E116: Doing the Best You Can: The Path to Liberation

Michael Singer: jai guru dev, jai masters. There are some aspects of the spiritual path that seem trite and mundane, but they end up being the entire path from totally lost to totally liberating. So I wanna talk about the biggest one of those. And believe it or not, there are those that say the entire bag of agita is about this. All of its chapters, all its different phases.

The whole conversation between Krishna and Arjuna, and that is doing the best that you can. Everybody wants to do the best they can. Every tells you to do the best you can. But what does that really mean? So let’s start this way. If you’re playing a sport, doesn’t have to be a professional sport. You’re just having friends, fun with your friends, playing volleyball, football, basketball, whatever.

How much fun is it? If you’re playing against somebody who doesn’t care? How do you like doing that? They couldn’t care less. If you made a shot, they made a shot. They’re just wasting time. That’s not doing the best that you can. Now what if you argue, well, I don’t understand. There was a field out here, just an open field.

We have a lot of land out here, an open field, and you took some white lines and you took a hundred yards and you drew this box 50 by a hundred, whatever it is, and you drew these lines on it every 10 yards and it took a ball. It was kinda weird shaped, egg type shaped, and you decided, what do we do with it?

Okay, I got an idea. Let’s try to move it every 10 yards and you know, we can just carry it. No. What if the other guys try to stop you? Why? Just for fun, why would they try to stop you? Who cares? There’s nothing happening. It’s just a field in the middle of planet Earth spinning around. Right? Well, if you take that attitude, I don’t want you on my team.

Well, what if I take the attitude if I don’t win, they gimme some serious problems around here. I don’t care what I have to do. I’ll cheat, I’ll lie. I’ll hit people. I’ll do anything I can. Well, I don’t want you on my team either. What’s this yin yang thing? It’s kind of saying you do the best that you can.

Why? It’s just lines on a field and a stupid ball. ’cause you all know the answer ’cause you don’t do the best you can. There’s no reason to be playing, but there’s really no reason to be playing. It’s just lines on a few, you could have drawn circles. It’s just a game. It’s just something you made up. Yeah.

But somehow if you do the best that you can, you become better. Better at what everything. You become better at doing the best that you can no matter what you’re doing. It causes you to dig down and bring up energy and learn, and grow is healthy. It’s good for you. Doing the best that you can, the absolute best that you can is a very, very growthful.

How can that be ful? You get better at the sport, you get better at sportsmanship. Well, what if you’re behind? I love to see this. And then it happens in pro. You’re behind the 50 points and there’s two minutes left. They do the best that they can. They take the attitude, if I can get one more touchdown, it made it all worth it, even though you lost, it has nothing to do with winning and losing.

It has to do with doing the best that you can, and that is not only true of football or baseball or soccer. It’s true of every single thing you do in your life, and that is yoga. I. You will have to be evolved beyond your ego to do that, or your ego will want. Ever wanna quit? Have you ever wanted to quit?

Why bother playing? We’re so far behind. Ever felt like you would go to great ends and maybe in cheating to win? We see a lot of that going on in this world, right? It’s like, I’ll win any cost. You’re not becoming better. You’re becoming worse. You’re becoming an ugly being that. Doesn’t have any real energy or real shockty or real meaning.

It’s just using your power. But if you take the attitude that what life, not the game, life is about. Every minute of your life is about doing the best that you can. You’re living the highest life that could possibly exist. And it’s taught, and the Gita teaches this, and it’s true. The outcome is not what matters.

What matters is the income. It matters what happened to you because you took that time to dig down inside yourself and bring up something greater about yourself. Do you understand that? God, I hope you do because your society does not teach you this. Your society teaches you is all about winning and losing, and if you lose, then don’t bother playing again.

Oh, that’s sure. Doing great. That’s just wonderful. You used to teach this, let’s say you gave a test the math test your students. And they were good students. They were your best students, okay? Honor students, and they studied hard to do the best they could at every test. Everything they did, they participated in class, everything.

Okay? They say 10 in a class, 10 of ’em go to the class, and when you give ’em a test, they get it all right. But one of ’em gets three questions wrong. But if you asked him did he study? Yes. Did you do the best you can? Did you do everything you possibly could to do the best you can on this test? If he says, yes, he won.

’cause it means he learned something. The others already knew it. That means that person walked into that room, took the test, walked out a better person than walked in, who knows how much of his future was taken care of. ’cause he learned what he learned. It is always about doing the best that you can. It is never about winning and losing, and we are not taught that.

And that’s why you guys have trouble hearing it. Okay? What do you win when you die? It all goes away. Nothing’s going with you. He who dies of the most toys dies. Okay? The toys don’t go with you, doesn’t mean anything. And then what happens is if it’s about the results, then you have to feel challenged the next time, not challenged to play the game better, challenged to win.

Otherwise you’re embarrassed. It’s like, where do all these personal emotions come from? Fear of guilt, fear of nothing wrong. Embarrassment, insecurity about what? If you do the best that you can. Let’s talk about that now. If you do the best that you can at every single thing you do, how can you feel guilty if something didn’t come out?

