Guy Finley Interview

Summary

The discussion explores how spiritual awakening unfolds through dissatisfaction, inner struggle, and moments of revelation in everyday life. It also examines whether enlightenment is a final achievement or an ongoing integration of deeper aspects of consciousness.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can ordinary experiences reveal deeper spiritual qualities within us?
• What role do suffering and personal crises play in spiritual awakening?
• Is enlightenment a final state or an ongoing process of discovery?
• How can we stop relying on external success or power to feel fulfilled?

Key takeaways

• Relationships and life events can reveal qualities of consciousness that were already present within us.
• Spiritual growth requires transforming anger, fear, and suffering rather than merely accepting them.
• External success can become another form of bondage when identity depends on what it produces.
• Crises can expose personal patterns and open the way to deeper self-understanding.
• Enlightenment brings complete moments of integration while consciousness continues to unfold.
• The spiritual path gradually replaces excuses and outward seeking with direct self-observation.

Transcript

Rick: 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 threshold, so there are many to listen to. If you’d like to listen to others, go to batgap.com and check out the past interviews menu, where you’ll see them categorized in about five different ways.

Also, this whole operation depends upon the generous support of appreciative listeners. If you feel like supporting it, there’s a donate button there.

Guy is a very prolific and well-organized man, among the most organized of the people I’ve interviewed. He’s written about 40 books, produced audio albums and more than a thousand unique audio programs, and his work has sold millions of copies in 24 languages worldwide.

His most recent book is called The Secret of Your Immortal Self. I’ve been reading it and enjoying it. I’ve also listened to about a hundred of his YouTube videos in preparation for this. They’re short, just a few minutes each, so I’ll be linking to his YouTube channel.

Guy is the founder and director of the Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit center for self-study in Merlin, Oregon, where he offers four Inner Life classes each week, open to the public. The admission fee is $3, and if you don’t have $3, he’ll let you in anyway.

Guy: Yeah, so I’ve heard. I may be in the wrong business, Rick.

Rick: So, Guy, I listened to a lot of your videos, read your book, and read a bunch of other materials. The book is about discovering your immortal self and self-realization, but I never really learned much about your own realization or awakening. The one thing I did get was that, when you were 11 years old, you saw a display of bonsai trees which moved you deeply and initiated a spiritual quest.

Take us back a bit and explain what you’ve done in your spiritual quest and what results you’ve gotten.

Guy: From an incredibly early age, I was privileged to be dissatisfied with life. I was born into an incredibly successful show-business family. My father was Time magazine’s Man of the Decade in his field. He was a progenitor of late-night television talk shows, before Johnny Carson, Jack Paar, and Steve Allen. My dad had the first variety television show on the West Coast in 1950 or 1951. He introduced people like Desi Arnaz, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nat King Cole.

He later went into the music and video business and became a highly noted individual there. I ran with the in-crowd. My friends growing up were the children of the Martins, the Arnazes, the Minnellis, and the Sinatras. I rode in the Christmas parade in Hollywood and sat on the lap of Jayne Mansfield.

From the time I was six or seven years old, I remember feeling, in the green room where all the celebrities were gathered, a tension and anxiety that I almost couldn’t bear. I couldn’t understand it then.

Rick: In other words, they were feeling it and you were picking up on it.

Guy: Exactly. Here’s the cream of the crop, so to speak, and fear and alcohol are rampant. The disparity between what one is led to believe culturally and socially is the pinnacle and the immense pain produced by being at that pinnacle—a child’s mind can’t begin to grasp that.

Nevertheless, that started a quest for me. Then I had some extraordinarily unique, mystical or spiritual experiences.

Rick: You have to tell us about them, just as a sampling.

Guy: I’ll tell you the one that’s most precious to me. I was 11 or 12 years old, and to this day I can see myself standing in my closet, reaching for a shirt on the second rung.

I heard a voice as clear as a bell. It wasn’t masculine or feminine, and it said, “With this pain I give thee life and do thee wed.”

