UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Welcome to The Michael Singer Podcast, presented by Sounds True in partnership with Shanti Publications. For more information about Michael Singer’s work, access to all prior episodes, and information about upcoming releases, we invite you to join us at MichaelSingerPodcast.com
Michael Singer: In truth, if one was totally honest with themselves, they would be able to understand the benefit of their own chosen spiritual practices. The problem becomes when we don’t understand what’s going on and we use spiritual practices, spiritual techniques, our whole spiritual growth, if you will, as just another thing to get into. People get into religions that way. People get into yoga that way. People get into gurus that way. It’s just something that the ego, something that the self-concept can just start to define itself as. “I believe this way. I’ve done this, I’ve read this. I can do this.” With any of the different religious or self-help or yoga, any of it. If you let your ego, if you let your mind make it that, you just changed clothes and changing clothes doesn’t really do anything. Maybe other people will look upon it differently, but inside you’ll know you’re just as nervous when you see somebody as to whether you’re doing the asanas right or whether you can quote the scriptures as good as somebody else or whether you said something wrong as you were with your fancy clothes and nice course. It just becomes another thing to get into.
That’s absurd. The whole purpose of spiritual growth is to get out, not to just get into another trip. The highest practices that you can practice are the ones that you see from the depth of your being as beneficial for you to free yourself of yourself. When it is said and done, you will start to see that you are bound, your personal self, your ego self owns you. It tells you what to do all the time. It is constantly making demands of you. “Like this person. Don’t like this person. Say this. Don’t say that. Why did you say this? This is what you should do about the fact that you said this. Don’t wear that. Oh my God, no one will like you if you wear that.” Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It just occupies and preoccupies you constantly and tells you what to worry about, tells you what you want and tells you how to go about doing it.
The only reason you don’t see this and that you’re not freaking out is that it is so prevalent that you identify with it as you. If it wasn’t quite as prevalent, if it was something that was there sometimes and not there other times, then the net result would be you’d look at that and say, “No way. I ain’t doing that. I ain’t getting involved in that.” But the fact that it’s there every single moment all the time and never stops, you don’t separate yourself from it. You say, “No, I don’t have anyone inside of me telling me what to do all the time. Telling me who to like. Telling me who not to like. What I should worry about and what I shouldn’t. There’s just me.” Well, that’s the one I’m talking about. You’ll someday understand that it’s not you. You are the one who’s watching that. And that is just so prevalent that you’re comfortable with it. That’s just the way it is all the time. You’ve never known it otherwise and that’s just how it is.
Spiritual growth can’t take place from that framework. Spiritual growth is not about that thing telling you how to meditate, telling me you better do this or telling you how to do your asanas right or telling you to read this or telling you to believe in this. That’s not what it’s about. It’s just I told you. It’s just that same dictatorial completely preoccupying psyche getting into spiritual things or getting into religious things. So you have to have a perspective to start with, which is not hard to get, which shows you there’s a way out and that perspective is the witness. That perspective is what your mind says to you and what your heart feels is something you hear and something you feel. It’s that simple. You feel what your heart does and you are aware of what your mind is saying.
Someday you will realize it is all about paying attention to who’s hearing it and who’s feeling it rather than what it’s saying and what it’s feeling. That right there is the entire spiritual path. Not funny, no books, no nothing. It’s just the simplest thing in the world. Somebody’s watching that mind. If somebody wasn’t watching that mind, you wouldn’t know it was talking, but you do know it’s talking and if you don’t listen to your mind, what happens, you freak. Your heart freaks, your mind get scared, all kinds of stuff goes on inside. How do you know? What would you do if you didn’t do what your mind told you to do? If your mind told you, “Don’t do that. You’re going to get in trouble. That’s scary, don’t do that.” What if you paid no attention to it? You’d start freaking out. Fears would come up. All kinds of things would go on inside of you. How do you know that? You do know it, you do see it. How do you know that?
That is the spiritual pursuit to ask the question. How do I know that the mind is active? How do I know that the heart is sending these messages? Who am I? Who knows this? The moment you get even an inkling of that awakening, and that’s what awakening is, that’s the awakening. What it means to wake up, what it means to be born into spirit is when you step back into the witness. You realize, “Uh-oh, I’ve been sitting there listening to this idiot talk to me my whole life, my whole life. He doesn’t know what it’s talking about. And I’m just sitting here watching it and this heart, it’s been like a wild maniac driving me here and driving me away from there.” That’s it. You could be totally perfectly happy married with kids and I’ll turn a little screw in there. You wake up one morning, your mind starts saying, “I’m not happy here. This isn’t like I thought it’d be.” And your heart starts to get quiet and dull and you don’t feel love anymore, right?
