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: Masters, there’s vast difference between having a spiritual experience and becoming established in a spiritual state. You can use deep meditations, which is wonderful. Don’t ever tell me I teach not to meditate because I don’t. But you can have experiences, but they’re not who you are. They’re experiences that you had. They’re inspiring. They can do a lot of GL on your path, but there’s a vast difference between becoming established in a state and visiting a state. If you live in New York, you live there. If you visit, you visit, they’re very different things. So how does one understand those differences and work with those differences? And they’re not mutually exclusive. You can have experiences along the way. They can be inspiring, but it’s not the same thing as doing the work that permanently establishes you in a permanent state of being. So what you have is it’s not a leap to heaven, it’s a stairway.
It’s a stairway to heaven. So let’s talk about that. Your starting position is you’re lost. What does that mean? It means your thoughts and emotions are so powerful and so distracting that you don’t even know they’re not. You are enmeshed in these mess of thoughts and emotions. They’re consistent. You have a personality, you have a way of you do things, you like things, you say things and that’s who you are. Well, those are just thoughts. Those are just emotions. The things you are experiencing. They’re not who you are, but you don’t know that when you’re lost, when you’re lost, you’re busy being that and pretty much everybody’s lost. Okay? That’s why I don’t judge have compassion everything nowadays. You see there’s all kinds of things you have trouble with. No, no. People are lost in their minds. They’re lost in their emotions, so they behave accordingly.
Fine, you better accept that because that’s how it is. It’s been said. This is not a very high plane. There are much higher planes. People are lost in their minds. We’ve discussed before why? When you’re lost in that mind, the mind you’re lost in is not the intellectual mind though you can get lost in that. Scientists get lost in intellectual mind, but it’s the personal mind. It’s a mind that got made based on your past experiences and it ends up being filled with likes and dislikes and preferences and beliefs and so on and so forth. Those are a belief, is a mental thought. They’re very nice things. I’m not talking against them, but call it what it is. A belief is a mental thought. Faith is a mental state of mind. So your hopes, your dreams, your beliefs, your faiths, your likes, your dislikes, your preferences, they’re all mental, mental and emotional.
The mind and heart work together. If your mind says, I don’t like something, your heart closes. If your heart opens to something, your mind talks nicely. They’re in cahoots. It’s a conspiracy. Have you noticed? So that’s what goes on in there is you have thoughts and you have emotions, and they’re very powerful. Like I said, why are they so I’m going to do it very quickly so we can go all the way up. Why are they so powerful? Because they’re based on the things that you kept inside of you. You had experiences. They made your heart feel good and experience made your heart feel bad and experience, they made your mind think nicely and experience made your mind be scared and not think nicely. And so because they were strong, either strong, positive or strong negative, you weren’t able to let them go. You end up holding onto them If they’re positive, I want it to happen again.
I keep thinking about it. It was so nice two years ago when you hugged me, I felt so much love and now I don’t know that you still love. See, you liked it two years ago, didn’t you? And so you have that pattern stuck in your mind. You didn’t keep the white lines on the row, you didn’t keep the leaves on the tree, you didn’t keep the clouds. Those things just came and went. That happened to you also. But they didn’t have the impact. They weren’t either very strong, positive or strong negative. Most of them are strong, negative. Like I said, I got to go quick that I don’t want to rehash what we always talk about. Alright? Why are they mostly negative? If you stop and look at it, you have built preferences over the course of your life. You like this kind of animal, you don’t like that kind.
You like this color, you don’t like that color. If things happen that hit those preferences in the wrong way, they’re negative. I asked you once, how many things could you list on a piece of paper that would blow your mind that was so positive? You can’t wait for ’em to happen. My God, you’re getting all excited just to write them down. Five two, I want to get married and I don’t have, children are very healthy. I want them to go to Harvard. Okay, there’s three. It’s like you got a handful of things that if they happen, we’ll turn you on. How many things could you honestly write down that would freak you out? Just don’t think about it. I don’t want you to get into that here. How many things could happen? Could somebody say, could somebody do? Could somebody not say, could somebody not do anybody?
Everything? Whether this, that, how many things could happen that you don’t like? Way more than how many things could happen that would blow you open. Okay? It’s because you set up these mental preferences and the world doesn’t unfold that way, and so you get disappointed, you get scared, you get all kinds of stuff. So basically you wake up and realize the first step that people go through is they’re lost. It’s part of your evolution process. You’re lost. You’ve built these mental thought patterns, heart emotional patterns, and the world comes in and it’s not likely to be what you want. Is it okay if you left it alone? Would it be what you want? No. You think you have to make it be what you want. You have to make sure it isn’t what you don’t want, and so you’re lost struggling with life because you have these issues inside.
So that’s the starting position, and it is lost. It’s lost. It’s very difficult to live that way. There’s a lot of tension, a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear, a lot of disappointment. There’s a lot of stuff goes on. If you live like that and the inside is not very happy. If you’re living like that once in a while, it gets happy. If you get what you want the rest of the time you’re struggling to get what you want, being disappointed you didn’t get what you want or things are happening that you don’t want or you’re worried. Anybody worry? They may know what the word worry means. What do you worry about? The things will happen that you want. No, I don’t think so. You’re worried that something will happen that you don’t want and you’re always worrying. How do I know? Because you’re trying to think about what I need to do so it doesn’t happen.
