512 | The Secret of Letting Go

Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed Oh I bet that you'll be fine without it Yes, welcome to the minimalist podcast where we discuss what it means to live a meaningful life with less. My name is Joshua Fields Millburn and joining me here at Earthing Studios in beautiful West Hollywood, California. It's my good friend T.K. Coleman. Let's create a beautiful day. You know today we're joined by the director of the Life of Learning Foundation, a non-profit center for self-study. He is also the best-selling author of more than 30 books including this one right here, The Secret of Letting Go. Please welcome to the show our new friend Guy Finley's here. Look at that, a studio audience look. That's the most applause I've had in 30 years. T.K. you said you showed me this video of a guy named Guy and you're like, we've got to get him on the show. Why did you feel that way? He's one of my top five living philosophers today. You know, you listen to a lot of podcasts and it seems like whether you're listening to a comedian, sports commentator, self-improvement author or a pastor, they're all having the same conversation about the same things. It's a response to whatever controversy the algorithm promises to reward the most. And then there are those thinkers who show up and no matter what's going on in the world, they may not say it verbally, but they say it viscerally, vibratially, I'm here to talk about what resonates with me. I'm here to talk about what makes me come alive and Guy Finley is one of those thinkers. And because he doesn't identify as a minimalist, he doesn't wear that label. He's not necessarily in this space. I was so excited about the thought of him coming on and weighing in with his unique insights to the questions that our audience tends to ask. And he's just one of those thinkers who I wish I could ask him about everything, including those things he may not be interested in, because I know the way he thinks about it is just going to be fascinating. Like I'd ask him about basketball, even if he says, I don't care about basketball. I'll say, I don't know. I don't care. I want to know your predictions anyway, because I know the insights going to be fun. Oh, how fascinating. You know, I wanted to bring you as soon as TK brought you up, I wanted to bring you into our world because, as he said, we often talk about minimalism. For us, there's a whole lot of overlap with, you know, the secret of letting go here and letting go. And often it starts with the material possessions, but then we learn really quickly that the stuff isn't about the stuff. We're letting go of the stories behind the stuff. We're letting go of the past that is tied up into our things. We're also letting go of identity. We're letting go of the need to control everything. We're going to talk about quite a few of those things today. Coming up on this episode, we're talking about letting go of precious memories. We're talking about why letting go can be so freaking scary. We'll look at 10 truths to follow. This is on page three, 10 truths to follow if you want to let go. Also, we've got something here about a clutter that shows up unexpectedly in your home or it shows up in different areas of your life and maybe letting that go as well. And much, much more, I'm sure we'll navigate all over the place. But let's start with our callers. If you have a question for our show, we'd love to hear from you. Our phone number is 406-219-7839, or you can email a voice recording right from your phone to podcastattheminimalists.com. Let us know if you're a Patreon subscriber so we can prioritize your message. By the way, big thanks to our patrons. Your support keeps our podcast 100% advertisement free because sing along at home, y'all. Advertisement suck. Yes, they do. Our first question today is from Ilona. Hi, Joshua, Ryan, TK. Ilona here from Utrecht, the Netherlands. I was already on my way to minimalism when I discovered you. And I have to say that you gave me the extra push to take it further. I got rid of so much stuff working through it with your vision. I love your philosophical considerations and the fact that you don't just limit it to physical clutter. So big fan vibes from Europe. I'm a poet myself, and I use my sense memory to dive deep to find the best way to describe what I want to convey. So considering my own ponderings in living a meaningful life with less, I was thinking about the following. Although your memories reside within you and not within your things, your things can still be a gateway to those memories. Either it's tech talk, quality, smell, or just the simple look of it. How to deal with that? Yeah, so in our last film, Guy, we talked about this revelation I have when my mom died. It was really the start of minimalism for me. It was about 16 years ago this month, in fact. And I was letting go of her things or trying to, and I was struggling to let go. Because I had all of these memories and these things or so I thought. And then I had this moment of epiphany. It's like, wait a minute, our memories aren't in these things. Mom's not in these things. The memories are in me and they've been in me the whole time. But of course, as Ilona is talking about here, sometimes our things can, as she said, be a gateway or I would say a trigger to some of the memories that are inside us. So what would you tell her about letting go of things that are imbued with these precious memories? Well, the first thing I would say is, you know, how precious is it to be knocked down in some kind of pain because your mind takes you back to a moment where the memories flush. But inside of it, there's no freedom and you are literally, as she's alluding to, captured by your own memory. I mean, how is that possible? I mean, these are the things that I ask myself. How can I be captured by a dog that I loved dearly? You know, Tessie, for instance, you know, she died, whatever it was. The thought comes up. Suddenly there's this pang of pain. What's the relationship between what my mind is doing and my experience? And what I've found and what I would suggest to Ilona is to start recognizing that, and