Couldn’t it come out how the way somebody else said it should have the way you were taught that it should have. When you do the best, I’ve taught this many times in my books. The results of the best that you can are holy if you truly did the best that you can. The results are holy because they came back and taught you just like that person on the math test.

If you sat there in your relationship and you’re doing the best as you can, you’re really doing the best you can to be open and tolerant and everything like that, and then somehow a fight takes place or something, but you were doing the best that you could to accept and honor and respect, okay? What comes back from the best that you can is your teacher.

It’s not your karma. Now, I don’t want you using those words. I mean, karma can be understood at a deeper level than a punishment. What what it means is you put out the best that you can and the world’s gonna come back. It’s gonna come back. You’re gonna get the results the best you can, and don’t sit there.

You deserved it. You deserve to learn. It’s fine. When I did 30 years of prison work, a maximum security prison, people in there for life, everything, you know, death row was on one of the prison, right? These guys in serious trouble, right? Most of them. Did the best that they could. But you’d look at that and say, how could that be the best you can?

They robbed a liquor store and somebody got hurt or shot. If you were to really get down to that moment where that person was going through what they were going through, it was the best that they could do. It’s not like they sat there and decided, some of ’em do. Rather, they sat there and decided, I’m gonna do evil or hurt everybody.

Right? They wanted something. They needed something. They were afraid of something, and their consciousness had not evolved enough to where they didn’t deal with it. They didn’t deal with it properly. Did they purposely not be able to properly? No. The emotions were too strong. The need was too strong. The fear was too strong.

That’s why they say judged. Now you not be judged. When I look at a person like that, you feel compassion Now, not somebody who knows this is wrong and I don’t care. I’m gonna hurt ’em anyways. That’s different. It’s not doing the best that you can, but if you’re sitting there, I’ve met, I’ve met gentlemen that I love somebody they wanted to get married and they wanted to get a ring and they couldn’t afford it, and there was a liquor store and they just, they tried to stop it.

It was just, and they just did that and they ended up in jail, in prison, and sometimes for a very long time. It’s way beyond anything you would think so. But I always ask them, did you do the best that you can at that moment? And then you ask, if you were in that situation again, would you do the same thing?

And every single time they said no. What does that mean? They grew. They learned. They evolved. You tell me that a bad thing. Just people should do the best that they can, but you don’t get to judge the best that somebody else can do. You understand that? ’cause just what the best you can do is the best you can do.

Best they can do. They have totally different input, totally different situations and experiences. Well, what if you’re doing the best you can and it doesn’t come out good? Do you quit? Do you run away? No. You look at it and you sit there and say, how can I do better? Can you do better than the best you can?

Not at the moment you did it. That’s what the best you can means. I did at that time, given the emotions of this, the situation, what I had for dinner last night, whatever it was, I did the best that I could. Would you do it again that way? Of course not. What came back was not what I wanted to do, was not what I intend or anything like that I learned.

Then I know you look at me weird ’cause nobody would teach it this way then that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing, but if somebody got hurt, I know it’s, isn’t it terrible if somebody got hurt? Okay. It’s called life. It’s called people interacting. If they all did the best that they could, this would be a very different place to live.

But they don’t, and they’re not taught to. They’re taught to be goal oriented. Not growth oriented. You’re here and your whole spiritual journey, it is to grow inside to a greater being than you were at the moment before. And it’s a moment to moment thing I always taught you, right? You wake up in the morning, get yourself together, take a look.

Let go of what happened yesterday and then do the best you can throughout the day. When you wake up the next morning, you’re not the same person. Do you know how many things happen during the day that you don’t even think about doing the best you can? You just react. Somebody said something. All these emotions come up.

Do you try to deal with them? No. I try to tell’em stop saying that. Get away from me. Don’t ever talk to me like that again. Right. So he doesn’t say something here. Here’s an example. Not the best you can. Somebody doesn’t say something. You, you say hello to them. They kinda walk by, ignore you, whatever seem like it.

Your mind goes crazy, your heart goes crazy. What did I do? I didn’t say anything Them. How come they didn’t say hello? Oh my God, what if it start to figure it out and think they didn’t hear you, they earbuds on and you made a whole micka outta it? Alright, then that’s not the best that you can Not even close is it?

You could have looked at the reaction. That your mind was doing, that your heart was doing, and I got very strict with him in the beginning. I’d look at him right in the eyes down there. Do you know why that person didn’t say hello? Obviously not ’cause he keeps coming up with 40 different reasons, right or wrong.

This is what it means to the best that you can. When you work with yourself, does your mind argue with itself and try to figure things out and then change its mind? What does that mean? It means it doesn’t know if it n Oh yeah, well, she at the end of it, if it doesn’t do that, does it? That I say at some point the best that you can.

I’m not gonna tell you discipline your mind. I don’t like that word. Okay. I can tell you do the best that you can. How can that neurosis going on in your mind that makes you upset and nervous when you don’t even know why the person didn’t say hello? Or you don’t know what the person meant when they were covering their, their third chakra and their body language.