And then when the heart starts to feel the mind says, “I’m not even happy anymore. Am I really going to spend the rest of my life like this? I only have one life to live and I don’t want to tell anybody because it’s embarrassing and I know I’m not supposed to…” You think that’s you talking. That is not you. It’s not you. It might as well be a tape recorder. You are the one who hears it saying that. You are the one that could just look at that, just sit there and watch it say that and just say, “She’s in that mood today.” And not even listen to a word it says, and then it’s going to say something else. It’s going to say, “Oh, what do you mean you don’t listen to me? It’s going to be like this for the rest of your life. You better listen to me.” And you don’t listen to that. You are capable because not it. That’s what it means to wake up.
You woke up to a deeper part of your being. You woke up to the witness, you woke up to the consciousness that is watching this. It has nothing to do with your marriage. It has nothing to do with the children. It has nothing to do with anything. It’s something going on inside of you that one day can think this way the next day you can think that way and one minute one way and one minute… Day, don’t even talk about days. It’s minute to minute that thing’s crazy, right? And you eventually wake up. That is not you. Isn’t that amazing? What an amazing realization. So it’s called a realization. That’s not you. You’ve listened to it your whole life. I guarantee you that is not you. You are the one that is aware that it is saying it. It’s a very small awakening, but it’s the beginning of the end, right? It’s the beginning of the beginning and the beginning of the end. Once you have that awakening, now you’re ready for spiritual practices. You’re not ready before that.
At that awakening. Now you look there and you say, “I don’t have to put up with this. You want to bet? Wait until you see what happens when you try not to.” Somebody’s been in charge for a long time. You think that someone’s going to say, “Oh, you got me. You got me, now you’re watching. Bye. Pack up like the bugs. Exterminator’s here, I’m going.” That doesn’t want to happen. Okay. That thing is strong, really strong, way stronger than anything you could ever imagine. You are in for a surprise if you try to free yourself from the power of the psyche, from the power of the mind and the heart, which work together as the psyche. That’s it. So you’ll eventually get to the place how I would have you grow if I had my way. First you’d wake up. Wake up means you watch it. Sorry, you wish you didn’t watch it. You watch it, it’s going on in there, isn’t it? It’s nutso in there.
Okay. I love it when someone’s honest about what’s going on in there. That’s the beginning. They get embarrassed to talk about… Don’t get embarrassed to talk about it. That is what’s going on in there. And so you look at it, that’s your awakening. Now I want to know how you get out. So your first step is step back now you’re awake to a certain degree. Your next step is devote yourself to getting out. Getting out merely means that you are free to leave. You’re free to settle back into the peace and the joy and the ecstasy and the spirit that’s inside of you. You don’t have to take the psyche with you. If the psyche says, “I don’t like this.” And it starts to get weird. You don’t have to do anything about it. Isn’t that far out? Psyche says, “Oh my God, I’ll die if that happens.” Melodrama, melodrama, you just change the channel.
You just don’t even care. You don’t even care what it says anymore. It doesn’t make any difference to you in any way, shape or form. It is so full of it and it is full of it and you know it is not you and you do not have to listen. Now, you have started your awakening process. I want to know what you would do if you got to that state and you realize that thing’s strong and he keeps trying to pull me into it and I keep getting sucked into it. I get up and think, “All right, I’m going to touch it today.” And 10 minutes later I don’t see anything till night and then, “Oh, here we are again.” And it’s like pretty strong stuff. What are you going to do? If you really devoted yourself to that question and you experimented with different things, I’m going to guarantee you the first thing you’re going to notice once you start to catch on. Even if no one taught you anything, you know what you’d notice?