You’re trying to think and plot and plan your life so that it can be what you want and not be what you don’t want. And you’re taught to do that, by the way. Okay? That’s like, well, it’s a very healthy thing to do. Think. Make sure you know what you want. Make sure you know what you don’t want. Then go out there and get it or make sure it doesn’t happen. Hi, having fun yet, you’ve been doing it your entire life. How’s it working out your entire life? You had a list of what you wanted and what you didn’t want and you struggle with the outside to try and make it be that way. Guess what? You’re still doing it to me. If something’s happens for your entire life and you’re still doing it, something’s wrong. Maybe it doesn’t work and it doesn’t work. It has never worked for anybody.
You can’t make up in your mind what you want and what you don’t want and expect it to happen outside. Psychology says your thoughts, your preferences, hope streams. Your whole psyche is a summary. You learned experiences. You’ve been programmed. Your mind, your heart had been programmed by your past experiences. You went to camp when you were young. It was terrible. The counselors were awful. Will you send your kids to camp? How do you talk about camp? Somebody else never went to camp. They don’t talk about it that way. You don’t realize it’s so natural to you. You don’t understand how true it is. Your thoughts, patterns, preferences, hopes, dreams, concept, F. Beliefs are the sum. You learned experiences. What do you think? You got ’em. You think you made ’em up? You did not make single one of them up. Watch. I really like, I got to know him.
He’s a good friend. I really like him right there. Some learning experiences. He was always nice to me. I like how he dresses. I like his hair. I like whatever it is. Okay. All of a sudden somebody walks up to me and says, are you kidding me? He’s a mass murderer. He had a good lawyer. He got off. Next time I see him, what’s it like the sum of your learned experiences? That’s what I’m telling you. That’s what that is. One more experience and you’re thinking differently. You think it’s logical. What if I walked through later? It was April Fools. He’s a wonderful person now you like him again. Okay, so what your preference and your hopes and dreams are the sum of your learned experiences and how you process them. So that’s what’s going on in there. Is that what’s going on outside? Is the outside the moments unfolding in front of you, the sum of your learned experiences?
Is that why it unfolds? Because it knows the sum of your learned experiences. The weather knows it. People know it. Everyone talking to you knows it. The car in front of you knows it. Every single thing out there knows some of your learned experiences. Is that true or no? False. So therefore some of your learned experiences is something you’re stuck with because the outside world is not that way. Now we into science, physics, chemistry, meteorology. What do you mean? Just as your inside is the sum of your learned experiences. The moment unfolding in front of you is the sum of its learned experiences. It is raining because of what happened in Spain two weeks ago and the warming of the oceans and this and whatever the heck it is. It is not the learning experiences. It’s called cause and effect. There’s science going on. That’s what the outside world is.
Well what about people? Psychology? It’s the science of psychology. That person is behaving the way they are. Not because of you, because they ate something and didn’t feel good. Their mother died two days ago. Hey, this their why, how to fight, okay? The world outside of you is a sum of its learned experiences, which have nothing to do with the sum of your learned experiences. You grew up in New York, you grew up in California. Oh my God, didn’t know you got married three times and had all kinds of problems. You didn’t know your sister died when you were young and it doesn’t know anything about you. Every moment I’m talking about as you go through this world, every moment of folding in front of you is the result of science is the result of cause and effect inside of you. It’s the result of only your experiences programming you.
So once and for all wake up, it is not going to be the way you want. Why do you think you have to work so hard to try to make it be the way you want? Because it’s not going to be the way you want. You dress a certain way, talk away, act a certain way, wear your hair a certain way, do kinds of things because you’re trying to impress somebody outside so that they be the way you want them to be. Why I? Because they’re not going to naturally be that way. They’ll naturally be the way they are. So this whole thing of saying that what life is about is to manipulate. I don’t care if you use good looks, use drugs, use guns, use force, use money, use. I don’t care. How are you going about manipulating the world to try and make it be what you want?
And the very fact that you’re going to give me an answer means it won’t be that way by itself. It is not naturally the way you want it to be. It’s going to be the way the force that caused it to be, caused it to be that way. That’s a very important thing. It’s sort like there’s no Santa Claus, I’m sorry to tell you. It is not meant to be the way you want. It is not going to be the way you want. How could it positive be? What you want is not what he wants. What you want is not what you wanted yesterday. Somebody told you something. So how in the world can the moment in front of you be what everybody wants it to be? I wonder why there are wars. I wonder why there’s so much disharmony. I’ve just given it to you.
You want a lecture, you got one, right? That’s why there’s disharmony because people are programmed by their experiences and they don’t do well when the moment in front of’em doesn’t match what they want, you don’t do well if it doesn’t match what you want, you do well when it does. Okay, so now you’ve got the overlay, man. So your first step in this growth process is not very growthful. It is basically saying I am lost in me. I’m lost in my thoughts about what I want, what I like, what I don’t like, how people should be. I’m lost in that. It’s okay. Isn’t that bad? You’re supposed to be the highest species on the planet. Well, you’ve evolved wonderfully outside. Let’s start evolving inside because that’s your starting position. Just like animals run away, we have beautiful deer out here. They run away. I’m not going to hurt, but they run away.
So it’s nature, it, it’s survival. You are running away insight. Your survival is psychological. I want to be liked. I don’t want to be rejected. I want to get what I want. So your starting position of evolution is I am lost in me. My consciousness is lost in me and I am out there trying to make you be the way I want you to be. Okay? And you means everybody included the weather. Why does it have to rain on my birthday? My God, it didn’t rain for two weeks. Why does it rain on my birthday? It doesn’t know it’s your birthday. It doesn’t care. It’s your birthday. Nor should it because she’s a farmer and she needs the rain and you don’t have to rain on your birthday. Who wins war. That’s the problem is that people’s psyches are programmed by their past experiences and nobody’s had the same experiences.