this is something I just talked about. So you tell me if I get off base here, this mind, our mind is a sleeping mind. We don't know what it's doing 99.9% of the time. It's just going on with its mechanical life, the habits it has, and then hoping that when things happen in a certain way, everything can fit, the pattern that it has already established. So that you're suffering is when something in life challenges a pattern that you don't even know you're a part of. So in this instance, I'm suffering over, how do I separate this thing? Our mind is what I call object dependent. It is object dependent. That means that it will have its own accord and she'll attest to this. I hope if she listens to this, my mind suddenly goes to, I walk by that painting that my mother loved and suddenly I'm filled with remorse because my mother's gone. She loved that painting. Well, that whole reaction is a product of a mind that first attended to something that you didn't even know was going to go to. It just went to it and then it goes to it and when it goes to it, then it goes, oh no, this terrible, I loved her, but now I'm suffering. Well, who's involved in that? So that you begin to discover that your mind will in fact attend to an object to bring up this subjective state of yourself. And then you are suddenly identified with something that you didn't even really want to or think about getting identified like this. Who goes to a museum and buys a painting on the wall that when you bring it home and you see it on the wall, you get sick to your stomach. That would make no sense, would it? I buy something that I hate what I bought. My mind brings up what it then wishes it wasn't visiting. And if we can begin to see that, then we recognize that this mind is fine on the street, you know, doing what it's got to do. But this mind is not intended to be the source of consolation, the source of freedom, even the source of love. That's not what this particular level of mind is for. But we're so caught in it that we don't recognize that level of consciousness is often doing its own thing. And then we wind up footing the bill. And one of the problems with memory, the memories that we think our things are imbued with, is it does keep us stuck in a past. It keeps us stuck in a pattern of misery as well. You conjure this emotion in me. I often think about when you go to a museum, you can appreciate a painting without needing to take it home. But then when we take something home, it can become the object of our discontent as well. I think about there was this car I just had to have in my 20s, right? And it was this really nice Lexus. And I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. I don't think it's an evil or a bad thing, but it was not appropriate for me at the time because I didn't have the money to buy it. So of course it was financed for 72 months. And so that thing that is like, oh, this is going to give me so much joy and satisfaction. I get it home and I do like it. It has the new car smell and that feels good and sort of new car smell as a metaphor as well. Like, oh, yes, this is comfortable. This is new. This is novel. There's some variety here. But then that first bill shows up. First payment. Yeah. Yeah, see, there's always a payment. No, I mean, quite literally, the thing is underneath what we're describing is that that memory, the only authority it has over me is the extent to which I'm identified with it. You take the identification out of the memory and suddenly it's a memory. And you, if it's simple enough, you can enjoy what it is. But if you're identified and then that memory morphs, which they tend to do, you know, you start in one direction. And the next thing you know, you're walking down an alley and getting mugged by something, right? I'm thinking about that great time I had in Spain. And then I'm thinking about, you know, the siesta that I slept through and missed my appointment. And now I'm suffering again. And it's all just happening in a kind of a stream that we don't see taking place. So it's the really, when we boil down everything relative to letting go, it's an inside job. It's always an inside job. And to be present enough to it means that I have to be within myself in these moments when memories come. If I'm not present to the fact that a memory has come up and I'm beginning to participate in the joy or the sorrow of it, I'm dead in the water. But if I can be present to it, then that awareness will allow me to see, you know what, guys, something's trying to draw you into something. That you don't need to be a part of. How do I know? Because I've done that a 10,000 times and it doesn't do, I don't, it promises, but it doesn't deliver or it promises and then punishes me in order to take deliverance of that identity with the Lexus or whatever it might be. The possession is not the problem. It's the persona that pursues it for the sake of glorifying itself in one sense or another. And that's pretty much for all of us. You know, if we think of the mind as a kind of inner eye and we think of our thoughts as the objects of perception, we can make a distinction between what we see and what we watch. Yes. What we observe and what we become engrossed or enchanted with this morning on my way to work. There's like this 15 minute traffic delay and everything looked pretty normal at this point. And as I get close to the source of what's causing this delay, I'm on the highway. It's the other side of the highway. There's apparently some minor accident and there's a fire truck and there's the police and a couple of police cars and you can see the, you know, the lights coming from afar. And everyone on my side of the highway is slowing down to look at this accident. So the accident isn't actually obstructing us in a direct way. And there's nothing that any of us can do about what's happening on the other side. In fact, there are already people over there doing something about it and it will be the height of arrogance and presumptuousness to think that we could do better. But everyone's slowing down and looking as if this is so necessary and we are delaying our own selves from being where we want to be. And