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: Jai Guru Dev, Jai Masters. In the end, it is your understanding and methodology of dealing with your mind. It has the most effect and most lasting effect on your spiritual journey to enlightenment. The truth is beyond mind, but it’s like saying to a drug addict, truth is beyond your drug. Oh, that’s nice to say, but if they’re caught up in the drug, you’re going to stand the drug. You have to deal with where you are so we are caught in our minds, period. You may have some experience periodically where you transcend the mind. People use drugs, people have spiritual experiences and so on, but you don’t stay there. You come back to talk about it because our addiction is to the mind. Our addiction is to their mind. Period. You are addicted to your mind. In fact, you’re so addicted to your mind that you use a collection of thoughts in your mind to define yourself.
You say, I am this, I am that. I’m a person that thinks this way. A person believes in this and the person who likes this and a person that doesn’t like that I am my mind. People think they are their mind, but people think they are their body. We discussed that before. Amazingly despite survival instinct, which is very, very powerful, the most powerful drive that the body has to do with, you are willing to give up that instinct for your mind. And I always use the example of Hamilton and Aaron Burr. These are very intelligent men who graduated from Harvard, Princeton or wherever.
Somehow somebody said something, somebody got a insulted and somebody did something and they challenged each other for this thing called a dual. What does that mean? You stand back to back, you take 10 steps, you turn around and shoot each other in the face of the musket. Well, having a survival instinct, that is not survival instinct. That’s ego survival instinct. That is you care more about your identification with the mind and thoughts in your mind and your self-concept, which is mind. Then you care about your body. That’s unbelievable. That’s pretty powerful stuff. That’s quite the addiction that you have to your mind. Is it reasonable? No, it’s not reasonable. Do you have to have it? No. You do not have to have it. And so we’re going to discuss your relationship with your mind, with thoughts and how you’re dealing with that. So we have fallen into our minds.
Who has God? Your consciousness. You’re a great being. Your consciousness, the witness, you in there that is noticing the thoughts of your mind, that is noticing the feelings of your heart, that is noticing what’s coming through your senses is the highest thing ever walked the face of the earth? It is man was created an image of God and what we do is make God have two arms and two legs in a beard. No, that’s God has created an image of man, okay, man was created an image of God. What is God, spirit consciousness, ti and that’s what you are. That’s what’s back there. Where? How far back do you have thoughts? I better start my lecture this way. Do you have thoughts? How do you know? Because I experienced them. Who does the thought doesn’t experience the thought, the consciousness, the awareness, experiences, the thought.
Do you have feelings? Have you ever felt love, ever felt fear? I felt jealousy, anxiety. How do you know I’m in here? That’s right. Is the same you that feels love, anxiety, that notices your thoughts? Can they go on simultaneously to ring circus? Of course, because you’re the consciousness, the awareness of being that is God descended. We’ll get there in the end. Alright, you in there. That’s the core of your being. That’s what soul is supposed to mean. The soul is the core, the seed, the essence of your being. That is the essence of your being. Everything else is something you’re aware of. You’re aware of your thoughts, you’re aware of your emotions, you’re aware of your body, you’re aware of the outside world who is, it’s always the same you, isn’t it? Are you aware of your dreams is the same you who experience your dream, who experiences the outside world? Yes, it’s experiencing something different.
So basically you come down to understand that the consciousness has completely forgotten and got lost into who you are and you try to find yourself in your mind. That’s literally true. You try to find yourself by this collection of thoughts you develop in your mind called your self concept, your ego, and now your conscious rests on there and you literally will give up life in order to keep that thing going. Why? Have you ever had anything that you were very sure about and you rested, a lot of you got married, this, that, whatever it is, lots of things can happen in life and you identified with them, I’m so-and-so’s mother and so’s a husband, this is my house, this is my job. I’m a successful person. People respect me. I got a self-concept. That’s what it is in your mind. What happens when it doesn’t work?
What happens when somebody walks up to you and says, what do you mean that’s your husband? That’s my husband. How you doing? Especially you find out it’s true. We’re talking about two timing, right? How you doing in there? You break. Has it ever fallen apart? Has it ever literally fallen apart that what you are resting on as who you are, the evidence coming in didn’t match it anymore. It didn’t work. Okay, you go crazy. Alright, let’s do this. Let go small step. Have you ever felt defensive? Have you ever been defensive? What are you defending? You’re defending that you built this concept and those other guys better accept that and you said I did something. I did not do that. Even lying and you know you did, but no. Alright, so you’ll defend till death your self-concept. That’s how lost the human race is. They have the fallen of the or is you have fallen into your mind instead of being the one who experiences your mind.
So that’s what we are. Can you do better with your mind? That’s what I teach all the time. Your mind doesn’t have to be thinking about you. You might can think about what I teach you. Stand up on the planet and notice how small this is. There’s this black, dark, empty space all over the place. Nobody knows you and nothing. The rest of the whole universe is so big. 1.3 million earth fit inside the sun. I know your mind doesn’t want to think about it. I have people write me saying, why are you saying that? I feel so small. Now you are. That’s supposed to liberate you. If you understand that 1.3 million earth fit inside the sun and the sun is one of 300 billion stars in your one galaxy, how important are you? You’re making it up. Well, I’m his mother. I did this job. Alright, I play music well and people clap.
