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: Ative, Jai Masters. It’s amazing how often the opposites come around and touch each other. So for example, we always talk about joy, ecstasy, love. Let’s talk about pain and suffering. You’re going to find out how close they touch each other in the back. First of all, the proper use of the word pain and the proper use of word suffering is as follows. Pain is a physiological event of the body. Sensors usually tactile, but it can be otherwise experiencing something that is sending very, very, very strong difficult vibrations through the nervous system and it creates pain. Okay, that’s pain. What is suffering? Suffering is a psychological event, not a physiological event. We use ’em interchangeably, but they’re not, I don’t know about anybody else, but from a spiritual point of view they’re quite different. So suffering is as an internal experience, mind and emotions of those psychological things, not physiological things. Suffering is generated when what you want inside is not happening outside or what you don’t want inside is happening outside. It’s the distance between your preferences, your desires, your earnings, your fears. These are all psychological, emotional things and what is coming in through your senses from the outside. The greater the gap between those two things, the more you suffer.
That suffering is very different than pain. They’re both very difficult to handle as far as the soul’s concern sitting in there as ah, not comfortable, but it’s very important to distinguish them. If you have pain, as I’ve described it, it’s fairly straightforward what to try to do about it. You go to some form of a doctor, whether it is a spiritual healer, a naturopathic, or you just go somewheres to people who know more than you do about the body and the system that can help with the pain and if they can help with it and they help with it many, many different ways, you all know that what western science has said is I can make you not feel it. I can suppress it. I can make the nerves less reactive. I can block different things in the brain. I can do things to make it so you’re not feeling the pain.
Okay, fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. It helps people. That’s what they do. When you get more toward eastern medicine and newer things, energy things you’re dealing with, well, I don’t just want to stop the pain. I want to find out what’s causing it and find the root cause and fix it. So then you go deeper. Not that Western science doesn’t do that, but all the pharmaceuticals and all these different things are generally not about that. They’re about suppressing. How about making it so you don’t experience it, which is fine. I don’t judge these things and you’re going to find I don’t judge anything. Everybody has to go through what they need to go through and deal with it the way they need to deal with it and they learn and they grow and so on. So you take painkillers and you get addicted to ’em.
Obviously we’ve seen what goes on, right? So everything has it gene young or you try to do totally natural things and it doesn’t do anything and you feel terrible. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I need to go through. You need to go through and learn from it. But if you’re talking about physiological pain, there are professionals that one end of the spectrum or another that try to help and you make your decisions and so on. And if you have pain that can’t be taken care of other than extreme medications and you don’t want to do those, there are things that you can learn to do to make the pain a little more tolerable. And the main one is relaxation. They will teach you if the nerves, now we’re talking about physiological things. If you have a pinched nerve, you have trouble with a nerve.
If the muscle can relax around it, you’re not going to feel as much pain. So there’s massage, there’s finding out why you have tension. There’s all kinds of things because psychological things do manifest as pain in the body. Why? Because if you’re psychologically tense and suffering, it causes you to tense physiologically, which can cause ulcers and cause all kinds of problems in the body. We all know that. So they teach you, relax, relax, relax, relax, relax, relax, relax. If people who have a lot of pain that they have to deal with, learn to relax, relax, get some distance from it, relax. Yoga does that. It’s a methodology, right? That’s physiological pain. I don’t teach what to do because I don’t feel the right to a teacher that I had once very, very early in college. She taught that if you teach somebody about how to deal with something, you’re going to get challenged to deal with it yourself. So I don’t want to tell you what to do.
I ain’t touching that stuff. But there we have a discussion about pain. I’m much more interested in the discussion about suffering. I define suffering as the distance between what you want inside and don’t want inside your preferences and what is going on outside. So talk about it. I never talk about at this level, let’s say you really like somebody and not paying attention to you. Why should that cause pain? Nothing’s happening, but it is happening inside of you. So in your psychology, your inner mind and emotions, you’ve developed a mental and emotional pattern that says, I want this person to like me. I want this person to pay attention to me. Okay, you made that up. Somebody else is freaked out. As the person walks up to ’em and they says, all free, I don’t have anything to do with this person, but you’re freaked out.
They don’t walk up to you. The person’s not caustic. You are done this. You say, no, you’re not treating me right, not talking to me. Nice. They’re not doing that. No, they’re just being them and you want them to be other than that, and therefore you say they’re causing me to suffer. Well, I can say you’re causing you to suffer because it takes two to tanga. That’s the difference between suffering and pain. Suffering takes you wanting something to be a certain way and the outside not being that way and you feel suffering. Now we can talk about it and I want to talk about it. We’re going to talk about it. Why? I don’t understand. There’s nobody poking you. There’s nobody sticking knives in you, but it feels like it. Okay? It feels, does it get hot in there but there’s no heat, there’s nothing going on.
Take your temperature. 98.6, okay? But it gets hot in there. Can you feel like you’re being torn to pieces inside? Can your heart feel like it’s being shredded in a shredder? Yes or no? Can you feel like it? She ripped my heart apart. I always thought poetry. Have you ever had your heart ripped apart? Every single one of you have experienced stuff like that. Have you ever had anybody say or do something that drove your mind crazy? It just kept thinking about it. It bothered you couldn’t sleep. Okay, that’s suffering. Notice it took two things. It took you wanting something to be a certain way or not wanting to be a certain way. Mental pattern. I want you to like me, not him. Therefore, I suffer. I feel jealousy. I feel abandonment. I feel rejection. They’re not have anything to do with the body. They manifest in the body.
