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September/October 2010 Everyday Intention
The Courage to Be Free

by Barbara Norby

Guy Finley, author of The Courage to Be Free, is not who you may think he is, and you are not who you may think you are. You are not any of the defeated thoughts and feelings that try to drag you down. Finley, who is the founder and director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit center for self-study located in southern Oregon, teaches that when you stop agreeing to see yourself as powerless in the face of punishing thoughts and feelings, you discover your original fearless self.

Guy Finley

Q. Why does it take courage to be free?

A.The need to let go of something or someone would never even occur to us were it not for the fact that some part of us is clinging to it with both hands. It takes courage to be free because it isn’t the person, possession or situation that must be released, but rather it’s our identification with that condition that holds us captive.

Self-liberation means just that: liberation from the (level of) self that knows itself only through whatever it first becomes identified with, then attached to, and finally dependent upon. You can’t separate this kind of false dependency from the fear it creates when the conditions that created it finally fall apart, which they always will.

Q. Who is our original fearless self?

A. Our original fearless self is that part of us that knows, without having to think about it that whatever happens to us in life, no matter what its nature seems to be, happens to us for the good of us.

Q. Some of your short stories make the point that we've lost our right to be free, and what we need to do in order to regain it. How does that work?

A. Actually, we haven't really lost our right to be free — we've given it away. This idea of having given away our freedom is paramount for a person to understand, because the mindset is that something has come in and taken it, or that somehow I misplaced it. And we need to be very clear about the difference between those things.

Q. So then, what freedom have we lost and how do we reclaim it?

A. The first step to reclaiming freedom is self-honesty. Without that, nothing can change. And the principle thing we've lost, that underlies all of the fear that visits most of us, is our ability to love. By love I don't mean the sentimental, common type of love that is full of sensation and everyday emotion. What I mean by the ability to love is the divine capacity each of has to become one with whatever we give our attention to.

Q. You say that we need to shatter our false beliefs. What are our most limiting false beliefs?

A. The father of all false beliefs is that we are separate and apart from everyone around us. Of course this is how our senses report reality to us, but what we see, touch, and take in through them represents virtually nothing of what is present and possible for us to know in other ways. This false sense of separation breeds fear and all the forms of greed that shadow it.

Q. You talk about seeing the good when things look bad. Many people are seeing a lot of bad right now — the economy has hurt many people and nature itself seems to be in upheaval. How can we see the good in events that seem to be so destructive?

A. First, can we agree that freedom from whatever limits a human being is always for the good of them? If so, then the reason that there's always something good in what seems to be bad, is that the moment comes along as a gift from God to say, "Hey, look at what you are clinging to." It's not the thing, but the sense of self whose very premise is a limitation. The opportunity to see that is why there's always something good in what seems to be bad.

Q. You advise us to let go and flow with real life. Why is it so hard to just let go?

A. People wrongly equate the idea of letting go with a condition outside of themselves seen as being responsible for the conflict they're in. The things people do to change their lives don't change anything, because the essential conflict is born in this comparative mind that doesn't understand its own workings.

So a person has to be present enough, aware enough to see how there are parts of him or her — fear, worry, doubt — that start running this negative "circle of self." And as it runs through that circle of self, it generates everything we identify with, all the sensations that in turn produce a powerful sense of self that then we resist because we don't like it.

And the more we resist it the more substantial it becomes and a person is literally back in the prison of the first question. That's where one needs the courage to be free, to step out of that circle of self when it starts to drive itself through these dark cycles.

Learn more about Guy Finley by visiting www.guyfinley.org.