I’m really impressed. Nobody else know who universe knows anything about any of that stuff. If the entire planet earth blew up to smithereens tomorrow, a couple of planets would change their orbit a little bit to adjust for that and nothing else would know you were here in the entire universe. How important are you and you think that that’s belittling you? No, it’s liberating you if saying you’re trying to make something out of nothing and you’re suffering, you feel anxiety and worry and jealousy and fear. You built this model inside your mind and now you live off of it and there’s no reason to. You can come here and have a good old time if you stop thinking it’s supposed to be the way you want it to be, you’re on the nicest planet. There may not be any other nices we don’t know, but not anything our telescopes have seen.
Even the space scopes or anything ain’t seen squat and you’re living on this plate. There’s animals and there’s things and there’s trees, there’s people and there’s computers. Oh my god, are you kidding me? Right? I was taught and I really believe it. Earth is God’s idea of Disney World and you are so special that you got selected to come down here and spend your entire life at Disney World with all kinds of excitement rides and to do and they got all kinds of stuff. Alright? So they have all kinds of things and people go there to have fun and you get dropped out of this planet. It has all of this stuff, hundreds of billions of animals and this and that and treason, oh my god, different people. It’s so exciting. It’s ridiculous. And what did you do? Because you’re lost. Because you don’t keep that consciousness that I am a spirit.
I’m consciousness descendant and I was lent to body a spacesuit and I have all this ability. I have a mind, I have a heart. Oh my God, it’s so exciting. I could do a million, billion things. Alright, what happened? Instead of being who you are and remembering that you came down here for a few years, earth has been here for 4.5 billion years. How long are you going to be here? 80, 90. And you are making a big deal out of your presence, but if I tell you that’s ridiculous, your ego feels small instead of, oh my God, I don’t have to do this. I have to play this game. I can go down and have a good old time. I’m must stay very long anyways. It’s a vacation dropped out here. Well, where are you going to go when you die? That’ll be the most exciting thing to find out.
I have no idea, but I’ll find out. I tell you guys what you do is you use your mind to build an ego and they get lost in it. Instead of using your mind to explore truth, you can do anything you want here and you just do it and then you guys worry about death. I don’t understand. You know what death is a once in a lifetime experience. You say I had a once in a lifetime experience in the mountains or when I got married or you’re going to have a once in a life, true once in a lifetime experience when you die, well what’s going to happen? You’ll find out, well what if nothing happens? That’s not a problem. If nothing happens, it’s fine. It’s not like I tell you, right? Your mind thinks this right? It’s not true. It’s not like, oh my God, I’m not here what I’m going to do now.
No, you’re not there. It’s like the light bulb got turned off fine. It can’t be a problem. What if you are there? What would it be like? Just a whole nother universe with no body or whatever. It’s so exciting. It’s ridiculed but no rush it. You don’t get to rush it, alright? But you shouldn’t be afraid of it and you shouldn’t be afraid of your life on a planet earth. But what if, here’s the key. Are you ready? Why do you have trouble? Why can’t you live like that here? Every single minute of every single day ready? Because things happen not the way I want them to because what I want to happen doesn’t happen and that the problem, what I want to happen doesn’t happen and what I don’t want to happen sometimes does or at least it might. That’s how you’re living here instead having a good old time.
That’s like going to Disney World. Send your kid to Disney World and you go well excited to pick him, her up and they’re all depressed and they’re crying. What happened? I had to wait in line. I didn’t want to wait in line. I wanted a ride and I didn’t know the person next to me. I wanted to sit next to the other person and she was cute. There’s something drastic wrong with you. You supposed a good time at Disney, but not if you decide here. How about this one? No, I watched all the web things before I went and it wasn’t like that. It was a little bit rainy and the web things it, it was always sunny. Do you hear me? If you develop in your mind when you come here to visit the planet earth for a few years, what you want it to be like, you’re dead.
You will not have a good time and that goes through Disney World, that goes through your marriage. Just decide how you want it to be for the next 10 years when you want to have children, what they want to be like and where they’re going to college and they’re going to support you and you’ll never have to go to nursing. Just go and lay it out. Lay it out. You’re not going to be a very happy camper. You’ll suffer. You’ll suffer because it’s not going to happen the way you want. Or the Beatles say, life is what happens to you or you’re busy making other plans. Now there’s a true statement, isn’t it? And guess what? You ain’t doing squat about it. You can worry about it. You get upset if it’s not the way you want. You get excited if it’s the way you want, right?
You can make a mess of this. I was reading something I wrote a while ago and I don’t like talking about it, but it was arguing that you are addicted to your mind in the same way as a heroin addict is addicted to heroin. If they don’t get the drug, they suffer. They’re upset, their body gets tight, their mind gets weird, and if they get the drug, oh, much more comfortable. That’s how you are with your mind. If it gets what it wants, how are you doing? If it doesn’t get what it wants or it gets what it doesn’t want. You get tense, get anxious, have problems. It’s exactly the same. So you’ve allowed your consciousness to become addicted to your mind and instead of enjoying your life on earth, every second of it you say, but how can I enjoy every second of it?