I told you why. Let’s get it over with. Is there energy work and body work? Yes, of course there is. Why? Because the energy system, the the Shakti has to pass through the mind, through the emotional body and down into the physical body. If those higher bodies, his thing of his bodies, those higher bodies are clean and pure. The Shakti pours down and feeds this body and you feel wonderful. You feel enthusiastic. You could take on the world. You don’t get tired. You’re just fine because you’re being fed from inside. If those bodies are a mess, are caustic and they’re vibrating and they’re out of balance, then when the energy comes through, it vibrates like that. When it comes through, it’s like passes through the filter. You know what your mind looks like. How would you like someone to pass through a filter of your mind, what it’s doing?
And so when it hits the body, the whole nervous system, the whole muscular system, even the organs, that’s why they can trace. You get acupuncture and stuff like that. They can track the energy that’s going to certain organs and cause problems with the organ and sit there and say, what’s happening because of this happening, because of that energy point and they can heal the organs. They’re not healing the organ. They’re stopping from being sick because the energy’s out of balance, right? So let’s get that down. So don’t tell me that. I’m not saying that there’s healing work that can take place with energy work and with massage and with all kinds of things. It’s generally not the root cause. There can be physiological nerves that are messed up that cause your muscles to protect, try to protect. No question that’s pain. But a lot of the time it’s the suffering you’re doing inside in the subconscious and the conscious that by the time it comes down into the body, the muscles lock up and the nerves get all nervous and all messed up.
So they are tied together. But if you’re only working on the body work and you’re not working on why that energy is going down like that, it’s not going to last. It’s going to show up somewhere else or show up back there again because you haven’t dealt with the root of the problem and generally the root of the problem is that you’re suffering inside and that causes your body to experience pain and attention and all kinds of physical ailments. Yes, if the energy is messed up enough when it comes into the body, it can cause sicknesses. It can cause ulcers, it can cause all kinds of things. They may find out it causes cancer. I don’t know. All I know is your body is a very delicate system of 35 trillion cells that are trying to communicate with each other, talk to each other. It’s a very sophisticated thing.
You go throwing junk in there, it’s so good. Which is why something like yoga, which was formed hundreds and thousands of years ago, to stretch the body in such a way that it could release energy. That’s all yoga, zooming, haha, yoga. It’s releasing energy that got blocked just like acupuncture and so on. Okay, so we’ve dealt there how suffering, psychological suffering can cause physiological damage and thank God the western world has caught onto that and they’re teaching that. They teach you that part of your ailment can be due to your tension and your stress and all that kind of stuff. The trouble is they give you pills, which like I said, if you need ’em, you take ’em. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there are many things you can do. I want to focus on what is this mess that is suffering? You have suffered and you know what I mean when I say suffering and it has nothing to do with your physiological being.
It has to do with your psychological being, which means what is your psychological being? Okay, let’s do that. What truth? I’m not saying psychology teaches do this. Some of it does, but most of ’em doesn’t. What is your psychological being? Things have happened to you in your life. Some of them when they come in are pleasant. They’re just pleasant vibrations. But a rattlesnake rattling in front of you is not pleasant. A tiger jumping at you is not pleasant. That of course is not psychological, it’s normal or reaction. But there are things that come in to you that are not pleasant. What do you do with those? That’s where psychology comes in. That’s where the root of the problem comes in. You don’t handle them well. You don’t handle things like the weather when it’s not the way you want. You don’t handle things that drive in front of you when it’s not the way you want.
You don’t handle what somebody said to you that you didn’t want. You don’t handle what somebody didn’t say to you. When you want it, it comes in and it doesn’t feel good. Okay? Well, Buddhists say everything has its nature. So in the purest sense, vibrations that come in from the outside come in and some of them feel comfortable and nice and pleasant and some of them don’t just leave psychology hours. Just basically the vibration itself. Like I say, a rattlesnake rattling in front of you is not, or even if it’s 10 feet away and they can’t strike that far, it’s not comfortable. It’s not a comfortable experience. So what do you do with these things? I know what you do. I’ve watched it for so long in me. We’re all the same in there. We’re at different levels, but we’re all the same in there.
What you do is resist when something outside is happening is charging at you. Here comes the maniacs charging at you with a bat. What do you do? You protect yourself. What do you do when somebody comes in that isn’t pleasant? You protect yourself. You resist it, you push it away as you understand that you have hands in there, don’t you? And you have the ability to resist the energy that’s coming in. When you do that, you store it. That’s the same thing I teach you when I’m talking about joy and love. That’s what I said. They’re the same thing. You store that thing. If it can’t pass through you and you use your will to resist it, you stored it. It has no place it can go. I told you the Colorado River used to run all the way down through Colorado, wherever it runs, and then they built the dam.
Guess what? It can’t flow anymore. Therefore it gives up. It does not give up. I don’t care how long that dam’s been there. You get one crack. It’s going to try to push its way through to get back where it was this energy that came into you, this vibration of the outside world that came into you. You’re not receiving the outside world. The outside doesn’t come inside, but the experience does. It actually happens inside, doesn’t it? You experience it inside, not outside. It gets stimulated outside and then it comes in through your senses and picked up by your nerves and passed back to your brain and it manifests in your mind and you’re sitting back there experiencing it. I’m not going to get into that. I do that all the time. You’re back and there experiencing this. It needs to pass through to be finished.