Therefore, nobody has the same pattern and not like pattern and there’s only one moment out there, one world out there, and we’re trying to manipulate it to be what we want. It’s stressful, isn’t it? A lot of anxiety. No, you do not have to live like that. You do not have to live with that. There’s no stress, there’s no anxiety. If you’re stressful and anxious, you’re doing the thing I just told you about. It’s you’re silly enough to make up these things based on your past experience and say, I’m only going to be happy if what I want happens and I’m going to be miserable if what I don’t want happens. And then you’re out there trying to manipulate the world to match you. Okay? That’s step one. That’s stage one. That’s basement. Okay? It’s not there’s further down, but basically there you are, there’s the human race, not understanding that they’ve been programmed by the experience they had to and dislike different things and then only be okay if they get what they want and be terrible, terrible, be depressed if they don’t get what they want or if they go what they don’t want.
Alright, so there’s your starting position. So what happens next in your growth is for some reason and there are lots of different reasons it can happen. You start to wake up a little bit, whoa, that’s beautiful. What do you mean? You start to realize that you are not your thoughts. That’s the major next step. You do have thoughts and they’re very strong and you do have preferences. They’re very strong and you do have different feelings that e and a from your heart, but you’re in there watching those. You actually wake up and realize I’m not my thoughts and I’m not my emotions. I’m the experience are my thoughts, the experience are my emotions. It’s just the basic next step of your evolution is to realize you are not these things you’re watching, you are the one who’s watching them. And so you now start to work with yourself naturally.
It doesn’t have to be big teachings or anything like that. Some people wake up how? One of two things, I’ve always taught this and the different degrees of them happen that wake you up. One, you have some experience, some very high experience. You fall in love, you meditate deeply. Something happens that is extraordinary and you realize that you’re much higher than you thought you were, that there’s something very beautiful inside of you. You touch something beautiful inside of you and you start to notice that you can’t stay there because your mind is negative and you have all these fears and so on. And you start to realize I want to stay there. And so you start to work with yourself. We’ll talk about that as we go on. Or you suffer so much, it gets so dark, you go so far down that you can’t handle it and you just have to find a way out.
Do you understand that? That can wake you up also, I can’t go on like this. I’m not saying if it’s suicide, but you just realize what do I do? And you reach out for help, to help you get out of this mental state, emotional state that you’ve gotten into and you can start to feel better. You start to lift yourself up and you start to work with yourself. And you can have, when I say lift yourself, you can have help, but you start to lift yourself up and realize it can be nicer in there. And if it’s not nice in there, guess who did it. It must be you because you’re the one in, there’s your mother in, there’s your father in there, your kids in there. No one’s in there. Only you are in there. So if it’s a mess in there, that’s why you wake up.
If it’s a mess in here, I better clean house. So either because you have a beautiful experience and you get inspired to lift that up or you got so far dark and so far down that just, I got up, I don’t care. I just got to get up. I got to pick this up. I can’t go on like this. Alright? And people wake up under those circumstances. So Mayor Bobba once said, life is sandpaper. It gives you what you want and then takes it away. It gives you what you want. It keeps going back and forth to try and wake you up to cause something that you just don’t stay doing the same stupid thing your entire life of trying to get what you want to avoid what you don’t want. So you start to do what we call work on yourself. That’s your next stage of awakening.
That’s the stage of awakening. People help witness consciousness, mindfulness, that’s a deep state of that, right? What they mean by witness consciousness is you are far enough back to where you’re not struggling to get out. You’ve gotten out enough and what does it mean to get out? Your consciousness is who you are. You are the being who’s aware of your thoughts. You’re the being who’s aware of your emotions. You’re the being who looks out through your eyes. Here’s through your ears, all of it comes back. You’re what we call the end user. A computer can do all kinds of things, but you’re sitting in front of it receiving everything it’s doing. You’re in there watching your thoughts. There’s a difference. Words are so powerful, right? You’re not normally watching your thoughts. You’re normally lost in your thoughts. Witness consciousness is not even true. Witness consciousness is not watching your thoughts.
It’s being aware of your thoughts. Watching is a willful act. I’m watching, I’m watching you. The other is I’m aware that you’re there. One is just a passive awareness. Consciousness is aware of what’s going on. The other is you are still efforting to try and willfully do something. So they’re like phases. There’s phases of awakening. So you first awake, you’ve got to get out or you want to have more nice internal experiences. So you start working with yourself. Oh, you can do positive thinking, you can do mantra, all kinds of things you can do, but you found different techniques that help you separate yourself from the part of you that habitually tends to be negative, tends to be fearful, it tends to be needy. You learned to be that way. You had past experiences that hurt you, and so you carry this on inside. So there’s that part, but when you start to wake up, then you start to pay attention that I don’t want to be like that.
That’s the key intent. I don’t want to be like that. So you raised above that you don’t think you’re in anymore. You just notice you have one of those things, an ego, a problem, and you start to work your way out. I talked to you about a very high state, which you witness consciousness. The highest state of witness consciousness is you’re not doing anything. I want to get that across. You’re not doing practices and I’m not telling you not to do practices. I’m telling you you’ll get to a state if you work with yourself to where you’re just here. Here’s an example. What I mean, don’t do anything just right now. Can you see what’s in front of you? How hard was it? How many mantras you have to do? How many hours of meditation what’d you have to do? How much will did you use?