I pulled my arm down and looked around to see who had spoken to me. There was nothing there, and then it repeated itself. I felt it so deeply, but I hadn’t a clue, so I wrote it down so that I wouldn’t forget it. Thirty-five or forty years later, I started to understand.

This was one of a hundred different types of powerful interior experiences connected with my work. From that point, I started meditating and doing the things 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: So even as a little kid, 10 or 12 years old, you were teaching yourself to meditate?

Guy: Distinctly. I was drawn to Buddhism as a boy. My parents wanted me to go through their religious discipline, which I did, but I couldn’t stand that. I went through four or five other religious paths before I was 17, none of which satisfied whatever it was that was beckoning me.

Then I got into the music business and became a successful composer and performing artist. My partner and I were the first white soft-rock artists ever to sign with Motown Records. We were called Martin and Finley, and we had an album called Dazzle ‘Em with Footwork. Later I went into motion-picture and television composing.

Rick: And you wrote songs for some of the Motown stars?

Guy: I was successful in the world. I was living in Malibu in my early twenties, with a house, a tennis court, horses, and all the nine yards. It was at that point that the bonsai experience happened, and it began to round out some of my understanding.

Shortly afterward, I retired from the music business and traveled. I went to the Far East, India, and all around, hoping someone would tap me on the forehead with a peacock feather or give me some kind of shakti pot and straighten out the whole mess.

The bonsai experience

Rick: Tell us the bonsai experience, otherwise people are going to say, “What was that all about?”

Guy: I was living in Malibu and went to an open-air market. I turned a corner, and there were perhaps 300 or 400 square feet where all these tiny trees were displayed. I didn’t know what they were; I’d never seen one.

I walked in and looked at a couple of the trees, and I began to weep. I have no idea what came over me, other than an incredible longing for something. I began talking to the owner of the exhibit. He trained me in the art of bonsai, and I became fascinated with it.

The reason we are interested in the relationships we are interested in is that, through relationship in the moment, we are introduced to qualities latent in ourselves—qualities we are not awake to until that relationship comes along.

I saw the bonsai tree, this miniature, ancient thing in a pot, and it stirred in me all the suffering in the tree that you would see on a mountain in China or Bhutan, where you know that thing was whipped by winds for a hundred years. Yet in that little bonsai tree, you get the same experience.

You look at horses running across a field, and you can feel the majesty, strength, freedom, and flow. Until you’re standing in front of something like that, you don’t know that timeless quality is already in your consciousness.

The relationship with the event produces a revelation, and the revelation is what is eternal in yourself, because it was there prior to the event.

Life itself is a ceaseless process of revelation. If we’re present enough to it, we are introduced continually to a quality and character of ourselves that is, in fact, immortal.

That applies to all of life, not just beautiful, open light or balls of light dancing on a lake, but the whole nine yards. We are made in the image of the Divine, which means that the forces expressed and reflected in the world outside of us are revealed inside of us if we’re present to those moments.

Rick: I’ve been thinking about this lately. If everything is consciousness, or essentially consciousness, then everything we see and experience must be revealing qualities of consciousness. As some people say, “The world is my guru.” Everything points to the deeper underlying reality and has significance.

Guy: Great significance. That’s 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. Resistance makes us fearful.

As we begin to live what I call the meditative life, our eyes are open, and we experience what we were not present to prior to that moment in ourselves. You can’t experience something that’s not already a part of your consciousness. It’s impossible.

🕊️ From success to spiritual work

Rick: What did the bonsai experience precipitate in you, and where did you go from there?

Guy: I couldn’t shake this fundamental dissatisfaction. When I was first signed with Motown, it was one of the most exciting things that ever happened, because I was being paid to write music. That’s rare: to make a living doing something you love. All my lyrics and compositions, even if you went back, were about God. They just sounded like love songs.

But I had equated composing and being paid for music with the fulfillment I felt when I started writing music. Instead of liberating me, I became the servant of the image. I had to write music to sustain my level of success. Rather than being freed by what I loved, I became ensnared by a process of becoming identified with what that path produced.