One example I always use, your neighbor has three dogs and you’re very afraid of dogs and basically the neighbor’s calling them to call for dinner and they just want to run by, but you’re scared of them. So you keep yelling at them and putting six at them and keeping them back. You’ll do that forever because they’re going to keep trying to go home. Do you understand that energy needs to flow. You can’t block it and think it doesn’t make a difference. So when these energies come into you and you don’t want to experience them, too bad. I’m sorry. I’m not compassionate. I’m very compassionate. I wish it didn’t happen, but it did. I can’t make it not have happened, nor can you. No one can make an event already happened, not have happened. Therefore, your responsibility is to, it happened. I can let it pass through.
So it made it through me and I can deal with the next event. But that’s not what we do. We don’t want it coming back in that far. We don’t want to feel it. If it comes in further, you feel it more. There’s no distance between your consciousness and the event First, there’s the distance of coming through your senses. You’re still distant then through your nerves. You’re still distant. You don’t feel it until it manifests in your mind. And then your conscious experience is it. Well, I don’t want it then to come all the way into me and pass through me. There’s no way I’m letting that pass through me. I always use the example. There’s some things that pass through you. Very few. By the way, I’m embarrassed to say that there are very few experiences that you’ve had that are the way I just talked about in your entire life.
It was so beautiful. It was so moving. It blew me away. What does that mean? It blew away your resistance. It blew away any distance between the event and the consciousness. It touched me. That’s a favorite sentence. It touched me to the depth of my being. Ever had that happen melted. Some people have never had that happen that touched them that deep that they weren’t even there. I melted away. You not only say it touched the depth of your being, you say, I swear I felt I was in the presence of God. You did not resist this thing one single. You didn’t even be there enough to think about resisting it. It was just so beautiful. You just open completely and it poured through you. It bathed your soul. Those are the right words. Why? Because melted into your consciousness. You experienced it, but not mentally, not like a mental or emotional thing.
It made it way past your psyche. It made it into your soul, into the essence of your being and it passed through. That’s a real beautiful experience. That’s a real thing. Very few people deal with stuff like that very often, a few times in your whole life. So if you’re not experiencing that, which by the way, a master experiences with every single event that takes place, positive, negative, neutral, it comes in and goes through. That’s called be here now. When Round Dutch wrote be here now back in the sixties, I was in college and we’re all into that stuff. What be here now meant is I’m not here now, but I’m going to try and be here now pay attention. Did you see that? Look at it. Focus it. That’s not be here now. That’s not be here now and trying to be here now.
True. Be here now is. There’s no one else in there. There’s just the experiences happening and it’s bathing. Your being, your whole, your complete. Okay, now we don’t do that. We don’t do that. Why? Because it’s scary. We need control because we’re afraid, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. No way. I’m stepping aside and let whatever’s going on out there pass right through that chance of the world, not even for your husband or wife or children. You don’t going to control those suckers, not even behave the way you want ’em to. No way. I’m just leaving you alone. Okay? So you could argue, and people do argue that it’s instinctual, that we used to be people, animals that had to protect ourselves from the environment, from all kinds of things that could survival. How’s that? The survival instinct, and I’m not going to argue with it, the survival instinct has moved up from first chakra to third.
In other words, first chara means you are down there and you’re just protecting your body, protecting your life, and you do it with all your might, don’t you? It’s amazing things that can happen when people’s lives are threatened, the power that comes in and they just do all kinds of stuff. Well, now I’m sorry, some people do have to deal with that, but you guys don’t. It is not a normal part of your everyday life. So that instinct of survival for the body has moved into survival for the ego where you live. That’s third chakra you live in. Do they like me? It’s like, oh, it killed me. What? She said, no, it didn’t really kill you. Not like the tiger. I’m scared to death that that might happen. No, that’s again, not like the animal attacking you, scared to death, but you are scared, aren’t you?
So you’ve built a psyche, you built a psychological concept of yourself that’s like I said, those you into yoga. That’s the third chakra. You built a psychological concept of yourself and now you protect that just like you protect your body. And I’ve argued people tell you the survival instinct is the strongest instinct. You were taught that in school, weren’t you? Alright? They’re wrong. I have absolute proof that they’re wrong. Why? Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, somebody insulted somebody, duh has insulted me, sir, I challenge you to a dual. Well, what’s a dual in those days? We will stand back to back March 10 steps, turn around and shoot each in the face because I said something you don’t like. Yeah. What are you saying? That my instinct to protect my ego is bigger than my instinct to say alive. So basically you’ve moved the survival instinct from your bodily self to your ego self, to your psychological self.
You know have. And that’s why we have trouble there. So what happens is when things come in that are not comfortable to us, to our ego, to what we think it should be, to what we want it to be, we don’t let it come all the way back. There’s no way I’m letting that come all the way back. I’m going to push it away. I’m going to keep it at a distance so I can deal with it or figure out what to do about it. In other words, try to make it not have happened. Apologize. Apologize. That wasn’t enough. You got to make me believe you. You’re trying to make it not have happened. Admit you are wrong. Come on, admit it. I want to believe you. Or in other words, somehow I can’t handle this energy and I need you to take it back.
