing before we get on to that guy is the founder and director of the life of Learning Foundation, which is a nonprofit center for self study in Merlin, Oregon, where he offers four inner life classes each week open to the public. And the admission fee is $3. To those and if you don’t have $3, he’ll let you in anyway. So I thought that was nice and generous. Some people charge a lot for these things.
Guy Finley: So I’ve heard I may be in the wrong business.
Rick Archer: Yeah, so guy, you know, as I just said, I listened to a lot of your videos, I read your book and read a bunch of other materials. And the book is about, you know, discovering your immortal self and self realization and all that. But I never really learned much about your own realization or awakening, such as it must have been. The one thing I did get was when you were 11 years old, you saw a display of bonsai trees, which moved you deeply and that kind of initiated a spiritual quest in some sense. But um, take us back a bit and explain to us you know, me might want even talk about the bonds I experienced that but then on from there, I mean, what have you done in your spiritual quest? And what results have you gotten?
Guy Finley: Goodness You know, I, I would, I’d rather summarize it all in a way.
Rick Archer: I don’t expect it in real time or anything.
Guy Finley: Yeah. From an incredibly early age. I was privileged to be dissatisfied with life. I was born into an incredibly successful showbusiness family, my father was Time Magazine man of the decade in his field. When I was
Rick Archer: Which was music or show business or
Guy Finley: no, he went after the music business after actually, he was the progenitor of late night television talk show before Johnny Carson Jack Paar the you know, the old guy Steve Allen, my dad in 19, whatever it was 50 or 51 first variety television show on the West Coast introduced people like Desi Arnaz and Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, I mean really was a front runner in that industry. He left that and went into Do you remember Earl months and eight track cartridges and all stuff like that before? I remember 8 track cartridges. This goes back, I mean, I’m I’m getting near 70 But and he he led that field and in the video world he actually became a highly noted individual. Anyway point being I ran with the the the in crowd, my kids Growing up, my friends were the children of the Martins and the Arnezes and the Minnelli’s and the Sinatra’s that’s who I hung with, rode in the Christmas parade, you know, in Hollywood here, sat on the lap of Jane Mansfield. And from that point, I mean, I was what, six or seven years old. And I remember feeling in the greenroom where all the celebs were gathered, I remember feeling a tension and an anxiety that I, I almost couldn’t bear. And I couldn’t understand it then Rick.
Rick Archer: In other words, they were they were feeling it, and you were picking up on it. Yeah, why here’s the cream of the crop, so to speak, and fear and alcohol are rampant. So you know, those kinds of disparities between what one is led to believe culturally, socially, is the pinnacle, versus the immense pain produced by being at that pinnacle, but a child’s mind can’t begin to grasp that. Nevertheless, that started a quest for me at that age. And then as these things happen, and I won’t go into it, unless you say I have to, I had some extraordinarily unique, I guess you’d call them mystical or spiritual experiences you have to. I just think there’s a sampling.
Guy Finley: I’ll tell you, the one that’s the most precious to me. Because I was 12, or 11, or 12 years old, and I was, to this day, I can see myself standing in my closet, in the house that I lived in reaching for a shirt on the second rung. And I was reaching up and I heard a voice as clear as a bell. It wasn’t masculine, wasn’t feminine. And it said, with this pain, I give the life and do thee wed. With this pain, I give the life and do the wed and I I remember pulling my arm down, I looked around to see what who had spoken to me. Nothing there, obviously. And then it repeated itself. And I felt it so deeply. But I had not a clue. So I went and wrote it down. So that I wouldn’t forget it. 35-40 years later, I’m starting to understand. So this was one of honest to God 100 different types of powerful interior experiences connected with my work because from that point, I started meditating and doing the things that you do as an aspirant, without knowing that’s what you are, you’re just reaching for something that has touched you. And that’s been my path all along.
Rick Archer: So even as a little kid, 10-12 years old, you you were kind of teaching yourself to meditate and doing something of that nature.
Guy Finley: Distinctly
Rick Archer: Yeah,
Guy Finley: I was drawn to Buddhism as a boy. And then and then my parents wanted me to go through their religious discipline, which I did, but I couldn’t stand that I dropped that. And then I went and got, I went through about four or five other religious pas, before I was 17 years old, none of which satisfied whatever it was that was beckoning me at that point. And then because I know you’ve asked us, then I got into the music business, I became a successful composer, performing artists first. My partner and I first white soft rock artists ever decided with Motown Records. 1971 hung out with the luminaries there, did you have a little group, you and your partner was it didn’t have a name? We were called Martin and Finley. My partner was the son of Tony Martin, Jr. and centuries. And we had an album called dazzling with footwork. Then I went into Motion Picture and Television composing. And you wrote some songs to write songs for some of the Motown stars. Oh, yeah, I had, I had a number of I was successful in the world. I was successful. That’s cool back it was when I was living in Malibu at the time, I had a house with a tennis court and horses and all the nine yards. It was 20 in my early 20s. And it was at that point that the bones I that my experience happened with those bonsai trees. That began to round out some of my understanding. And shortly after that, I retired from the music business and I traveled I went to the Far East, and went to India went all around, by the way, hoping that someone would tap me on the forehead with a peacock feather or give me some kind of Shakti pot, straighten out the whole mess. Now wait a minute. Yeah, we’ve talked about this bonds. I think you might as well just tell us the experience otherwise, otherwise people are gonna say what was that all about? You know? Well, it is significant. And it introduces a lot of what I teach now. I was living in Malibu I went to an open air market and was walking through you know, those things that are like a turned a corner and they’re by me about three or 400 square feet. We’re all of these little tiny Tiny trees, I did not know what they were, I’d never seen one. I walked in and I looked at a couple of these trees and I began to weep. I have no idea what came over me other than this incredible longing for something. And I began to talk to the owner of this exhibit, he began to train me in the art of bonsai, I became fascinated with it. But the point was this, and it was the opening story in my book. Shall I go into that? Yeah, sure. We have plenty of time. That’s the nice thing about this, isn’t it? Yeah. The reason that we are interested in the relationships that we are, whatever they may be this is what I’ve learned is that it’s through relationship in the moment that we are introduced, to qualities that are latent in ourselves that we are not awake to in the moment, until that relationship comes along. I see the bonsai tree, this miniature ancient thing in a pot. And it stirs in me all of that. All of the suffering in the tree that you would see on a mountain in China or Bhutan, that were you know, that thing was whipped by winds for 100 years. And yet, in that little bonsai tree, you get the same experience. You look at horses running across the field, and you can feel the majesty, you, you sense the strength and the freedom, the flow of it. And until you’re standing in front of something like that, you don’t know that that timeless quality is already in your consciousness. So the relationship with the the the event produces a revelation. And the revelation is what is eternal in yourself, because it was there prior to the event. So this experience began to open me up to the idea that life itself is a ceaseless process of revelation. And that if we’re present enough to it, we are introduced in an in an, in a ceaseless manner, to a quality and character of ourselves that is, in fact, immortal. In all of its aspects, not just beautiful, open light, you know, balls of light dancing on a lake kind of thing. But the whole nine yards, we are made in the image of the Divine, which means all of those forces expressed and reflected in the world outside of us are revealed inside of us if we’re present to those moments. I like that I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, actually. And that is that if if everything is consciousness, or even if everything is essentially consciousness, then everything we see and experience must sort of be revealing qualities of consciousness. And if we see it in that way, then you know, then as some people say, the world is my guru, everything is is sort of pointing to the the deeper underlying reality and has significance,
Rick Archer: great significance. In fact, what you’ve just described, is how a person finds what is authentically fearless in this life. It makes no sense for us to be afraid of ourselves. And most of what we do in life is an attempt to escape some sense of inadequacy or limitation, by resistance makes us fear. So that little by little as we start to have this more revelatory, you know, I call it the meditative life. You know, your eyes are open, you are experiencing, essentially what you are not present to prior to that moment in yourself. So that, to me is adding to that. You can’t experience something Rick, that’s not already a part of your consciousness. It’s impossible.
Guy Finley: Good. It’s kind of a complete point. No need to question it. So okay, so you had this experience with a bonsai tree? I guess you’d be pronouncing it bones I I used to have a client named Joe bones. I hear you ever hear him? Do you still do bone size? I still have my collection that I work on intermittently. Anyway. And so what did that precipitate or initiate in you? And where did you go from there? You mentioned, you know, going to India and all this stuff and fill in some details. I couldn’t shake this fundamental dissatisfaction. I mean, it’s hard to explain this. I mean, in those days, I was working directly under Mr. Barry Gordy and Suzanne to pass the supreme beings at Motown. I hung out at Mr. Gordy’s house, you know, I that’s what that’s what you did. I was in my middle 20s I was being primed whatever the word is. And I realized that something had happened that I couldn’t have foreseen but that again, I was grateful for. When I was first signed with Motown, it was the most exciting thing. One of the most exciting things that ever happened. Because I was being paid to write music. That’s a very rare thing to actually make a living doing something that you love. And I did love music, albeit all of my lyrics and compositions. Even if you went back, you would still hear everything was about God. It just sounded like love songs. That’s how I did you read any that we wouldn’t remember heard through the grapevine or any of those old Motown songs, oh, I wrote songs, I had an out of a song that received that was a platinum on a platinum album for Debbie Boone. But I can’t, I can’t remember the name of any of these things. Diana Ross Jackson Five, I worked with Bob Gaudio, he wrote and produced all the four seasons music. But by and large, here’s the summation of this. I was absolutely thrilled to be paid for writing music. But what happened was, I had equated composing and being paid for music, the same as the fulfillment I felt when I started writing music. And instead of liberating me, I wound up being the servant of the image. Now I had to write music, to sustain my level of whatever it was, so that rather than being freed by the thing that I loved, I had become ensnared not by what I loved, but by a process of becoming identified with what that path produced. And it grew to such a point that I started to think to myself, My God, you know, now I have to write music. So it reached a point. And I read some material. And I was working with some, in some East Indian individuals that I helped bring over from the India. And I reached a point I didn’t, I just didn’t care anymore. And I quit. I basically retired. And I started traveling, went to see some individuals never had a more disappointing journey in my life, which proved to be very fruitful. You mean some spiritual teachers? Yeah. Yeah, I came home. Knowing that if there was going to be what I in my heart knew existed. It wasn’t going to be through what someone else did for me. And then by good fortune, and I have to put this in because it’s principle to my path. I met a I met an awakened man, a true Christian mystic. His name was Vernon Howard. Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of Vern. I spent 15 years working directly with Mr. Howard became the West Coast director of his work until he died in 1992. He had given me some instructions, I follow them to the letter, I quit myself from his foundation, did not leave a forwarding address so as to not divide the work that he had done, moved to Southern Oregon and started new appear. And that’s sort of a summary of my journey. Yeah.