Eventually I realized that I had become the servant of the thing that was supposed to liberate me. I quit, retired, and started traveling. I went to see spiritual teachers and had a very disappointing journey, which proved fruitful.

I came home knowing that if there was going to be what I knew existed in my heart, it wasn’t going to be through what someone else did for me. Then I met an awakened man, a true Christian mystic, Vernon Howard.

Rick: I’ve heard of Vernon Howard.

Guy: I spent 15 years working directly with Mr. Howard and became the West Coast director of his work until he died in 1992. He gave me instructions. I followed them to the letter, quit myself from his foundation, moved to Southern Oregon, and started anew.

Rick: But in terms of the blossoming of your self-realization, was there an “aha” moment, or has it been incremental growth without remarkable milestones?

Guy: There have been 300 milestones, significant things. Some I won’t talk about, and others are so common that they don’t sound like milestones, but they are.

To realize that I became the servant of the thing that was to liberate me—that’s a milestone. To be around people looking for others 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.

The mind, awakening to itself, begins to see that it cannot do what it imagines, and it quiets down. It’s like being in a room where the walls get smaller and smaller until you’re left with just yourself and no excuses.

Rick: People like the biographical picture. If you don’t talk about personal experience, it becomes philosophy and metaphysics, which anybody can talk about.

Guy: I have had interior experiences in almost every discipline, East and West, where I have been transfigured. I’ve died in dreams. The interior stirring and pain, often physical pain, tighten a certain set of screws, creating a tension that is itself an effortless awareness. At the same time, in the great paradox of spirituality, it opens everything.

All of this happens at one time and yet is spread out over my whole life. This started when I was seven.

When I was 18, I met what was then the second-oldest living disciple of Yogananda. I studied with him for about seven years. During those years, I meditated and did breathing exercises for eight to ten hours a day, in a little home under a mountain, completely cut off from everything. To this day, I only know that I had to.

Rick: Some people say realization is a never-ending journey, while others say there is a final breakthrough after which you’re basically done. I tend to side with the first group. Where do you stand?

Guy: It’s both. Enlightenment is the moment in time when what is timeless is allowed to express itself, so that opposites are reconciled.

In a moment, what we did not know about our interior life and consciousness is illuminated. The level of self involved in that operation has been given a moment of integration. The light and darkness are brought together, and something new is born.

That is complete at that level, but what is born and whole at that level goes through the process again. It is infinite, yet every one of these moments is complete in itself.

Enlightenment is both in time and timeless, because what we are is a consciousness with no bounds. There can never really be an explorer who encapsulates it. It is a ceaseless revelation of one’s self in one’s true being.

Rick: What would you say to those who say, “You’re already enlightened. You don’t need to do anything. Call off the search; you’re done”?

Guy: They’re right and wrong. It isn’t wrong that anger and hatred are in us; they’re there. But they’re meant to be used and transfigured, not simply accepted.

A crisis is a close encounter of the truthful kind. The revelation keeps coming back. The more I push it away, the bigger it gets. Eventually I see something about myself that is complicit in the experience. In that discovery, an integration takes place.

If what happened wasn’t a new revelation, I didn’t discover something out of the blue; I realized an aspect of my consciousness to which I had been asleep. Our path is the gradual revelation of those possibilities and their integration into our being.

Rick: So whatever enlightenment is, you have it in full within you, but your actual cognition of it may be another thing.

Guy: Yes. I call that closing the gap in time. When resistance fades and I stop blaming someone for my pain, I begin to see that the experience was valuable and ask whether I can apply that understanding in the moment it is needed.

Christ would have called this metanoia. Can I take new understanding and apply it to the experience instead of mechanically resisting every unwanted moment?

Resistance can’t learn. Resistance can’t learn.

Resistance is the seed of reincarnation at all levels. What I push away seems separate from me, but resistance is a subtle form of identification. The more I resist, the more identified I am with the very thing I say I don’t want.