Zero. It was just consciousness, being aware of what’s in front of it. Okay? Why can’t you do that inside? Why can’t you just be there aware that jerem mind is talking and your heart is feeling not doing anything about it, just that’s what’s happening. Just like you just did it. I love teaching you that. You just did it with how you experience and see the outside world. It’s just there. Unless it does something you don’t like, then you have to do something about it, don’t you? And if you’re spiritual, you’ll feel that you have to do something about it. Then you’ll try to not do something about it. So now you’re double trouble. Then you’ll judge yourself for wanting to do something about it and then you’ll tell everybody how good you were because you didn’t do something about it and you manage to get over the guilt.
Whoa, that’s kind of busy. That’s not the same as I told you. What’s it like to just see, it’s called just seeing. It’s a very zen term, isn’t it? Just seeing, just being. That’s who you are. You are the consciousness that is aware of us in front of you. Guess what your thoughts are in front of you. A person who’s seated in a seat of self, not all the way back. We’re going to go back much further, but one who’s established in a seat of self, believe me, they look down at their thoughts just like you have to look out to see things at a distance. There’s a sense of perspective in there. You are sitting back here, your thoughts are down here, your emotions are down here, and they don’t pull you down into them. You’re just aware that they’re going on just like you saw that you guys are here.
You saw, okay, I see what’s going on. He’s feeling insecure today. There’s a little tinge of this, whatever the heck it is. You’re not saying it. You’re not saying it. You just notice he’s excited about it. Just like I noticed he’s sitting there. I know she’s sitting there, he’s noticing. That’s witness consciousness, okay? And I’m telling you, you don’t have to look down. I don’t have to look anywhere to see you guys. It’s just hello There you are seeing it all the time. And then every once in a while you’ll see the tendency to get pulled down. You see, oh, there’s a tendency. Somebody said something, you were doing fine and it just hit you the wrong way and you start feeling your consciousness start to get pulled down into that emotion or into that fear or into that need and you’ve done it long enough.
You know who you are. It’s like pulling a reins on a horse in this tiniest movement, tiniest act of will like that. That’s all I was serious and it doesn’t go down there because you did enough work on yourself to become established in the seat. Now we went from the beginning was you just woke up enough to start working on yourself. You don’t want it to be that way or you want to experience something nicer that you have before experience, but now I just went that whole gambit. It’s all witness consciousness from first awakening to establishing a seat of awareness. What is happening? Consciousness is freeing itself, extricating itself from being attached to what it’s looking at in between. You’ll do things like this. I need to learn to stop my mind. You don’t want to stop your mind if the mind is talking. There’s a reason.
If the mind is negative, there’s a reason. If the heart feels jealous, there’s a reason. You don’t want to sit there and say, I don’t want jealousy anymore. I don’t want to feel jealous anymore. I don’t like it. I don’t want to be jealous anymore because you’re going to suppress. Because the very fact that you say you don’t want to feel jealous means you do. So you see that this is coming up, that that’s there. Okay, fear, jealousy, insecurity, what the heck it is? And you see it coming up and I don’t want to have that. I don’t have that. I’m telling you, you’re going to suppress if you have it and you want to not have it. It is not the highest way to deal with that, to push it away, to sit there and say, I don’t like this. I don’t want to have that.
I don’t want to be like that. It’s nice. I’m glad you don’t want to be like that. Good. Don’t be like that. But you’ll find out as you grow, there’s a higher way instead of how do I get rid of this? You ask a much deeper question. Why is this there? Now how do I get rid of jealousy or fear or insecurity or self-consciousness? Why is it there? Why do I feel that? You look down under it and I’ve talked to you a million times. If you do that, you’re going to find out the same answer all the time for all of that stuff they call humanness. You over the course of your life have had experiences that were not comfortable. What you did with them is push them away. You didn’t want to experience them so you held them inside, you pushed them away.
So now you are scared of them. They want out. They don’t want to be down there. Nothing wants to be down there. It wants to be open so it comes back up. It’s like a reminder. I’m still here. See, you’re scared, aren’t you? That’s you shove fear inside of you for your entire life. You see, I see jealousy. There it is. It’s still there. Why? Because you shoved down rejection, insecurity, different things that happened. It hurt you, people disappointed you and so on. You couldn’t handle it so you shoved it inside of you and there’s an energy inside of you that does not want that stuff in there. Just like your immune system for your body does not want bacteria and all kinds of stuff in there, viruses and bacteria. Therefore it actually knows how to get rid of it. Whether there been reason, I mean, yes, there’s an extreme where it can’t take care of it. You need help, but man, 95% of the time, all the time, it’s taking care of the stuff. You don’t realize how much it does. You don’t ever experience it. It sends those white part puzzles out to her fights. Everything boosts it out of there. It’s just a natural process. Guess what? Your heart and your mind have a higher more system of how to get garbage out of there.
Well, how do you know? Because it keeps coming back up. Go on. Just have a talk with somebody that made you uncomfortable and don’t handle it. Well, think about it a lot and suppress it. Guess what? I want to know what happens the next time you see that person, right? It doesn’t want it down there. It’s pushing it up. The Shakti underneath the system of purification is pushing it out of its way. Get out of my way. I want to feel love. I want to feel beauty. I want to feel Shakti. I want to feel spirit, but you shove this stuff on top of me, I’m going to keep pushing it back up for your entire life. Tries to push it back up. You think that it’s bad you don’t like when it pushes it back up. You say something’s wrong. You literally sit there and say, how do I not feel jealous?