There’s wars, there’s things going on. There are people that are not nice to other people. There was somebody yelled at me and I didn’t even do anything wrong, but I might get fired. In other words, it might not be the way my mind was, but because you decided what you want to happen here, that’s the bottom line. Instead of coming here and saying, wow, I woke up this morning, wonder what’s going to happen. It will be exciting. Will everything be the way you want? Of course not. And you start doing real questioning with your mind like asking it. How did you decide what you want? I don’t know you. How’d you decide what you want? I know how you decided what you want. I don’t have to be psychic. I know why you decided what you want because you had past experiences that you liked and you want ’em to happen again and you had fast experiences that you did not like.
You want those to happen again? No. There you go. It’s that simple. It’s that simple. You let your mind get programmed by the experiences that happen that you were comfortable with or uncomfortable with, and now it has to be what you want or you get upset even with the weather or every single thing and you end up living on the earth not having fun. You only have fun when things happen to be the way your mind decided you want ’em to be. That’s what it means to be lost in your mind. Okay, so what can you do about this? Does it have to be like that? No. It does not have to be like that. Can you wake up every morning excited, enthused, inspired about what everything there’s going to be weather today. It might be cold. That’s fun. It might be hot. That’s more fun.
It might be really beautiful. That’s fun too. Who decided that one is fun and one is not? If it’s really, really cold, you get to bundle up your layers and layers of clothes that you get to wear and deal with, okay? And if it was really hot, you take ’em off. You just get to it. Play less GB as little children. What do you think that’s talking about? Christ teachings are the essence of what I’m teaching you. If your mind is this thing called open, what does that mean? You’re experiencing the reality of life. It doesn’t always feel good when it comes in. I always use an example, a coiled up rattlesnake rattling in front of you is not a fun experience, not a nice experience anyways. It makes fear come up, doesn’t it? Do I have to learn to not feel fear? Listen to me.
Do I have to learn to not feel fear when a rattlesnake’s rattling in front of me? No you do not. Fear is an absolutely natural reaction to a rattlesnake rattling in front of you. Well then whatcha talking about you can be okay feeling fear. You don’t have to suppress it. You don’t have to not like it. You have to deny it. It’s an experience you’re having and it doesn’t feel good. Fine, it comes in. He’s not going to stay there say’s going to crawl away. Did he crawl away inside of you? No. Why? I didn’t like the experience. So I always ask you this, if you don’t like something here, you just ate some food, you’re chewing on it, it’s disgusting you don’t like it at all, takes ’em home in a doggy bag, would you do that? No. Then why? If you don’t like an experience, do you store it?
Do you understand that you store it inside of you? I want to make sure I feel it all the time. I want to make sure that if I hear a baby rattle, I get all scared again. I want to make sure if I see a coiled up rope that I freak out. Okay? All you have to do is catch on that you are not using your mind properly. There’s nothing wrong with your mind. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s how you experience things. It’s how you think about things, how you create, how you do all kinds of things. The mind’s a wonderful thing, but it is not a place where you go in there and say, I had this experience and I didn’t like it, so I’m going to make believe I didn’t have it. I’m going to push it away. Suppression, repression, denial. I don’t care.
I call it resistance. I’m going to resist having had the experience. Do you do that? Do you push things away in there? Darn well you do when you push them away. They stay in there. You don’t need a PhD in psychology. Why do they stay in there? Because you didn’t let ’em go through. All it takes to have a healthy mind is to be open. A healthy mind is an open mind. There ain’t anything else. If it’s open, it blows through and you have the experience and you learn. If you say, no, I don’t want to have had this experience, and you push it away, it gets stored inside of you and it comes back up, doesn’t it? You think about that snake, don’t you? You dream about that snake, don’t you? You get scared when people talk about snakes. You won’t go to the zoo.
They have a reptile exhibit. There’s snakes in there. What did you do? You ruined your life. Life didn’t ruin your life. You ruined your life by not being able to handle the experiences when you came down to earth. So the way to work with your mind, and I always talk about it, we’ll go very quickly. I want to get further deep into this way to handle your mind is to accept reality. If you think about it, it makes sense. What’s your alternative To deny reality? You lose. Reality is reality. It’s happening. It happened and so on. And to store it inside of you because you didn’t like it is a pretty silly thing to do. So you learn how we can talk about it to let every single thing someday, let every single thing that ever happened to you and is happening and will happen have the right to come in and pass through.
But what if it’s not nice? I’m not telling you to make it be not nice. I’m saying if it actually happened, you can’t make it not have happened, right? Does it make sense to you? Something actually happened already. Somebody said something that wasn’t nice. Somebody did something that wasn’t nice. You resident the paper that wasn’t nice. It happened. You put the food in your mouth, it tasted terrible. It’s real. It happened. You can’t make it not have happened. So you only have two choices. People always write me like, what do you mean acceptance? How can I accept things? Because the alternative is to deny them. I’m not telling you to want it to happen. I’m not telling you to let it happen. I’m telling you if it happened, you better be able to accept that it happened because the alternative is to be sick. That’s what creates psychological illness.
Is it took place? I can’t make it not take place, but I don’t want it to have taken place. Have you got any things in there you don’t want it to have taken place? Do you have things in there from the past that you don’t want to have happened? Guess what you lose. Why? Because they happened and they will never not have happened. So that is the most irrational thing in the whole world to sit there and say, but I didn’t want it to happen. So what’s the alternative? You only have two choices. Accept or deny. Accept or resist. That’s all. If you accept it, it’s difficult. It comes in, it doesn’t feel good, but it passes. You let it pass. That’s what letting go means. That’s surrender means. It doesn’t mean do something outside or don’t do something outside. It means inside. If it comes in, you have two choices.