You just made it up. They had a stomach ache. The point is, that’s not the best that you can to get yourself together. That is a way of protecting yourself, of defending yourself, of controlling the situation. And so you try to figure out what to do with your mind. So let’s start evolving beyond the normal state of a human being, which is I only care about me and I don’t wanna feel bad, and I wanna feel good.

And what you just did made me feel bad, and therefore you better take it. How can that be the best that you can do? You are interacting with the lowest part of your being. The part that can’t handle anything, gets sensitive about everything, and tries to figure every single thing out and tries to control it.

Do people have control issues? Why? Why do you have control issues? Because you’re so sensitive that you can’t handle life. You can’t handle this. Something might happen that hit your heart and didn’t feel good or made your mind get a little weird, and so you need to control all of life to make it so it comes out.

That’s all. Notice that is not about doing the best that you can. That’s about goal orientation again. God, I feel funny talking about it because you are taught goal orientation. You know that, right? It’s all about picking a goal and making sure you hit it. It is not, it is not. That goal, which you had five years ago means nothing to you.

Now, the toys you played when you were young and Barbie and the first boyfriends and girlfriend, do you understand that? It’s not true that it’s about goal orientation. It’s about becoming a greater being every moment of your life, and that’s what yoga’s about. That’s what spirituality is about. So you don’t have to give it names and religions or any junk like that.

It’s just about are you in there? Check? Is it a mess in there? Check. Is it fun living in there if I get what I want? But if you don’t, ah, by the way, it’s worse than that. What if I think that someday I might not get what I want?

Speaker 14: Ah.

Speaker 13: You take a look in there and you say, this is not the best that I can do.

That’s a neurotic mess in there. And the only time it’s okay is if it manipulates everybody and everything to try and make it be what it wants to be. Otherwise I’m suffering. And even then I’m suffering people who get what they want. Worry about losing it. Tell me about it. I love you so much. Oh my God, you’re so beautiful.

And it’s the first time we met. Can we get together again? You don’t know what to wear. What? What did you say that he liked so much? Tell me it’s not true. It’s crazy in there. Why? Because you’re goal oriented. You can’t go and meet somebody and have a nice little interaction and not want it to happen again.

Your goal oriented, what you gonna find out someday is that if life gives you something nice, say thank you. It may stay, it may go something nicer might happen, but no, anytime anything happens that you like, you clinging, but is called clinging. It’s funny, that’s what we were talk about tonight. Doing the best You can notice how offering we using the word goal orientation.

Those things are polar opposites. Goal orientation does not make you a great being. It makes potentially you to struggle to try to get an event a given way and then struggle to keep it that way. And by the way, if you’re goal oriented, does anybody have an issue with acceptance? It might like being accepted instead of rejected.

Did you know that every single person you interact with. It’s different. They had different experiences in their life. They had different parents, different upbringing, different formative years, different. Every single thing is different. How do you know how you’re supposed to behave that will make them accept you?

And now you’re in a group of seven people and they’re all new. Oh my God, how do I know what the view how? I don’t want you to be like that. Why is it like that? ’cause you’re goal oriented. You didn’t just sit there and say, I’m on a planet spin middle of nowheres and there’s some people there. Let’s go meet them.

Well, they don’t like me. That’s fun. As long as I’m doing the best I can to be the best person I can, I can’t please all of them. Go bring somebody you’ve been dating for a little while, home to your parents. Who are you gonna act like? Like the person you that you’re always with, or like your parents want you to be?

That’s what creates tension and anxiety and neurosis. And it’s all because instead of saying, I’m gonna walk into every single situation I walk into, get quiet for a moment and just do the best I can to be the best person I can be, to be the most loving person I can be the most compassionate person, I can be the most fearless person, I can be the most accepting.

Right. I just, that’s it. I dunno what that means, but I’m gonna just do my best given the interaction that takes place. Oh my God, how beautiful is that? I’d like to live around with people like that. Instead, you walk in and you have these preconceived notions of how you want it to be and what is success and what is failure, what’s gonna hurt you and what’s gonna feel good.

I don’t wanna live inside of somebody that has to figure all that out. I gave up. I’m not perfect at all, but I, that’s why I moved out here in 1971. 53 years ago, 54 years ago, I ain’t gonna live like that. There’s no way in the world that I’m gonna continue from that point in my life to try to please everybody and try to be accepted and try to earn the money that I think about or try to.

It’s a struggle. Life becomes a battle. Every single thing you do, there’s a battle. Raise your hand in class and give your opinion and then let me see your mind after you gave it. Oh God, I shouldn’t have said that. I could have done better than that. What? What’s so and so thinking? You do not want to live like that.

And the reason you’re living like that is exactly what I’m talking about tonight. Because instead of just saying, look, I’m not perfect. I’m not perfect at anything I, you’re saying that to yourself, certainly true of me. Right. But you’re saying I’m not perfect, but I’m willing to do the best I can. You never played the piano before.