I have to learn how to not feel jealous. You don’t sit there and say, what did I shove down there that is making me feel jealous? Am I willing to work through the garbage that I stored inside of myself? And then there’s no jealousy. I’m telling you there’s no, there’s nothing but love. That’s what’s in there. Love, beauty, inspiration. That’s what you feel you can get so high, so clean that if you love somebody and they do something that you don’t approve of, it naturally happens inside of you to say, am I willing to give up this beautiful feeling of love because of what that person did, even somebody you’re in relationship with? And the answer is no. Why would I give up love because of something you did. Love is beautiful, isn’t it? I told you, when you say to somebody I love you, you’re not telling the truth.
What you mean is I feel love in your presence. How do you know? Because if you don’t feel love in their presence, you try to find somebody else. You love, love. And if you happen to feel love in their presence, the chemistry, the physics, the psychology, the different stuff you got stored down there gets shifted around hope it lasts and you feel love, but it doesn’t always last does it. And so you catch on that when you’re high enough you start understanding. I love love and I love in your presence. I love being with you. I love the interaction. It’s beautiful. Let’s keep it that way. Let’s work on ourselves. So we always feel the love and the presence. But otherwise, if somebody does something and I’m not give you any examples, you’ll go upset anything. Anything doesn’t take much other, okay? And then all of a sudden you’re hurt or you’re jealous or you’re insecure.
This, that happens, right? And then you give up love, you give up love. Eventually you’ll do that. Let’s talk a little higher now because you cleansed enough of that stuff. You’re welcome the job and these are different stages of the witness consciousness state, but you’re now aware, you’re awake and you realize it’s very nice in there except for you made it a mess. It’s not naturally a mess. It’s naturally beautiful. Your natural state is love, inspiration, beauty all the time. But what you’ve done is you’re not evolved enough to be able to handle what goes on in there. And so you suppress all this stuff, you repress all this stuff, you resist all this stuff and it’s all built up in there. A lot of it. So you work on it and eventually get to the point where I’m not trading this off. I am not going to trade off this flow of beautiful energy going on inside of me because of something somebody else did, especially since the only thing they did was the sum of the learning experiences.
It is not personal, nothing’s personal, right? It is just the interaction with the sum of somebody else to learn experiences. Whatcha are you going to do right? You have a choice. Let it bother you or say, I’m not going to trade. So now we’ve reached a nice state of evolving, right? Steroid heaven and that’s a nice state, but notice the gap. First you woke up and you I don’t want to be like this. You start working with it, then you woke up enough and you got worked with enough. Now how do you work with it enough? You know what I teach? Yes, people teach meditation. Don’t why I meditate. There are enough people teaching meditation. You don’t need me teaching meditation. There’s lots of stuff going on. What I teach is what you can do while you’re not meditating there, which is way more time than when you’re meditating.
Don’t tell me I tell you not to meditate. That’s not true. But to me what you do the rest of the time is what’s really going to make the difference. That’s what we talked about. So what do you do the rest of the time you practice not shoving more down there. Somehow we think I need to get this stuff out. If you can’t even handle your daily interactions of the weather, the driver in front of you, what somebody said, what somebody didn’t say, just little everyday things. If you can’t handle those, you’re not going to be able to handle this stuff when it comes back up. That’s the stuff you handpicked over the course of your life. I ain’t handle this stuff either. You go through suppression, re pressure or denial. There’s Freud. That’s what you did with the big stuff, isn’t there? Yes, you need to go therapy, go to therapy, whatever you need to do.
I’m not telling you what to do, but I am telling you this, if you can’t handle the driver in front of you because they didn’t use their blinker and you’re getting all upset or because the red lights turned every single light, you have to stop every single time. If you can’t handle life the everyday interactions of life, you are not going to be able to handle that stuff. That’s hand-selected. Stuff that you pick to not like more than anything in the whole world. It’s a lot bigger than the light turning red when you’re in a rush or the guy I know uses blinker or driving 15 miles below the speed limit or raining when you don’t want it to and that’s really big. It rained when I didn’t want it to. Oh my God, I got so upset. Believe I have to deliver something and the papers and it wasn’t raining and the minute I stopped, I started pouring and told everybody this for the rest of the day for a week.
I couldn’t believe it. What’s wrong with if you can’t handle the everyday stroke sense of life, I am telling you, you are not going to be able to handle that stuff when it comes back up. So what your growth becomes real growth. Solid growth. That doesn’t go backwards. You keep it as yours forever. They say once you learn to ride a bike, you never forget. Once you learn to handle things, you’ll be able to handle bigger things than bigger things than bigger things. I’m telling you, if you can handle the way the driver in front of you drives, if you can handle, there’s traffic. If you can handle the everyday meniscus stupid situations that go on in the book and living untethered, I call it a cost benefit analysis. What does that mean? Here’s my cost benefit analysis. I’m getting upset about the traffic one.
I can get upset and screw up my entire life, screw up the entire time that I’m sitting there, screw up my day or I can not get upset and have fun there. A hundred percent costs zero benefit. So you start making rational decisions. I’m going to learn how to handle the traffic. I’m going to learn how to handle the driver in front of me when they don’t use their blinker, you kept step on their brakes because they’re looking for something and I’m going to learn to handle the weather. It’s hot, it’s cold, it’s wet, it’s humid, my hair is frizzy. I’m going to learn to handle that. I was eating, I dropped a little ketchup on my pants. Now I dunno what to do. I don’t have time to go home, but I have to go back to work. But I that’s embarrassing. They’ll think I’m a slob.