Rick Archer: But it still doesn’t bring in the actual subjective experience quite enough. You know, you went here, you did this. You met Vernon, but in terms of the, you know, the blossoming of your Self Realization, was there any aha moment? Or has it been just sort of this incremental growth without any, like, remarkable milestones along the way?
Guy Finley: That’s what I’m saying is, I guess I’m not being as forthcoming as you want me to be. There, there have been 300 milestones. And I mean, significant things. But some are some I just won’t talk about, and others that are that are so common. It doesn’t sound like a milestone, Rick, but it is to realize that I became the servant of the thing that was to liberate me, that’s a milestone to be around men and women who are looking for other human beings to grant them power, so they can become something special, and then realize that everyone’s looking for power proves no one has it. That’s a milestone. These are moments in which an individual realizes that the pursuit of something outside of himself must prove fruitful, and that everything the divided mind creates in an attempt to satisfy the desire formulating those images, that that’s a dead end. So What happens is the mind awakening to itself begins to see with clarity that it of itself cannot do what it imagines. And it quiets down. It’s it’s kind of in a room where the walls get smaller and smaller and smaller until you’re left oh my god with just yourself and no excuses. So that’s the Pap. Okay. The reason I asked some such questions is that, well, firstly, people liked the biographical picture, you know, they like to know what, what’s this guy been through? And then secondly, if you don’t talk a little bit about your personal experience, then it becomes sort of philosophy and metaphysics, which anybody can talk about. But, but all right, I will speak of things I’ve never spoken up before. I’ve never spoke okay. I have had interior experiences. In, in almost virtually every discipline, east and west, where I have been, transfigured, died, you know, how you’re supposed to never die in a dream. That doesn’t happen to me, you die. Yeah. And, and, and the interior stirring the pain, because often it includes a lot of pain, physical, physical pain, the stirrings of all that the each and every one is kind of like, at once, tightening a certain set of screws, creating a tension that is, in itself, an effortless awareness. And at the same time, that it’s tightening all that somehow in that great paradox of spirituality, it’s opening everything, because you’re no longer subjective in the way you used to be. Because you see how dead end that is to allow anything exterior to yourself to produce a sensation of yourself. So all of this at one time and yet spread out over. I’m 67 years old. Now. This started when I was seven. Yeah, no, that’s great. And thank you for divulging that. I might squeeze a few more tidbits out of you as we go. Yeah. And the reason they asked such things is that, again, as I just said, If you don’t talk about this, I mean, some people are reticent to talk about their subjective experiences, because they don’t want to make a big fuss about themselves. You know, and, and obviously, if someone talked about that all the time, it would be over indulgent, it would be too much. But at some point, that foundation has to be laid. It’s sort of like a doctor providing his credentials before you go in for surgery in a way you want to get. You want to see that diploma on the wall. So you want to know, is this guy just philosophizing? Or has he actually is he walking his talk? And has he actually had the kind of realization that I would hope to have if I were to associate myself with him, I get you. So here’s something else for you. Okay. When I was 18, I met this at the time what was the second oldest living disciple of Yogananda, and I studied with him, he, he took me under his wing. And I worked directly under Mr. Raymer. for about seven years, those seven years, I meditated and did breathing exercises for eight to 10 hours a day. And there was a number of unique experiences, I imagine, you can foresee that if you spend seven years doing 10 hours of sadhana, by yourself in a in a, in a little home under a mountain, I was completely cut off from everything dedicated to what I couldn’t tell you. To this day, I can, I can look back, and the only thing I know is that I had to, that’s the only thing I know. I had to. Yeah. Now, some people that I talked to, and that send in emails to me and stuff, say, Well, you know, realization is a never ending journey. It just keeps unfolding and unfolding and unfolding unfolding, as long as we’re alive. Others say, well, and they speak from their experience, that there is this sort of final resting place this final breakthrough, after which you’re pretty much done. And maybe there’s some kind of refinement or, you know, learning or something that takes place, but you’re basically resting on your laurels, you’re done. And, you know, I tend to side with the first group who say You’re never done, that there’s always going to be some deeper level of unfoldment. And that perhaps, there and that there are many sort of milestones along the way, some of which might be very convincing, you know, you might feel like, Oh, I really am done. There’s nothing more Yeah. But there’s this sort of built in self delusion that can take place now. What? Yes, I mean, where do you stand on that? Not both in terms of your own experience and in terms of your philosophy as to the scope of possibilities for human being. It’s both Rick what is what is Enlightenment? It is that, that that moment in time, relative to the one experiencing something where what is timeless, is suddenly allowed to express itself. So that the opposites are reconciled. In a moment, this living Trinity automat not automatically stirs in an individual, and what he or she did not know about their own interior life about their consciousness is suddenly illuminated. In the moment of that illumination, the level of self that was involved in that operation has been given a moment of integration, it is integrated, the light in the darkness are brought together, and something new is born. So that’s done its whole. But that which is born and whole, at that level, goes through that, again, it is infinite. And yet every last one of these moments is in itself, a complete moment. So Enlightenment is both in time, and timeless. Because who and what we are, is a consciousness that has no bounds. Therefore, there can never really be an explorer who encapsulates it. It’s an experience of discovery of one’s can’t even say of ones it is, there it is. That’s it. It is a ceaseless revelation of oneself in one’s true being. That’s a good way to phrase it. So what would you say to those who say, and there are many of them, especially on internet chat groups and stuff, who say, you’re already enlightened, you know, you don’t need to do anything, you’re there. Just forget about drop, call off the search, you’re done. I would say they’re right, and they’re wrong. There’s a lot of terrible things being done in the name of spirituality today, a lot of people making a lot of money, attracting people who want to believe that it’s okay to have the hatred and anger in them. It isn’t that it’s wrong to have it in us. It’s there. But it’s meant to be used. It’s meant to be transfigured, not to accept as something that one simply goes along with, and then prays to be forgiven for being what they have done. No work to understand. So, yes, part of my new book, what we’re kind of talking about, goes into great, great detail about this. If in fact, let’s let’s you can, we’ll use you, how many of us, Rick, you’ve had a number of epiphanies in your life, moments where I call it a crisis, a close encounter of the truthful kind. That’s what I call a crisis. Why? Because at a certain point, the teacher came, I said, Not now or I know better, he comes back, the revelation, the moment comes back, the more I push it away, the bigger it gets. One day, I realized, you know what, this thing isn’t going away, then I have to set myself down. I see something about myself, not about other people, not about the world, I see something relative to my own nature that’s inherently connected complicit in the experience. In the moment of discovering this complicity. There is an integration that takes place and I realized, you know, what, why did that take me so long to learn? How many times have you said that to yourself? Oh, plenty of times. Yeah. Right. So the point being, that, if in fact, what just happened wasn’t a new revelation, I didn’t discover something out of the blue, I realized an aspect of my own consciousness, I had been asleep too. So I realized the truth in myself that had been dormant, that truth is, in another order of time, it belongs to another order of being that is not connected to this passing level of personality. So that level of consciousness already has everything in it all possibilities. Our path is the gradual revelation of those possibilities, their integration into our essence level of being and then the gradual record Shouldn’t God you know what, if this is true, what I went through 10 years ago was the most valuable thing in the world. But it was the worst thing in the moment. Maybe that’s true right now, while it seems to be the worst thing in the moment, and it is, yeah. So to summarize what you’re just saying, whatever Enlightenment is, and we can define it more fully as we go along, you have it in full within you the the sort of full possibility that that reality is there, and its full potential. And, you know, your actual cognition of it, maybe another thing, just like, you know, maybe you won the lottery, but you didn’t realize it yet. Because you haven’t seen the news and you’ve got your lottery ticket in some sock drawer, and you go around for a year thinking you’re poor. And you know, maybe just before the deadline expires, you know, it comes to your attention that have better check than my sock drawer, you think, well, I won the lottery. And I’ve been 100. I’ve been a multimillionaire all year long. And I was acting like a popper. So we have this tremendous potential within us. And it’s there to be tapped. And what second part of what you just said, I think, just is that, you know, there’s an intelligence to nature, which, you know, has our best interests in mind. And that which may appear to be, you know, a crisis or a problem or something is, probably has a lesson inherent in it, which is why it’s happening to us. And if we can recognize, and maybe we only recognize that in retrospect, but maybe if we could recognize these things, as they hit us we learn more quickly. Yes, yes, I call that closing the gap in time. You know, I can see that when I have this terrible physical problem, I went through this heartbreak, I lost someone I loved. At the time, it was nothing but resist, resist, resist, then gradually, as the resistance fades, and the pain in the thing stops being something I’m blaming on someone, I start to see, you know what, this was valuable? Can I take that understanding, Christ would have called this metanoia, can I take that new understanding, and begin in the moment, it’s needed to apply to the experience, instead of allowing, mechanically, this nature that wants to continue itself at all costs, so that all it knows to do with unwanted moments is resist them. This is fundamental to the teaching that I give, resistance can’t learn. Resistance can’t learn. Resistance is the seed of reincarnation at all levels. Because what I push away from myself, it seems like I’m separating myself from what I don’t want. But in truth, resistance is a subtle form of identification. So the more I resist, the more I’m identified, the more I’m identified, the more I’m wrapped up in the very thing I say, I don’t want. I’ve heard humility, defined as the quality of not insisting that things happen any particular way. And if you think about it, if we are insisting that things happen a particular way, then what are we doing? We’re kind of like Ahab, you know, railing against the winds we’re imposing and sin and so doing, solidifying our ego in opposition to what’s real. And as Yeah, as Byron Katie always says, if you if you fight with reality, you’ll always lose. Yeah, if I would rephrase it, I would say that humility is the realization, that resistance belongs to a part of you that doesn’t know what’s good for you. And the more that you see that, the more you have to surrender that level of yourself. It isn’t. I have a saying that the gates of heaven, people think that it’s got footprints in front of it, you know, it little footprints in front of the gates of heaven. There are heel marks where people have been dragged.