Humility, patience, and tolerance

Rick: I’ve heard humility defined as not insisting that things happen any particular way. If we impose our will on reality, we solidify the ego in opposition to what is real.

Guy: Humility is the realization that resistance belongs to a part of you that doesn’t know what’s good for you. The more you see that, the more you have to surrender that level of yourself.

I have a saying that there are no footprints in front of the gates of heaven; there are heel marks where people have been dragged through the gates.

Vernon Howard once told a story about an outlaw who spent 50 years running from a sheriff. Finally the man was too tired to run. When the sheriff arrived, the outlaw said, “Take me away.” The sheriff replied, “What are you talking about? I’ve been trying to catch you for 50 years. The governor pardoned you!”

There is no such thing as a bad fact about ourselves.

The light doesn’t cover up darkness or fear a negative state. It sees these things as the “not yet,” the part of us still asleep that has yet to be integrated into broader consciousness.

Rick: Karunamayi emphasized the importance of patience and tolerance on the spiritual path. What is your opinion?

Guy: Scripture says, “In your patience possess ye your soul.” The original meaning of patience is to suffer yourself. We think patience means suffering others or unwanted situations. True patience means the observer is the observed, and that we are being given an opportunity to see a part of ourselves that is a living demand.

If I can suffer myself, I can surrender to the moment and let the lesson be given. At the same time, I am in a better relationship with the world, because I am using this demanding self instead of letting it command me.

Rick: Could we say that the observed is also the observer?

Guy: Yes, it works both ways. Look at a tree. The qualities of the tree—texture, strength, form, beauty—are inseparable from the nature that perceives them. The tree is experienced in you.

In more elevated states there is no observer. There is simply awareness.

✨ Awareness and intelligence

Guy: Awareness has intelligence. In fact, awareness is intelligence.

Rick: It’s an intrinsic feature of it.

Guy: It is the linkage, the connecting of the dots. Rather than trying to approximate relationships with people, places, powers, and possessions, experience and pain lead us to understand that our task is to be aware and present to ourselves.

If I’m present to myself, every possible relationship presents itself according to what this essence requires in the moment. Awareness is the cup, the water, the fullness, the emptiness, all of those things at once.

Rick: It leads into a discussion of what God is. What we’re perceiving at any moment is an incredible miracle orchestrated by an intelligence that is apparently infinite and vast.

Guy: We are beings in preparation, encountering endless opportunities to understand the perfection of what you’re describing. I look out my window and see something perfect. I can’t add anything to that perfection, but if I give myself to it, how am I different from it?

We receive impressions of the world through our senses. Our senses are to the body what insight and intuition are to the soul. Eventually we experience that we have been given an immense facility not to prove ourselves to the world, but to be part of the world discovering itself.

The whole purpose of my work and my new book is that this is not about being outside; it is about being inside, present to outside. If I’m present inwardly, not one thing I look at fails to give me something.

Otherwise I keep pouring thoughts and feelings into a bucket with no bottom, hoping to feel complete. The nature that lives in thought can never complete itself, because it is an opposite trying to complete itself through an opposite.

Rick: You use the word “celestial” a lot. What do you mean by it?

Guy: Everything is an expression of light that has congealed and produced a form in service to something. All this energy belongs to a certain cosmos, a celestial realm. It comes down and down and becomes me looking at you, hopefully knowing that we’re looking at each other.

Every one of those cosmoses is in us. The sun itself and a blade of grass are in us. One person sees a weed; another sees the sun.

Rick: So there is a nested, hierarchical quality to creation, from pure intelligence through subtler and more concrete levels to physical bodies, with still subtler levels beyond them.

Guy: We see the universe through a peephole. We learn to see the celestial in the common. Whenever I look at the world, I begin to recognize that what I see is an expression of a higher cosmos.

You see the vein in a leaf, then a picture of the lungs, then the delta of the Amazon. In scale and fractals, we see the same fingerprint repeatedly. A person begins to see life not as individual forms, but as the presentation of what is celestial in the common.

We learn to see the celestial in the common.