Learn to play the scales. I don’t know how to, I know you don’t know how to, that’s all you’re gonna learn. Just do the best you can. Yeah, but I keep getting it wrong. So what. The more you practice with it and do the best you can. Can you imagine somebody doing the best they can to play an instrument and not getting better?

Doesn’t mean they’re concert pianists, but they’re going to get better, aren’t you? Well, it’s the same with your relationships. It’s the same with your business. It’s the same with every single minute of your life. If you take the attitude, this is what’s been presented to me, I’m gonna do the best I can with it.

I don’t care best I can not, what’s my goal? What’s the orientation? Am I getting it? Are people accepting? Right? It’s just. You wanna know what the worst goal that could possibly exist and will make the, the most unhappiest person that ought the face the earth. Let your ego decide what you want to happen.

Let’s talk about that. Let that sensitive, neurotic, crazy part of you that is so sensitive and so scared and so needy, tell you what is supposed to happen with the interaction that you’re having. Have you ever changed? Your mind? Doesn’t take much, does it? Boom, you change your mind. Okay, then who are you listening to?

All of a sudden you just decided the best you can, something different. You just wake up and realize the purpose of my life is to become the most beautiful. Being free, liberated, open, non neurotic, just I’m here in life. Bring it on. It’s called be here now, by the way. That’s what I’m, man. But be here now.

That’s all the great teachings. Teach this moment is all there is. This is the only real moment in my life. Is it not? Everything else in my mind. What else happened before? What might happen in the future? What’s happening somewhere else? No, this is reality. These are what the atoms have come in together and it was presented to me right now, this person, this place, this job, there it is in this moment and I am going to give it the best that I can and not worry.

About what anybody thinks about it, what anybody else has to say about it. It’s just, I know I did the best that I could and I welcome whatever comes back as my teacher. That’s the essence of everything I learned about life. You do the best that you can, but you don’t say, yeah, okay. That’s what I do in a meditating and my spiritual stuff.

That’s not how I deal with my parents, not how I deal with my spouse, not how I deal with the kids. Yes, it is. There are no exceptions at any time. What happens if you, you got a teenage kid and they’re causing trouble and they found drugs in their locker, and you get a call from the principal, what should I do?

Freak out. You get scared. One of the neighbors thinking, what will my husband do? We’re not getting along any, there you go. That’ll be real good to help the kid and help the situation. That’s not the best that you can. What’s the best that you can take a breath. That’s a start. I bothered to take a breath.

And see what it would mean to bring the best parent in that situation forward instead of the reactionary stuff. And then you sit there and do the best that you can to work with the principal, to work with the school, to not care what the neighbors think. How can what the neighbors think help your child help the situation?

No, it just makes you neurotic and you just get to the point, it’s just very advanced. What other people think of you is completely irrelevant. Look at me. What other people think of you is the most irrelevant thing in the world. Now, I’ve given you talks before. While I can say something like that, psychology says.

Man is the sum of his learned experiences been a moment. This makes you understand that it’s not true. You are the consciousness inside and deep inside, noticing your psyche, noticing your mind and essence. Essence. What you’re noticing is that your mind and your heart of the sum learned experiences, do you see the truth in that?

You had experiences in your past that programmed your mind to think the way it did. Have you ever met somebody, had a big experience and now they’re just acting? Have you ever had a situation where your, your spouse or lover, significant others coming home, you all look forward to dinner and so on, but they had a really bad day at work.

Did they come back the same as you expected ’em to be? No. Why? I said the, some of the learned experiences. Every single person is the sum of all the learn experiences that they had over the course of their life a minute ago, 20 years ago. That’s psychology Freud, right? But I teach you how big is the sum of your learn experiences.

I know you think it’s very important, but what’s happened to you is very important, isn’t it? Over the course of your whole life, every moment. I know. I can’t ever get this across to you. Every moment that you’re having in your entire life. There are 700 billion zillion other moments that you’re not having everywhere’s else even two feet away, up, down, left.

Right. If you’re looking a different way, you’d be different. So that’s like you took one experience and said, it’s the most important thing in the universe because I had it. No, it’s no different than what every I, I can’t talk about it. Do you see it logically? Every other experience that’s happening in Einstein’s time space continuum is something that’s happening.

You just have me standing in front of that one, and the next one was another one. Next one or another one. So how much have you picked up over the course of your life? Nothing. Okay, I said it. I wanna see your eyes. How could it be anything You missed? Everything. And is it not true that if you had a different experience when you played your first game and didn’t win, if you had a different experience, would it affect your personality?

Would it affect how you think? Would it affect whether you wanna play the game again? Would it affect whether you wanna play with just that one stupid experience? ’cause it happened the way it did, but there’s all these other experiences you could have had. So you come down to start understanding what am I doing?

What am I doing, caring what other people think about me because it’s bad enough that I think about me based on the experiences I had. And if I had a different experience, I’d be totally different. My mom would think different, but they had their experiences. I don’t know anything about ’em, and they had one every single moment of their life.

They had a different experience than me. How can they like me? How can they dislike me? They’re just really liking themselves or not liking themselves. You don’t understand that when somebody judges you, they’re not judging you. Nobody’s judging you. On what base are they judging them? God, I like your hair.