No I can’t. Wow, isn’t that really important? And you start working on yourself to handle the everyday little situations that there’s nothing to it. You just, how do you handle it? Breathe, relax. People say, I don’t teach techniques. I do. So I teach you how to handle this kind of stuff. What do you mean when you’re sitting there in traffic getting upset, get off the planet. Just use your intellectual mind to get off the planet and see this little ball in the midst of black empty space spinning in the middle of nowheres dude and you’re driving around, scooting around just like the Mars rovers. They were fun, right? You got one on earth, it’s an earth rover, okay? And it’s got obstacles. You call the obstacles traffic. All right, fine. Have fun. You get to do this. Who’s stopping you? What did it cost? Zero.
Nothing. What does it cost to not do it your entire day? Getting uptight, getting anxious, close. Just start working with yourself constantly. Make it a game. It’s a video game. That is a technique. Don’t tell me I don’t teach techniques. I don’t teach opposite nostril breathing. She does. Somebody should because it works. Okay? Believe me, if I talk like this, I’m not telling you not to do those things. I’m telling you, if you do those things and if you’re doing ’em, you’re so uptight, how about we learn to not be uptight so you can do ’em to get higher instead of to not be down. It’s a wonderful thing to catch on and say part of your growth is your everyday life and it’s a major part of your growth. And once you learn how to not be bothered by things that you don’t need to be bothered by.
As Oprah said, her favorite line in the new book was as follows, the moment in front of you is bothering. You are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you. The traffic is not bothering you, it’s just traffic sitting on a road mean you’re bothering yourself about it, aren’t you? The rain is not bothering you by God. You take a shower every morning, you get wet, okay? The rain is not bothering you, you’re bothering yourself because it’s raining. How do I know that? Because there’s lots of times you like the rain, you’re doing this to yourself and then you’re anxious and you have anxiety and you have fears and ulcers and all kinds of things. So you wake up and realize there’s work I can do every moment in my life. And then when you do that work, it becomes your permanent state. If you’re able to handle the heat, able to handle the rain, able to handle the cold, then you’re able to handle it.
Just like riding a bike. Once you know how to do it, you don’t even think about it twice. There’s nothing to it. How about bothering to do that? That is your technique. So you just get to the point where if you’re able to handle it, it doesn’t bother you anymore because you’re able to handle it. And then I’m telling you, you will find out that when something bigger happens, you can handle that too. You just use the same techniques that you use. Relax, release, get to outer space, right? I say can you imagine if somebody’s yelling at you, you didn’t do anything but just they had a bad day and they’re yelling at you. Instead of getting ’em all uptight and closing down and yelling back at them, you just leave the planet. You taught yourself to do it. Just leave the planet and spin around and empty dog’s face and get yelled at.
I dropped out of the planet earth and somebody yelling at me. It’s like a dog barking. Have fun. Have fun. Doesn’t mean now when you come back, try to see if there’s something that they were saying you should be listening to. But don’t just get uptight and upset about everything which you do. And you know you can work with yourself. Then you can handle bigger things than bigger things than bigger things. Then you start to get to the state I talked to you about. Every time you can handle something that used to bother you, you’re less bothered. By definition one equals one. But if you’re not bothered by something that used to bother you, you’re less bothered. What does it feel like to be less bothered? It’s nice. And then eventually, if you’re not bothered and things aren’t bothering you, you start to feel good.
Why? It’s your natural state. You do not have to work to feel good. You have to work to stop feeling bad. Stop doing the things that make you feel bad. Do you understand your natural state is ecstasy. Do you understand that? Every human being’s, natural state is ecstasy. Total such an un eternal, conscious bliss. We’ll get there on our next stages. That’s what’s going on inside of you all the time. Well, why don’t I feel it? Because you have pushed all this garbage on top of it and you’re busy staring at your garbage. If I close the blinds, it got dark. There’s no light coming in. What am I going to do? I better get some artificial lights. I better get some LEDs. I better do something. No, open the blinds. No better than that. Stop closing the blinds. You have to open them. If you don’t close them, it’s the same thing inside of you.
Stop closing your heart. Stop closing your mind. Stop upsetting yourself and you’re going to find out if I stop doing all that garbage that I’m habitually lost in, it starts feeling nice in there. So now you’ll get back up naturally if you do this as you learn to handle things and stop bothering yourself, it’s fun. I sort of guess like a video game. You got to go. What layer can you go to and then pack, man, eat you. Gloria. I say you do better at it. You come up. Alright, so you keep working with this kind of stuff and you’re going to get better and then you don’t go down. I don’t want you to work to get up. I’m very different. I don’t want to teach you how to get up. I want to teach you how to not go down. If you don’t go down, it will take you up by itself.
It’s now a natural state. Now you have to worry, what did I do to get high? Oh, how do I do that again? What’s a vacation? How can I afford it? I can go to seminar. That’s wonderful. Do all those things right? But that’s like saying I’m down. How do I get up? I’m telling you, try to find out why you’re down and stop doing that and you’re going to find out your natural state will lift you up. That’s what I talked in the beginning. There’s a thing called a spiritual experience thing called a spiritual state. When you let go of the garbage that’s making it so you don’t feel the inspiration of the high, you’re going to start feeling inspiration of the high naturally. You don’t go down from there unless you choose to go down. Like I said, somebody says something, somebody does something.
They feel it starts to pull you back down there and you’ll reach a point, I guarantee you, where you’ll not go down ever no matter what. Period. Why would I go down? Everybody’s been trying to get up. You’re up. Why would you give it up here? I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you a dollar. Give me a million. No, I’ll tell you what. I’ll say something to you that bothers you. Give me your love. Give me your ecstasy. Give me all that beauty that you’ve worked all this time to feel. No, I will not. So you reached that state where you’ve done that work inside. So now you’ve reached the point and I’ve been talking about I don’t have to go too deep where you are high enough. That’s what it means. You get high, you let go of what was holding you down, not you forced yourself up the doors of heaven.