it's similar to what we do with memory. It's similar to what we do with things where we see something and we have the opportunity to go, hmm. Interesting. Fascinating. This is significant because attention is connection. And when you have a mind that you are not attending to, then it's going to go look for what it wants to connect to independent of you, which is why people slow down. If people really knew that they were encumbering the whole of Southern California when they slowed down to see a traffic accident, they wouldn't do it. But I'm so engrossed and I don't know my intent. And why am I actually slowing down incidentally to look at that? Is it so, you know, I can have a birthday party or do I want to see something that then I'm going to go, oh my God, look at that. So there's this constant vacillation inside of this mind that attends to what it does because it derives an identity from its attention. So the sleeping mind is a breeding ground for defeat. As the more sleep a mind is, the more defeat that human being will meet, not because it's inherent in life, but because that mind is looking for something to validate whatever that sense of self is that gets captured. We all have a billion memories. Well, what if I knew that in this body of this unconscious mind, something in me is always looking to corroborate me in some way. And if I be this person, I'd be that person, I'd be this person, I'd be that person. And I never know who I'm going to be. And then I have to explain why I am the way I am thinking that really it's me explaining me and it's not. It's just this unraveling of an unconscious mind trying to justify what it's going through. I mean, have you ever tried to defend yourself when you knew you were wrong? Who hasn't done that? You know, you're not in the right place. Yeah, but you know. I've never done that guy. I'm prepared to debate it. I just want you to know it's coming. You're reminding me my 12 year old daughter just this week and we were at the dinner table and having a conversation. There were some of the shows I've said about she goes, she knew she was wrong in the month and she was realizing that her point of view, like she was clinging on to being incorrect. She said, but I'm just so stubborn. And I said, that's fine. That's not immoral. You're not wrong for being stubborn. I said, being stubborn is making a contract with yourself to be dissatisfied until you're proven correct. And she looked at me and kind of blinked for a second. She goes, oh, remember that wee bay meme where it's just like, oh, that's kind of how she was in the moment. Like she realized like, oh yeah, I'm clinging on to my stubbornness. It's not wrong, but it is making me kind of miserable in this moment. Precisely, precisely because I can't be. That's a big point. I can't. I am as I am. I bring to this table, to sitting with you men and having this conversation, everything that to this date I have understood. But if I'm going to keep growing, then what I have understood has to be transcended. And it can't be transcended by thought. It's transcended by me seeing the limitation of my understanding. That's what went through your daughter. She suddenly realized, you know, I always thought I was right to be stubborn. Now I see that it's a limitation. I understand something I didn't understand about it before. Well, she didn't give herself that understanding. It was part of this broader awareness that allows a person to start recognizing where it is that they're in their own way. If you want to know how a person, I have this kind of an old saying, you know, everybody, people think about the gates of heaven and, you know, all these footprints, you know, deep ones marching through that gate. That's nonsense. If you want to know if you found the real gate, there's heal marks where people were drawn through the gate. Because that's the only way it happens is that you have to see as humiliating, as humiliating as it is from time to time, that I'm standing on ground that I've stood on for a hundred thousand years I have been like this. And by the grace of that light, suddenly I see I can no longer be that man. I don't know what man I'm going to be, but I can no longer be him. And that's the beginning of a new kind of crucible in which a person becomes aware of their own consciousness. Because without the awareness of your own consciousness, your consciousness is going on and telling you what you should be aware of, and then you're dead in the water. Yeah. And the flip side of that coin of I can no longer be him is I get to be who I create. And you know, I think about a man walking a dog is a healthy activity for both of them. A dog walking a man is a sign to be concerned. And I think the same is true with our thoughts. Who is in charge? Are we being guided by our thoughts and our things? Or are we the ones who are guiding them? And I think when it comes to this question about the subject of our memories not being in our things, the real question is, are my things what I look to to find my identity? Or are they a creative expression of a conception of who I am that is larger than anything could be? If it's the latter, the thing becomes a trap. You know, if it's if it's I look to this to get my identity, I become a slave to a thing, even if it's impressive to other people. But when I realize that I am the one who imbues that thing with the power that it has to represent something positive in my life, then the relationship is healthy. And that's the goal. And we have to go one step deeper. Let's take it. We are as human beings. Look, you have a very successful show. You guys deserve it. They're very nice people in case anybody out there wants to know. They're not just putting it on. But I am so as a human being, I'm endowed with the right to create. I'm an author, but I didn't make myself an author. Everything that took place in my life brought about a wish within me to understand. I didn't put the wish to understand in myself. Something developed that over time so that here I am, I can create. I can buy my Lexus. I can have a home where I want to have it. I can have horses. I can do any blessed thing I want to