I don’t like your hair. What’s that got to do with you? Nothing. It’s based on all the experience I’ve had about hair, so I’m really judging myself. This is called freeing yourself, waking up. Otherwise, you just go down life hearing what people think about you. Again, worrying and getting upset and closing yourself off, and no, there’s none of that.

There’s just a whole bunch of people running around that had totally different experiences and therefore they don’t think the same as you. And they think the same as them. How else could they think? That’s the information, the data they were programmed with. I’m telling you, you’re experiencing your life or programming your mind and your heart.

You think you decide what you like, you do not. You’ve had experiences in the past that cause you to feel good about something or bad about something. Now you like it or don’t like it. It’s nothing. If you had a different experience, you’d feel different, but at some point you wake up. And you sit there and say, of course, I don’t know.

First of all, it is bad enough that you care whether they accept you, reject you. What’s worse is who decides whether they’re accepting or rejecting you first. You have patterns that want it to be a certain way. They have patterns are totally different. They behave the way they do. Then you decide what they think about you.

Have you ever realized you were wrong, that somebody really liked you but was shy and that’s why they never talked to you and just walked away every, come on throughout your entire life. Ever find out your mom was wrong? Never find out. You thought, oh, they really liked me and they didn’t really talking behind your back.

It’s like you can’t know ’cause you’re interpreting their behavior, which has nothing to do with you. You didn’t have their experiences based on your behavior. So when stunned, you just wake up and you realize that. I’m just a mess in here. Doing this, caring about other people think about you is absurd.

Now does that mean I should just go out and do whatever I want and hurt people and steal things? I don’t care what they think about me. No. That’s not doing the best that you can. So how do you live? You get quiet inside just for a moment even, and you say, wow, it’s nuts in here, and that’s why it’s nuts in there.

’cause you do care what people think about you, and you do care about winning and losing and success and failure and that messes your energy up inside so you don’t feel like trying or you quit or you give up on things and it doesn’t work. And so instead you get these very basic principles of deep, deep, spiritual principle that don’t sound spiritual.

I didn’t use Christ or Buddha’s name yet, but they’re very deep. They’re basically saying, okay. Calm down. What I’m looking at in my mind, in my heart, is the sum of my experiences. I know for a fact that if I didn’t have that experience when I was 12, I wouldn’t be thinking like this. And there was nothing special about the experience, just God.

I say to you and I, God went see eyes. Eyes. There was something going on at every single spot in the universe. Every single moment. Definitely on the planet Earth and everywhere else there’s something going on everywhere. Okay. It’s called Einstein’s Time space continuum. It goes on for infinity and eternity, and bam.

Believe me, there’s something going on on Saturn and at three o’clock in the afternoon, alright, at that moment. Okay? Okay. You got it. You just happened to be standing in front of what it was that was going on in that spot, at that moment. It might not have been. If you see the phone call, you would’ve had that experience.

It’s just what happened to be happening where you happened to be standing. Anything could have happened and it wouldn’t be happening and you wouldn’t be standing there. But you take it personal, you said to say, no, what happens to me is more important than anything else in the entire universe. It is not.

How could it be? Right? It’s just anything could have stopped it from happening or stopped you from being there. It’s just, I, I’ve come down to saying it’s a match made in heaven. What is the probability that all of your past experiences led you to this moment and all the experience of everybody else and all that ever happened?

Created the moment, and that’s your moment. You’re having a moment, please. I know it’s so hard to let go of the personal, it’s not personal. You just, how many things could have happened that you wouldn’t be standing there? But those are the ones that happen. How many things that could have changed so that the event didn’t happen that way?

Billions. So just right there at that moment, and eventually you get to the point, it’s all part of the same talk as I know fucking way beyond, right, is you use the word God, not the way other people use the word God. ’cause God’s all good and always nice and does nice things. No, God is God And all of creation is all of creation and is doing its thing.

Been doing its thing for, what is it? 13.8 billion years. Not just moments now. 13 point billion years’s been going on and all of those events cause what’s in front of you, right? Look at me. You’re intelligent. If anything had happened different 12 billion years ago, the moment that’s in front of you would not be the way it is.

It’s all cause and effect. Everything interacted with everything that caused everything that interacted with everything caused everything. And then boom, this person’s yelling at you. Who’s willing to listen to the deep truths? It just happens. I always tell people, if you’re standing there and somebody’s yelling at you, they’re not yelling at you.

You just happen to be standing at a place in the universe where somebody’s yelling. This is how you liberate yourself. It’s part of doing the best you can. The fact that somebody else has going on in them based on some of the learned experiences. I can’t deal with that. It’s got nothing to do with me. I wasn’t there.

How can you own the sum of somebody else’s learned experiences? You didn’t have them. And if you think you do, oh, we have a relationship. We get along. So perfect. We’ll always get along. We think exactly like there’s no way in the world you think exactly right. Maybe for one moment you do. ’cause you fell in love.