Believe me, it doesn’t work if somebody does something that hurts you inside and they apologize If you’re smart, you accept the apology just to get it over with. But I’m telling you, you will never again fully be willing to open as fully as you were before they did that. I’m not cursing you, I’m telling you the truth. It left a mark on you and they’re saying they’re sorry made it so we can go on. But it did not get rid of that. Mark, you answered me. Do you three years later say, that’s what you did to me three years ago. You probably should never do it again. Whatcha doing? You kept that in there. Yeah, you do, don’t you? Come on. Come on. Listen to me. I’m teaching you about suffering. So what you did is you stored that and like I said, an apology or this or that or I go on a second honeymoon.
It’s nice, it’s wonderful. By all means, do whatever you can. But I’m telling you that unless you let it go, it’s still in there. You just put something on top of it. The apology went on top of the problem. It did not neutralize or get rid of the problem. If you have a doctor, let’s use somebody. I’m just talking about your psyche. Let’s get it straight. If you have a doctor who gets your diagnosis wrong, mix up the x-rays with somebody else and told you, oh my god, about three weeks left. And you go through a few weeks of pain and suffering and everything and then the doctor tells you, oh my God, I was looking at the wrong x-ray. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ll be more afraid of getting that disease than you were that happened. You’ll be scared from then on. Every time you go to a doctor, you’ll be scared every time they take an x-ray because the impression got made and you held it.
It did not pass through. You resisted it. Therefore it’s still inside of you. So the fact that it turned out it wasn’t true, doesn’t get rid of it, it makes you be able to go on. But believe me, it’s still going to influence you live in there. Do you see what I’m talking about? So basically the psyche is created by you resisting experiences. You store them like each one you resist is a brick that stays inside and it has all of the mental patterns and the emotional patterns associated with it are still in there. So if you were jealous and you think about it again, you feel jealousy. If you were scared and you think about it 20 years later, your heart goes like this, yes or no, you did this. Now when I say that people don’t like that, they really don’t like that I say that right?
They don’t want to take responsibility because they don’t understand how to live at this higher level and you don’t have the ability to handle what’s happening to you. You didn’t have the ability to be young to handle your parents’ divorce. You didn’t have all kinds of abilities. You weren’t involved enough. I’m not judging you. Earth is a place that soul sent to evolve. Earth is a place that soldiers sent to evolve and you go through what you need to go through to learn how to handle things. But we don’t really do that. We don’t want to go through the things that we need to learn how to handle. We want them not to happen, don’t we? And so we end up resisting the experiences that we don’t want to feel. And I’m telling you, everything you have ever resisted is still in there. Go talk to Freud.
See, this is psychology. It’s just psychology from a spiritual point of view because Freud stopped at that. He stopped at you suppressed this stuff. Yes you did. Who did? Who did? Who’s in there doing that? Who experienced it to start with so they knew to express it? That’s transpersonal psychology. They don’t get into that. They just get into what’s in there and what effect is it happening. How do I help you cope with it? That’s traditional psychology. So basically you are resisting it. You don’t know that. Not a consciously willful act. It’s almost subconscious that you resist what you’re not comfortable with and you store it inside of. You call it suppression, repression, denial. I call it resistance. Okay? Those are just different levels of doing it basically. Then suppression, repression, they’re just different levels from a yogic point of view, all I care is you resisted it.
You held that energy inside of you. I don’t care if it rained on your birthday party when you were five and now you don’t like the rain now you don’t like birthdays and they’ll never have an outside birthday party. It made an impression on you. Did it make an impression on you or did you hold the impression there’s nothing in there that will hold it? I don’t know if psychology knows that it’s empty in there, it’s pure. It’s just pure energy, a super glue in there or fly paper. The things come in and they go right through until you stop them. You have the ability to push it away and hold it and therefore it made a lasting impression on you. Okay? That’s what your entire psyche is made out of. Your ego is a collection of those things that you held in there and you defined yourself as that.
I’m the person that broke my arm, the person that went here. I’m the person that somebody liked. I’m the person that went through this. No, you’re not. You want to experience those things. You’re not what you experienced. Psychology says you are. Psychology says man is the sum of the learned experiences. No, you’re psyche is the sum who learned experiences. You’re the consciousness that’s aware that there’re cycles of some of your learned experiences. That’s what witness consciousness is. You are in there watching the thing and you’re going to see that what you’re watching is the sum of your learned experiences. They’re exactly right, but who’s watching? Who’s in there noticing that It’s getting upset. Who’s in there noticing that you’ve pushed this away and now it’s coming back up. You don’t want it to come back up. You are. Consciousness is the soul, the essence, the album call you want, I don’t care you.
So basically psychology is right. That which you are watching, that which you made out of your mind and your emotions is the sum. You learned experiences and now you defined yourself or your self-concept. You define yourself as that. I’m the one that had these experiences. I’m the one who likes this and one who doesn’t like that. It’s just defined to you. We made up a you can it change? Can what you made up as your self-concept change can what you like today, you might not like tomorrow. How hard is it? Nothing. Just takes a second. Just meet somebody who doesn’t believe what you believe, what you really like or him. All of a sudden your beliefs change very, very quickly. Okay? It’s just a made up thing. So you had another experience as a summary learn experience. You’ve got one more experience. There you go.
Have a job. You love it to pieces. I’m so excited. I can’t wait to go to work, get criticized, see if you’re going to work next day. The sum of your learned experiences. It’s not you were there before you got criticized, you were there before you felt inspired. You are in there, but this is what you’ve built in there. Why? To protect yourself. I don’t want it to happen again. I think the most funniest thing in the whole world, the human beings do is I don’t want it to happen again. I don’t like it, so I’m going to store it.