do. But until I actually understand that, yes, I can create, but I am first a creation. First and foremost, I am a creation. And if I'm a creation as a human being, that means that there's no moment in which this creation isn't taking place. So it isn't I who do with, that's actually out of Scripture, if it's okay to say it. It's not I who do with the works. My father does the works. Then you begin to understand that there's this much broader life. I get excited to just when certain things open up and I'm talking. We live in a, we look at life through a pinhole. I mean, literally we do. That's what to be identified is, is to look at something and derive my entire identity from it. But to begin to be aware of that identity means there is another order of awareness that is allowing me to see the thing I'm identified with and the self that's identified. Now there's no longer this duality. Now there's a trinity. Now there's a whole new way to look at my life, not through the eyes of I'm this or I want that, but to see them both at the same time. And then, okay, what I was getting to, then the action that I take is not determined by who I've been. It's determined by what I am being given to see in that moment and that new light, that new intelligence makes the choices for you so that you then begin to be, if you want to use those words, karma free. You begin to be someone who's no longer caring with you, every thing that you thought was so critical. And it's a process. You know, it's not like, you know, people say, well, what is it? What is enlightenment? And I say it's a wrong question. Because there's no moment if I'm present to myself that I'm not being enlightened. Because every moment that I'm aware of myself, I can see the whole of myself and I'm not the one providing the light that lets me see this. That light is already present with every human being. And the task is to live increasingly in this broader kind of awareness that lets you see your proclivity to want to attend to that. So we have a kind of a line where we look at this idea of awareness and attention. Because if I'm not attentive to what my mind is laying on as we started, then I'm going to start suffering the consequences of without knowing it being identified. And then we're gone. Yeah. And I find that as soon as the, that identity, that false identity, the false self, the ego, whatever you want to call it, as soon as we, as soon as it starts dissolving, you see it for what it is and it's like trying to hold on to smoke, right? All of a sudden, the identity becomes less precious. I think one of the things about the memories or about the stuff that we hold on to, anything that we're holding on to, is we treat it as though it's precious. And so we're not going to be able to see it before we cling. But then we start treating everything as if it's precious. And then if everything's precious, then nothing is. And that's what TK was alluding to. It's precious to me because it helps keep in place a person that I think I am. So that this object dependency, the reason that's so important to me is because I am important relative to that object. And if I think the object is to be successful, the object is to be a philosopher, whatever, anything the mind has desired is going to produce the opposite in the end. And you're going to find that, yeah, here I am. And I'm so afraid. What does this mean? What's going to happen to my podcast, to my body? What's going to become of me? I watched my father die. I don't want to die like that. And then in your gone, the deal is done because you're not present enough to recognize that you're about to be run through a gamut. Gamut was that, what are they? No, no, no, no, no, a gauntlet. That you're about to be run through a gauntlet that you didn't sign up for, but something and you signed you up because my identification is so deep with that memory, with that desire, with that image of myself. That's what we need to get to if we want to be true minimalists, because that means that I can begin to minimize this identity of mine that is so dependent on what other people think of me or what I have or where I'm going. Yeah. This idea of, we often refer to it as identity clutter. And I think fundamentally that is the thing that causes this other type of clutter, relationship clutter, material clutter, calendar clutter. I'm so busy because I'm an important person. An important person must have to be busy. And that becomes part of my identity. Or even the memory thing that Elon is talking about here is, you know what? That's who I am. And who am I without those memories? Maybe I'm not me. Those memories are so important. If I let go of them, maybe I'm not important. Yeah. And this is an eventual inescapable crucible for an aspirant of an inner life is the gradual recognition that everything about me is object dependent. I know myself through what I'm thinking about. But what if I didn't start those thoughts and I don't start those thoughts? The mind just picks something up to think about. And the next thing you know, you're busy thinking about it because that nature is telling you everything depends upon them liking you. If they don't like you, you're dead. And then you're afraid of dying. Nothing's happened at all except that you were in a dream. I mean, afraid of the inevitable too. Like that's the paradox of that. Like, I understand being afraid of the wolf because I don't want to be in a bunch of pain from him biting me. Or just here in West Hollywood, there was a coyote running down the street the other day. And it's like, I could understand the fear of that, the fear of pain, but like fear of death, it's inevitable. Like it's going to happen. So. So is pain. Yes. Yeah. It really is. When you look at that idea of the fear of inevitable, one of the things that I teach is that you can't have a fearful reaction without negative imagination. It's impossible because all fear of what may be coming, what is inevitable is what your mind has glommed onto as the thing to be feared. And then the mind selects the thing to be feared, the wolf. Because I'm not getting chewed up right now, but you know, two days from now, if I