Oh, we’re feeling the same thing. You know darn well. That’s not gonna keep being like that. This person is more than that One moment. Oh, we had a moment. You put up all the rest of ’em. You’re a vector. Oh, you know, so about man, you’re a vector moving through all the moments of your life. They’re a vector moving the moments of their life.

You’ve known each other for three weeks. If even that, by the way. And you just sit there and we’re the same as my soulmate. You have a soulmate as you. You are your own soulmate. I wanna know, I’m gonna see, is it okay if I talk to you this way? Do you see how different it is than the way you live your life?

Everything’s personal. Everything thing they think of me and no, I don’t even like to think that I, I told you once I heard from George that Sally told him that Fred didn’t like me. How do you feel? Terrible. What? Are you kidding me? Look at all those vectors. I, ugh. You have to reach the point of understanding that doing the best that you can has nothing to do with anybody else.

It has to do with you are in there, you’re conscious and you wanna do the best that you can to be the best person you can, to be the kindest person you can, to be the loving person you can. That’s about you, by the way. That’s something you have control over. You have no control what other people think of you.

You don’t even know what they’re thinking of you. Have you ever met people that, that seem like really nice to you and then they’re different the next time you see ’em? Mm-hmm. Of course you do, because it’s not about you. It’s about them. If when they met you, something really good had happened beforehand, somebody called them, they want a lottery, somebody got an A in a paper, right?

They’re gonna be a different person meeting you than if they got dumped by somebody and failed. What has that got to do with you? Nothing. It has to do with them. But you don’t live like that do you? Right. You take it very seriously and sensitive what people think about you. I hope this talk wakes you up for one second to say that’s absurd.

’cause they’re not thinking about you. If somebody sits there and says, oh, I don’t like the way you’re wearing your hair. That’s not about you. There’s some things that happened in their past or something like that. This is how they decided they liked hair. It’s about them. I don’t like what you said. I don’t like what you said.

What did I say? You know what you said. No, I don’t. Right or wrong. Are you listening to me? Are you willing to talk at this level? Alright. And you just realize I. How can you be happy interacting that way? So again, I’m gonna make a statement A person doesn’t like or dislike you. They like or dislike aspects of themselves and something about you reminded them of that.

What else could be going on? They don’t know you. They weren’t around for all the years and everything you ever went through and so on. My favorite one is this. How could you say that? How could you do that? I never would do anything like that. That’s such a silly thing to say. You didn’t go through my experiences.

Your mind doesn’t think the way my mind thinks. Your heart doesn’t feel the way my heart feels. Of course, you sit there. I would never do anything like that. What’s that got to do with anything? Nothing. That’s when you start understanding acceptance and compassion. You stop looking at people that they’re supposed to be the projection of you.

Why do you make them the projection of you? ’cause you’re not okay. And unless they behave the way you’ve decided it should be. How do you feel about ’em? You don’t like ’em or you do like ’em. Instead, you just sit there and say, look, I’m in here and I gotta learn to live in here. And I’m, I just been talking around some deep stuff.

I don’t normally talk that’s cheap because it’s scary ’cause you don’t live like this, but you can learn to, you wake up in the morning, I’m in here, are you in here? Check. Okay. And then you look. You say, what do I want to do with this day? And you look and you say, well, you know, yesterday I argued a little bit with some, I’d like to do better with that.

Okay. And you just look and just see how can you be better today than you were yesterday? Better at what? Better at being me. Better at being a decent human being. You know, one way to look at it is how can you be that if everyone was that way, the world would be a beautiful place. Not how I get what I want, not how I avoid what I don’t want.

How can I be that? If everybody just had that goal and that aspiration, that pole stark, this would be a very different place, wouldn’t it? Instead of going out there and adding to the junk. So you look in the morning and you see, how can I be, what can I do better? Not jump ’em along. I’ll be enlightened tomorrow.

No, you will not, but I can be better. And then you during the day, you stop a few times, as many as possible. I don’t talk about my life. I was so serious about that. I saw this when I was 22, 23 years old and I was getting a doctrine in economics. I was all finished, all but dissertation top student. I walked, I, I.

Doing that, that’s not who I am and I won’t gonna be alright. And moved out to the woods live alone. And I started practicing this stuff. And for example, I said during the day, try to recenter, try to remember what it’s about, but you’re not going to, the day’s gonna suck you in and you worry and and so on.

So I developed all by myself. I didn’t have a T train or anything. It’s just, okay, we’re gonna remember what we’re doing today. So I go out to get in my car and before I got in my car, I stop. I’m embarrassed, stuck with this. I had a VW van those days, a hippie. Before I got in the car, I would stop and realize I’m getting into a car on the planet Earth.

I am not, I’m going to do this. I, no, I’m just getting into a car on a planet earth. That’s what’s happening now. And before I started the car, I would think I’m starting. Then when I drive, I would drive. I’m scooting around and my thing, I trained them. I’ve scooting around from one place to another on the planet Earth and I just seen the ball.

