NEW BEGINNINGS
An Interview with Guy Finley

By Dr. Ellen Dickstein

Ellen: You’re saying that a right relationship gives the freedom we’ve been seeking all along?

Guy: Yes. Because right relationship begins inwardly. The reason I’m driven into relationships with money, power, people, possessions is because something’s got me. I’m not free. I don’t have what I want. So I’m driven to look outside myself and I become dependent upon someone or something and my freedom becomes derivative. Any freedom that is derivative can’t be freedom. So instead of freedom we have dependency that breeds fear that ultimately breeds destruction, hate, anger. On the other hand, right relationship is understanding that this life and all relationships have been given to us to help us come awake. As that occurs, our attention goes to remembering ourselves, to being conscious of ourselves. And that’s where compassion and everything we want begins.

Ellen: So, a wrong relationship, which is based on these driving desires, makes us more of a captive.

Guy: That’s right. Because it’s based upon what we imagine we don’t have. We imagine we don’t have happiness.

Ellen: So then we become enslaved to that picture of ourselves.

Guy: That’s it. The stronger the picture becomes, the more we depend upon the thing we say is going to free us from that. So now “I’ll die without her.”

Ellen: And we can use our relationships to become free when…

Guy: …when we use them to realize that we cannot imagine ourselves into happiness. Our happiness, wealth, contentment, confidence, strength all originate within us. We look outside ourselves for these qualities, but we can’t find a quality outside ourselves when that quality originates in us. Believing we can, and then imagining that someone can fulfill that, creates a wrong dependency.

We’ve all been disappointed in a relationship. And one of two things happens: We either dream up a better relationship, or become a defeated, disparaging, bitter human being. We either fight or flee because the relationship is based on the wrong premise. What’s the right premise? Well, “I’ve been through 770,000 relationships. I keep doing the same thing in them. I’ll start doing something different in them.” Then the relationship, instead of being used as a source of confirmation, becomes a source of clarification.

Ellen: So, we go into the relationship not just for what we can get out of it based on expectations and dreams, but enter the relationship with the idea this is an educational process.

Guy: Yes, exactly. It can be a blissful educational process or a terrifying one. But the point is that something fundamental has to transpire in individuals so they realize that if they want something different from their relationships, they’re going to have to go into these relationships with a different idea of what the relationship is for. When we change the basis of what I’m looking for from the relationship, we get something different from it, and it actually changes the one who went into it.