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March/April 2005 Spirituality
Master of Letting Go

Guy Finley interviewed by Miriam Knight

Guy Finley

M: You grew up affluent in Beverly Hills and even had a successful career in Pop Music. Why did you throw it away to become a spiritual seeker? Why didn’t you buy into the lifestyle?
G: Gosh, Miriam, when I was 7 years old I had a series of revelations about my family and the world that I was raised in. It was just so evident to me – although I didn’t have a way to understand it then – that there were some extraordinary contradictions in the way I was being raised. Everything about the lifestyle and those in it advocated that pomp and circumstance, power and possessions were the triumph of the human being. Yet all the big stars I knew were afraid and angry. And I remember these impressions so clearly as a boy that I knew that this would not be what I would do in my life. It didn’t work for my parents or for anyone around them. But I did fall in love with music and for a while I was going through these withdrawals from that world, and came back basically as empty as I left.
I was writing music, and even though all my music was spiritually based, my partner (Tony Martin Jr.) and I were the first white soft rock artists ever to sign with Motown Records. Then I worked with Neil Diamond at RCA, but it was evident to me that this was part of my development as a spiritual person, but I was not to pursue the fame of a Rock ‘n Roll life.

I guess it was when I was 27 – I had a beautiful house in Malibu, horses and a tennis court – that I just quit and I started travelling. I went around the world a couple of times, dusted a whole bunch of saints and gurus feet with my with my head, and came back basically as empty as I left.

M: What were you looking for?
G: I wanted to know if there was someone who could help me make sense of all of these contradictions. And I’m not saying that there weren’t great men and women over there, but none of them could help me understand in Western terms the things that were tearing me apart. Because on the one hand there was this innate longing for a life that didn’t have fear in it, nor compromise itself, and on the other hand there was this intense drive that we are all conditioned with – culturally, socially – to become a power unto ourselves.
When I came back, I decided I would just have to start by myself and figure out what I needed to do. It was then that I had this immense piece of great fortune when I met a gentleman named Vernon Howard, who had been writing boods for 30 years on self-awakening, self-realization. I spent 15 years working with him and became the co-director of his foundation in California. When he was still alive, he started urging me to write my first book, which I did – The Secret of Letting Go in 1989. When Vernon died in ’92, I resigned the directorship of his foundation to go do the work that I knew that I had to do.
On the trail from celebrity to writer, I became a carpenter and handyman to supplement my income – sort of a riches to rags story. (laughs)

M: But you have a long list of successful books behind you, and you started up your own foundation.
G: Yes, when Mr. Howard died I moved to southern Oregon. I came here really to get some isolation. I had been speaking four times a week for over ten years to groups of one to two hundred people. I wrote another book and realized I needed a nonprofit organization to disseminate the principles. I founded the Life of Learning Foundation, and since then have just continued to write and speak around the world.

M: I noticed that both your first book and your most recent book have the words, "Letting Go" in the title. That seems to be the leit motif of your work.
G: I would agree with you. Most of the material focuses on this idea of letting go, because we are presently living from a mind set of trying to gain control over those conditions or people that seem to have overpowered us. The fact is, the world doesn’t overpower us at all. It is we who have become identified with thoughts and feelings that make us power-less. So it isn’t a question of domination, but of illumination. We need to recognize where and how we turn our hearts and minds over to thoughts and feelings whose very nature produces conflict and negativity. Once we see these conditions active in us and recognize them as being compromising and self-limiting, then we drop them. When you let go of what makes you powerless, lo and behold you stand in your true nature – one that doesn’t need to seek power, because it already has it within itself.

M: So it’s not so much about achieving enlightenment or spiritual illumination, as it is about removing the barriers that prevent us from recognizing our own essential identity?
G: Yes, very much so. This is the great fault, in some ways, with today’s so-called spirituality. The whole idea of gaining some kind of spirital knowledge or ability is all rooted in an opposite. What is truly strong doesn’t go looking for strength. What is genuinely kind doesn’t go looking for ways to prove itself. What causes us to seek strength is the fear of being weak. What sets us looking for ways to be kind is something inside of us that thinks we need to be attached to an idea instead of allowing the inherent kindness of an awakened nature – of love, if you will – to be the actor and express itself in our relationships.
But you know what I’ve learned? If in a man or woman’s heart there is this divine dissatisfaction, then eventually we see through the inherent fallacy, which is the impossibility of approaching truth through something other than our own awakened nature. Because whatever a person’s path may be, and what ever symbols or tools they may use, at some point the person realizes that their condition cannot be changed by something exterior to themselves. Because the only thing we meet moment to moment, is ourselves. So if there isn’t an inherent change in my own consciousness, then all I’m really doing is identifying with something outside of myself that momentarily lends me a sense of power or control. But when the conditions that allow that sense of control change, there goes the control I have mastered.
When we identify with our true nature, we cannot lose! And when we start to see that no matter what happens to us in our lives, we can view unwanted events as an invitation to transcend the part of ourselves that is clinging to the very thing causing that conflict, then we really have something. Teach a person to see, in the moment that they start to feel afraid, that what they’re fearing is an image that their own mind has produced, you empower that person instantly to let go of the image. They realize that it is an unconscious part of themselves that wants to keep them in a prison of fear.

M: Well how do we promulgate this radical idea of universal freedom when everything in our society is pushing the other way?
G: We must recognize that this is a work of being alone. You know, I call truth a full-contact sport. We’re deeply conditioned to believe that unless at least three other people agree with how we feel, something’s wrong with how we feel. And so we seek power and support through the process of finding people to confirm our view. In reality, there’s no such thing as a group of people changing. It is the awakening of the individual to what has compromised us that is the awakening of consciousness. And it is the conscience that separates us out.
This doesn’t mean that we have to be by ourselves, but it means that we must be willing to be by ourselves, because the world is not going to change unless you and I change – period.

M: Yes, but we still have an inner yearning for affirmation and connection.
G: Let’s say a person is lonely, because they’ve just broken up with someone. If I don’t change, I can’t do anything but attract to myself the exact same level of relationship. The same thing holds true with our spiritual life. As we grow and change, I believe that we are drawn by a kind of spiritual magnetics to those places and people that are resonating at a similar level, not so much to confirm what we have done, but to strengthen and celebrate our understanding.

M: Well, I guess that’s where we come in. Thank you Guy.

GuyFinley will be giving a workshop called Let Go & Live the Extraordinary Life at New Renaissance Bookshop, 1338 NW 23rd Av, Portland, OR on Sunday, April 3^rd, 2005 from 2-4pm. $16.
You can contact Guy at the Life of Learning Foundation, 459 Galice Road, Merlin, OR 97532. Phone: 541-476-1200. Sign up for his weekly inspirational e-mails at www.guyfinley.com