That repetition of fixed things at fixed times in fixed ways is completely and totally against what your personal self wants to do. All right? It just wants to do whatever it wants to do and it wants to do it. It wants to feel what it feels, what it wants to feel and it wants to think what it feels based on what it thinks with it and it just wants to… That’s it. That’s it. It wants to be utterly and completely and totally undisciplined, period. It just gets into a mood. It gets in a way of thinking. It gets into a something. It gets angry, it gets needy, it gets scared, it gets hopeful, it gets… I don’t care what it does, it just goes from one place to another and that’s what it wants to do. I guarantee you it wants to do what it wants to do when it wants to do it and there’s never been a time it didn’t want to do that. Okay. If it feels, “Oh my God, I want to be with people.” Then it wants to be with people, but it’s [inaudible 00:12:34]
“I don’t care. I don’t want to alone, I want to be with people.” It feels it wants to be alone, but it’s time to go someplace. Church, this, that some place there’s supposed to be people, it don’t want to go. It don’t. If it’s time to get up and it don’t want to get up, it don’t care. It don’t care if it’s work, it don’t care. If it’s meditation, it don’t want to do it, period. It just don’t want to do it. If it’s supposed to go to sleep and it’s too excited about what’s going to happen, it don’t want to go to sleep. It wants to do what it wants to do when it wants to do it. It doesn’t know anything except for that. It gets its mind in that space. It gets its heart in that space. It gets its Chi Shakti flow in that space and it’s like wild horses. Try and make it do something other than what it wants to do, isn’t it? All right, how about when it wants to eat?
The thing’s unbelievable. By the way, I want to play you for a second. What percentage of the time that when I say what about when it wants to eat, is it your body that wants to eat versus your mind? Have you noticed? Okay, yeah, you don’t want to answer me that. Your mind’s the one that wants to eat. I don’t get that, man. Your mind doesn’t even have a mouth. It got no digestive system. It ain’t got squat. What do you mean it wants to eat? It always wants to eat. Okay. That’s just the same thing. It just wants to do something that gets its vibration better. And if it’s any one of the things I listed and that’s what it wants to do. It’s just an amazing energy, isn’t it? Amazing process. So you catch on very quick that if you let it do that, it’s running the show, period. It’s in charge and you don’t stand a chance, you’ll never get out. And so you literally take the risk of saying, “We are not going to always do what you want to do.”
We’re kind of in here together. Not quite a democracy, you’re more of a dictator, but I’m here and I’m going to have some say in the matter from now on. So for example, in the mornings we’re going to do this at this time and in the evenings we’re going to do this at this time. It’s what’s going to happen, regardless of what you want to do. It’s like, “Regardless, what kind of word is that? That’s not a spiritual word. Regardless, you’re supposed to be in harmony with the forces around you. You don’t say things regardless of what’s going on.” Net result is, regardless, totally and utterly regardless, you just put down your foot. You just put it down and day, “This is what we’re doing.” “Well what if I don’t want to do it?” “That’s right.” “You’re going to do it if I don’t want to do it?” “Yeah.” “What if I really don’t want to do it?” “Yeah” “What if I really, really, really don’t want to do it?” “Yeah.”
It’s just like that. And you know what you’ll see? That even just to think that there’s such a thing that you’re going to do, not because somebody made you, that’s too easy. Not because there’s some penalty, you won’t get paid if you don’t work or you’ll lose your house if you don’t pay your mortgage. You’re saying, “No, no, no, no, that’s too easy.” It has to be something you decided regardless of what your psyche feels. First time you ever put your foot down in your life, you understand that? And you start to realize that creates bookends, limits for how far that psyche can take you. All of a sudden, a deeper part of your being has set up a pattern of repetition of what’s going to go on regardless of what the psyche wants.
That’s like first getting your hands on the rope if you’re going to train a horse. You’re not going to train that horse. Anyone will tell you that. Just sit there and watch the horse run around free. That’ll train it. I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s going to get much out of that other than the joy of being free, the joy of doing whatever it wants. The first time you get to hold that rope and if it’s a wild horse, it better be a long rope. You give it some room but you hold that rope and you let it start to get used to the notion that there is restriction, there is a limit, that it is not just free to do whatever it wants to do. You hear me? And little by little it has to start to adjust to that and you do that regardless of whether it wants to be held or not.
The day that you decide, “Well we did it for three months and it seems to be calming down some, let’s give them a few months off.” That’ll work really well. You know it won’t work. I shouldn’t take a horse, what I should do is take a child with a tantrum. A child throws tantrums. What should you do? Go about your business regardless of what the kid’s doing, you can’t sit there and change things based on the behavior. If you start to reign that behavior and you don’t then say, “Okay, we’ll go throw tantrums for a few months because you’ve been very good for this month.” That’s how you start to deal with your personal self because it will throw tantrums, won’t it? All right. It’s a wild beast. There’s two things that happen when you set that discipline for yourself. It’s got to be for yourself.