Rick: There is a graphic showing a neuron beside an image of the universe, and they look almost identical.

Guy: It is breathtaking to see this elaborate, perfect symmetry and understand that this living symmetry is my consciousness. What I see is a reflection of an aspect of myself yet realized.

Rick: The Upanishads say: “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 is the macrocosm. As is the atom, so is the universe.”

Guy: The task is to become the fact. We want that cosmos to be with us everywhere, so every moment can be brought into it instead of being reduced to a poor imitation of the unwanted moment.

Making truth a living reality

Rick: How can these lofty truths become a living reality rather than a momentary inspiration?

Guy: If my spirituality cannot be acted in, on, and through in this moment, it isn’t spirituality. Truth is a full-contact sport.

We love revelation when we see a night sky, the ocean, or a bonsai tree. But that same love has to apply when we don’t like what is revealed in us. That’s where the rubber meets the road.

Anger appears with justification and blame. Depression appears with the past. Anxiety appears with a project. You cannot experience a negative state that is not preceded by resistance.

Rick: Is the resistance produced by the event, or does the event reveal the resistant nature?

Guy: The event reveals resistance already in me. Resistance cannot learn. By its nature, it separates the experience from the one having the experience. The observer and observed split through resistance.

When I see something I don’t want to see inside myself, it isn’t who I am resisting the moment; it is an aspect of my nature to which I am asleep. The event shows me something I need to awaken to, so it can be incorporated into an understanding that transcends the experience and the experiencer.

Rick: Let’s use the example of getting cut off in traffic. How can someone use that as a learning experience instead of indulging in anger?

Guy: Someone cuts me off and suddenly I’m the Torch from the Fantastic Four. Did he set me on fire, or did the event reveal a disturbed nature already there? The event doesn’t create the disturbance; it reveals it.

Anything one does from an angry state is the continuation of anger, not the path to liberation it promises. The recognition of the futility of identifying with negativity is the negation of that negative state and the level of self that wants to continue it.

Rick: So recognizing anger, jealousy, greed, depression, and similar conditions as inner conditions rather than outer circumstances can root them out?

Guy: Awareness is a living intelligence. If I pick up a hot skillet, I don’t have to reason out what to do. My body has an innate awareness that won’t allow itself to harm itself.

How much greater is spiritual intelligence? When I get angry, I can’t see that I’m hurting myself because my mind has divided itself into the one being hurt and the one doing the hurting. To recognize that division is the end of it.

It hurts to be angry, hateful, greedy, or impatient. Awareness won’t act against itself. I need to let it lead instead of being deceived by a nature whose motive is to continue itself.

Stop, Drop, and Endure

Rick: What is the most effective way to access that spiritual intelligence?

Guy: I have an exercise called “Stop, Drop, and Endure.”

First, stop. Whenever a negative state comes up, I am quick to blame and justify myself. I begin to see that I’ve never resolved anything through those states. The moment I feel contraction or the onset of resistance, I inwardly come to a complete stop.

I understand that my mind wants the continuation of conflict so there can be a sense of myself different from the state it blames its pain on.

Rick: Is coming to a complete stop as easily done as said?

Guy: No. We are machines running on momentum. But if I understand that the reason my head hurts is because an unseen hand is hitting me with a hammer, one day I will see, “What is that? Oh, it’s me!”

A dog once sat on a sofa eating a bone. Its foot crept toward the bone, and the dog saw the foot, growled at it, and attacked it, thinking the foot was trying to take the bone away. This is a perfect description of us. We blame the situation when part of ourselves helped create it and wants it to continue.

When I stop, I have to drop. I become aware of the supporting cast of thoughts and feelings that wants to validate blame, resentment, and regret. I drop them, not because I’m spiritual, but because I see that including them makes my life more painful.

Rick: Stopping gives you some distance from them and makes them easier to drop.

Guy: Stop creates the first natural separation between the potential to be aware of myself and what is asleep in myself. Dropping happens when I realize that what I formerly took to be myself is not I. It is a mechanical flow of thoughts and feelings that justified my sleep.