come out with that pizza with all the toppings, you know, whatever it might be going on in your head, then it's going to get me. No, the minute that you have identified with a thought about the future where something may happen to you, you're got then, you're not getting got later, you're got then. Yes. Yeah. And so, and then you take it out a bit further and you realize that, you know, there are, there's present danger and we understand why we have a physiological response to that. But then we also have that same physiological response to, oh my God, the stock market went down 1% today. Exactly. Did. Exactly. I don't know. Oh no, I gotta go guys. I'll talk to you later. Really quickly makes me think of this science fiction story where these three men get together to travel into the future because they have this time device and they have a little bit of gold and this is their means for surviving in the future. And in a moment of temptation, one of the guys kills the other two so that he can have all the gold to himself. He makes it to the future and he gets there. And the first thing he discovers is that one of the great technological revolutions of the future is that they figured out how to manufacture gold. So that's a pretty useless currency now. And the moral of the story is that the basis for tragedy is when we exalt the thing over that which truly makes life precious and that is life itself. That's correct. Yeah. Guy, you put together this, the wisdom of letting go. It's this one hour seminar. I'd love to send this over to Ilona, but also for anyone who's listening to this. And we'll put a link to it in the show notes or Saviody is going to put it in the show notes. And you put together this one hour seminar just for our listeners. You want to tell us a bit about that? The wisdom of letting go. It really follows along the lines of what we're looking at here, which is that in any given moment, my identity has not been given to me to be determined by what people think, what they say, what they do. Now, we all know that. I mean, we can agree till the cows come home on spiritual principle. But how do I turn principle into action? That's the real rub because today everybody, honestly, you know, I travel a lot. I speak a lot. Everybody knows the password. I mean, we just do. We have knowledge that's almost unending because we have unending access to all the masters and all the teachings and all the things that have gone ahead of us. But how do I take that moment where I know so much, but I'm suffering so much? How can I know so much and suffer at the same time? This is where the rubber meets the road because if I can see that my knowledge doesn't really do for me anything, then in that moment, I'm aware of a certain very distinct gulf and abyss, actually, between what I know and what I am. I do what I am. Doing is downstream from being. Doing is downstream from being. So I need to get to where I'm being and not doing. Thinking is a form of doing so I can do all day long. I can pull the wool over almost anybody's eyes. That's what you call a successful person. Yes. It's the capacity to bluff, to pull it off, you know, and at a certain point, the wisdom of letting go, I just, I don't want, I can't do it anymore. Not I don't want to do it anymore. I can't do it anymore. I can't be that witty, you know, comeback kid. I can't be someone who regrets what happened yesterday, but oh, I've got a plan for tomorrow. All of those things at a certain point, a person realizes that in the end, if they really want to go through what is an authentic transformation, they are going to have to see that the future that they vest their life in is part of the fear they're trying to escape. And as that becomes clear to a human being that fear fashions a desire to be fearless. Why do I have to think about why do I want a fearless life? Because I have an image of what it would be like to be a person without fear. And the minute I have an image of what it's like to be a person without fear, then my mind is fashioning the places, the people, the power, the possessions, whatever it is. I got it. And the very fabrication of those images, which is by the way, why the Mandela in the older traditions, that's why they sweep that thing away. They make this beautiful form representing the cosmos. And as soon as it's done, it's washed away. Why? Because the attachment is the problem, not the thing that's been created. It's natural to create. It's natural to even think about, I run a foundation. I can't spill the beans here, but maybe you have me back. We're developing the most exciting app that's as far as I'm concerned, it can change the entire world. So that takes a lot of work and we've been hard at it. So you have to see it, you have to imagine it. But then to somebody says, you know, that's not going to work or this won't work. And then what happens to you? Oh, no. Oh, no, that's terrible. What's going to happen? You think you care about the app? You don't care about the app. You care about the app maker. That's the issue. So that's what the wisdom of letting go is, is beginning to understand the relationship between attachment and dependency and the unseen part of this mind that doesn't want to discover the qualities that are constantly identifying with whatever it's doing. Ilona, we're going to put a link to the wisdom of letting go in the show notes. You can download that for free and anyone else listening to this can download that for free. Theminimalists.com slash podcast to find those full show notes. Now, guy, before we get back to our callers, we have a little something here we call the lightning round where we answer the Patreon community chats question of the week. And we attempt to answer questions with a short minimal maximum. Don't worry. We can monder on as much as we want. We make the rules here, right? And we get to break the rules. So TK is here. Absolutely. We get to break them every day. We do these little things called minimal maxims. You could find this episodes maxims in the show notes at theminimalists.com slash podcast and every minimal maxim ever at minimalmaxims.com. We'll also deliver our weekly show notes