When you set it, one, you start to rein in the energies that were free to do whatever they want whenever they wanted or at least to try to. And second, you are actually asserting your independence from that part of your being. You are the Oversoul, you are the Atman, you are the self. And those energies have just never been harnessed, they’ve never been trained. They’re supposed to be serving you. You are not supposed to be serving them. You understand that? That mind, the house of the body, that mind, that heart. They are tools that was given to you to be able to feel, to be able to think, to able to interact in this world. Your car doesn’t tell you what to do, you wouldn’t put up with it, okay? The car is there to take you places and to serve you. Your body, your heart and your mind are there to serve you.
They’re there to serve the soul. You are not there to serve them and they’re not there to serve themselves. Very clear what’s going on, so you start what I’ll call repetitive practice and the only purpose of the repetitive practice as far as I’m concerned is it doesn’t allow the lower aspects of your habit formed energy to just go out and do whatever it wants. All of a sudden the soul is awakened, it is watching and it is asserting will. It is asserting to repetition and that discipline. It is not as they try to tell you that the particular thing you’re doing is so important. It is the act of doing it regardless. And people say, “Well, I love doing my morning and evening practices, except sometimes I like to go take walks and due to things like that when I don’t feel like it, I like to cut myself that space.”
Well then that person doesn’t understand the entire purpose of why they’re doing practices. If they think the practices are there because they enjoy meditating, they’re wrong. The practices are there for the very moments when you don’t feel like doing them, that’s the most important time, period. Because it’s really about freeing yourself from your personal self. It’s all about that. When it’s all said and done, are you capable of letting go of your personal self? If you are not, you’re just going to stay there and you’re going to carry this thing around and it’ll be a little bit easier to carry around. The spiritual practice do make the thing a little calmer but you’ll not get out. You’ll not realize the deep, beautiful spiritual states of what you’re capable of. You must free yourself from it and the way you free yourself from it is asserting your independence.
Do not ever use the word freedom to say that which the personal self wants is what it means to have freedom. Freedom is the freedom from the personal self, the freedom to be happy within yourself, the freedom to be truly be free. And you will not be that while that psyche is deciding what it wants. You’d never ever want what you want. A yogi does not want what they want and they don’t not want what they don’t want. If your personal self has a particular desire of wanting something, deep inside, you couldn’t care less whether you get that. You’re not going to nod, it’s not about renunciation, right? You’re not going to go out of your way to get it. And if you’re afraid something’s going to happen, you don’t want something to happen, you wouldn’t go any way to make it not happen. Because what you want is freedom from want and not want.
You want freedom from the part of your being that’s so caught up and I need things to be one way and I need them not to be another way. Because if you’re still that way, you’re still trapped. So it starts with an understanding that you are trying to free yourself from yourself. That is what freedom is. Freedom is freeing yourself from yourself, not freedom from this world. The world, it just goes about its business. The world cannot bother you. It can’t do anything to you unless it bothers your personal self and your personal self can certainly bother you. If the world went about its business but it never bothered your heart or your mind, would it be bothering you? By definition, no. It’s not what the world is doing that you say bothers you. It’s the fact that the world stimulates your mind and your heart to bother you. Then you say it bothers you.
And the way I prove it to you is take anything that you’re now saying bothers you and just make believe that when it happens your mind likes it and your heart feels good about it. Now you’re going to say it bothers you? No, don’t bother you at all. Take that what you say doesn’t bother you and just make believe it’s opposite day and when the thing happens, the person who you love seeing or the event or the food takes place, you freak. Your mind just starts going, “I don’t like that. I want to…” And your heart starts freaking out. Now what you going to say? “It bothers me.” It is not the event that bothers you. It is the fact that it stimulates the mind into turmoil and the mind bothers you and the heart bothers you. What if the mind and the heart never went into turmoil? Then nothing would ever bother you.
What if the mind and the heart found peace? Then you would be at peace. Do you understand that? That is spiritual growth. It is the understanding that your work is on yourself and your work is to free yourself from yourself. And the way you do this, you’re going to see there’s no way other than starting to draw the line. You just draw the line. You do it yourself for your own reasons. The reason to free yourself. Well, why do people eat a good diet? Because I want to feel better. I feel better. It makes me feel healthier, right? I feel more energy, more vitality, and all of life is more fun if I eat right. Okay, good. That’s a good reason. Why do people keep spiritual practices? It is because they see that they must free themselves from themselves or they will stay trapped and they will be caught in this for the rest of their lives and this is how you free yourself from yourself.