Rick Archer: That’s pretty good claw marks.
Guy Finley: All that. And one of the things that I would add quickly here, because because I want to turn that story around a little bit, that that you said, if Vernon Howard once told this story to a small group of students, he said a man had been an outlaw, meaning someone who lived outside of the law as a spiritual metaphor. And this outline had been running for 50 years from a sheriff that was always trying to catch him in the outlaw was sure that the sheriff was going to throw him in jail, as we resist our own unwanted characteristics. Anything that comes to show it to us or seems to capture us, we don’t want it. Long story short. Finally, one day the the guy’s just so tired. I can’t run anymore with the sheriff. Come, I don’t care. Sheriff comes. He says, All right, take me away. Shares is what he told me about. I’ve been trying to catch you for 50 years. The good governor, pardon you There’s no such thing as a bad fact about ourselves, Rick. There is no such thing as a bad fact about ourselves. But something in us believes, and then fights to prove itself. That anything that we see that’s dark in US has to be denied or covered up with some imagined light. The light doesn’t cover up a darkness. It doesn’t fear a negative state. The light sees these things for what they are, which is simply I call it the not yet the part of us that is still asleep, that has yet to be integrated into this broader consciousness to serve a broader and better purpose.
Rick Archer: That thing about the sheriff reminded me of the movie My cousin Vinnie, where at the end, Joe Pesci holds his arms up, because Fred gwynn’s, the judge is coming out of the courthouse he thinks he’s about to be arrested. And instead Fred, when the judge congratulate him on what a good job he did.
Guy Finley: I liked that movie too. I have the word. So while we’re on this topic of humility, I have the words patience and tolerance written here. Somehow I was reminded by something you wrote to ask you about that. I interviewed Karuna my a few months ago who is an Indian saint and she was emphasizing how important patience and tolerance are in the spiritual path. And for some reason, I just felt like inclined to ask you your opinion about that. Don’t know the Scripture but it’s something like in your patience possess you your soul. In your past, patients possess you yourself. You know, the original old meaning of the word patience is to suffer yourself. We think patients is suffering others suffering unwanted situations. The understanding of to patients means the observer is the observed and appreciates the fact that they’re being given an opportunity for this revelation of the part of themselves that is nothing but a living demand. Because the reason we have the demands in life isn’t because life doesn’t bring us what we want. But rather, in those moments, where we’re suddenly brought into this tense, impatient state, we have a chance to see a nature that believes its existence depends upon that moment being completed according to its image. But if I can suffer myself, then I can not only let go surrender to the moment and let the lesson be given, which is always incidentally, Hey, there’s this living demand in you. At the same time, I’m in much better relationship with the world around me. I’m using this demanding self, instead of letting it command me to do its bidding. When you say the observer is the observed, could we also turn that around and say, the observed the observed as the observer, and in this this theme of suffering yourself, that the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are actually us, and and we need to be patient in terms of taking those in stride? It works both ways. It’s a very confusing topic for most people, our minds are not suitably developed, for the most part to understand the opposites. But just jumped in my head, Shakespeare said that the surest sign of an intelligent human being is the one who understands the opposites. Look, I look out and I see a tree and then somebody says the observer is the observed. Are you saying that I’m the tree? No, I’m not saying you’re the tree. I’m saying that the tree is experienced in you the qualities of the tree, the the texture, the strength, the form, the beauty, those essential qualities of the tree are inseparable from the nature that perceives them. Hence, the idea of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it is one thing, but we have to have a proper understanding of that
Rick Archer: will just kind of flow here with with this conversation is going but could you also say that, you know, that which the tree essentially ultimately is happens to be the same thing as that which you ultimately essentially are? And if you’re really grounded in that, then when you look at the tree, you do see the tree in terms of yourself, you see yourself in the tree because you and the tree are essentially the same self ultimately.
Guy Finley: Again, I think yes and no and I only say that as a caveat because in in more elevated states, and by the way, one rarely lives in a fully blown state, there is no observer there. You don’t think and say, Gee, there’s a tree, and it has these marvelous qualities. And now I’m experiencing them. There’s just an awareness. We this is a fascinating subject, I don’t know if we should go into it, share it. Over awareness. Awareness, I want to say, has intelligence, but it isn’t that it has intelligence. Awareness is intelligence.
Rick Archer: Yep. It’s an intrinsic inherent feature of it. It is, it’s the linkage, it’s the connecting dots. It’s, it’s something that interpenetrates and gives an in it all is given rise. So that rather than trying to approximate a relationship with people in places, powers and possessions, which eventually all proved to be impossible, one is led by experience and pain connected with identification and attachment. One is led to begin to understand my task is to be aware, my task is to be present to myself. If I’m present to myself, every possible relationship that can exist, will present itself according to what I require. What this essence requires in the moment. So that awareness is this. It’s the cup, it’s the, it’s the water, it’s the fullness, it’s the emptiness, it’s all of those things. And we are all of those things at once.
Guy Finley: Very well put. And I particularly like you’re equating awareness with intelligence, and it actually leads us if we want to go there into a discussion of what God is. Because if you think about what we’re actually perceiving, at any given moment, it’s an incredible miracle orchestrated by an intelligence that’s apparently infinite and vast. I mean, I heard recently that in a in a gram of hydrogen, there are so many atoms that if you made them the size of unpopped, popcorn kernels, they’d cover the continental United States, nine miles deep. And each one of those little atoms is a perfectly functioning little thing. You know, yeah, universe, operating according very perfectly according to precise laws of nature, nothing random or arbitrary accidental about it. And that’s just a gram of hydrogen. I mean, think of how many cells cells there are in your body. I mean, each each, Carl Sagan says each cell in your body has the information, 10,000 volumes in it, and we’d have like 37 point 5 trillion of them in our bodies. And that’s just one body. I mean, there’s this kind of like, incredible intelligence that we’re just in the midst of, and in interacting with all the time, but we take for granted.
Rick Archer: Yeah, we do we are I want to say it positively, you know, we are depending on ourselves, beings in preparation, and at the same time, encountering endless opportunities to understand the very perfection of what you’re describing. I mean, look, I see, I look out and I see something, I look out my window, I see something perfect. I can’t add anything to that perfection. But if I give myself to it, how am I different than it? It isn’t something that I acquire in thought. It’s something that is experiential, at the level of myself that observe, that takes in what my body allows, you know, we receive the impressions of the world around us, through our senses, our senses, our to our body, what insight, intuition is to our soul, we have a series of bodies, it’s not a made up thing, it isn’t something that you I mean, you’d kind of start your learning to read a book and oh, there’s this, that the other. But eventually you start to experience directly that I have this immense facility that I had been given, not to go out and prove myself to this world, but to be part of the world discovering itself. And then I’m not apart from everything that I was trying to get to this. I went too long to say it. Everything about us by and large is outside of us. The whole purpose of my work, my new book, is the fact that this is not about being outside. This is about being inside, present to outside because I’m actually present to myself, there’s not one thing that I can see, that doesn’t give me something. If I’m present inwardly, not one thing that I look at, doesn’t give me something. If I’m not present inwardly, I can’t satisfy the nature that’s trying to find itself outwardly. So I never endingly pouring thoughts and feelings into a bucket with no bottom, hoping that I can reach a stage of feeling complete. That nature that is exteriorly oriented, that lives in thought. It can never complete itself, because it has an opposite, trying to complete itself through an opposite. There already done you asked me about God, it’s done. The Trinity exists as a whole. The thing has all been handled, we get to enjoy it, or we get to live in fear of it. It just takes a long time to realize that trying to protect yourself isn’t the same thing as being fearless.