directly to your inbox for free, including seven new maxims every Monday. If you sign up for our email newsletter over at theminimalists.com, we'll never send you spam or junk or advertisements, but we'll start your week off with a dose of simplicity. All right. Question of the week this week, guy. This is a simple one, but I can't say that it's easy. Why is letting go so scary? Why is letting go so scary? Now we reach out to our audience. I got it. Save it. Save it. Save the answer because I want to talk about Ashley here. She said, for me, letting go was scary because I felt like I was giving up control over something, but letting it go helped me understand that the thing I was claiming to was actually controlling me. Can you talk about the role that control plays and our inability to let go? Yeah, I do. I like the question. I like the young lady's answer to the question. Letting go is scary because without something that I'm clinging to and deriving an identity from, who am I? Now step back for a minute and I've tried to keep this as brief as I can. The mind that is so occupied with thought, the mind that has all of this knowledge from reading and talking and even good ideas, it's still a world of thought. It's still a world that as I'm thinking and looking at my thoughts and quotes to decide what is intelligent or clever to say so I come off wise. There's another order of being that knows better than trying to be wise. I mean, literally another order of awareness that doesn't have to, like Christ said, what man taking thought can add one cube into? Taking thought seems to be the way to get through something. No, taking thought is the way to get not through, dragged into whatever it is that started speaking and then needs to defend itself. So that it requires inwardly, why it's so scary, seeing the futility of trying to free myself with ideas, with beliefs, with opinions. Because I've been trying to free myself with whatever it may be all of these years and I'm still like that when somebody says something, I'm ready to have the quip. I'm that fast and people admire me because my mind is a quick mind. But my mind is quick, but it's quick to deceive me into believing that it is I who have said this when if I look closely at it, I would never say that. If I was present, I wouldn't do it. I would never hurt another human being if I was present. It would be impossible. But we all hurt each other and we don't know we hurt each other because we're living from a mind that looks for like having a giant warehouse of endless files. And the moment comes and it happens so fast, especially intellectual center, just like that and it pulls up what it needs to be safe. And the very fact that I have to pull something out of the hat to be safe means I'm in fear. So I'm protecting the fear. And that's what's so difficult about this idea of letting go when you really start seeing these things. You realize the answer isn't to try to answer the moment. The answer is to be as present as I can to something that's trying to answer the moment. So I get through smelling like a rose and that's what's frightening. Because who am I going to be if I don't, if I'm not always this person. See, that's what a great, what an unbelievable trick to believe that the continuity of this identity is the proof of its intelligence. No, the continuity of a sense of self is the proof there's no intelligence there because nothing's being reborn moment to moment as it's intended to. If you take part in creation as opposed to protecting what you've created and you didn't create TK, you didn't create Josh, I didn't create Guy. We talked about that earlier. You know what's fascinating here is what you're talking about is we create this thing through all of these memories and past experiences and then we drag it forward because of this perceived continuity. I am who I am only if the past remains true. And then we get to a point like with me, it was when my mother died or other things can happen. Often it's like a life changing event where you're like, I don't want to keep clinging to that past. And in fact, Becky says here, letting go is scary because when you let go, you no longer look back and are thus forced to look forward. Are we always letting go of a piece of the past? See, I would challenge that. Okay. You ready? Yeah. Okay. So letting goes, I have to let go of the past. Now I'm going to look forward. Forward to what? I'm looking forward to knowledge. I'm looking forward to a new plan, to a new idea. Paul, Saint Paul, our hopes must not be in things seen for who has hopes that there must be in things unseen. This is why real letting go is scary because you start to realize that everything I call my future, what I'm going to be, what I'm going to do. And I'm not saying don't strive. This is such a difficult thing to describe because you have to let whatever it is that you have been given, you have to let it go. You have to let it work. You have to let it teach you. How am I going to learn about guy if I'm sitting there governing guy at all points and times, given to what guy says is good. Then I'm just, I'm not alive. But if I begin to see that, okay, so I'm very upset with my husband. I'm very upset with my daughter. And my mind is telling me, well, you know what, you don't go on the past because part of the upset is, you know, you have this dependency and your mind's working all that out. And then your mind says, well, here's what I'm going to do. Well, where are you getting that idea from? The past. Not the future. Because the only thing the mind can access is thought. And thought is the past. That's what's scary about letting go is gradually everything starts to slow down and you become a quiet human being. Your mind is no longer running around. You're happy to be where you are as you are seeing what you're being given to see and changing according to your willingness to let that will reveal what it's intended to reveal to you. Then you have a completely different order of life. Then you can go do your work. Like I said, I run a foundation and we're doing really cool things right now. But if I get lost in that, I'm dead in the water