What the heck? The more you don’t like it, the more you store it. Why are you storing it to make sure it doesn’t happen again? I’ll say I got it in there the whole time to make sure it doesn’t happen again. And though I go out there and fight with the world to make sure it doesn’t do what I don’t want. So that is your ego, that is your psyche and what suffering is. Let’s get back to topic and suffering serious. I’m not belittling it, but suffering is that you stored this stuff and you don’t want stuff to happen and it starts to happen. You can suffer without it starting to happen. You could suffer thinking it might happen. Okay? Why? Because you didn’t let it pass. Eventually you’ll catch on. If I had let it pass, yes, he said something mean. He said something not nice.
He had a really hard day and he’s taken it out on me. He came home and he dumped, okay, can I handle it? Of course I can handle it. I handled the rain, I handled the driver in front of me. I could handle the guy who came home had a bad day. The funny part about it’s I could handle it means you didn’t handle it. You let it go. I didn’t touch it. Now let’s just get down, okay? Because people now you understand. You suffer, right? You suffer. Somebody does something like that to you. You start getting all upset. How can somebody talk to me like that? I go put this right, go. You’re suffering. Suffering. Why? Because you couldn’t handle it. Got said. If you could handle it. If your attitude was boy poor thing had a band, okay, let him go to his room with pout.
We’ll have a good evening. It comes back out. How would you like to be like that? It just pass through. It. Pass through. But you know what happens if it passes through? You feel love. You feel love a little baby. They do all kinds of things that are weird, like pee on you. You don’t get upset. It’s all you. It’s in you. Well, what happens if it’s not well, then you’re fine. And guess what? So is everybody around you. What a gift you are that you can handle people’s problems, not handle them. Like fighting and changing and apologizing. Could you ever do that again? You don’t have to say, don’t you ever do it again if it didn’t bother you, and guess what? If it passes right through, it doesn’t bother you. I told you once a great enlightened master armor, Krishna talked about this, not like this.
He talked about this. Someone wants asked him, does a great enlightened master ever feel anger? Whoa, okay, I want to hear the answer. You know what he said? Yes, but it’s like writing on water. Go write a little sentence on water. Write some curse words on water. See what happens. Nothing. It just go right through. It doesn’t stay for a billion. Therefore, so fine. There’s this human in there. It comes up and it passes right through. If it becomes a alt, it just passes right through. Just like beautiful experiences. It’s just fine. So you didn’t store it inside, nobody owes you anything. It just was an experience like the wind blew through. Can you handle the wind? Yeah. Does it mess up your hair? Yeah, I like it. I somebody ask you mess up your hair. It’s you that’s deciding what you resist. Spirituality growth.
Spiritual growth is I don’t resist anything. Doesn’t mean I don’t deal with it. Let’s get that straight. Does not mean that if it happens and it passes through that it doesn’t mean I suddenly have to deal with, I have to deal with it. There’s responsibility. I have responsibility, not I can’t handle it. So the way I’m dealing with it is to try and make it so it didn’t happen. I’m dealing with it because it needs to be dealt with, not because I need it to be dealt with. It’s not a resistance thing, it’s not an ego thing, it’s just a responsibility towards dharma. That’s the word. Dharma means you’re not taking it to personal. There’s nothing you need to change for you, but it needs to be dealt with. See the difference? Yes or no? No, I never know you guys get this all because we’re so caught in using it for ourselves.
We’re caught in using it to protect ourselves. You said that to me. That’s ridiculous. I’m putting up with that. Okay, fine. You said it to me, I’m fine. You say anything you want, right? But you probably shouldn’t say it to your mother. I handled it, but she can’t really handle it. Let’s talk about that a little bit. That’s totally different as opposed to yelling at somebody because you couldn’t handle it. You’re dealing with them to help because you could handle it and now you’re giving as opposed to taking. That’s the difference between being able to handle it and not being able to handle it. So basically you’re working toward being able to not store this stuff inside. That’s what it’s all about. I define suffering as the distance between the outside world events and what you stored inside that you like and dislike. We’re all different. That was turned you on, turns her off, et cetera, et cetera. Like I said, five minutes ago it turned you on. Now it turns you off. That’s all it takes. Like wow. That’s why relationships are so hard. So you get to the point where you understand, let’s now get down to real suffering. So we dealt with little things. Let’s say you really have a ego situation where you have had bad experiences in the past, whatever it is, you’ve developed a very deep seated blockage about certain things.
There are people that if their husband or wife, it could either way gets a new employee and he or she’s good looking, they don’t like that. Yeah, we’ve been married but I don’t don feel comfortable with you hanging out with this lady or with that man. That person suffers. They suffer because you hired a good looking assistant suffering the distance between what you want and are comfortable with and what is going on outside and then there’s really big suffering. Somebody dies who you love and you’re dependent upon. Let’s talk about that. You suffer, you suffer. It doesn’t have to be a suffering. It can be an experience, a very powerful experience of a sense of loss, of a sense of yearning. It’s the heart expressing itself. But if you don’t let that heart express itself, if you don’t want to feel that, you resist it and it will tear you to pieces.
You’ll lose all your energy. You’ll get depressed. You’re just, oh my God, the sadness is overwhelming. That’s not a natural thing. A natural thing is of course you feel sorrow. Of course you feel lost. It’s an experience, a human experience. Are you able to handle it? Does that mean you giggle? No. It means you literally, I’m going to say it, you’re going to hate me. You literally appreciate the depth of the experience you’re feeling. It has a beauty to it. It touches you so deep, doesn’t it? There’s something to touch the depth of your being, but are you willing to let it? Are you willing to let it come in and wash over you? And when it does, it leaves beauty, it leaves openness, it leaves love, it makes you a greater being because you were able to handle these deep experiences instead of they scarred you.