First step is you set the limits, you set the posts, you hold the rope. You’ll go in the search for truth. The 30 years ago I put in the ox herding pictures just so that you’d always have them if you wanted them. Every few years of your spiritual growth, you should read the ox herding pictures again, they’re about as deep as it gets. But they’re Zen. There are 10 stages of the spiritual path. Very beautiful, very beautiful. But the words are so deep and you’ll read them different every few years. You’ll think you’ll understand them and then you’ll read them again. When you’ve grown a few years, five years, 10 years, and they say something totally different. And one of the early things you will see is he took the rope. See this ox, what is this ox? Okay, he’s saying nothing, right, but he took the rope, he held the rope.
That’s the rope we’re talking about. He were holding for the first time onto the rope of this wandering thing of your personal self. Some day you’ll understand it’s who’s holding the rope. That’s what matters. Who’s holding that rope? Not the rope, not the ox. Who’s holding that rope? Always, whenever you can ask that question, who am I? Who’s in there doing this? That’s what matters. But in the meantime, if you’re going to free yourself of this, you must set up repetitive discipline practices for yourself. Like I said, I said morning and evening. It could be anything about anything. All right, so let’s say physically you set up certain things for your physical being to do. All right, and you just do them. There will be times your psyche doesn’t want to do them. And if you’re smart, then you’ll smile. You’ll say, look, I can’t even keep the discipline.
Isn’t that cute? I can’t even keep the discipline I set for myself. Eventually you will. You will because it works. You will because of the joy of freeing yourself from that part of your being that drives you crazy. That’s what it could be with discipline, with your body, discipline with food, discipline with whatever it is, spiritual practices, right? Now let’s talk about discipline of mind. One, you should not fight the mind. You cannot fight the mind. Never fight the mind, never fight the mind, never fight the mind, never fight the mind. Never ever, ever, ever let yourself fight the mind. You will never ever win if you fight the mind, never. All right? The mind cannot be fought. It is not something you do. It can be ignored. It can be ignored, but it can’t be fought. There’s a big difference. If you fight the mind, you think you won, all you did was suppress.
You got it? If those thoughts are coming up and you’re fighting them, you don’t win. You lose because they’re stronger than you and you lose because you were stronger than them. You lose either way. That’s why I say you never ever fight the mind, you ignore the mind, you disengage from the mind, you transcend the mind. That is how you deal with the mind. Thoughts are just things, they just pass through, let them pass through. Now you’re going to find that that’s not all that easy to do. How will you discipline yourself? Because you’re going to get caught in your mind. You decide you’re going to do something three seconds later, you’re off thinking about something else. Well, that’s what mantra is all about. That’s what Japa is all about. You sit there just for kicks if you want to, you play with it.
You start repeating a word or phrase in your mind over and over. Isn’t that a waste of time? No, not a waste of time at all. Why? Because you’re going to find you can’t do it and that’s what matters. You’re going to find that if you sit there and try to say God’s name or say peace or say [foreign language 00:27:28]. Doesn’t make any difference. Just sit there. Mantras are nice things you want to say the age-old mantras, they have good power, but it doesn’t matter. What really matters as you say something over because you said you would. You are capable of making your mind say whatever you want right now. Just say, “God, God, God.” Over and over inside. It does do it, doesn’t it? Good. Start saying it. And what you’re going to see is you’ll say it a few times and then you’ll get lost. What do you mean you get lost? You’re just sitting here.
[inaudible 00:27:59] get lost. Why? Because other thoughts will get created that you’re not telling it to do. “Wait a minute, I told you to say God’s name. I told you to say peace. I told you what to say. I told you…” People don’t believe me. In my books, I sit there and say, “Say hello.” I’m telling you to get enlightened by saying hello. It doesn’t matter, right? Just say something that’s you willfully making your mind say something. You’re perfectly fully doing it. It did do it, didn’t it? Well, isn’t it funny that it doesn’t just keep doing it if you tell it to do it? Who’s the boss? All of a sudden the mind decides it’s going to say what it wants to say on its own and it ain’t going to be hello. That is not something the mine wants to go around saying, “Hello, hello.”
Right, it wants to go around saying, “Oh my God, how did you do that? I can’t believe it. What am I going to do when I got older? Oh my God, did I pay for that… and he doesn’t really like me anymore, what should I do? Should I wear this out? I don’t know. I wish I didn’t wear this. Should I go back? No, you can’t go back and check…” That’s what the mind wants to say, isn’t it? Well, all of a sudden there’s World War III going on there. What do you mean? Well, it was bad enough that the mind wanted to say all these things. It does that all the time, but you want to say hello or God or whatever you want to say. We’ll just say God’s name. All right? You want to say God’s name, so now there’s this conflict. That’s a good conflict.