Guy Finley: Nice. Use the word celestial a lot. Yeah. And elaborate on what you mean by that word. Well, you you said it. You talked about this, this little Adam, you know that it’s a perfect cosmos? Well, we, we are made in the image of God, that’s not Western. That’s not That’s one beautiful broad concept since the beginning. What does it mean to be made in the image? Well, don’t look at me. Although you could say, you go outside, you’re looking at a weed, you’re looking at a turkey, I’m looking at Turkeys right now. You know, I look at my assistant, everything is in fact an expression of light that was congealed, that produced a form that’s in service to something. So in the end, all of this energy is, belongs to a certain Cosmos, a certain celestial realm. It comes down and down and down becomes me looking at you. And hopefully, knowing that we’re looking at each other. And, and now you’ve got Cosmo after Cosmo. And all of that’s in us. Every last one of those things in us, the sun itself in a blade of grass, isn’t that what Whitman talked about? You know, you look at a blade of grass, someone sees a weed, someone else looks at a blade of grass and sees the sun. Yeah. And there was Blake, you know, it turned it in what was FINITY and a wildflower eternity in an hour that, you know, have that potential to see the sort of infinite value in inherent in everything. So by celestial then you, you’re kind of implying that there is a well, here’s my understanding based on what you said, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but that there’s this sort of nested hierarchical quality to creation, which most fundamentally is pure intelligence. And that kind of manifests through more apparently more and more concrete levels of, of life until we have, you know, physical bodies. But that, you know, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And that, in fact that, you know, we’re, it keeps going, Yeah, that It’s turtles all the way down, that there’s this sort of kind of a deep, vast range of, of creation, from the obvious gross level to through subtler and subtler levels to the unmanifest, or the transcendent, and that a lot of what happens on this, the apparent surface of life is really just a reflection or an expression of far more sublime celestial levels, which most people are unaware. I’m kind of elaborating here. But there’s this kind of work where you’re going with this. Yeah. Summarize the whole thing we see the whole week. It’s like looking at the universe through a peephole right now the way we are. I have a phrase that I use quite often that is, we learn to see the celestial in the common we learn to see the celestial in the common so that whenever I look out and see in the world around me, I begin to recognize that this that I see is an expression of a higher cosmos. You know, have you ever walked by a pond and seen you know the the moss in the algae coming up from the bottom of the pond? If you have and you’ve ever flown over the Amazon? You see my god this is just like flying over the Amazon Oh, It’s an another coast, another cosmos, another realm, you see the leaves in a vein, the vein in a leaf. And then you look at a picture of the lungs of a human being. And then you look at the delta of the Amazon, that in scale in fractals, we see this fingerprint over and over and over again. And gradually, God willing, a person begins to see life, not as an individual form, but as the presentation of what is celestial in the common, then you’re connected to the celestial through the common, and you’re not doing anything, you’re just seeing it as it is beautiful. There’s a graphic, I actually have it on my computer here, but I couldn’t really just show it to people. But if you do a search for neurons, universe, I think you might find it, where there’s a side by side picture of a neuron. And then there’s a side by side picture of what the best understanding of the entire universe might be, like, from cosmologists point of view, and it looks like the same photos side by side. Yeah,
Rick Archer: it is, it’s, it is in the real meaning of the word breathtaking, to see this elaborate, perfect symmetry. And then to understand that this perfect, elaborate symmetry, this living symmetry is part not part of it is my consciousness. So that what I see is merely a reflection of an aspect of myself, yet realized, then life takes on a completely different feeling a different flavor.
Guy Finley: Here’s a quote from the Upanishad, which I was able to grab as is the human body so is the cosmic body, as is the human mind. So is the cosmic mind, as is the microcosm so as the macrocosm as, as the atom, so as the universe. This is, you know, for what it’s worth, not that the Upanishad that, that they need me, but that is the fact the task is to become the fact. Yeah. I mean, you know, it’s stimulating one’s heart can swell a little bit, one’s mind can be broadened by such an idea. But then I go out, and I get in my car, and somebody cuts me off. And I’m reduced to a little irritated. You don’t know who you’re messing with? No, we want that cosmos to be with us everywhere. So that every moment can be brought into it. Instead of it being shrunken down to a poor imitation of the unwanted moment. Yeah. I think that’s a really key point. And I think probably everyone listening to this is saying, yeah, right on. So I mean, the key question for any teacher, I think, or any student is, how can, how can this become a living reality? And obviously, a lot of teachers are really good at just getting up and talking about it. And people listen, they get inspired, and they go home and get cut off in traffic and react, as you say, and other teachers seem to have more specific things to prescribe. So in your own life and work, what do you do to enable people to live this experientially, as opposed to just being inspired momentarily by lofty concepts?
Rick Archer: I’ll greatly strengthen what you just said. If my spirituality cannot be acted in, on and through in this moment, it’s not spirituality. I have another saying, truth is a full contact sport. You know, but the essence of that contact is what we are unfamiliar with, because we want to kind of drive through, you know, the, the Bob’s Big Boy have brighter life experience and pick up a side of freedom, and go home and watch TV and eat it and it doesn’t work that way. So let’s, we’ll go into if we should, Jerry, what what that would mean. Okay. So we’ll pick up on what we had before. We said and we agreed that life, in its essence, is presenting a series. It’s actually not an accurate word, but there is a constant revelation. Some are bigger than others, meaning the teacher appears the students ready or not. And we just love that idea. When we see a night sky. We go to the ocean and look at the bluffs and the waves crashing against them. We just the bonsai tree, who doesn’t want to feel that ancient strength. We all do. So we love the idea that the revelation of the moment is the Same as helping me integrate this consciousness into an understanding of its true nature. But that same love of revelation has to apply. When I don’t like what’s revealed in me, about me. That’s where the rubber meets the road. We are asleep in a certain order of nature that believes that it is not what it doesn’t want to see. It believes it is not what it doesn’t want to see. So I look out and I see this angry as anger in me. Well, when I am anger, I’m a it’s accompanied by justification. Anger appears with blame. Depression appears with the past, anxiety appears with a project. And we never get quite the whole idea that this is a key idea. You cannot experience a negative state that is not preceded by resistance. You cannot experience a negative state that is not preceded by resistance. So that if I’m suddenly afraid, it’s an indication that something in me has measured and decided the quality, the nature of the event. You say something to me, I get angry. Something in me knows that you shouldn’t have said that, or I can’t get angry. So resistance precedes the negativity. We’re on the same page, Rick? Yeah. All right. And I have a question here. So throw it anyone keep going?
Guy Finley: Well, let me just finish this first part, then we’ll get that okay. Is the resistance produced by the event? Or does the event reveal the resistant nature?
Rick Archer: If you’re asking me, I would say the latter. Yes.
Guy Finley: The event reveals this resistance in me. This resistance in me cannot learn. By its nature, it separates the experience from the one having the experience. So the observer, the observer immediately split by resistance. But we’ve learned just in our dialogue, that the only way in which we’ve changed is when these things are married, and the integration takes place. So the beauty of this is the discovery, that in those moments where I see something I don’t want to see inside of myself, it is not I resisting them. It is not who I am resisting this moment, but an aspect of my nature that I’m asleep, too. So the event actually serves to show me something that I need to awaken to, so that it can be incorporated in that understanding that transcends the experience and the experiencer.
Rick Archer: Okay, so my question is that we entered into this phase of the conversation with the thought of, you know, how does this become a living reality, there are all these wonderful, sublime truths that all the Scripture scriptures talk about, we read in various books, and so on. And, you know, we don’t want to just have a momentary upliftment and then go back to our humdrum life, we want our life to actually be kind of stabilized on on a level of profundity that we have heard is possible if we read the accounts of various saints and sages. And so then what you began to talk about just now is it sounds like that, one of the key things for you and enabling people to do this is to somehow resolve or, or eliminate the tendency to resist and to place blame on circumstances rather than looking within to find, you know, the source of resistance if resistance is taking place. Is that Is that so clear?
Guy Finley: It’s a phenomenon, that we believe in our negative states. It seems natural to us. I’m saying that a negative state is actually a deflection, a redirection of our attention, stealing from us the opportunity the moment has brought for the revelation to produce an integration.
Rick Archer: Okay, so let’s take a concrete example. So let’s say you know, use the example of getting cut off in traffic, which everybody else has experienced. And, you know, our immediate reaction is, you know, this guy’s an idiot, and, you know, blow your horn, flipping the bird. So how could a person deal that same situation in the more enlightened way that you’re suggesting and use that as a learning experience rather than as an opportunity to sort of indulge in in anger?
Guy Finley: Translation, someone cuts me off. And suddenly I’m the torch from the Fantastic Four. Did he set me on fire? Did he give me a pill that was made of the gelatinous gasoline? Or was the disc look, the the event reveals a nature that was already there, the event doesn’t create the disturbance, the event risk reveals this disturbed nature, we want to use the presence of what is incomplete of what is in the dark. And by using it, I don’t mean I’m going to be active towards it. It means I’m not going to let it become active in me. See, when I get angry, I have a host of reasons that I have a series of things to do to get things straight. I’m saying that anything one does from an angry state is the continuation of the anger, not the path to liberation, it promises. So the recognition of the futility of identifying with negativity. I’ll say it again, the recognition of the futility of identifying with a negativity is the negation of that negative state and that level of self that wants to do it.
Rick Archer: Okay, so you’re saying that if one can develop the habit of recognizing that anger, jealousy, greed, depression, all kinds of things like that are futile if one can recognize that, if one can develop the habit of recognizing that those are sort of inner conditions rather than outer circumstances, that one can actually root out these conditions, resolve them, and then be free of the of the tendency to indulge in them. Now putting words in your mouth. But is that what you’re saying? That well?
Guy Finley: No, that’s why we’re, I’m enjoying our time together. Incidentally, Rick, thanks. That’s like, no, that’s kind of post mortem, that we agreed that awareness is a living intelligence. A simple example, if I pick up a skillet, I don’t have to stop and say, let’s see, my body is burning. What do I do? Okay, oh, that’s it, put down the skillet. My body has an innate awareness that won’t allow itself to harm itself. How much greater is that spiritual intelligence, that level of awareness, so that when I get angry, I can’t see that I’m hurting myself in that moment, because my mind has divided itself up into the one being hurt, and the one doing the hurting. To recognize that that is duality, that that is a form of division, that drives the continuation of that level of myself is the end of it. Why? Because it hurts me to be angry. It hurts me to hate, it hurts me to be greedy, it hurts, it actually hurts to be impatient, that awareness won’t act against itself. I just need to let it lead. Instead of being deceived by my own nature, that has an ulterior motive, which is the continuation of itself.
Rick Archer: So what I’m trying to get at is what is the most effective way of accessing that spiritual intelligence, as you just termed it? You know, how? Because really being able to operate as an enlightened person, so to speak, is a radically different way of functioning than the way people are people ordinarily function. Yes. And so how do we get from A to Z? How, how does a person listening to this, make that transition and really begin functioning as a Latter Day Saints, so to speak, which I think we’re all capable of doing?
Guy Finley: Perfect. Two things. First, you expressed it completely accurately. It is said in certain schools, that the yoga as its taught, became a discipline in order to purify the noddy’s in order to bring about certain energetic patterns working to clear out blockages. Well, the practice came from seeing men and women who went into spontaneous posture as a result of these energies awakening in their bodies. So then we practice the posture to facilitate the energetic movement.