Resist or accept. If you accept it may be difficult. It comes in and it passes through. That’s the end of it. You don’t build your life on it. Somebody, your husband comes home or wife comes home and they have a hard day at work and they don’t even say hello. They just march in and they go into the room and close the door. You got two choices. Accept or resist and you know what your mind’s going to do. They shouldn’t treat me like that. No, I shouldn’t be treated like that’s ridiculous. I don’t even know if I want to stay in this marriage. He better apologize. What did you just do? You made it so that when he or she comes out of that room, they’re in trouble and so is your evening. I assure you, and maybe so is your marriage as opposed to at a bad day and let it go.
And now you can be happy and nice when they come out. You have the right to decide. You don’t have the right to decide what happens. You have the right to decide what you do about what happens once it comes in. And no one teaches this, okay? Parents didn’t teach it, school doesn’t teach it. You’re the only one in there. There’s no one else in there. It’s your choice except or resist. And if you resist, you’re going to build these resistances into an ego, into a self-concept. This is what I like. This is what he did. I don’t like. I’m the one who likes this. Someone doesn’t like this. I like this kind of person. I don’t like that. You just to find a fake world inside of your mind that doesn’t exist but you want it to. And now you’ve tried to judge every other thing that happens against that and you’re going to suffer.
You’re going to suffer and have fears and tensions. Can you live life without fear? Isn’t that beautiful? There’s two types of fear. One is the natural instinctual, fear of a rattlesnake rattling in front of you as a perfectly normal fear. What do I do with it? Honor it, respect it, deal with it. But let it go by. Don’t let that fear cause a fake fear for the rest of your life. So one fear is the real fear that something’s happening that you got to deal with. The other is I’m afraid that you’ll say this again. I’m afraid that will happen again. I’m afraid of seeing something that bothers me. In other words, it’s psychological fear and as opposed to a true instinctual fear, do you see a difference? You don’t want that one. How many fears can your mind think about? Well what if a meter falls?
What if there are aliens and they come down and shoot at us? What if I find out that my parents aren’t my parents? Sally, find out her parents weren’t her parents. I don’t want parents, not my parents, not to be my parents. What if it happens to me? What if the house burns down? What if electrical fire? What if I electrocuted? How many can you have? 800 million zillion. How many times are you going to deal with that rattlesnake? Once or twice in your life normally. I mean some people have tough lives, but a general thing that true physiological fear is not something you deal with every day, but that mental fear, you did that. You did that by saying, what I can’t handle if this happens, it hasn’t happened, but I can’t handle the thought that it could happen. Well, you’re in trouble then because the mind could think anything.
So what it means to work with the mind is to be disciplined enough to at least want to get out. Not that there’s going to buy into all this junk that the mind’s making up that might happen. There are people that don’t want to die. Well, you’re in trouble. I did a statistical study once of everything that was born, everything, not just people, everything that was born and how many died. It was amazing. The correlation coefficient was a solid one. It’s amazing. It’s the most perfect statistical study that ever got done. Alright? If it’s born, it’s dying, but I don’t want to die. Well saying you’re in trouble. You’re not going to have a nice life. And it’s likewise, I don’t want this happen. I don’t want that to happen. I want this to happen. You’re not going to have a nice life. You know what you’re saying when you say that, and I know it’s hard for you to understand.
I don’t want this to happen. I don’t want that to happen. I want this to happen. You’re saying you’re only going to be okay if those conditions are true. The whole rest of what could happen you’re not okay with. So you limited your happiness to it. Like a sliver point. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. 1% of what could happen you’ll be happy with and what didn’t happen, right? Versus I’m happy. Okay, let it unfold. Bring it on. Okay, you have the right to do that, but you don’t do that. And so you’ve misused your mind, used your mind to define who you think you are and what you want and what you don’t want, and that causes a lot of problems. The alternative is to sit there and say life is going to unfold. Check like a pilot. Take it off. Check. Life’s going to unfold.
Okay? I’m not in control. Ooh, you don’t like that one? I was thinking I’m not going to do it. I wouldn’t do it. I promise I’m not. Write a book and it’s going to go as follows. What if this doesn’t happen colon? That’s the beginning. Maybe that’s the name of the book. What if this doesn’t happen? What if your heart doesn’t beat, you’re dead. What if your lungs don’t clean it out? Breathe. You’re dead. What if the atoms don’t stay together? You’re dead. What if the 35 trillion cells in your body don’t multiply and divide and you’re dead? What if your food doesn’t digest? Once you swallow, you’re dead and just start listening. What if the sun doesn’t shine and there’s no food? You’re dead. What if the sun’s five degrees are hotter than it is? You’re dead. What? There’s no water. You’re dead. How many can I lift?
Every single thing. It’s unbelievable. Are you in control of those things? No. So that which you’re not in control of is way more important than this stupid stuff that you want. Well, I don’t to like me. I don’t want to say anything stupid in front of people. Oh, it’s real important compared to your breath, clean and out your cells dividing, right? So I’m telling you 0.00, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh 1% of the things that are actually important that you need to be alive and you need to experience life and so on or happening by themselves. You don’t do any of them, but you made it up. You just made up what you want to happen. You just made it up based on your past experiences and so you suffer and that’s what all suffering is. So the mind is not a bad thing. It’s a wonderful thing.