That’s the same conflict as you get up to meditate. There’s the same conflict as you stop eating when you get full. It’s the same conflict that you don’t shove your face full of sugar or smoke cigarettes or whatever it is, right? There’s a part of you that wants to, but you don’t. Okay. So all of a sudden this is going on inside and nobody made you. Understand, it has to be something you do for yourself. Why? When it is said and done, you have to want out. You have to want out, you have to want out because you see the predicament you’re in. And sure the Masters can help all that, but not unless you want out. You have to want out. You must want to go. It has to be your soul wanting out or it ain’t going to happen. So I’m assuming you want out this mess because it’s a mess.
What’s life doing besides being a big burden? And so let’s say you start saying that, saying a mantra of Japa. What’s going to happen is you’re going to have trouble doing it and so you just discipline just like the other discipline. Repetition, I’m teaching you. Repetition destroys the personal self. Doing what it wants feeds the personal self. Repetition, not making it do what it doesn’t want. It’s not about renunciation. People get into such terrible heads. If you let it do what it wants, it will stay alive and feed itself. If you decide that that means I have to never let it do what it wants. I have to devote my life to not doing what it wants. You just still devoted yourself to your personal self. You just played opposite day all the day. It’s not about that. It’s about setting up a repetition of discipline, mentally, physically, lifestyle, whatever you want, which doesn’t waver because the personal self wavers, it’s just about holding onto the rope. It’s not about beating the ox. Big difference.
The mind will try to go elsewhere, it does it all the time. But now you’ve created a place where you want to stay. And as you start to get into the habit of mantra, you will have a choice. Do I stay with it or do I go where the mind’s going? You don’t have that choice now. You just find yourself gone, if you’re lucky. Maybe you don’t know until you come back. A few hours went by of neurotic thought. So instead you use a repetition just like I was telling you. It’s exactly like the outer discipline or any of the other disciplines. And its purpose is very obvious and you’ll see its purpose. Its purpose is you have a choice. It’s yours. It’s your kingdom. It’s your domain. It’s your mind. Understand that. It’s your body. It’s your life.
Now it’s not. Now it belongs to the personal self. And if you don’t do what the personal self says to do, you suffer, you freak, you’re scared. That’s got to stop and that’s not healthy, right? That thing is in charge and so you take it back. Now mind, physical being, your interaction with life. What about your emotions? People don’t get it. Again, even spiritual teaching, you do all kinds of things concerning those emotions. You just decide how you want it to be. It’s yours. Your heart is a gift that was given to you by God. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s beautiful. You want to be neurotic? You want to be scared? You want to be insecure? You want to be angry? You want to be jealous? Is that what you want to do with your heart? That’s like I gave you a skill, started building a building, you want to cut your arm off, you can do whatever you want with whatever you got. It’s your choice.
Not a wise thing to do. You look at your heart and you say, “Oh, heart, I have seen you feel peace. I’ve seen you feel compassion. I’ve seen you feel beautiful, love. I would like to live there. I would like to live there. I would like to be in that fountain.” And just like with the mantra and just like with your practices, you say to heart, “We’re going to come back there when we waver.” That’s all. So if you start getting jealous, you start getting scared, you start getting insecure, start feeling angry. I’m not going to fight with you. Man, if you don’t think you fight with the mind, don’t ever fight with a heart, okay? I’m just not going to go with you. I’m not going to go with you. I’m going to again, permit the energies to release and come back to this place which is no different than Japa. It’s Japa of the heart instead of Japa of the mind. And all the Japa of the mind and Japa of the heart is getting up in the morning, brushing your teeth, taking a shower, eating what you decide to eat.
It’s just discipline of setting for yourself how it is that you’re going to set it so that it doesn’t have to be the way that this neurotic nut would have it be. But it’s not about the discipline in of itself. Don’t get into it. Don’t get into how we do better than somebody else. It’s about the self, the consciousness, regaining control of their kingdom. As funny as it seems. It’s about the times you don’t want to do it. Ultimately it’s about deciding, “Now I’m going to do it anyways.” Every time you decide, “I’m going to do it anyways.” You have let go of the control that that part had over you. And the next thing you know, you’re in charge. You’re back. You’re here. Now what do you want to do with your regained consciousness? What do you want to do with all this energy that now is not scattered running all over the place?