Rick Archer: Yeah, drag a table by any leg and the whole table will come along and
Guy Finley: it’s very much like that. So here’s what you’ve asked me. I have an exercise that in that embodies what we’ve just described. It’s called stop, drop, and endure. Stop, drop and endure. First phase stop. Well, in this instance, what does it mean? I’ve been a ride along. Anytime a negative state comes up by and large, I’m quick to blame. I lend myself to whatever justification is required in order that I’m not the one really at fault here. I begin to see through that, for one thing, I’ve never resolved any of these issues through these negative states. So I start to think, well, maybe I should do something else with a negative state, what’s left? The moment I feel the contraction, the onset of the resistance, I inwardly come to a complete stop. I understand that my mind wants the continuation of that conflict, so that there can be a sense of myself different than the state. It’s blaming its pain on
Rick Archer: and is that as, as easily done, as said, coming to a complete stop?
Guy Finley: No, no, of course not. We are we are machines running on momentum.
Rick Archer: So it’s something that might take some cult cultivation to get the hang of it. That’s the beauty
Guy Finley: of this. If I actually understand that the reason my head hurts is because I’ve got a hand that I don’t see with a hammer going behind me. One day I actually, holy, good grief. What is that? Oh, it’s me. Did you ever do you ever see the most precious, I will answer this, but I got to do this most precious YouTube I ever saw my life. A dog small dog is sitting on a sofa, eating its bone. While it’s eating its bone, for whatever reason, it’s left rear foot starts to kind of creep up towards the bone. The dog looks and sees its foot and it goes and starts to drown and its own foot. As the foot gets closer, the dog attacks its foot, because it thinks its foots trying to take the bone and the foot retreats. It does this for 10 minutes. Funny. This is a perfect description of what I’m talking about. I blame the situation, when there’s a part of myself that’s not only helped create it, but wants it to go on so that it can be growling at something taking something away. Stop, here comes my foot. Here comes those thoughts and feelings blaming you again, Rick, how long am I going to believe that someone who died 30 years ago is responsible for my pain today. I catch myself I call it revisiting the scene of the crime. The thing I say I don’t want there I am living it again. Stop. If I stop, I have to drop drop what I actually create a condition where now I’m aware of all of the supporting cast that wants to talk to me and validate me pointing the finger of blame, meet going through the resentment or regret. And I actually begin to wake up to the presence of these painful thoughts and feelings that before I took as being me, I dropped them. I don’t drop them because I’m spiritual. I dropped them because I’m aware of the fact that the more I include them in my life, the more painful my
Rick Archer: life is. So the stopping gives you some distance from them and makes them easier to drop.
Guy Finley: Stop creates the first natural separation between the potential to be aware of myself, and what is asleep and myself. Dropping is what happens when because I’m aware now at a new level, I realized that what I took to be myself before is not i It’s a mechanical flow of thoughts and feelings that formerly justified my sleep state. Now, can you guess what the indoor part is?
Rick Archer: I would say that you have well I asked you earlier about patience and tolerance. So it would seem that you know, just stopping and dropping isn’t necessarily going to completely eradicate the situation that’s pissing you off. But if having taken those two steps, then your your endurance your patients, your tolerance are going to be amped up quite a bit and you should be able to just sort of work your way through the situation the let’s say the annoying person at work that’s not going to stop being annoying. They’re going to continue being annoying, but now you have a different perspective on the situation which you know, enables you to kind of like, deal with it and you know, without getting your buttons pushed
Guy Finley: the onset of what I formerly took to be myself the support cast of thoughts and feelings that are actually a form of suffering that I took to be a guide are clearly seen as being not a guide. The clearer it becomes that I am calling it out. And that I’m saying, You know what? And listeners, I hope you’ll listen to hear this. I call it our nature calls on what it thinks God is, in the moment, when I’m afraid, and I call on a fearful thought or feeling to protect me. I believe that that fearful thought or feeling can protect me it is my God, it is my guide, I see that it is not my guide, I see it as not my God. And what do you think that nature does, as you begin to see through its game, it amps itself up, instead of whispering or politely promising things, it begins to pronounce to you, you’re a dead man. If you don’t act, now, you don’t step up and speak out, you know, punish your enemy, if you don’t do this, they’re gonna walk all over you. And now you get to endure the presence of a level of yourself that you thought was you before. And here’s the beauty of this. It’s a mechanical level of consciousness. It will escalate, culminate, and pass. And when it passes, you are left on the other side of that revelation, a different order of man or woman that went into it. Because now you know who you are not, you have a better insight into what you cannot do or agree to. And your level of being has been changed. Because the former dark order has been illuminated, you actually are now enlightened relative to that level of yourself. And its possibility.
Rick Archer: And it might be self evident. But this sounds like something that is not just done once and you’re done. It’s it’s a, it’s a habit that can develop and that will serve you for life basically. And as far as and you know, resolve layer after layer and thing after thing as you go along.
Guy Finley: It is eternal. Yeah. It is eternal, active forces, meeting, passive forces, and being reconciled simultaneously. It is eternal, all things are created that way. All things come into existence and live out their lives that way. And all things past from physical existence. That way, we are privileged, if we are privileged to be part of that process.
Rick Archer: And it sounds like a process that one primarily would do in the midst of activity well, at work well, you know, dealing with your family and this and that. It’s just a kind of a way of functioning that one cultivates. In addition to that, do you also teach or recommend something that one would do in a more meditative sense? Like go in your room for half an hour, close the door and just practice something rather, as an as part of your toolbox?
Guy Finley: Oh, absolutely. As I said, I, I began a rather intensive process of sadhana, my meditation. A long, long time ago. I’ve written books on it, I have a book called The Law secrets of prayer. There is no in my opinion, way in which and now again, I’ll ask you, you know, here I am, and I sit quietly, doing whatever practice I may do, when I’m done with that practice. Isn’t it true that for whatever length of time, I’m able to keep my attention in that centered place, that I am, I am a lot less a lot less likely to agree with a negative state.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And I also have found in my experience, having been a meditator for 48 years or so that I don’t have to make an effort to keep my attention anywhere after I finished meditating. It just sort of sticks with you some to some degree and continues to cumulate as the years go by, sticks with you in the way but maybe having taken a shower in the morning, you don’t have to run around all day thinking well, I’m clean, I am clean because I took the shower, you just cleaner because you took the shower and you can just forget about it and you’ll enjoy the benefit.
Guy Finley: Yes, the the, the purpose of meditation, I think, ostensibly is to allow one’s attention, to relate them interiorly to a different order of one’s own being that’s already there. The alignment between this nature that sets itself out to be in this Allah It provides a certain kind of food to come all the way from whatever level of one’s consciousness into one’s being, so that I am being nourished. Through that meditation. I have an album called the meditative life. It isn’t about specific practices. It’s about the fact that my life is meant to be a living meditation. What does it mean? A living awareness of the ceaseless state of revelation and the integration that I am a part of? And that is this bridge between cosmos is this bridge between levels of existence now our purpose incidentally.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And earlier, you mentioned noddy’s and chakras and all that. So I mean, meditation I think is also a way of fine tuning the instrument of the nervous system, both the gross nervous system and the subtle and in order to enable it to play the symphony of life more tunefully, you know, which it does spontaneously once once we’ve tuned it up.
Guy Finley: Yeah, there’s no doubt about that. Yeah, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a thought of mine. It’s a little bit off topic. But it’s kind of goes back to the micro cosmos and the Macro Cosmos. It is said that if we were to take our DNA in one human body, and just unravel it, that it would spread out from here past Jupiter, easily single strand of our DNA,
Rick Archer: actually, I think, well, in one cell, we actually have about six feet of DNA if you uncoil it all in the nucleus of each cell. And as I recall, it would seem it would go from here to the Andromeda galaxy and back 20 times or somesuch. Some crazy amount
Guy Finley: in its totality. Yes, yeah. I just, I think I have I have an intuition that that DNA, you know, something has something has to interface between what is ineffable, invisible, energetic, and form? We see this extraordinary thing. One of the reasons I love plants, trees, everything, because if you ever marveled you, can you this thing grows out of water. Now sunlight, and dirt,
Rick Archer: right? You’re saying?
Guy Finley: What’s that about? That, that all of this exchange of energy, from the top to the bottom, I think that part of this process inside of ourselves, where these two worlds interface, that we have literally a kind of antenna in us receiving things from far, far away, that is part of a both individual and collective experience. And we’re not in tune with it. We’re more in tune with Dr. Dre, you know, and other miscellaneous experiences that provide heart pounding sensation, but no true experience of the spiritual. So it’s, it’s a direct. It’s a direct connection that we’re talking about.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And of course, he’s speaking generally, because some people are in tune with it. And, you know, very acutely. Yes, and you just made an interesting point. And a couple of questions that have come in which I want to ask you in a second. But it’s like you were talking about sort of the interface between the, the subtle unmanifest source of everything and the gross body that we perceive ourselves to be. And we were talking earlier about nested hierarchies. But there are sort of, I think, you were just saying this, that there’s a sort of range of degrees of manifestation through which this connection takes place. And in most people, there’s a kind of a loss of awareness of the full range as they become more and more outward directed, you know, where Dr. Dre and booming beats become their world. But we can reverse that direction, take an inward 180 degrees and thereby become more acutely attuned to that whole subtle range that lies within us.
Guy Finley: Very much so again, to the heart of my work and my new book. We have forgotten ourselves that’s as simple as it can be put. That’s why the whole idea of it’s true you know, stop dropping Doer i over the years, I’ve probably developed 1000 exercises that are in books, audio programs. In my I have an online wisdom school called guy friendly now, that is replete with attention exercises, and things that we can do to develop ourselves. But the bottom line is, I need to understand, I did not create peace I did not create love, I did not create comfort. Passion, I did not create patience or kindness. I am intended to be an instrument of these eternal qualities. That means I don’t have to produce the conditions for this consciousness to express itself. I have to be willing to let it express itself through me. How? By remembering in the moment, who and what are my possibilities. Instead of listening to some thought or feeling, tell me what I have to do to escape a pain. Nice. We’re not here to escape pain. We’re here to transmute pain, into the understanding of the relationship between the Higher World and the lower world where the lower world is being asked, Will you step into a relationship where your suffering has meaning? Where it isn’t useless to you or anyone else, but where it becomes a process of something about to flower and producing something beautiful, which is a new me a reborn me in the moment, because I agreed to go through the the conditions that I was offered through the presence of that moment.