and I refuse to because I understand it's not joy. It's something promising joy, but delivering sorrow when the joy doesn't appear on time the way it's supposed to. It's a playful expression of something that is so much larger than the work itself. And I think that language is very interesting too. I have to let go of the past. There's that sense of obligation. I think about Wayne Dyer's stop shutting all over yourself. I have to let go. Well, every relationship that we have with people with things, these are just patterns of interaction and we can transmute those patterns of interaction, negotiate them at any time. And so what if we substituted, I have to let go of this thought, I have to let go of this situation for this thought does not own me. This thing does not define me. This situation is not the totality of who I am. Then you transmute the energy around that and it's no longer something that I am obligated to let go of. But if part of the play I choose to let go, I can play the game that way. If I may. You always may. Here I am and I have to let this go. Did you ever, Josh, you ever pick up a skillet? Sound asleep dreaming about the pasta or whatever it is and you pick up that skillet? He's done exactly that several times. Do you go, oh my God, I've picked up a hot skillet. What an idiot I am. I have to let this go. I mean, that sounds stupid, doesn't it? And then I get on Google and I look, how do I let this go? Watch some film while you're holding it. But that's what's going on up here all the time. So, no, intelligence, physical intelligence provides me with an instantaneous action that doesn't require thought at all. Well, what if I actually see that that memory is burning me? What if I actually see that this desire that I have to be someone special and time to come, whatever it might be, that in that moment, I'm seeing the glory, I'm seeing all that's coming my way. I can't see the fear that's projecting it that says you're nobody unless that happens. Because if I see that, TK, I don't have to try to let go. Intelligence, the divine does it for me. It says, it doesn't even say it. You just stop hurting yourself because now you can see where it is that these parts of you are indeed clinging without you knowing. They're clinging and that's part of the beauty of running into situations where, as you described, suddenly I see myself. Well, again, do I see myself or is something showing me the self that's clinging? Do I see myself or is something showing me? You know what, Josh, let go, dude. This thing's really burning you and that's what happens. Christ said, love your enemies. That's impossible today for human beings. How do I love my enemies? How do I imagine what it's like to feel loving? Well, that's not loving. To love my enemy is to understand that there is no enemy apart from the part of me that makes it out of him so that I can have a sense of myself as someone other than this kind of person or that kind of person. Then you're done with judging others because you actually recognize that there is no judge unless you're superior to what you're judging and it hurts to be a superior person. It's not pleasurable. Our whole pursuit in life is to be seen as somebody superior. That brings me actually to my pithy answer. My minimal maxim for this week was letting go is not something you do, it's something you stop doing. And it's exactly what you're talking about there with the hot skillet. It's not like, what do I do to let this go? I simply stop clinging. I see it. This awareness sees it. So letting go isn't doing. It's seeing something in me that wants to do me in. Yes. Because it's saying, you're so stupid. Let go of that handle, Josh. No, because if I drop it like it's hot, people are going to know I picked it up in my sleep. I'm going to look so stupid if I drop this. So I'm going to keep burning myself. Honest to God. Honest to God. And you can take that exterior world life and see it interiorly. I'm at a dinner table. I say something embarrassing. Face drops. The minute you catch yourself having that reaction, if you're watching, you can see something clever trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. So you don't look like somebody who just got triggered or hurt. Because a real spiritual person doesn't get triggered. No, a spiritual person sees what got triggered and then they use that moment to begin releasing themselves from identification with that part of oneself. There is the difference. And that's why he said that letting go is an inside job. DK, how about you? Do you got something, Pithy? Why is letting go so scary? Every new chapter begins with your own obituary. So if you think about it in evolutionary terms, you could say it is a process in which a species has to adapt to circumstances that are adversarial to those parts of itself that are not conducive to survival. And that means I've got to let go of who I thought I was in order to become this stronger version of myself, if you will. And so one of the reasons why letting go is so hard for many of us is because we have these things and we have these stories that we tell about these things that say this is what makes me important. In order to realize that I don't need strength. I don't need strength. Who is it that needs strength? Somebody that's got to deal with something. Well, what if the whole thing is being dealt with all the time and in a very beautiful, deliberate fashion by something that knows a lot more about Josh and TK and Guy than we know about ourselves and is trying to educate ourselves? You don't need strength to learn. You need to see where weakness is interfering with your wish to see the truth of yourself. Because then you start recognizing, and again, this is why if you want it one more time, why is letting go scary? Because at a certain point you have to realize that I never had any power. I never had any control. What I had was a lot of pain and a lot of ways in which I was trying to ensure that I didn't feel that pain. And as you start recognizing, you know what? This part of me that's always afraid of falling down and being seen as stupid and making a mistake. This part of me, it's