NEW BEGINNINGS
An Interview with Guy Finley

By Dr. Ellen Dickstein

Guy Finley, best-selling author of a half dozen books on self-transformation is also the founder and director of Life of Learning, a nonprofit Center for Self Study located in Merlin, Oregon.

Ellen: Guy, so much is happening right now with Life of Learning Foundation and your own personal work. To what do you attribute this increasing pace of activity?

Guy: There’s a little-known fact of our existence that can change the life of anyone who understands it: A virtually limitless supply of energy and enthusiasm for life is available to anyone who learns how to request it. But everything depends upon a person first being able to see that he or she has invested a tremendous amount of energy in many things that haven’t paid off as hoped for - everything from business pursuits to happy relationships across the board. When we’re honest about these things, a natural redirection takes place away from trying to create our lives the way we want them to be created. Instead we’re directed to remembering that there’s a great power station in the heavens producing an endless source of energy that we’re all equally entitled to. So, if the increased amount of productivity is to be credited with anything, it’s to remembering that this power station — this great generating source — exists. Remembering this gives a person a whole new set of lines to stay connected to that are a source of new energy and communication. Put together abundant energy and abundant communication, and you have an endless pool to draw from.

Ellen: You said a person has to make a request. Would you say that the remembrance is the request?

Guy: Yes. It’s the only genuine request. When we learn to remember ourselves remembering Truth, that very action goes before us and, in essence, makes the choices for us. These choices, determined by a higher kind of consciousness, always keep that contact open, unlike our present choices which tend to be self-serving and self-limiting and close down that higher relationship.

Ellen: Let’s talk about your two new tape albums. The first called, Waking Up Together: Building Compassionate Relationships Founded in Higher Love. Why is there so little compassion among people today?

Guy: First we should state clearly that there is less and less compassion, even though governmental and other types of programs have been set up to try to stem the tide of insensitive relationship. Our relationships with life have become dominated by the idea of accomplishment versus discovery. And where you have individuals whose lives are dominated by the idea of accomplishment or maintaining the image of accomplishing or being something at all costs, then you have people who are literally isolated within a set of relationships that were never of their own choosing.

If people are at all sensitive to themselves, they can understand that they would never choose to be cruel. No one would really choose consciously to be unkind because you can’t be unkind to someone without first having experienced unkind feelings in yourself. So we have a world that’s swirling faster and faster within a cycle of ideas about what it means to be happy and successful. As we pursue these things, what we end up experiencing is not the reward we seek, but rather self-wrecking that self-enclosure brings. The more pain we’re in, the less likely we are to be concerned with anyone else’s suffering.