Rick Archer: Yeah, you’re remind me of that prayer of St. Francis, you know, Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. It goes on and on, says a bunch of beautiful stuff. But the whole implication is that, you know, we’re conduits, we’re instruments, we, yes. And we can serve as such, if we’re willing to go through the crucible of purification that you’re referring to here, here as pain, which has, because there’s some pain associated with that purification, and to be come fit instruments for really pouring an abundance of, of, you know, divine qualities into the world through our life.
Guy Finley: Yes. And just to touch that one more time, before we go on with the questions that you’ve got. Were are, by and large, you know, I do speak maybe two generally, but as a as a rule. Most of us are afraid of pain, psychological pain. We’ve been conditioned by seeing everyone taking drugs, making plans, anything you can to push away some kind of psychological pain. Oh, yeah. You
Rick Archer: know, what percentage of the US population is on Paxil or all those different kinds of mind numbing drugs, it’s like I heard something majority,
Guy Finley: like 78%,
Rick Archer: something like that. It’s crazy.
Guy Finley: Terrifying. The path leads a person to understand that useless suffering is in fact useless. hatred, fear, blame, worry, useless suffering, self concern, useless suffering. But to begin to understand that the nature in us that has convinced us to be afraid of those states in ourselves, can be used to produce a new order of ourselves, then it’s useless suffering, becomes the seed of our soul becomes the new possibility out of which now, I’m not afraid anymore, of seeing my irritation. I’m not afraid of being set off because I know the moment that that nature is revealed. It can be grist for the mill, it can serve as food that I become new made from so big idea, useless suffering versus voluntary, conscious suffering.
Rick Archer: Interesting point. Ask your doctor if being a numbed out zombie is right for you. But you know, oh, go ahead.
Guy Finley: You know, you really want to hear it?
Rick Archer: Yeah, sure. Stories are fun.
Guy Finley: Well, this is God’s honest truth. I got hit by a car. When I left the music business. I didn’t know what I was going to do to make a living. I had some income from it. I became a handyman, and I made my living doing carpentry and stuff like that landscaping for about seven years. Well, in the middle of that I had an old truck and I was ran out of gas. I was pushing the truck. Long came a car didn’t see me took the car, truck door off with my head, broke my neck shattered my body, basically. It’s okay. So finally, everything’s healing in my legs in a cast because it was destroyed. And I go to see the doctor. And he says, Well, you got to keep the cast on for another six weeks. And after six weeks or more caston we’ve got extensive therapy. And I said, um, you know, I gotta tell you something, I want it off. No, it’s impossible. I said, well, the guy that hit me didn’t have insurance and I don’t have insurance. He says, Excuse me for a moment, goes out of the room because back he says, we’re going to take the cast off for you.
Rick Archer: Because he because he realized you weren’t going to be able to pay him anymore, right. But this brings up an interesting question, and that is that if if 67 or so percent of the US population are are taking all kinds of tranquilizers, mind numbing drugs, it seems like the genie is really being forced to stay in the bottle. And, you know, if suddenly there were, you know, the dragon industry collapsed and people didn’t have these drugs anymore, we’d probably be running around in a madhouse. So the question is, how does one transition from being dependent upon such things, to actually being able to having the maturity to see their psychological pain in whatever form it takes as grist for the mill as an opportunity to grow? How would you help a person make that transition and actually get off using such drugs if they become reliant upon them?
Guy Finley: Well, two things. First, I think it was fennel on said that a stone beneath the surface of the Earth weighs as much as one beneath it. So that it isn’t that we probably live in a madhouse. We are in a madhouse. Humanity, by and large, has lost its connection with sanity, with awareness, the drugs and alcohol and the other substances dedicated to ensuring the stone stays beneath the surface. So that we aren’t conscious of the suffering can only be handled on an individual basis by those rare men and women who gradually as we’ve been talking about, start to realize, this isn’t really changing me. It’s just keeping something in place that in my heart of hearts, nose, ought not be kept in place. At that point, an individual like that, just like with cigarettes, or any other addictive process, can begin to realize that whatever it is in me, that is attached, identified as dependent upon this, I need to understand it, rather than let the culture and the drug itself, tell me who I am. That’s the beginning of the reversal. You know, the meaning of the word repent, the original meaning in the New Testament turned around, first shall become last last first, what is up as to come down, everything turned around, we are dependent upon God help us. And he will if we ask, we are dependent upon a nature that has not only convinced us that as we are, we need to be fixed, and fixed according to its instructions. But we have been complicit in allowing. I’ll make this shorter, who in their heart of my heart or mind believes that we are supposed to let thoughts and feelings tell us who we are? How does it get to where a man or a woman can listen to a thought say, Go? hate that person? A feeling that says, Set yourself against that other group of people?
Rick Archer: Where Where did it go shoot up this movie theater? I mean, you know,
Guy Finley: exactly, where did it happen, and in part, you hit on it. Literally, Rick, as this consciousness is increasingly denied the relationship that allows the circulation that’s intended to be the fulfillment of the human race, that circulation becomes stagnant. It’s the second law of thermodynamics, it becomes a closed system. And a closed system becomes entropic, and gradually melts down to where there’s no exchange left. And when that pressure reaches that point, where there’s nothing left, you see these explosions, you see this hatred, you see all of this emnity flooding out of what shouldn’t be a human heart, flooding out with relationship open to life, not trying to push it away for fear of more pain. So we’re at risk, we are at a tipping point. There’s no question about it. The evidence is all around us. Where do we want to be in this tipping point? That’s the question.
Rick Archer: One interesting question This raises is that some people feel that the we are societal societally at a tipping point, and that the ambient level of consciousness in society is rising for for whatever reason, there are various theories as to why it’s rising. And that, you know, those who have cultured, intentionally cultured higher conscious within themselves will find this to be a great joy and upliftment, but those who have not will, things are going to get kind of rough for them because there has been no processing or no, no gradual release of the pent up, you know, stuff. So any comments on that? Well,
Guy Finley: it’s it’s obviously a pretty large subject, but first, nothing goes in one direction at the same. Everything moves into two actions that once polarities, everything, everything moves in two directions at once, it’s actually connected already. But the appearance of these opposites, Christ went to, in quotes hell, before he rose, these experiences, the east and west indicate a relationship between darkness and light that we don’t understand yet. So that you see a world in which this darkness seems to be manifesting itself at greater and greater intensity, but so does the light one cause. Exactly. And to the point, it is said, and scientifically, pretty much confirmed that the harmonic, the harmonics of the planet itself is experienced as intensifying the rate of energy, the the actual photons that we’re receiving, because of our movement near towards the center of our galaxy, are accelerating. This has an impact on the whole of our soul of our body, and all other parts. So tension is increasing. Well, as the opposites become more intensely connected, you have greater opportunity for fusion, or fission. That’s where spirituality comes in. Can I use this increased darkness, this increased tension to be more liberated by the understanding of the process? Or do I become punished by it? And then punish everyone else? Because I don’t know what the heck’s going on?
Rick Archer: And it’s a good answer. All right, let me ask these questions that have come in. So first of all, Dan from London asks, Guy has used the term trinity several times, but he’d be able to elaborate on his interpretation of this word.
Guy Finley: Sure, Hi, Dan, from London. It is fairly widely known not just spiritually, in all scientific camps, that wherever you have something come into creation, it is the product of something that is active, working on something that is passive, and being modified by something. Because if you just have two forces, active and passive, meaning each other, and there wasn’t something to modify what brought them together, you’d have a stalemate, you’d have static life, life isn’t static, you have something active, working on something passive, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost in Christian terms, the the Vishnu from the Shiva can’t think of, yeah, the, the Trinity there, these are a never ending human expression of a personification of these forces, we are these forces, they never stopped working in us. So our awareness of this trinity is the same as a relationship with it, because we discussed that. So this is the Trinity that I’m describing a relationship with a ceaseless set of forces that are never endingly, exchanging themselves with each other, in order to create the world we see. And the seer of that world.
Rick Archer: Interesting answer, yeah, you’re hitting on number of things that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. And this one is one of them. In, in sort of Vedic cosmology, there’s this understanding that consciousness is one. But because it’s consciousness, it comes conscious of itself, because that’s what it is it does what it does, it’s conscious, and then becoming conscious of itself. Instantly, a threefold structure is set up of observer observed and process of observation. And they even have names for these three things. And, and yet, how can it become three things because it’s really one thing. And so there’s there’s also this sort of infinite frequency between three and one, three, and one, three, and one that creates this dynamism that gives rise to the dynamism we see in creation.
Guy Finley: Yeah. I do i Well, you know what, I just love this dialogue, this these things that we’re talking about. I actually wrote a whole book called The seeker the search the sacred, about this trinity, that we are at once the seeker we are at once the search, and we are at once the sacred. And I support a series of essays with quotations that I took from 7000 years ago, literally, all the way to present time, that support this premise, because some people don’t agree with it, that within us lives, this trinity. We are it’s expression, it is us expressed, and that our joy in life, our fearlessness in life, the journey of life is this movement from seeker to search to sacred and it is this constant play to see all the players on stage at once used to no longer take yourself seriously.
Rick Archer: All the world’s a stage. Yep. Cool. Let me ask you another question that came in. This is From Amit, from College Station, Texas, he asks, I find I am only interested in spirituality when I am unhappy. How do I determine if this interest is an escape mechanism or a genuine quest for truth?