It can’t scar you. What it can do if you resist it can leave impressions on your resistance. It left an impression on your energy body. If you don’t resist, it goes through so suffering. I don’t want to sit there and say you cause your suffering. That’s silly. People can’t handle that. Okay? It is your resistance to the experience you’re having. That causes suffering. But I know that that’s meaningless to tell somebody something because if they’re resisting, they couldn’t handle it and to tell ’em, well, if you could handle it, it wouldn’t be bothering you. Thanks. I ain’t paying you for the session, but I want you to understand that there’s another aspect to the energy aspect of suffering. When you are in a relationship with somebody, what happens is you’re blocked. Why? Because you store all that stuff in there. So you’re not okay, you’re lonely, you need a connection, you need something you’re missing.
It’s not working for you. Okay, very good. Why? Because you’re blocked. I’ve taught you a billion times. You’re the highest being walked the face of the earth. You’re the most beautiful thing. You are filled with love, filled with shakti, filled with spirit, filled with energy. That’s who you are. But if you close the blinds, you don’t see the sun. If you block your energy system, which is what you’re doing with every single one of those thing you push, they’re blockages to your energy flow. So you blocked it. Now you’re blocked and so you’re going about your business and you want to find somebody and all of a sudden you bump into somebody on a supermarket. This who the heck knows, right? Something happens and there’s, I want to use your words, there’s a connection. I felt a deep connection where in my heart, wow, I love it.
You don’t understand your yogis, your to what’s your heart? The fourth chakra, the center that loves come out of that energy can flow. I felt the connection in my heart, don’t you? Why? Something about that person, what they were wearing, what they said, what they smelled like, how they walked, how they treated you. Something helped open up your blockages temporarily. Alright? It shifted such my God, if we started talking, he liked the exact music that I like. It was unbelievable, right? And the show I watched and nobody else watched, he watched that movie right around the time I did. I felt a connection. What is that bead? Because you did feel a connection and you did feel it in your heart. It meant your blockages are blocking your heart’s flow and events are happening outside, which matched your stuff and made you feel more comfortable that you’re not alone.
That somebody can relate to you. That somebody looks the way that people say that, I don’t know. I mean bow tie, people are like bow ties with my uncle. Wear a bow tie. I loved my uncle. I haven’t seen him. Guy just fell in love with him. He just melt in my heart. So what happened is because it matched your stuff, you felt comfortable to open and so it opened, you’d have to do it yourself. It did it by itself. There was a connection there. What happens then? The energy that was blocked inside of you, that is always there but you can’t experience it On the other side of the closed blinds, the blinds opened up to see, parted the energy that’s always there. It had nothing to do with that other person. The energy that’s always there inside came up, came into your heart.
That’s where the energy goes, comes up out of your third chakra, which you’re worried about. Everything protective came up. You opened some, you felt that energy and guess what happened? It went out toward the other person. Have you ever felt the connection? You ever sat there and felt such love just you couldn’t have to talk it just, man, it’s just so beautiful. That is that energy, your energy that’s always there, making it through your blockages. They opened up going out and connecting with the other person and you literally feel the connection. I know you’ve had that experience and you tell the other person, I love you. It’s not really true, okay? What you really mean is I feel love in your presence. If you didn’t feel love in their presence, you wouldn’t be saying, I love you and all they have to do is tell you one more thing about them that turns you off.
What does that mean? Turns you off. It closes and you don’t love them anymore. Okay? I’m talking to you in there, having an honest conversation. Can it close like that? Can it close like that? Why? Because it didn’t match your stuff all it takes. One little thing that somebody says or doesn’t say, you’re open, you feel so sensitive. You sit there and say, God, I would love to go on a vacation with you. He’s feeling that and the person says, yeah, or someday what? Or doesn’t say anything. You see what I’m saying? Look how sensitive you are. Are you sensitive? When that heart’s open, are you sensitive? That’s why because it has to make it past your third chakra, which is your ego, your preferences, concepts, views, opinions, hopes, dreams, all that junk that you made up, your past experiences that have to open up to permit it, to get up to here, to the fourth center.
And so basically it does and it connects and what happens is that connection is very beautiful and don’t listen to me. I tell you all the time, I want you to know these things. They should be in your storage bank, but you need to live the life at the level you’re living the life, but know how high it can be so that you can work with it. You can use relationships, business, money, everything to evolve, not to grab it and keep and hold it, but you have to be honest about where you are. Alright? So basically it comes out, it connects and what happens? As long as it’s able to make that connection, you can feel love, you can feel support. You can feel strength. That’s the whole beauty of relationships. It can give you something, doesn’t it? Okay? When it stops doing it, you’re out.
Okay? You’re staying together for the kids. Alright, so what happens there now that this connection has taken place and they’re connected to you, so it’s going out and it’s coming back. It’s beautiful. Don’t say, I’m not saying it’s beautiful, it’s a beautiful thing. What does LeBron say in the prophet when love beckon, you follow her? I used to think what kind of things I have to tell people when I was doing about meditating? Come on, go back in there. He says though the sword hidden in opinions may wound you. It does that because you’re open. You’re open, so things can affect you and the main thing it affects is that flow. Now let’s say you have that flow and you have connected with it and it’s gone on for a long time. It’s a beautiful relationship and that person dies, that person leaves, that person gets sick and changes.