always protecting itself. Well, why would I want to protect something that's stealing my life from me? Why do I need strength? I need to see. I need to understand that real strength is something that has to do with this constant revelation. The revelation of myself in that is all that is good and true. And we are intended to be constantly revealed to ourselves with the moments we don't want. I might add TK. Because if I don't have those moments, how am I going to know that I came into it bringing all these suitcases with me? And then I get to see that I've done that. And then I have a choice. I can either pack another bag, you know, change my costume, or I can say, you know what? I'm so sorry. I did it again. I have something has to change. Then you begin, and this is what I was really getting at, then you begin to see, all right, you know, what would happen if I didn't try to change this moment? If I didn't have an idea of what a strong man was in this moment, what would happen to me who wants to be strong? And what would happen is that you would see the whole of yourself and that awareness is this intelligent. It is this action. And then you realize this actionable nature, that part of us that's intended to be free and clear, is never not there. So I don't need to go looking for something. It is already within me, not I, but another kind of I, another kind of an individual. I'm not afraid of intelligence and it's there. Then I'm not afraid anymore. Because there's that recognition that nothing real can be threatened. And that's what completes the analogy, right? Because in physical evolution, it is the stronger attributes that survive. And one can look at it as a purification of weakness, but on a spiritual level, it's the record. It's the purification of those stories, those narratives that I am not enough, that I must earn the right to my existence, that I must become that which I already am. And these troubles, these challenges, these instances where we're called by life to let go. We're really just letting go of not even superficial aspects of ourselves. We're letting go of illusions that distracted us from the real. There's this beautiful, it stopped me if I... Man, we're not going to stop you. We brought you on here to start you. Okay. Imagine a woman walking along the beach and she sees this beautiful stone. And she takes that beautiful stone and she gives it to someone that she knows can grind it and polish it. Now the stone isn't going, God, this is great. I love this grinder, you know. I love this. No, I can't stand it. Because this is who I am. I'm encrusted. I'm caked. I know who I am. I'm fully defined by what these thoughts that confine. But that process is indeed what we are intended to be. We are intended to be constantly purified. I mean, if you think about it and you have moments where you see things about yourself, letting go is really the dross, isn't it? Separating the wheat from the chaff. We understand I can no longer cling to these things. Well, that understanding that I can no longer cling to these things wouldn't take place unless something was acting to separate the wheat from the chaff. Separating the dross on the stone from the beauty of the stone itself. So that what if a person actually understood every moment of my life, God willing, is intended for me to exit the moment a pure, true person that went into it, but not because I tried to be true and pure, but because I saw what was untrue and what wasn't pure. So the difficulty becomes letting another will reveal to you what your own will has manifested and then seeing that, look, this is fine. I'm learning from this, but there's always another purity. I can always be more present. And that's endless. It's literally endless. It is a place without time. And being without time means being without becoming. And being without becoming means that I'm no longer trying to become someone special. I realize I've been given everything I will ever need to be a whole human being right now, right now, right now, all the time. I see it. Come on. How about you listeners? Tell us in the comments why is letting go so scary for you? We have a minimalist tip, but let's hold that for next week for the sake of time. We're just going to take a quick pandiculation break and we'll be right back for page two. All right, that's the first 35% of episode 512. We'll see you on Patreon for the full Maximal Edition with Guy Finley, which includes answers to a bunch more questions. Questions like, how do you decide whether a new possession might add value to your life? How do I navigate the emotional minefield created by a loved one with severe memory loss? How can I enjoy new interests and hobbies one at a time without losing momentum so quickly? Plus a million more questions and simple living segments over on the minimalist private podcast on Patreon. The link is in the description. When you subscribe, you can listen to our private podcast episodes on Spotify or Apple podcast or your favorite podcast app. Plus you'll gain access to all of our archives all the way back to the very first episode in 2015. Big thanks to Guy Finley for joining us today. You can check out any of his books, including this book, which we were reading from on page three today. The Secret of Letting Go. We'll put a link to his website in the show notes. You also have a link to that one hour seminar you can download for free called The Wisdom of Letting Go. That's in the show notes as well. And that is our minimal episode for today. Thanks to Irthing Studios for the recording space on behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, TK Coleman, Post Production Peter, Spire Jeff and Spire Dave, Jordan No More, Tomcat, Professor Sean, Savvy Dee and the rest of our team. I'm Joshua Fields-Milburn. If you leave here with just one message, love to be this. Love people and use things because the opposite never works. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll see you next time. Peace. Every little thing you think that you need. Every little thing you think that you need. Every little thing that's just feeding your greed. Oh, I bet that you'll be fine without it.