Fight your way through because you’re coming back down. That’s why people ask me about drugs. I don’t want to talk about it. Why? I’m telling you, you’re coming back. Go read MDOs, my God, what that man did to try and stay up there with drugs and I’m funny. Alright, so basically he said the same thing. You can’t stay there. This is how you stay there by letting go of why you’re not there. But again, I’m not judging anything you do. I don’t teach you how to live your life, but I do teach you things that you can do while you’re living your life that raise you. People write me from all over the world. They write us every day. Who writes an author to say thank you? I never heard of such a thing. But anyone who practice this stuff, all of ’em, they sit there and say, my whole life has changed. Well, of course it’s changed. You stop bothering yourself. I’ll tell you what, write me a letter. I don’t know what to do. Make. I keep hitting stuff in the head. I keep hitting. Oh my God, I hurt. My head hurts, right? Say make you rise back. Well, when you feel hitting yourself in the head, don’t I’m doing so much better. What advice? That’s unbelievable.
That’s all I’m telling you. Stop bothering yourself. If you stop bothering yourself, you won’t be bothered. The vast majority of stuff you bother yourself about, there’s nothing to do about there. Nothing to do about the driver, friend, nothing to do about the rain, nothing to do about the heat, nothing to do about somebody not liking you. They’re some of their learned experiences. I don’t understand why they don’t like me. Of course you don’t. You didn’t have their experiences. You just start to wake up and you stop bothering yourself and then you stop being bothered. And I’m telling you, you will find the shakti, this energy, you don’t know what the word means. I don’t care. You will feel this uplifting energy happening inside of you all the time until you bring yourself down, until you’re willing to go down. And eventually you won’t do that. I don’t care how long it takes, okay? I’m interested in being okay for the rest of your life, but it takes some time. You understand that? Somebody wants to ask me, well, if I follow that path and keep letting go of things, how long will it take before I become enlightened?
You know what I answered? None of your business, none of your business. Just do the work. See what happens. You come back and tell me. So basically you commit yourself to stop bothering yourself. And what happen when you stop bothering yourself, you’ll stop being bothered as much obviously. And this energy will start coming up inside. And then you have to decide what it’s worth. Am I willing to give up this energy? Because what somebody said, what somebody did, and eventually you’ll say no. Every single thing I was doing was try to get love, was to try to feel high, was to try to feel elated, was try to feel inspired. That’s why I’m doing it. Why would I give up what I want? So you just basically decide, I’m not giving up whatever level I get, I’m not giving up. And you start working with letting go, letting go of part of you that would go back down.
Don’t go back down. Okay, alright, fine. So now we’re at the point where you don’t go back down. What do you mean? It is not about opening your heart, it’s about not closing your heart. You know, close your heart, don’t you? If you close your heart, it’s like closing the blinds. It gets dark. Why would you do such a thing? So you learn not to close your heart. Then you’re going to sing a song door of my heart, open what I keep for thee. You’ll get to the point where no, no, it’s not door of my heart open. What I keep for thee. There’s hinges on doors. If you take off those pins and the hinges, the door falls off and it’s not there anymore. There no door all gone. Bye bye. That’s what I want for you. It’s not a matter of not closing it.
It’s not even there. It will never close for the rest of your existence, not even the rest of your life. Take the door off. Be willing to let it go. You don’t need to protect yourself. What are you protecting yourself from the garbages you stored inside yourself. You’re capable. There’s no one in there, but you make it nice in there. I’m telling you how to eventually you’ll reach the point where it’s so nice in there that you don’t have to do anything. Just like you didn’t do anything to look outside the shakti’s flowing. You’re feeling it all the time. It’s uplifting. It’s lifting you up. Things happen. You feel a little shake, a little stutter. You’re let go. I’m not going down. Why would I go down? Why would I go down? Then I have to work to come back up. I just got to go down, right?
You start by accepting whatever happened, I’m not coming down. That’s what acceptance surrender are. It doesn’t mean that when you’ve managed to let go and you’re fine that you don’t come down here and deal with it. There are things you need to deal with. Not most things, you listen to me. Most things you think you need to deal with are because they bothered you. I have to figure out what to do with you because you yelled at me. You said something because you took the corner office and I deserved it. In other words, you are doing this. The moment I say, okay, fine, I honor you, you got the corner office, congratulations, I really mean it. Then there’s nothing to do. Most of the stuff you are dealing with, you can’t handle what happened. You’re trying to figure out what to do about it. So when you’re willing to let go and stay high, yes, there are things you have to do.
Take care of the kids, do this, do that. Earn a living. There are things you do, but you don’t do them out of trying to fix what’s wrong with you. You do it out of expression, the beauty that’s inside of you. I said that over and over. Do you understand that most people now go to work to earn money. They work nine to five, five days a week. So they’re going to have the weekend off. There’s a wasted life. You enjoy the work. I like the paycheck. No. What are you doing? That’s crazy. How does a yogi go to work? I can’t wait to get there. I can’t wait to get there. Whatcha going to do what I always do, serve, express, give. That’s what I get to do or do whatever they want me to do. I don’t care. It’s fun. And in fact, a true yogi, true being who’s in the states I’m talking about, they don’t understand why they’re being paid.