Guy Finley: That’s such a great question. Over the years that I’ve been writing and teaching, you know, the unhappiness is the front runner. We need to realize that the unhappiness that we consistently recur re experience that that, listen to me, it doesn’t go away, man, go, I don’t know, it doesn’t go away. The conditions that have revealed it change. Once we understand that the conditions are this cycle, this movement, we get the fact that I’m on a kind of merry go round right now. And when I’m on this horse, looking out at the cotton candy stand, I’m in seventh heaven. But as soon as that horse runs around to where the diesel engines are, that are driving the carousel, I smell the stink, I see the dirt. And now I don’t like what I see. But then I’m back to the cotton candy, forgetting the diesel, and what I don’t like both are in you. Both are in you to understand that this cycle is going to repeat itself will begin to give you an understanding. You don’t have to resist or regret, being happy feeling joy. But don’t identify with it so fully that when the unhappiness comes, you believe that’s all there is. They don’t come apart from each other. Strengthen that understanding. And I promise you that that which led you to see us and ask the question will continue to develop your wish to understand the nature of unhappiness, don’t look for happiness, to make you to fix unhappiness, don’t look for happiness, to fix your unhappiness, see through the nature that can be made unhappy, and you will find a happiness that can’t turn into its opposite.
Rick Archer: Good. That last sentence kind of derailed a devil’s advocate question I was just about to ask which is, which is that you’re kind of making it sound like that the goad that unhappiness can be is never going to get resolved. Because you’re gonna go around this merry go round, and you’re gonna come right back to the same unhappiness that you started out with, which is not my experience. My my, I don’t think it’s yours either, which, which is our level of happiness has continued to grow over the years. And apparently, we’ll continue to do so. So So there really is a payoff to this whole spiritual game.
Guy Finley: Wait, it isn’t that our level of happiness has gone up is that we’ve understood that the things that want to make us unhappy, are untrue. And that what we call our unhappiness actually serves what we would call happiness, which is the end of a nature that believes it is dependent upon conditions outside of itself to be content. Contentment isn’t the same as the experience. Oh, I’m happy I got a new car. Somebody did this. I don’t think you’re using that terms, Rick, but I’m just saying that we want to transcend the idea. We want to see through the idea of a happiness that I find because I’m identified with a passing circumstance. Yeah. Right. To see the pathing circumstances serve happiness, not unhappiness is a sea change. Because now I’m one with the changes, as opposed to, for some and against others.
Rick Archer: And I think there’s another sea change. And I think you alluded to it a half an hour ago, when you use the word, I believe, use the word nourishment, that the sort of the inner, there’s an inner reservoir, which can be very nourishing to our lives if we have access to it. And, you know, I tell me, if you would agree, but you know, not only is happiness not unhappiness, not really due to external circumstances, it’s but more fundamentally, it’s due to a lack of flow from that reservoir of inner nourishment or fulfillment into our conscious lives. And that if we can kind of hook up the pipeline and get that flow going, then regardless of external circumstances, we I mean, you know, Gandhi was imprisoned for Aurobindo was imprisoned you know, for quite some time and it was part of the happiest times of their lives. So we can be in a in a circumstance completely devoid of any kind of external gratification, and yet be as happy as clams.
Guy Finley: Yeah, I mean, look at the the genius, the patience, the kindness that came out of Franco’s life, you know, Here’s a man in a concentration camp, who who trends, who transcends his condition, the ability that we have to transcend our condition. And the laws that it would ordinarily place us under, cannot be separated from our entering into that condition so fully, so as to recognize it is not authority over us. That new relationship is the same as a new understanding. And it’s the same as freedom from the conditions that formally determined whether we were happy or unhappy in life.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So I guess maybe to our meet, we could say, you know, let this unhappiness be beer in your motivational code to pursue spirituality, but, you know, keep at it, because if you, it’s like, if you keep, if you put sort of money in the bank, but you’re always spending money at the end, then you stop putting money in the bank, you’re gonna run out of money, again, you have to kind of keep putting in if you’re gonna keep spending. And life spends money, so to speak. And as long as we keep replenishing, the Treasury will never run out.
Guy Finley: And something that we rarely think about Rick is that, you know, a, I didn’t produce directly this unhappiness, a, I don’t directly produce this happiness. But suddenly, something in me is aware of the fact that I seek happiness. I seek spirituality when I’m unhappy. Hmm, maybe something’s trying to show me something. Maybe something saying, meet? Isn’t this interesting? At this point, that now you’re starting to realize that you didn’t before? Suddenly I’m all for God, I’m all for prayer. I’m all with my Purusha. I’m all down with all things spiritual, when things are bad. Is there a relationship between these two, the awareness of this, he didn’t give himself the awareness that shows me this dichotomy will lead me out of this dichotomy, if I will stay true to my wish to understand the truth of myself.
Rick Archer: Now. Good. In other words, keep on trucking.
Guy Finley: Yep, it all boils down to a T shirt, Rick.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I mean, there’s probably so many stories in all sorts of traditional scriptures about the value of not just calling on God, so to speak, when the going gets rough, but, but continually reinforcing that connection, in the good times and the bad so that, you know, you’ll, you’ll be prepared when, when anything happens, you know, it’s, it’s kind of too late to do it when, when all hell’s breaking loose.
Guy Finley: If my contentment is the product of a condition that I am identified with outside of myself, that same contentment and condition will be the source of my anxiety and fear. To see the relationship between this attachment, this dependency, and the image of myself that the condition supports, is the beginning of the end of that relationship, because awareness won’t compromise itself. In my book, I have one of the essays on false beliefs. A false belief, what’s a false belief? Well, if I believe that I’m only as valuable, as my co workers agree I am, then I am going to sell my soul for their esteem. To be aware of the contradiction that I sold my soul to feel worthwhile proves that there is a part of me that thinks to be worthwhile means I’m only as good as people think I am. And when I’m only as good as people think I am and you change your opinion of me. Everything’s lost in that moment, meaning my identity is threatened by your refusal to smile at me. Mr. Howard used to say that permitting your life to be taken over by another person is like letting the waiter eat your dinner. So we see these contradictions, will we live up to the awareness that showing them to us, because if I’ll stand in the middle of the expression, then I see both sides at once, Rick, I see the experience and I see the nature that is inseparable from it. To see these things at the same time, changes my relationship to the part of me that wants to blame or that wants to retreat as a meet said in new now God is everything to me. Oh, please save me. We want to be proud hasn’t at all times this is practicing the presence, the old Desert Fathers, the Eastern traditions, where the Dieker the prayer is going on and on. Not because I’m trying to be spiritual. But because I see the value of finding a relationship with an order of contentment, that can’t be shaken by changing conditions.
Rick Archer: Yeah, that is funny because you often end up your answers on really good little phrases, contentment that can’t be shaken by changing conditions that that could be a sutra.
Guy Finley: Well, in the end, we are a living sutra, aren’t we? Yeah. We just have to get to the, to get to the sutra part. First, the conscious first, the unconscious suffering, the false certainty, then the uncertainty, and then the real certainty, to the sutra, to that nugget that produced and led us through all of the experience to get to the end of realizing that this was always always in me, that understanding, I just had to go through this process of seed, stem flower, fruit, and pasture myself.
Rick Archer: Yeah. You know, and I would say further to Amit, that, you know, this is such a worthwhile endeavor in life. I mean, we all do all kinds of things, and we should keep on doing them. You know, we have livings to earn and hobbies to pursue and so on and so forth. But, you know, if this kind of spiritual pursuit becomes a key priority in one’s life, it’s it’s so worth the effort, or the if it if it even is effort, I’ve always found it to be just so gratifying that I don’t think of it as an effort.
Guy Finley: It has its moments, you know, where you have no feeling in it. But you’ve said something very important. Another book of mine, called The Apprentice of the heart, it states very clearly through his a certain seven year process, I went through that what you love, you didn’t give yourself that love for it. And if you didn’t give yourself the love of something, do you really think that that love would stir in you, that longing, without leading you to itself in the end, so that your life gradually in this instance, maybe I’m caught up in the world, I’ve got business, I’m an entrepreneur, I got friends and family, I’m all running, running. But every once in a while, the rubber meets the road, I’m not so happy, suddenly, I want to have a spiritual life. Well, as you grow in understanding, the same divine intelligence, that made your unhappiness evident as being incapable of leading you to happiness, it’ll start to change the order of your life, you’ll want to spend more time being present, as opposed to pursuing things, you’ll want to be more interior, instead of rushing out anxiously after goods, your life will be changed from the inside out, because you have agreed to go through what awareness is showing you about yourself.
Rick Archer: seek and you shall find knock on the door shall be opened.
Guy Finley: Yes, actually, I just talked about that last week. Ask and it shall be given. It sounds as if those are two separate moments. They are the same moment. Ask and it’s given meaning if I wake up, and I’m aware of myself in the moment, everything I need to be completed in that moment is given to me in that same awareness. One moment, one movement, one perfection.
Rick Archer: Yeah, no. And this gets back to something we were talking about about an hour ago, which is that, you know, we are fish swimming in an ocean of intelligence. And this in this intelligence is not oblivious to our intentions. And if we have the sincere intention and desire to grow spiritually, and so on, that, that I believe that intention is recognized and supported. There’s a little there’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita, which says, even a little of this yoga delivers from great fear. So, you know, there’s so many analogies and metaphors we could use, but you know, no, there’s another thing which says that no effort is lost and no obstacle exists says that in the Gita too. So, you know, I’d say if one has even a shred of motivation, yeah, there we go. Another example if you have even faith as much as a grant of mustard seeds, you show you’ll, you’ll move mountains you know, so any any shred of intention, cash it in, pursue it, you know, go for it, and one thing will lead to the next
Guy Finley: is it at the most amazing thing in the world. That literally an infinite number of people, places things going on, and yet all of it will come together in your lesson hmm, I’ve always I actually have often said, How in the world does does the divine do that? How does it the whole cosmos leads to this moment where I get to see something about myself that I couldn’t see if everything didn’t happen exactly that way. I think that’s the most basic thing of the world.
Rick Archer: I do too. There’s a, there’s a verse in that another verse in The Gita, here we are again, which goes, who is it gonna Karmani Gotti, which means unfathomable the laws of karma. And they’re unfathomable the human intellect, you know, because they’re infinitely complex, but the infinite all pervading intelligence doesn’t break a sweat, you know, dealing with these infinite complexities and orchestrating things just so for our evolutionary benefit.