In other words, it ain’t working anymore. What do you feel? Pain loss, suffering. Why? Because you don’t feel what you were living off of. You were living off that connection. Anybody ever have a breakup like that? So basically the energy is going out now I can’t now I can’t go out. Sometimes you grab to the person and say, well wait a minute, why do you want me to change? I’ll change. I’ll do anything you want. I need you. Oh, so sad and beautiful, alright? Country music loves to sing about that. And so the energy goes out, it connects and now it can’t connect and you’re in pain, aren’t you? Why? Because the energy is now hitting your blockages all the more so because you relied on that. You were living off of that either because the person loved you, was giving stuff back and now they love somebody else or they died.
All that stuff just means that connection got broken and so you don’t know what to do. A human being doesn’t know what to do. I had an older gentleman and I heard a long time ago that his wife died and he said to me, I’m going to be okay. He said, somebody told me the other day that I had gone through a similar death like this. He said, eventually you’ll be okay, but you’ll never feel love again. You’ll never feel the joy of life ever again. I just shut up. I mean that’s not true. Do you understand that? But it feels like that, doesn’t it? It feels like that. It feels like it will never, ever be beautiful again, right? Because you lived off that energy and the connection’s not there anymore and therefore the energy doesn’t know where to go and because the energy doesn’t know where to go anymore, it tears your heart apart.
It’s trying to find another channel. Listen to me, this is the essence of understanding yoga and the whole inner energy. It’s trying to find where’s the energy going to go. It used to go out there and make connection and feedback. I was living off that connection, wasn’t I? You called that a beautiful relationship. It is. It’s beautiful. Someday you’ll realize it doesn’t have to go out to get in, right, but it’s fine that it does. You learn, right? But you’re going to learn that. You’re going to learn that you’ve used an outside situation and it’s not going to stay. Either the person changes or death happens or they fall in love with somebody else or you change. Something happens and all of a sudden that energy flow, it’s a real energy flow. It’s a Shakti that used to go out and make the connection, doesn’t know where to go, and it bounces off the inside of your heart and it does all kinds of stuff and it goes down to the third chakra, which now hates the person.
I’ll never talk again. You told me you’d be with me forever. How dare you die? That’s what’s happening in there. That’s why your heart’s torn to pieces. That’s why the ego goes crazy. That’s why you don’t have to do with yourself. How do I get depressed? I can’t handle this, so I push the whole thing down. I don’t want to feel any energy because I can’t handle the energy the way it is, and so I push it away. When you push it down, now you’re totally blocked. That’s what depression is. Is anybody listening? I usually talk about the real nice stuff. Let’s talk about this. Why? Because it happens. It’s real. That’s what suffering is, as opposed to pain. Use the words differently. You suffer because the energy flow is not working and that’s why people go on the rebound so quickly and they tell you not to do that as if basically you had it flowing and it’s messed up in your suffering.
I need to find another connection. I need to find a way. Next thing you know you’re falling in love with a serial killer. You never checked that out. First, go out to the web to understand is this not what goes on? So what is the answer? We said the answer to physical pain is you go to a doctor, you do what you can and you learn to work with it. Take care of your body. By all means. What do you do with this heart? What do you do with the suffering of the psyche? You understand why it’s happening. It’s not going to make it go away, but at least you have an understanding. What’s happening is my blockages are getting hit. Either they were open now they can’t go, or somebody did something or something and it hit my stuff and I’m burning up. It’s bothering me to pieces.
I can’t handle what’s happening. I can’t live like this. That’s because it hit your stuff and so what’s the answer? Get of your stuff. Easier said than done, but if you get rid of your stuff, there’s nothing to hit, all of a sudden it can come in and pass through. What do I do if I’m suffering and I obviously can’t let go of my stuff because it’s being hidden. That’s the hardest time to let go of it. The hardest time to let go of your fears on the rattles stakes rattling in front of you and the hardest time to deal with your stuff is when it is being hit, isn’t it? That’s hard because you get sucked down into it. You lose your center of consciousness, you lose your objectivity and all of a sudden it’s just I need to stop again, handle this and I’m not making fun of you.
I understand. Believe me, we’ve all been through it plenty of times. What’s the answer over time? Understand that it takes two to tango. It takes the outside situation and your inside state of being what you decided you like and what you don’t like because you store that stuff in there. So what you do is you start to say part of my life, not all of it, eventually all of it. Part of my life is about at least let’s not put any more in there. It’s teach this all the time. That’s your path that don’t put more in there tomorrow. You’re going to go through different situations. They’re going to bother you a little bit. Just a little bit. It rained when you didn’t want it to, but you said something embarrassing. People laughed a little bit. Whatever it is, something happened. I don’t want it in there.
I don’t want that to be just another thing that’s going to block the flow of your energy so you learn to let go. Those are the teachings you let go. What does that mean? You start to feel the resistance. Let’s get right down to it because people say they don’t understand letting go. They think letting go is outside. No, no. Letting go is an inside thing that when you start to feel the resistance, you do feel resistant, you relax, you let go of the resistance. Oh, then it’s going to come deeper inside of you. Yes it is. You can’t handle the driver in front of you coming deeper inside of you. You got a problem and so you decide I’m going to learn to handle it. I’m going to learn to relax when I feel the resistance. That’s your first step. Relax instead of resist.