You have completely misused it. You used it to store things you didn’t like and used it to store things you did. And now when you look out into the world, you don’t ever want it to happen. What you don’t like and you want it to happen what you do, that’s the folly. So what do you do about that? I told you, you can’t start from the mess you are. You have to slow it down and break it down to individual pieces. The problem is that you can’t handle the reality that unfolded in front of you. Well, there are a lot that I didn’t handle in the past. I have to go back and redo ’em though. What you have to do is learn to handle reality. Start now. When things happen now, which things? Anything? Everything. I know it’s tough. I don’t care what it is.
Eventually you’re mature enough to realize if there’s anything I don’t want to happen and it happens, I’m not okay, so I’m not going to do that. I’m going to learn that whatever’s happening in front of me today comes in. I have to deal with it, causes problem, whatever it is, and I let it go. I let it pass through. Okay, fine. Somebody beeped at me. I was doing my cell phone and looking at my cell phone in the car and I didn’t go in a light change me. Oh, I don’t like that. That’s embarrassing. I can’t believe I did that. I told you I used to watch freaky in the early days. Did that happen to him? And the light changed a few lights later and this time it wasn’t behind me. It would’ve been next to me. He didn’t want to pull up. He did not want to pull up at the same level to where I have to look at that guy who beeped at me.
You better be laughing because you do it. Also, how can you have a nice life if that’s what you’re doing with your mind? That’s ridiculous. It should be beep, sorry. And there’s nothing. There’s nothing. He’s your friend. You got to know him. He’s the beeper guy. Really? You met somebody. Can you learn to do that? Of course you can learn to do that. You learn anything. You learn a piano, you learn sports. You learn all kinds of notes. You learn calculus for God’s sakes. Alright? And you can’t learn how to do this. That’s the essence of true spiritual teachings. Can you learn to accept reality? What does it mean? It means it comes in and you don’t buy. Okay? If the mind gets weird about it, fine. I quote onto that. Do you have an ego? I have to find ego for you. That collection of thoughts you put together in your head and are married to you got an ego, right?
Can you handle that? You have an ego instead of being the ego, can you see it and see what it is? This thing that you built in your mind that gets upset if it doesn’t got what it wants, it gets all happy. If it does, can you sit back? That’s what witness consciousness is. That’s why you’re taught that objective observation. You’re the consciousness noticing. You have an ego. Don’t try to not have an ego. All that’s doing is spiritualizing. Ego. I don’t have an ego. I wear white and I’m vegan. Okay? I don’t do anything. I don’t kill anything I eat. Only the berries off the tree. The Bible tells me to. There’s still an eye there. You just developed a self-concept. That’s spiritualized. You’re not getting out that way, are you? Okay? So they don’t teach you that. The deep teachings teach you witness consciousness.
Christian, objective observation. I’m in here, check and I’m noticing I have an ego. It’s very sensitive. It has things it likes and doesn’t like and it really wants people to like it. It’ll change who it is to make somebody like it. Don’t worry, don’t leave me. No. I promise I can change. Who can change? Change what? I just made them up anyways. I could change him. Just don’t leave. You. Start watching that instead of being it. You’re not your ego, you’re not your mind. You have built this thing in your mind and you’re addicted to it. Well, you start going through withdrawal. You start doing practices within yourself and that’s your business. What you do that sit there and say, I got this ego and it’s a problem and the way I try to solve the problem. How do you try to solve that problem with your ego to give it what it wants.
I’m going to spend the rest of my life using all my will and all my effort to try and make the moment in front of me match what my ego wants so it feels good and not match what it doesn’t want and nobody’s going to waste my life. So you wake up and you realize there’s only one way to do this thing. And that is learn to accept reality and learn to be open. Don’t sit there and say of a spoiled child who’s throwing a tantrum in department store, everyone’s looking. It’s embarrassing. It’s ridiculous. The kid’s screaming, what do I do? Which to do you want this one? Is that the one you want? Go on. See how that kid grows up? Which one you would do that to A spoiled child’s throwing tantrums. That’s what you do to your ego. There’s not one of you that don’t do that.
Your ego says, I don’t like that. Oh my God, look at that. There’s a scratch in my car. Who did that? How am I going to find out who did that? It’s late. Everybody already left. What car was next to me? Who could have done that? What are you doing? You’re sitting in a plant in the middle of nowhere, there’s a little scratch in your car and your ego can’t handle it. So now I’m going to ruin my life to try to get my ego what it wants. I’m going to sue somebody. Please laugh. You’re making hell out of the most beautiful place that could exist. So instead, what do you do? You learn to handle reality and you deal with the ego that we deal with the child. You sit there and say, look, I don’t know you child psychology. I don’t care what you do, but don’t buy into it.
I don’t like what you said to me. I’m going to sue you. People do that. Said I’m going to sue you. You said that. Alright. You bumped into me to touch me. Too many people got in the elevator. They should have a sign that limits how many in the elevator. It’s too crowded. I’m going to go talk to management. Hope you’re having fun. Yet you’re just basically trying to make everything be the way you want it to be and it isn’t that way and so you worry of anxiety and so on. So you just basically catch on. This is a non-starter to go out there and serve the ego. Yes, I have one. Can I live with it? Yes, I can live with it. How? You don’t have to beat it up, don’t beat it up. It doesn’t work. But you have to do it.