You really, that’s all that’s happening. And then you get out and I was appointed, was CEO of a public company and every phone call that came in, my secretary would a phone call for you from so and so and it wouldn’t matter who it was. I’d stop, take a breath. I’m about to pick up a phone on the planet Earth and talk to somebody.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is, how are you doing? It’s called centering. It just keeps centering, centering, centering. Alright, you figure your own way. But you remember in the morning I wanted to change how I live. I change you. Live doesn’t mean moving or change your relationship, everything. Your relationship inside, how are you doing?

What’s your motive? What’s your intent? Are you acting outta reaction and fear and anxiety or desire? No. I mean, I am, but no. Right. And so you say, I want to change this little by little, I want to live from a higher place. And then you remember that during the day and you stop and it changes everything.

And that’s why I said the next morning when you wake up, you’re not the same person that woke up the morning before. You changed even that little, any little bit of effort that you put out, that means doing the best that you can. But what if I’m at work and I have a job to do? You do the best that you can.

You know what it means, do the best you can. Or if I miss something, did you do the best you can? Fine. No guilt, no fear, no shame, no nothing. And if your boss calls you in and says, how could you miss that inside you don’t defend. He inside you say, I did the best I can. I’m gonna do better. I can do better.

Never. I did everything I could. No, you didn’t do everything you could. You did the best you can. Alright, but in order to do that, now we’re back to this yin yang we’re talking about. That’s, that’s the argument of doing the best you can. How that changes your life. Why can’t you do that? ’cause you’re goal oriented.

’cause you want the boss to say nice things about you. You wanna a raise. You want everybody around you to think, oh, she’s so special. She’s the best it could possibly be. That’s all. Clap when she comes in the room. Alright. That’s a fun way to do it, by the way. ’cause ego is ridiculous. Just make believe that what ego’s really saying is when I walk in the room, I want them to bow their heads and.

And you just look at how absurd it is this goal orientation, like, look at people that are successful, but the divorce rate in Hollywood and the problems in the, and the suicide rate in advanced Western cultures is way beyond the suicide rate in third world countries. Do you understand that? Go check it out.

Boy, these goal orientation stuff is doing really well. It’s like because you set a goal orientation, if you meet it, you’re full of pride and you want everybody to respect you. And if they don’t, you see what goes on. And if you don’t get your goal orientation, you feel guilty, you feel shame about failure.

That’s where the whole psyche comes from, is this idea that there’s something you’re supposed to be achieving as opposed to when you lay down on your deathbed this what should be going on. Wow, that was beautiful. What a journey. I learned so much. I used to tell you this. I don’t know how many you understand.

The purpose of life is to go back up with less than it came down with. Less ego, less garbage, less reaction, less judgment, less fear, less anxiety. Are you doing that? No. I’m trying to feed my ego that’s full of fear and goal orientation to make it look like I’ve succeeded people, even they make believe they succeeded when they didn’t.

Okay, I’m gonna go to a party, but I’ll rent a Rolls Royce first. Boy, they respected me when I went in there. Oh, you do not want to live like that. You want to feel inside yourself. I did the best that I can with every single thing I did. There’s no guilt. There’s no shame. There’s no fear. I don’t care what other people think.

I care that I know inside myself. I did the best that I can. Do you see that difference? If you would live like that, you will reach the highest yogic states. Like there’s literally a chapter in the Gita, which is called Being the best you can Be, right? Doesn’t mean the end, the gita’s very deep. There’s a line, it says something like, do thy own task though done imperfectly.

Then try to do somebody else’s task and try to do it perfectly. It’s your Dharma Life will give a job to you. And I’ve learned to live like this. Life will give a job to you. What does that mean? How do you know the job? It’s in front of you. I used to have people come to me way back in hippie days, right?

And said, I can’t get the job. I graduated in college and I’m like finding a job I want. I have money, I have nothing. It’s all messed up, right? I say to them, alright, go outside and dig a hole in the field and do the best that you possibly can. He says, why? ’cause you’re doing something. You started the process of applying yourself and doing the best you can to the job that was given to you.

Well, what’s that gonna do? I don’t know. Maybe you’ll get thirsty. You’ll go down to seven 11 and there’ll be a sign that says we need some counter people buying a seven 11. But I graduated on a master’s degree in psych. I don’t care. If this job comes to you and you have nothing else to do, that’s a gift.

And the next thing you know it’ll be this next. And I’m telling you, I, ’cause I ran a, I had 2300 employees in the company I ran at one point. If they devoted themselves the best that they can to the job, given to them, not I’ll do well. So I get a raise, not I’ll do well, so people respect me. Alright. Just.

You just, you’re the best mail delivery person. You’re the best sist. They always just rose up phenomenally. I could tell you stories. I had a, I had an employee came and she started working at the company. She didn’t even have her high school equivalency degree. She ended up an executive vice president of the company.

She was brilliant, but she had to work her way up and just did the best she could. If you do the best, you can wait till you see what happens. But if you sit there and think, what do I need to do to get what I think I want? I’m trying. I’m trying. ’cause this is not what they teach you. And don’t let your parents hear their stalk.