Then comes endure. The nature I formerly took to be myself begins to intensify. When I call on fear to protect me, I believe that fearful thought or feeling is my guide. When I see through its game, it amps itself up.

It tells me, “You’re a dead man if you don’t act now. Punish your enemy. If you don’t do this, they’ll walk all over you.” I have to endure the presence of the level of myself I once thought was me.

It is mechanical consciousness. It will escalate, culminate, and pass. When it passes, I am left on the other side of the revelation, a different order of person, because now I know who I am not.

Rick: This is not something done once and finished. It is a habit that serves you for life, resolving layer after layer.

Guy: It is eternal. Active forces meet passive forces and are reconciled simultaneously. All things are created that way, live that way, and pass from physical existence that way.

Rick: Is this primarily practiced in the midst of activity, or do you also recommend formal meditation?

Guy: Absolutely. I began an intensive process of sadhana long ago. When I sit quietly and finish a practice, I am less likely to agree with a negative state.

Rick: After meditating, I find I don’t have to make an effort to keep my attention anywhere. It sticks with me and continues to accumulate. Like taking a shower, I don’t have to spend the day thinking, “I am clean.”

Guy: The purpose of meditation is to allow attention to relate inwardly to a different order of our own being that is already there. Meditation nourishes us.

My album The Meditative Life isn’t about specific practices; it is about the fact that life is meant to be a living meditation—a living awareness of the ceaseless revelation and integration of which we are a part.

We have forgotten ourselves. I did not create peace, love, compassion, patience, or kindness. I am intended to be an instrument of these eternal qualities. I don’t have to produce the conditions for consciousness to express itself; I have to be willing to let it express itself through me.

We’re not here to escape pain. We’re here to transmute pain into understanding.

Rick: That recalls the prayer of

Saint Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” We are conduits and instruments, and we become fit instruments through the crucible of purification.

Guy: Most of us are afraid of psychological pain. We have been conditioned to take drugs, make plans, and do anything to push it away. But useless suffering is useless: hatred, fear, blame, worry, and self-concern.

If we understand that the nature which made us afraid of those states can be used to produce a new order of ourselves, useless suffering becomes the seed of the soul. That is the difference between useless suffering and voluntary, conscious suffering.

Rick: How does someone transition from dependence on tranquilizers or other drugs to seeing psychological pain as grist for the mill?

Guy: We may think we live in a madhouse, but we are already in one. Drugs and alcohol can keep suffering beneath the surface so we aren’t conscious of it. The transition has to happen individually, as a person realizes, “This isn’t changing me; it’s keeping something in place that I know ought not be kept in place.”

Then the person can begin to understand whatever is attached, identified, or dependent upon the substance, rather than letting the culture and the drug tell them who they are. That is the beginning of reversal, the original meaning of repentance: turn around.

We have allowed thoughts and feelings to tell us who we are. How does a person come to listen to a thought saying, “Go hate that person,” or a feeling saying, “Set yourself against that group”? As consciousness is denied relationship, it becomes stagnant and closed. When the pressure reaches a certain point, explosions of hatred and violence occur.

Rick: Some people feel society is at a tipping point, with consciousness rising. Those who have cultivated higher consciousness may experience joy, while those who have not processed their material may find things rough.

Guy: Nothing moves in one direction at the same time. Everything moves in two directions at once. As darkness intensifies, so does light. As opposites become more intensely connected, there is greater opportunity for fusion or fission.

Can I use increased darkness and tension to become more liberated through understanding, or do I become punished by it and punish everyone else because I don’t know what’s happening?

The Trinity and the structure of creation

Rick: You have used the term “Trinity” several times. Could you elaborate?

Guy: Wherever something comes into creation, it is the product of something active working on something passive and being modified by something. If you had only active and passive forces, you would have a stalemate. Life isn’t static.

In Christian terms, this is the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. In other traditions there are corresponding trinities. These are personifications of forces that never stop working in us.

Our awareness of the Trinity is a relationship with it: a ceaseless set of forces exchanging themselves to create the world we see and the seer of that world.