Every time you ever find the clarity of realizing you’re there, just ask, “Who am I? Who is watching all this? Who is asserting this will?” Come back into the self. So discipline of mind, not control. But just it’s more a matter of finding a fixed place and letting go of the rest. That’s the word I want to use. And it’s very subtle, isn’t it? How to deal with the mind. Find a fixed place and let go of the rest. That is not control. You’re not forcing it to be the other way, just release. And what will happen is all the energies will come back to you. I’ll tell you a couple of things that’ll happen. I’ve told people this and not until they really do it do they understand how honest I’m being. You think of yourself as having a certain level of intellect, maybe smart, maybe not so smart, whatever it is. Okay. Look at me. You have no idea. No idea how smart you are, none. I’m telling you, you could compete with Einstein.
There’s nothing particularly important about the physiological being that gives the power to the mind. It is a question of discipline and… It’s pranayama. It is pranayama. You’ve seen Swami Chidananda, some of these others, old ones. If that’s right, name’s Chidananda like 80 years old and he does all those weight lifting, all that kind of stuff. He’s a little guy and he’s old and he wins these weight… I’m talking about stuff that nobody could do, but he’s a yogi. He can channel his energy. And by channeling your energy, the body that doesn’t look like it could do something that shouldn’t be able to do it can do anything. It is the same with your mind. Will you look, how much energy is wasted in your mind? Will you look for a minute? The neurotic nut monkey mind that’s just running around doing all the stuff it does, worrying about everything, battling with itself, all that you’ve suppressed. Anything you’ve ever suppressed in your whole life is still there and you’re still suppressing it, otherwise it would’ve come up.
How much energy is that? You understand that? How much thought goes on in there that has nothing to do with what you’re trying to read and focus on? What if all of that was part of your intellect? Because it can be and it should be, right? I am telling you, you are brilliant, not smart, brilliant. And I’ve watched people who think they can’t do anything who just their experience through school or through this or through that is that they ain’t so smart, not so left brained sit there and through yoga start to focus and all of a sudden they’re doing all this stuff and they’re doing math and they’re doing this and they’re doing left brain stuff and then they’re better and they’re better. I’ve just seen total blossoming. God, they just don’t teach you right. They don’t let you understand. They say, “Find out what your talents are and then go do those.”
You’re talented everywhere. You’re talented to do everything. You can be great. It’s all a question of will you please look how much energy is wasted? Look how much heart mess is going on. And when you put your heart into something, as they say, “Boy, he puts his heart into what he’s doing. You do good at it, aren’t you, right?” How much you put your heart into? Are you kidding? Your heart’s a maniac. Most of the time, the best you can do is get away from it. It’s something to run away from. It’s like a volcano that you wish you could just go about your business without the thing freaking you out. That’s what most people think when they have a good day if the heart didn’t bother them and knock them off the bike. Because boy, it can go crazy. What if all of the energy that you ever felt, all the power of anger, all the power of lust, all the power of love, all of that power… That’s a lot of power, isn’t it? That can come from your heart was channeled? Was channeled into what you’re doing into the task at hand, into the thoughts that you’re having into what you’re doing?
Are you kidding me? How much more would you be rather than what it is now? That’s what happens if you work with these things. It is not about renouncing. It is not about right and wrong. It is not about better and worse and getting good at something. It’s about realizing, “I’m great. My true being is great and I’m not practicing any of that in any way shape.” Look what you give in your relationships. You know what you give to your loved ones. The biggest mess that they could ever be with. You feel comfortable being a baby and being a whiner and a complainer and you think, “Oh, but well, of course this is the person that loves me.” What are you, nuts? A lot of times people are just their weakest wussy self around people who they’re very close with.
You should be giving beauty to the people that are around you. You shouldn’t be taking from them expecting thing from them. And the last thing in the world that you give somebody else is the weakest part of your being. What kind of bargain is that? For that I fell in love to get the weakest part of your being. It’s crazy. So you work with your heart and you sit there and say, “This is what we’re going to do.” Just like you work with your job and you work with the disciplines outside, right? Does that mean you can feel love all the time? No. No. It also doesn’t mean your mind’s going to be quiet all the time, but it does mean you set the post. And when it starts wandering, you’re letting go and you’re pulling back to the center. You work with your heart. You do not let that heart go berserk and go crazy all over the place and get all weird. You watch it carefully.