Really though I’ve found use child psychology on it. If it sits there and says, oh, I want that. I want that. I used to use this years and years ago. I don’t have to do it anymore. He talked like that. I literally can’t beat him up. Can’t tell him No, you don’t want it. Can’t argue with him because he’s winning, because he’s arguing both sides of the argument. So I would say to him, oh, of course, of course you can have that. We’ll do it tomorrow. I’d never do it. So you just find a way to work with yourself that works. Instead of sitting there saying, the only way I’m going to be okay is if he’s okay, because it’s limited your happiness. It’s ridiculous. So you start working with yourself. It’s not about the mind has to be perfect or anything like that. It’s just about you, the consciousness or higher than your mind.
And so you should learn to use your mind to get it together. Alright? What will happen? It was something I wanted to talk about. Eventually what will happen and I promise you it will happen. They write me, I can’t believe it. I try to answer all my emails all over the world. We get a ton of emails every day and today, 60% of them were thank yous. I read your book, thank you. You’ve changed my life. I didn’t change with life. Whatever This changed your life. Well, of course it did. Because you’ve been so busy spoiling and buying into your ego that somebody all of a sudden finally said, Hey guys, that’s not the game. The game is to be comfortable with life and then come out and deal with it. It’s not that you don’t deal with it. I keep saying it over and over and it sounds stupid.
I keep saying it. If you can’t handle something, you can’t deal with it. When you sit there and say, I can’t handle, it’s too hot. Then you’re the worst person in the world to deal with it. You’re the one that can’t handle it. Get in a car accident, don’t but get in a car accident and be bleeding. Who do you want to show up? The person that can’t stand the side of blood or the person that can handle the side of blood. Gee, I wonder that’s for every single thing in your life. If you can’t handle it, you’re the worst person to be dealing with it. How often do you say, I can’t handle this? Look at me. Look at what you say. I can’t handle what you did. I can’t handle what you said. I can’t handle what the child is doing. I can’t handle this.
I can’t handle that. I can’t handle the job. Alright, then you’re saying I’m not the right person to deal with it and if I teach, handle it, accept it. You think it means don’t deal with it. No, it does not mean that. It means first get clear, get centered, accept it. Let it pass through. Become now look and see what can you do to help? That’s a totally different attitude, isn’t it? So surrender doesn’t mean do everything the outside world does, right? A drug dealer shows up. You just read the surrender experiment. Drug dealer shows up. Hey man, I guess some stuff for you. Well, making sense, surrender. No, no, that’s not what happened. You let go of your resistance inside. You surrender that. You let that go. You surrender to life. Doesn’t mean you don’t deal with it, but you surrender to the reality of what happened.
A drug dealer walked up to you and you didn’t feel comfortable with it, but you let go. Now what? Decide how you want to deal with it. Do you want to keep walking? Do you want to talk to the person? I don’t know. It’s not my business. It’s your business. But what matters is you’re not interacting with the moment because you can’t handle it. I said, do now. I don’t like what you said to me. I can’t handle that. I’m going to go out and every word I say and everything I do is to try to make it so you didn’t do that. Apologize. You better never do that again. I don’t need to put up with this. What’s that saying? I can’t handle it. You shouldn’t have done it. Said, I’m not doing anything to fix the situation. I’m trying to fix the fact that I can’t handle it.
But if you can’t handle it, let it go. Okay, fine. I got a bad day. I can handle it. Now what? Now you either be compassionate or ask, do you have a bad day? We talk like that, right? Or just let it go so people have a bad day. It’s okay. You decide how to handle it, but you don’t handle it because you, how do I say it? You can’t interact with it because you couldn’t handle it. You’ll never solve anything. You’re just dumping your stuff out into the situation. That’s already a problem. So first except first surrender. So the surrender experiment’s not about surrendering to whatever life does. It looks like that when you look at the outside, it’s because you surrender inside and then you make good decisions about what to do with the outside. Then all of a sudden everything’s unfolding well because you handled it well.
So letting go and surrender things you do inside. As you do that, you’ll stop collecting more garbage inside your mind. You’ll go through days that normal things happen and you don’t define them as you. I’m the one that she yelled out. I’m the one that got the B in the test. I’m the one that was so hot I couldn’t even handle it. I’m one lost my jacket. I’m the one that somebody scratched my car. No, no. You just make it through the day. You didn’t define yourself as the different things that happened to you and you go to bed at night giggling. Look what happened. You wake up in the morning and you’re a higher person that woke up yesterday because you let go of more stuff and all of a sudden you start being happy. Why? Because you’re not making yourself unhappy. You live inside.
The outside does not touch the inside until you say it. Does the great masters handle everything? That’s what the teachings are. Let the world come in and pass through. But then they do great work because they’re clear and they bring down. Let’s talk about that. If you let go enough, you get clear in there and what happens? You don’t have to do anything anymore. But what happens with clarity? I’ll go a little deeper. You have layers of your being. I talked to this once in detail a couple of weeks ago. I won’t do that. There is your physical body, but there’s also an emotional body. There’s also energy. You have emotions that aren’t your physical body. That’s not chemicals. I don’t care what they tell you. An emotion, something you experience is a thing. It’s energy and you have a mental body and you have higher beyond.