Rick: In Vedic cosmology, consciousness becomes conscious of itself, and instantly a threefold structure appears: observer, observed, and the process of observation. Yet it is still one thing.

Guy: I wrote a book called The Seeker, the Search, the Sacred about this Trinity. We are at once the seeker, the search, and the sacred. To see all the players on stage at once is to no longer take yourself seriously.

🕊️ When unhappiness leads to spirituality

Rick: Amit 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: Unhappiness is the front-runner. The unhappiness we repeatedly experience doesn’t go away; the conditions revealing it change. We are on a merry-go-round. At one point we see cotton candy and feel wonderful; at another we smell the diesel engines and dislike what we see. Both are in us.

Understand that the cycle repeats. You don’t have to resist or regret happiness, but don’t identify with it so fully that when unhappiness comes you believe it is all there is.

Don’t look for happiness to fix unhappiness. See through the nature that can be made unhappy, and you will find a happiness that cannot turn into its opposite.

Rick: It sounds as though the goad of unhappiness never gets resolved, but that isn’t my experience. Our level of happiness seems to grow over the years.

Guy: It isn’t that our level of happiness has gone up. We have understood that the things wanting to make us unhappy are untrue, and that unhappiness serves what we call happiness: the end of a nature dependent on conditions outside itself to be content.

Contentment is not the experience of getting a new car or having someone do something pleasing. Passing circumstances serve happiness when we are one with change rather than for some changes and against others.

Rick: There is an inner reservoir that can nourish our lives. If we connect to it, regardless of circumstances, we can be happy even in prison, as Gandhi, Aurobindo, or Viktor Frankl were.

Guy: Look at the genius, patience, and kindness that came out of Frankl’s life. The ability to transcend conditions cannot be separated from entering them fully enough to recognize that they do not have authority over us.

Rick: Let unhappiness motivate the spiritual search, but keep at it. If you put money in the bank but keep spending and stop depositing, you’ll run out. Life spends the money, so keep replenishing the treasury.

Guy: I didn’t produce unhappiness directly, and I don’t directly produce happiness. But awareness of the relationship between unhappiness and spiritual interest may lead a person out of that dichotomy if they stay true to the wish to understand themselves.

We want to practice the presence, not only calling on God when things are bad, but maintaining the connection in good times and bad. We seek a contentment that cannot be shaken by changing conditions.

A contentment that can’t be shaken by changing conditions.

Rick: That could be a sutra.

Guy: In the end, we are a living sutra. First there is unconscious suffering and false certainty, then uncertainty, and finally real certainty—the understanding that was always in us. We go through the process of seed, stem, flower, fruit, and pass to ourselves.

Trusting the intelligence of life

Rick: If one has even a shred of motivation, pursue it. The Bhagavad Gita says, “Even a little of this yoga delivers from great fear,” and that no effort is lost and no obstacle exists.

Guy: Isn’t it amazing that an infinite number of people, places, and things can come together in your lesson? The whole cosmos leads to a moment in which you see something about yourself that you couldn’t see unless everything happened exactly that way.

Rick: The laws of karma are unfathomable to the human intellect because they are infinitely complex, but infinite intelligence orchestrates them for our evolutionary benefit.

Guy: To sense that this intelligence arranged everything so I could be less afraid means that the whole universe is collaborating to reveal its consciousness to itself through me, this old idiot walking around in Oregon.

It adds gravitas, beauty, and grace to life, because you don’t merely think it—you see it.

Rick: Saint Teresa of Avila said, “It appears that God himself is on the journey.”

Guy: The undivided consciousness seeks to know itself. It sets itself out in the first expressions of energy, which become the law of creation. The marvelous path unfolds through all the levels of existence. It is all there for those who want to see it.

✨ Letting the infinite express itself

Rick: Is there anything in your heart of hearts you’d like to express that we haven’t touched upon?

Guy: There is no one in the universe like you, and no one has been given the role you’ve been given. Your essence and unique qualities have produced an instrument whose possibility is infinite.