Guy Finley: And to even sense the truth, that somehow in this unfathomable intelligence, it put that together, so that I could be a little less afraid, means that the whole universe is in a collaboration to reveal its consciousness to itself through me, this old idiot walking around in Oregon someplace, yeah. See, it adds a gravitas, a beauty of grace to one’s life, because you don’t think it? You see that?
Rick Archer: Yeah. And not only through you, but through the turkeys outside your window and freeze and everything. There’s a beautiful saying from St. Teresa of Avila, she said, it appears that God Himself is on the journey very
Guy Finley: much to that again. That’s exactly right. And again, as an Eastern tradition, this idea of this undivided consciousness, seeking to know itself, setting itself out in the first three expressions of this energy, all unconditioned, that then become the law of seven of creation. And you see this marvelous path take place till you get to the 108 gunas. I mean, it’s all there. For those who want to see it. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Cool. Well, I’ve got a whole sheet of questions here that you provide for interviewers to ask you, and I haven’t asked you any of them. And I’m not gonna ask any of them now. And there’s a whole nice sheet of quotes from your book, The Secret of the immortal self, which should be too long to take one by one. But having, you know, had this conversation for the last couple of hours, is there anything in your heart of hearts that you feel like you’d like to express that we haven’t touched upon?
Guy Finley: There is no one in the universe, like you. And there is no one in the universe that has been given the role that you’ve been given. Your essence, my essence, those unique qualities that are somehow combined in the moment of conception, have produced the possibility, no, have produced an instrument whose possibility is infinite? Will we let the infinite play itself using our life, not us using our life to try to make music according to our culture, our religion, or our social values? The clearer it is that I am that you are this unspeakable marriage of light and darkness of eternal qualities fashion into a time form, the more we’re willing to use what happens to us for the purpose of deepening this revelation. So a no one is like you, no one can experience what you experience and no one is intended to. So when our mind begins, as it often does to deride us start talking about well, you’re an idiot or you’re inadequate or you can’t or you won’t. This thing is so over your head, you’ll never understand it. I remember when I was a boy, I used to go see Krishna Murty up in Ojai. i What is that man talk? And then one day, because you have a love of something, it’s talking through you. You didn’t produce that. You allowed it because you gave yourself to what you know is true. And you began at the same time to see what isn’t true, and you retreated from that. So do never, never believe the limit of your present view is never the limit of your possibilities. Understand that anything that wants you to feel afraid, angry or worried is trying to convey Didn’t you to remain in its world under its laws within you is something that cannot be held captive, choose in favor of that. That’s the work.
Rick Archer: That’s nice. And I mean, these days there, there are so many kids that commit suicide because they’re getting bullied and, you know, tragic things like that. And I think what you’re saying here is that we’re all infinitely precious and have tremendous potential and possibility. And, you know, all we have to do is discover it within ourselves. No one is incapable of doing that. And, you know, everyone can live a very meaningful and fulfilled and beneficial life, if they just sort of go about it the right way.
Guy Finley: The Divine wants to use you,
Rick Archer: like Uncle Sam, need
Guy Finley: to divine, the divine wants to use you get out of the way, yeah. Get out of the way, and don’t know what it means to be used. That’s the big problem. You can’t you can’t know what it means to be used. You can see the unpleasant effect of being used by this unconscious nature that is serving itself. But you can’t to be used means to be present, to allow what is pervasive, ongoing unfolding, its place in us so that you express it, then you’re not clinging to anything. I have this impression, Rick, am I okay? I had this impression last week. I speak four times a week in Southern Oregon. And there’s two online study groups. So I talk a lot. My voice sounds like an old Ford. And each talk that I give, I’ve never given the same talk twice over 40 years is I you know, and quotes I create is given to me and I flesh it out my talk. And I realized last week you know, every last talk is like a Mandela. I watch and I see these men, these beautiful monks sitting and with their colored sand producing these elaborate anagrams, these beautiful forms, all to express one beautiful principle one idea. And then what do they do? wipe it away, wipe it out. That’s a that’s, that’s a really good example, in scale of what our life is supposed to be like. It isn’t something they’re doing on a distant mountain. My life is meant to be a constant formation, fulfillment, and elimination. All gone, no residue, so that the next fullness can begin its formation.
Rick Archer: Nice. Like a line in air as the metaphor goes. They say that some people, they’re very rigid, that’s when they have an experience. It’s like a line in stone. It’s etched in others, it’s more like a line in sand. Others align and water, others align and air and you can actually make a much deeper line in air more easily than you can in stone. Meaning much fuller experience, but it’s gone as soon as it happens.
Guy Finley: Yeah. That’s nice, Rick. That’s nice.
Rick Archer: Cool. Well, why don’t you tell us a little bit about in closing about, you know, how people can connect with you. But you mentioned a bunch of live streaming things. And so I’ll I’ll be putting up a page on BatGap with links to your books and your websites and all that stuff, but give people a sense of how they can plug in?
Guy Finley: Well, first and foremost. My website, public website, guy finley.org GUYF i en le y.org. A person could spend Rick without exaggeration, you’ve been there. You know, you could spend years going through the free resources. All the social networks have tons of free material on YouTube. I have a wisdom school, www dot Guy Finley now.org. One word, guy, Finley now.org. It’s a online wisdom school with everything in it. Very inexpensive, like the classes and I have a special offer. I’d like to LIS offer anyone who’s watched this and interested. My foundation is going to give a free download of an eight hour eight mp3 album called Seven Steps to oneness. It’s a talk a series of talks I gave at the Omega institute some years ago, and I want everybody to have it it’s free. All they have to do is go to Guy friendly.org/batgap Guy finley.org/batgap And there’ll be right there the album and the mp3 is it’s a gift download it.
Rick Archer: Is it already there now It’s already there right now. Okay, great.
Guy Finley: And the only other thing I’d say, besides that, the free Guy Finley now, I don’t know what I’ve got Rick.
Rick Archer: Guy, Phil, you’ve also got one journey.org. I see here.
Guy Finley: Oh, yeah. And that’s another thing, beautiful video, the secret the search the sacred one journey.net. All one word.net.org a.org Sorry, beautiful site. Here’s the key. You and I have had a nice time together. And we’ve acknowledged some really nice truths. Now I say that we have to take that knowledge and act on it, we have to act the knowledge. If we don’t do that, there’s no point to this, I must become the body, I must become that which the body acts through. I must be that which witnesses the action, I must acknowledge this must act the knowledge. If we do that, just like a meter, whatever the fellow’s name was, we’ll see, I was brought to this point for a purpose, can I learn to trust that what brought me here will not betray me. If I discover that what is good and true and beautiful, can never betray the one that it leads, that I become more open to being led, more willing to sacrifice what I must, and more most important at all, it becomes the foundation of my existence, then you and I, as individuals, make this change inwardly, that allows the, the broader consciousness to become affected by it. You change, the consciousness changes, the consciousness changes, the planet that is expressing the consciousness changes, and everything works for the good. Last word, I haven’t saying all things good, come to those for whom the good is all things, all things good. Come to those for whom the good is all things, let us all agree to make the good, all things.
Rick Archer: Beautiful. So I won’t add to that, or try to ask any questions about it, because it’s just a beautiful note to end on. But I do need to make a few little closing remarks that I always make. Yes. So we’ve been speaking with Guy Finley, you know that by now. And I’ll be linking to his websites and his books and everything on his [email protected]. And that guy finley.org/batgap, he has that thing you can download, which I’ll also put a link to that on batgap.com. This, as you know, is an ongoing series of interviews. So if you’ve enjoyed it and would like to hear more, go to BatGap. And under the past interviews menu, you’ll see about five different ways that the past interviews have been categorized. There is an audio podcast of this if you don’t feel like sitting in front of your computer for two hours every week, so you can sign up and listen on your iPad. There’s a link for that on the top menu. audio podcast is working fine. Now after a couple months of not working so well. There’s the donate button which I rely upon in order to be able to do this. There is an email signup thing. So you can be notified by an email each week when each new interview is posted. And bunch of other stuff. If you play around on the menus, you’ll find some interesting things. So thanks for listening or watching. Next week, I’ll be speaking with Gary Renard, who’s A Course in Miracles teacher and has written a book called The Disappearance of the Universe. It’s gonna be kind of a provocative conversation because he says some pretty far out things that Oh, question. Be interesting. Who got it? I think he My attitude is, I take everybody with a grain of salt, but also give everybody the benefit of the doubt. And, you know, I don’t know anything for absolute sure. And the universe is a lot more mysterious and wonderful place than most of us can imagine. So it’s it’s fun, kind of like talking to these people who have these amazingly rich experiences.
Guy Finley: The three most powerful words in the English language, like an essay in the book, I can learn.
Rick Archer: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, well, thanks guy, as has been a lot of fun.
Guy Finley: I enjoyed it to Rick, be well, and thanks for the opportunity.
Rick Archer: Yeah, if I ever get out to Southern Oregon, I’ll pop in and say hello,
Guy Finley: please do. We have we have 15 acres of old growth sugar pine. We have about 30,000 square feet of organic gardens. It is the most beautiful place in the world. Not to mention the Satsang the fellowship that’s here. So anytime you will be my guest.
Rick Archer: Sounds like a nice place to live. I don’t think Oregon is one of the few states in the country I’ve ever been to.
Guy Finley: It’s a beautiful place. The foundation is a beautiful place. Choir madrigals a whole school really, anytime you’re welcome here.
Rick Archer: Well, you’re a prolific guy, it’s impressive to see how you churn out the material, the books, the audios and everything else. And then as far as I can tell, it’s all very reasonably priced. You know, you’re not charging $2,000 for a little something or other. So I commend that and keep on truckin as we said earlier,
Guy Finley: you to be well, Rick,
Rick Archer: OK, thanks a lot Guy.
Guy Finley: By now
Rick Archer: Bye