Don’t suppress the energies so you will lose your heart. You don’t want to lose your heart. You want to release the energies that come up and stay fixed in a fixed place within your heart. If you’ll do that with your external life, if you’ll do that with your mind, if you do that with your heart, what I just said to you will take place, you’ll have a totally different life. Everything. Your relationships, your intellect, your finances, health, every single thing will be totally different. And it won’t make any difference to you because what will happen spiritually will be so beautiful you couldn’t care about the rest. This is pranayama. You’ve heard the word. Pranayama is the channeling of the life force.
That’s what [inaudible 00:41:21] and I used to teach. Control of the life force, those are the lectures he gave at Carnegie Hall in the thirties. Control of the life force. That’s true pranayama. What is the life force? That which is making your mind go berserk. That which is make your heart freak out at the times that it freaks out the most. That is your Shakti. That is your chi. That is the energy. that which is nervous energy that keeps… Here, when he sits there with the roll control changing channels constantly over and over again. There, that’s non-pranayama. There’s non-controlled life force, okay? I used to do it too. I watched this very clearly. I used to do it when I’d study. I remember as a freshman in college, my leg would just go up and down and go this while I was studying. What is that? That’s Shakti. That’s Prana. What’s it doing? What good is that?
You’re wasting that which is the most precious thing in the universe. Your spirit, God, chi, Shakti. You waste it in your mind, you waste it in your heart and you was it in your daily life scattering it all over the place. And then you wonder why, “Oh, I can’t do too good.” What if you straightened all that out? What if all of that energy was at your command? When an athlete becomes great, how do they do it? Practice, practice, practice. What is different than what I just talked about than what they do. They just practice and practice and practice and practice and focus and practice and practice until what? Until they have more of their life force going into that golf shot, going into that punch, going into that thrown ball, going into that whatever they’re doing, same thing with the musician, until they have so much of their being, their whole being going into that, right?
I guarantee you, whether it’s football, whether you’re a conductor, whether you’re playing an instrument, whether you’re playing golf, if your mind’s doing what ours do, you ain’t very good. If tiger’s sitting there about to take that putt and it’s going, “Oh my God, I wish my father was here. I can’t believe he didn’t see this thing.” That putt ain’t going in a hole right now. And if you talk to him, he’ll tell you he was trained for early. His doesn’t do. That’s what I loved about those movies they made about golf. I don’t remember their names, but they literally tried to show that state. They tried to use cinematography to show going into that [inaudible 00:43:38], into that state of total one pointedness when they took their shot.
That is what happens to a great athlete. You are an athlete of life. That’s what a yogi is, and a yogini. You’re an athlete of life. That’s your sport. That’s your lila. And your whole being belongs to you. Mind, heart, body, interaction with life, it’s yours. You are super conscious under all conditions. You know what’s happening in your mind. You know what’s happening in your heart. You know what is happening and you are directing that prana, all of it, to go where it’s going. All right. Until it becomes totally natural. Wherever you look, it all goes. Imagine that? Your whole being. And so spirituality and spiritual growth is so beautiful. It’s your whole life. It is your whole life and now you understand what pranayama is. Pranayama is not nostril breathing. Pranayama is control of the life force and control of the life force is control of the life force, right? It is the channeling of all these energies, all this chi, all this shakti that’s flying around completely and utterly out of control.
You throw away 99% of your life every minute. It’s just thrown away into wasted thoughts, wasted feelings, wasted energy, wasted fears, wasted desires, wasted junk. Okay? And you can’t live. You don’t have to do that. All of that can be yours and this is how you work with it and you’ll catch on. If you were to try to work with this yourself, you’ll catch on that these disciplines of setting the post down for no reason don’t get into your grade because you’re doing it. Better to have the humility. Oh yeah, I have to do these disciplines because I’m so screwed up. All right? Don’t get into it. It’s not a thing. But you’ll start to see that now you have a choice. That’s what it’s all about, having a choice. Because you set a standard, you’ll see what deviates from that standard, and eventually you’ll sit there and love the experience of keeping the energies harnessed and channeled because of what a gift to you and does for you.
Truth is, I’ve just talked about yoga. That’s yoga we just talked about. That is the science of yoga. All right? Work with these things. Jai Guru Dev, Jai Masters.
Tami Simon: You’ve been listening to The Michael Singer Podcast, produced by Sounds True in partnership with Shanti Publications. For more information on Michael’s body of work and all back episodes, please join us at MichaelSingerPodcast.com. Thanks so much for listening. Sounds True: waking up the world.
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