Will we let the infinite play itself using our life? Not use our life to make music according to culture, religion, or social values, but allow what is eternal to express itself through us.

No one is like you, no one can experience what you experience, and no one is intended to. Never believe that the limit of your present view is the limit of your possibilities.

Never believe that the limit of your present view is the limit of your possibilities.

Anything that wants you to feel afraid, angry, or worried is trying to convince 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: We’re all infinitely precious and have tremendous potential. No one is incapable of discovering it.

Guy: The Divine wants to use you. Get out of the way.

To be used means to be present, to allow what is pervasive and unfolding to have its place in you so that you express it. I once realized that each talk I give is like a mandala. Monks create elaborate mandalas from colored sand to express one principle, and then they wipe it away.

That is what life is supposed to be: constant formation, fulfillment, and elimination—no residue—so the next fullness can begin its formation.

Rick: Like a line in air. Some people make a line in stone, others in sand, water, or air. You can make a deeper line in air more easily than in stone, but it is gone as soon as it happens.

Guy: That’s beautiful.

How to connect with Guy Finley

Rick: Tell us how people can connect with you.

Guy: My public website is GuyFinley.org. A person can spend years going through the free resources there, as well as the material on YouTube and other social networks.

I have an online wisdom school, GuyFinleyNow.org, with everything in it, and it is very inexpensive, like the classes.

I’d like to offer anyone interested a free download from my foundation: an eight-hour, eight-MP3 album called Seven Steps to Oneness. It is a series of talks I gave at the Omega Institute. Go to GuyFinley.org/BatGap, and the album and MP3s will be right there as a gift.

Rick: Is it already there?

Guy: It’s already there right now.

There is also OneJourney.org, with a beautiful video called “The Secret, the Search, the Sacred.”

Here’s the key. We have acknowledged some beautiful truths. Now we have to take that knowledge and act on it. We have to act the knowledge. If we don’t, there is no point to this.

We have to act the knowledge.

I must become the body. I must become that which the body acts through, and I must be that which witnesses the action. I must acknowledge this and act the knowledge.

If we do that, we will see that we were 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, true, and beautiful can never betray the one it leads, I become more open to being led and more willing to sacrifice what I must.

Then we make a change inwardly that allows broader consciousness to become affected by it. You change, consciousness changes, and consciousness changes the planet expressing it.

All things good come to those for whom the good is all things.

Let us all agree to make the good all things.

Rick: Beautiful. We’ve been speaking with Guy Finley, and I’ll be linking to his websites, books, and free download on BatGap.com and at GuyFinley.org/BatGap.

This is an ongoing series of interviews. If you’ve enjoyed it, go to BatGap and look under the Past Interviews menu. There is also an audio podcast, an email sign-up for notifications, and a Donate button that helps support the program.

Next week I’ll be speaking with Gary Renard, a Course in Miracles teacher who wrote The Disappearance of the Universe.

Guy: Go get him, Rick.

Rick: I take everybody with a grain of salt, but I also give everybody the benefit of the doubt. I don’t know anything for absolute sure, and the universe is far more mysterious and wonderful than most of us can imagine.

Guy: The three most powerful words in the English language are, “I can learn.”

Rick: Absolutely. Thanks, Guy. This has been a lot of fun.

Guy: I enjoyed it too, Rick. Be well, and thanks for the opportunity.

Rick: If I ever get out to Southern Oregon, I’ll pop in and say hello.

Guy: Please do. We have 15 acres of old-growth sugar pine, about 30,000 square feet of organic gardens, and a beautiful foundation with choir, madrigals, and fellowship. You will be my guest.

Rick: It sounds like a nice place to live. You’re a prolific guy, and it’s impressive to see how you produce the books, audios, and everything else. As far as I can tell, it’s all very reasonably priced. I commend that. Keep on truckin’, as we said earlier.

Guy: You too. Be well, Rick.

Rick: Thanks a lot, Guy.

Guy: Bye now.

Rick: Bye.