Do you ever think about that? The opposite. The antithesis of resistance is relaxation. When you are relaxing, you can’t resist. When you are resisting, you can’t relax. One is muscles tensing. The other is muscles relaxing inside where those inner hands are that push stuff away. I hope this conversation helps you understand you don’t want to do that anymore. That’s ruining your life. That’s blocking your energy flow. Now you have to go out and compensate for it by finding something, doing something, going somewhere, having something that helps you release the energy that’s blocked. So what you do is you decide I’m going to have fun every day, not putting more in there. You may just have fun. Do the easy stuff. Want to do the big stuff. You can’t handle it right now. Do your best, do your best. Whatever you’re doing, you understand that, but learn how to let go and if you learn how to let go of the little stuff, do not resist.
Next thing you’re going to know something a little bigger happens and you to do the same thing. You now learn the piano, you learn the sport, you learn the sport of letting go. You practice, you just keep practicing and you get better at it and the next thing you know, something bigger can come in and you let go. Doesn, you don’t deal with it, you let go. Then you look to see, and I’m telling you, 80 to 90% of the time there’s nothing to do except that it bothered you. There’s nothing to do about it. And so you keep letting go and now the bigger stuff’s going to come up by itself. If you let go of the daily stuff, the easiest stuff you left room for the stuff you store from before to come up and they’re eventually going to catch on. I like that.
Not only can I handle it, I want it to come up. I don’t want that inside of me. I don’t want the cause of this suffering to stay in there. I’m willing to go through soul birth like childbirth. Yes, it hurts. Of course it hurts. You start with pain’s going to come back with pain and you start working on yourself and that’s the spiritual evolution and that’s the end of suffering. Who else taught you that? Buddha, Buddha’s. Noble truth one. All of life is suffering. I mean you break your arm. Well, if he didn’t say all life is pain, say all life is suffering. Well what’s the cause of suffering? I love him so much. It’s so beautiful to make all this noise. It was so simple what he had to say. What’s the cause of suffering? He said desire. What is desire? Preference. A desire is having a way you want it to be.
He said that’s the cause of all suffering and suffering and desire. I use the word preference because a little easier to digest. Preference is you can’t handle the way something is because you don’t want it to be that way. Surrender is things are the way they are. I can handle ’em now. I’ll deal with it. Isn’t that beautiful? That whole conversation. Buddhist said in one line, the cause of suffering is preference. So what can you do about it? It’s more of a long-term thing like learning to piano and piano learning to play tennis. You start practicing letting go inside. Just eventually you learn. I really want to do that. I don’t want this junk in here. I don’t want to suffer. Do you want to suffer? And it doesn’t mean I don’t want to suffer mean you’re suppressive. I don’t suffer. I don’t care what you do.
Yes you do. That’s why you say you don’t care. I’m talking about it passes right through. You don’t have to touch it. It’s very beautiful. It’s very beautiful. I use the example in living untethered. I go to this very deep in the Living Untethered book. If you’re in a tug of war holding onto a rope and you’ve got the whole football team on the other end pulling and you just want to go to lunch, but you can’t, you got to pull them back and you do everything you can to fight and pull and so on. And then you realize, wait a minute, wait a minute. What if I let go of the rope? That’s cheating. No, it’s not. I don’t need to bring the football team with me. I don’t need to win the struggle. I just want to go have lunch. And you literally learn to relax your hands instead of struggle with your feet and muscles.
Just relax your hands. It takes two to tango. You let go of that rope. You’re liberated, you’re free. That’s what you learn to do inside. You learn to let go. That’s what surrender means. Also doesn’t mean you surrender what everybody tells you to do the wrong impression. It means I accept the reality that took place. I surrender. I’m not resisting. Now I can deal with it if I need to deal with it. And I’m telling you, you can put an end to suffering. You can put an end to suffering. The third zen patriarch wrote of treatise, it’s called the treatise of faith mind. So beautiful. It starts with the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent and it becomes clear, and undisguised make the slightest distinction, however, and heaven and earth is infinitely apart.
To set aside what you like from what you dislike is the disease of the mind. Avoid such pursuits carefully. That’s the deep teaching. You did this, you’re causing it inside yourself because you can’t handle reality. Practice handling reality. You’re going to find out there’s so much joy inside of you behind those blockages. You eventually, you would never trade it. I’ll go through anything to have that flowing inside of me all the time. I don’t care what the price is, I don’t care what it costs. I don’t what pain there is. Bring it on. Bring it on. I want this out, and you start learning how to be open. The more open you are, the less it hurts. The more open you are, the less it hurts. I teach you. Eventually you get to the point where you realize you did this. You stored that stuff in there.
You start apologizing to the stuff you stored in there. You shoved it into darkness. You just start welcoming it up. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I stored you down there. I’m higher now. I can handle you. Come on up. I welcome you here. I’ll take my hand. It takes some time. Take as much time as you want, but I want you to come up and what happens? That stored dark energy when it comes up becomes part of your being because it makes it through you. It’s like the river that was blocked now pouring into the ocean, feeding it. You’re a beautiful being. You suffer because you block stuff. You can handle this. I hope you understand this has a best thing can tell about suffering. Okay? It is not necessary, but it is right now because you stored this stuff and you develop preferences. Learn to be more open. Learn to accept things. Learn to appreciate life and what’s going to happen. You won’t have to throw this stuff down there. Put an end to suffering. Would you like that? I would like to put an end to all suffering, but the only way that’s happening is people have to be willing to let go of themselves.
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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