Your mental body is your wisdom body and then it is your body of ecstasy. That’s real. These are things yoga teaches the different kos. Alright? Someday you’ll experience them personally. Personally. They’re experiencing right now. You’re experiencing them, but you don’t know the difference. You think, oh, my emotions in my mind and my body, that’s me. No, none of it is you. You’re the one that’s experiencing it. As you get quieter, you see the distinction. Here’s my physical body. Yes, it tells me it’s hungry. Yes, it has physical feelings, but I also have a spiritual body that has emotions and feels auras and does all kinds of stuff feel impressions. When I walk in a room, people have been fighting. I feel it. If people are filled with love it, you feel it. You pick up their energy. Everyone, you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t do that.
That’s not your physical body doing that. It’s your higher bodies. So what happens is as you work with your mind to clear out, a very amazing thing happens. The energy from your higher body, from the wisdom body, their deeper body drops down into the mind and that is what you call inspiration. That is what you call intuition. All these words we use what in between? Mental concepts and intuition. Like Beethoven heard music playing inside his head enough to have drove him crazy. The only way he felt peace is if he wrote it down and played it and could hear it through his ears. That created the fullness, the harmony of what was going on. He was not writing the music, the orchestra. He was hearing it. Then wrote it down, where’d that come from? Even great thinkers. Darwin once said that he traveled all around the galas islands, this, that, everything like that, right?
Tried to figure out, well, what’s going on and what’s these species? He did not intellectually figure it out. He wrote all these notebooks. He did everything. He said that once he was walking through the courtyard of a church and like a lightning rod, bam. He saw a natural selection. Now we say it’s obvious, but no until you see it. Nothing’s obvious. And it just all came together and then he started writing about it and it all poured in. That’s where inspiration comes from. It comes from a higher place of your being. Okay. It comes from God, if you will. It’s just something drops in there. Then what? The mind tries to figure it out. He thinks about it and writes about it. The mind processes it so that it can deal with the physical plane, but it’s coming from a higher level. That’s what inspiration is.
People often, I don’t ever talk about those higher levels, right? I want you to experience for yourself. I don’t want you to want them. I wish I could have inspiration. Christ said, if they bring you to court, do not think about what to say. The words will come to you when you need them. Go check it out. What’s he talking about? Just exactly what I just talked about. It’s like you don’t need to think it all out. You can’t think it all out. You get neurotic trying to think it all out. You only can think of what you think about based on your past experiences. Then all of a sudden, some of the left fuel will come in. You want to know what to do, you’ll freeze if you’re open. That doesn’t ever happen, ever. You’re just there and it comes in. It’s something you didn’t think about so you know exactly what to do with it.
Exactly what to do with it. I mean, I tell them like to talk about me. I tell that story in the surrender experiment that I’ve been meditating six hours a day, blah, blah, blah. They wanted me to teach a course in Santa Fe and they told me I could teach whatever I wanted. So okay, fine, and I went in there. I had no idea what I was going to teach. I mean, none. I was very disciplined in my mind at that time. I had never taken a sociology course in my life. I was business, school, economics, et cetera, et cetera. And I went in there and did not let Mickey think one. I mean, I’m telling you the truth. I’m here personally telling you, looking in the eyes. I was disa. I was meditating six hours a day without hearing solitude, right? I was suppressing.
I pushed my thoughts down, but he didn’t think stuff, alright? I kept him quiet the whole time. So not one single thought or was he going to teach in that class. And I walked in that classroom, sat down on a table and my mind had no idea what to do. And some of you have read it now, 50 years ago out of all of that, a book came. Well, the Search for Truth, it just started coming out. And so I just started talking. I had no idea anything to talk about class after class, after class. It just came out. It just built it logical. This, that, nothing. I can’t say anything. Where does it come from? Don’t ask me. I don’t want to talk about it. But it was there. Every single class, everything. And at some point, instead of having 10, 15, 20 people signed up for their required sociology class, freshmen level, right?
First class level. There’s 50, 60 people standing in the hallway wanting to hear what’s going on. I never taught before. I never did anything that all this started, and I’ve never, ever, ever thought about what I’m going to say before I teach for you guys anything. Never. Not even a topic I want. I will not let ’em think about it. What is that? That’s inspiration. Don’t talk to me about channeling or something like that. It’s this thing called inspiration. You’re open. It just naturally flows out and you’re naturally able to handle the different things that go on every single one of you’re capable of that, but your mind is not capable. So do not ever think that the mind is a cause of inspiration. The mind is a computer and even the ai, somebody programmed it. It’s like the computer does very good at repetitive challenges, things it has to do.
That’s where a computer got smart. It can do them so fast in so many that it’s better than a calculator. It’s better than this, better than that, better than your brain. And it basically can do a variety of things by trying all kinds of stuff. He can do it so rapidly. That’s all your mind can do is move things around that you’ve learned about. The mind cannot have inspiration about something he’s never thought about and never seen. Creativity comes from the higher level, but at some point it just all melds together. You don’t do anything. It drops into the mind and the mind naturally takes that as information has been given and intellectually puts it together and then it’s able to express it and write it and do stuff like that. Somebody once taught me a psychic lady, very, very psychic, very beautiful lady back in the early seventies, late sixties, and she said that even inspiration cannot find a home if the mind isn’t trained in that area.