You should be goal oriented, decide what you wanna do. Like, okay, you’re a young woman. Well, there’s this thing called biological clock. I don’t wanna tell you about it. You’ve probably heard of it, right? Was it 32 or something like that? Or after that age, you should be having children and so on. Okay. And see, tell someone I’m, I’m gonna get married.

Why? Because I’m 30 and I haven’t had a child yet. And I wanna make sure, by the way, not only that I’m healthy another child, but when I’m a little bit older, I’m strong enough to pick ’em up. I’ve had people tell me that by the time the child gets to six, they’ll weigh this much. And I don’t wanna be so old that I can’t play with ’em or pick them up.

Okay? And you sit there and you play line, and I say, okay, fine. That’s wonderful. I have a child. That’s the problem. I, I’m not in a relationship. Something’s outta kilt here, and somehow the cart went in front of the horse. Your mind just went out there and decided goal orientation, goal orientation, goal orientation.

And they get all depressed. ’cause you don’t know. And then you go pick somebody just because you can have a baby, you don’t even like ’em. People do that. Don’t they? It’s just unbelievable. Instead, you sit there, I, if I could teach you, I would say enjoy every moment of your life as it sits unfolding by doing the best that you can and growing from what comes back.

But what if I don’t meet somebody? Then you don’t meet somebody. Big deal. There’s plenty of people that are happier than married people. You don’t define how it’s supposed to be. You sit there and say, it is supposed to be the way it is. How do I know? Because that’s the way it is, but it’s not what I want.

I’m sorry, but I want something else. I’m sorry. This is what life. And that’s when you start seeing it, that it’s not random, that life has given you a task to do. Like a test. Can you do it? Can you do the best you can? And you’re gonna start seeing that if you do that task perfectly, the next task is higher than higher because you’ve succeeded at that task.

I dunno what to tell you. So success is you do the best that you can. There’s a quote in the Bible, you’re gonna, I’m not a Bible quote, but you’re favorite quote in the Bible is as follows, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all things you may add on you nowadays. It’s. See what he want added to you and seek it.

Just decide what you want and then seek it. No, seek. What does it mean? Seek your first kingdom. God of righteousness. It means inside yourself. Beef, the whole is being that you can, the fully integrated human being that is filled with love and joy and inspiration and loves doing what’s put in front of them.

I don’t care if it’s washing the dishes, taking the kids to soccer, whatever it is, who’s better off the person that’s driving a car that has a bumper sticker that says I’d rather be sailing, or the one that has a bumper restric that says I’d rather be doing what I’m doing. You sit there, say, I look for passion in life.

You can feel passion every second of your life with every single thing you do. If you stop judging and deciding, I can only feel passionate if I get this job and this person treats me this way. It’s an inner work. You work on yourself inside. So I, I didn’t lay the talk out, but look what came out is do the best that you can, is a very holy thing, and being goal oriented is what destroys you from doing the best that you can.

He said, why should I bother? Why should I bother? They criticize me. Well, I have no words. If they criticize you, do the best you can to listen and see if you can do better. Don’t sit there and let the ego decide how you’re doing and what you’re gonna do. Okay? So it’s, it’s very deep. You’re doing the best that you can to just say, I’ve dropped down to the most amazing planet you wanna go to Mars?

You go to Jupiter, Venus, there’s no place we have. We got these telescopes looking all over the darn universe. They didn’t see anything. Burning things and rocks and sand and black holes that suck everything in right where I go. This planet is so beautiful. It’s got animals and it’s got foliage, and it’s got people, it’s got computers, it’s got things to do, everything.

How often have you woken up and there was nothing in front of you, nothing to do, nothing in front of you. Now, how often you woken up and it wasn’t what you wanted to be in front of you and you didn’t wanted to do. You’re ruining your life. Instead of being amazed that I’m on this planet and I’m gonna do the best I can to have the happiest life, am I accepting everything and serving everything and giving everything I have to everything that’s in front of me the best I can do?

And then see what happens. I’ll do the best I can. The next thing, the next thing. You can live like that. You’re allowed to live like that, but your society will not teach you that. Okay? Turn on a TV with the advertising. You need this. You need this? Oh my God, you need this? Let’s judge everybody. Alright, so you came here.

And you heard a spiritual talk, the most spiritual life you can live is to do the best that you can every moment of your life and not base it on goal orientation. Let that be your goal to be the best being that you can, serving what’s happening in front of you, and what it does, it leads to total liberation.

You don’t have the psychological problems. You undercut the psyche. Which is why your ego’s fighting back and the ego says, how do I get what I want? The only reason you want something is ’cause you’re not okay. I gotta stop it, right? Do you know that you have things you want, don’t you? That’s ’cause you’re not okay.

What if you were filled with love and joy and shock you pouring inside of you all the time? Now what do you want this? I want what I’m experiencing, what I’m telling you is how to get to that point of being so filled with love and joy and freedom and liberation that it just pours off of you. And by the way, it helps everybody this’s so funny.

Alright, I hope you understand .

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@michaelsingerpodcast.com. Thanks so much for listening. Sounds true. Waking up the world.