Do they pay you to go to the beach? They pay to go home and take care of the kids, enjoy being with the kids. Why are they paying you to love what you’re doing? Express yourself and participate. Work with people, but you get paid also. Well, it’s a whole different life. Once you don’t have to go out there and offset the fact that you’re not okay, you are okay. I want you to always be okay. Look at me. I want you to always be okay. I want you wake up in the morning, I’m back and I don’t care what happens. It’s going to be fun, but not everything. Sometimes are rough roads. Yeah, I told you in the Olympics they have some races, but some of the races, they put obstacles in your way. They’re called hurdles. They put obstacles in the way. What do you do?
You learn to jump over ’em. You learn to get good at it. That’s what life is. I hope you’re having a good time. Alright, so now we reach a state where you become established in that seat of consciousness where everything is just something you see. You’re able to let it go, but you still deal with it. You come down and serve, but you’re not coming down, right? You’re just expressing. You’re expressing. Is that a high state? No. No, it is not a high state. How great are you? That’s the launch pad for the high states. While you’re lost in what you’re looking at, you can’t go higher. You’re coming down now you’ve established yourself. Your consciousness has extricated itself from being lost in the mind and emotions. It’s able to stay there and mind emotions go through their changes. You work with it, you deal with it.
You’re at peace with it. You’re in harmony with it now. And this isn’t something that you do, something that happens to you. Spiritual growth, something happens to you because you’re not resisting anymore. What starts to happen is you’re sitting there, you’re looking forward and you’re fine with what you’re looking at because you’re fine with what you’re looking at. It’s not pulling you down. And because it’s not pulling you down at some point, not mentally, it just dawns on you. Where did you come from? I just explained to you where your thoughts come from. Your emotions come from. Biology told you where your body came from. Where did you come from? You who’s now not getting pulled away from yourself are established in the self. You’re seated in a seat. What’s behind the seat? You’re used to looking forward, down. All of a sudden you realize, wait, there’s a behind.
There’s everywhere. It’s only because I’m looking down that there’s a down. If I look at you and I don’t see anything else, I was busy looking at me. Who was, where did I come from? Cry? Where did I come from? What’s my source? What’s the source of your consciousness and what is behind? And that’s the great higher states is when you stop looking down at you at your thoughts and your emotions, it just naturally you get centered enough to where you start to feel a pull back up just like you felt a pull down into your stuff. Now this is the next stage. You literally feel a vacuum cleaner pulling your consciousness back into it. It’s like a hot air balloon that was tethered and the tethers got cut. Well, it was tethered. You kept trying to go up. When you cut the tethers, it goes up by itself.
That’s the true ascent. Now you’re not looking down. There’s nothing holding you down, and you feel this force pulling you up. That’s a natural force and it’s not easy to let go. The great masters talk about that. You’re going to talked about, you said it right you once, that a bird that’s been locked in a cage for a prolonged period of time. When you open the door, it doesn’t fly out. It lands on the right of the edge of the cage and looks around. It’s not easy to be free. You understand that You’re not used to being free, not that kind of free, where you don’t have a body, you don’t have a mind. You’re just completely free. And so it starts to pulling you up. And now the letting go is not about letting go because it’s pulling you down. It’s letting go. The innate fear of not existing, of not being separate, of not being a consciousness that’s a point of consciousness, looking at your mind and your emotions, but it’s just consciousness.
This ocean of consciousness, and you’re letting go and it pulls you back into it and the great ones went there. That’s what the deep states of yoga are about. Yoga means union merger. Mayor Baba said, when I reached that state for the first time, it was like my consciousness had been a drop of water staring at me. When it let go completely, that drop fell into the ocean of consciousness and that’s the merger, that’s the oneness. That’s Christ said. My father and I are one. That’s where Buddha went to Nirvana. You are in that state right now, but you’re looking down at your own thought. I try to teach you the highest thing I can teach you is you’re not trying to go to God, you’re trying to stop leaving. You are already there. You’re there looking down from there. So when you’re done with that addiction of yourself, it starts to pull you up and you start to let go.
You just let go. If you use an active will, you can’t go because will requires that you be there exercising the will. So eventually it’s just surrender. It’s just that state. Have you ever closest you can understand? Have you ever been so in love or something so beautiful happened that you melted, you lost your sense of separateness. You just melted into the moment. The sunset was so beautiful. It’s just the touch, the depth of your being and you weren’t there for a while, right? Unfortunately, you came back and you didn’t like coming back and then you tried to go again, which you can’t try because it happened by itself. Imagine that somebody loves so much that they’re in their arms and just melt, just melt, just cease to be, just melt into it and they say, I want to do this again. You can’t. Now you’re there trying to make it happen again.
Have you noticed? So this thing of being able to let go of yourself, at that point, they let go of themselves and they merged and they came back and said, that’s who you are. You are God. So that’s the stairway to heaven. You see it? I went stage by stage. You have the right to use your life for something very great. Yes, you can get married. Yes, you can have children. Yes, you can have a job. Yes, you can have money. Yes, you can travel. That’s not the meaning of your life. Planet’s been here for 4.5 billion years. You hear how long? So many 80 years. That’s what your life’s about. Having a few experiences that are nice. There’s nothing wrong with the experiences. It’s not renunciation, but it’s not the meaning of your life. The meaning of your life is if it’s true that you are in this God realized state, but you’re busy looking down because you can’t handle your garbage. Maybe we need to work with that. So master said, I said, the meaning of life is self-realization. Now I understand self-realization, realizing who the self is, who you are in there. Alright, hope you work on yourself.
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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