So if you never studied, economics didn’t have that foundation. Some inspiration could drop in there and you wouldn’t know what to do with it. You couldn’t do anything with it if Beethoven didn’t know how to write music. So the mind gets trained as a vehicle so they can take the inspiration and then turn it into something that can be expressed in this world. Do you understand that? That’s why your studies are very important, but they’re not who you are. It’s higher than that. So I wanted to talk about mind. The problem when I talk about mind is its ego mind, but mind is way bigger. Mind can think about the universe. The mind can think about everything, but it doesn’t. It thinks about me. My beliefs, my hopes, my dream. Okay? You’ll reach the point where you don’t think like that anymore. Everything’s coming in from a deeper place and your mind is a servant of the higher level and you’re just basically mind’s being used to see how can I serve?
Doesn’t even have to think. I just naturally to how can I serve life? How can I serve humanity? How can I give? That’s all it ever thinks about it. Never thinks about what do I want, what don’t I want? Why? Because Christ said it. I have a nice Jewish boy. I like Christ’s teachings, alright? Christ said, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that leave with the mouth of God. What does that mean? It means you are now getting off on the things that happen outside, not just bread, relationships and this and that and success and money and travel. You understand that those are all outside things. Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that leave in the mouth of the Father. As you let go of this stupid stuff your mind is doing, which is limiting your happiness to getting what it wants, like a spoke spoil child, you start realizing there’s inspiration in here.
There’s Shakti in here, there’s joy in here. Natural, spontaneous is being fed from inside. That’s what I mean. But by every word, leave of the mouth of God. That’s what spirit is. That’s what Shakti is. And you start feeling that. Not learn about it or talk about it or believe in it. I don’t want you to believe in Shakti. I don’t want you to believe in anything I talk about. If it inspires you to work with yourself so you directly experience it, that’s something else altogether. Just wait till you’re open enough and you start feeling waves of Shakti feeding you day and night for the moment we wake in the morning till you go to bed at night and start realizing that the only time you don’t feel it is the mind’s not getting what it wants, right? That the mind’s, okay, I’m feeling good, but you’re ruined it.
Okay? Nobody can ruin it until you say they do. And so you start really catching on about this thing, about letting go. And you start experiencing all these things. They’re not spiritual states, they’re your natural state, but your natural state now is to be addicted to your mind. It don’t be embarrassed. Don’t feel guilty. Just work with it. How do you do it? I told you, yes, you can meditate. Yes, you do all kinds of stuff. It’s wonderful. But in addition to all that, I don’t want to teach against it. In addition to all that, you better be able to handle the moments that are folding in front of you on a daily basis. Every single thing I from mosquito, it’s hot scratching the car. The food wasn’t cooked exactly the way you like. The serving wasn’t big enough. It’s not hot enough. You just learn to start saying, come on, I can handle this.
I can handle this instead of I can’t handle this. And then do how? Let go. Go of the party that’s resisting. And when you see what happens to you, you entire being changes takes time. You’ve got stuff in there. But the more you let go, the more inspiration is just always there. It’s just there. You’re going to talk about it. It’s just there. I was going to tell you, there’s a line of the Gita, again, the same thing. I read the Gita once a long time ago, but it just stays in there that I read. I didn’t understand it at all. And now I do. The line says, when thought has passed from thinking, when thought has passed from thinking, that’s what inspiration is. The thought has nothing to do with thinking. Thinking is what happens after the thought, the creativity. You understand that the seed drops in from inspiration.
So thought has passed from thinking. It’s not that you’re using your thinking mind to experience things. It comes in from a deeper level. Now, I talked about inspiration. Do you understand what I’m saying to you? It drops in from the higher level things, things. How did you think about ’em as I don’t encourage all to think too much about all the spiritual stuff. Think right me. If God’s perfect, then how come he’s hanging out on this ego with, come on. You’re not going to think it through. But there is an intuitive understanding of things as you get back here. You just know things. There’s no question to ask God. How do you know God? You just know God. It says talk about it. Nobody has to agree with you, right? You’re sitting in a higher place that is in harmony with this beautiful energy and you just enjoy it.
Somebody wants ask Ram Krishna, do you know God? He said, he’s more real to me now than you are. That’s all he experienced. You can go there. There’s the answer to your question. Okay, ask a master. But if you ask a master what happens after death? Is there life after death? And don’t ask him. How do you know? He goes there and comes back. They’re able to go into Somani, merge with the universe and come back. They would visit higher planes, reads, books. So this thing about experience as opposed to thinking, that’s what the inspiration is. It’s getting back into the actual experience level, then it drops into the mind. Alright, anyways, I wanted to talk about mind. We did, but I also wanted talk about the fact that it’s something higher than mine. Viko Yogis have names for them. Kosha, the physical body, pr, kosha, your energy body, mono kosher, your mental body.
These are just vibration rates, higher and higher vibration rates of your being. And then Viji Kosha, that’s inspiration. The wisdom kosher. Alright, and then my favorite guess who the next one is. Not God, not God yet. Anand. Kosha. You’ll start realizing there’s ecstasy in there that’s beyond knowing and not knowing beyond the body. There’s just waves of ecstasy pouring inside of you. You feel that sometimes when you get every single thing you want, you open up, you feel something beautiful, don’t you? How long does it last? I’m talking about it’s who you are. And then beyond that. Beyond the Beyond. Alright, thank you for listening. Jai Guru Dev.
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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