E23: The Journey from Fear to Freedom

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.

If you drop down into this planet, you’re going to live here for years, you’re going to leave. That is an absolute truth. What you do between that time of birth and death is what you call your life. You have to step back very, very often and ask, what do I want to do in this time between my birth and my death? You’re going to die whether it’s 70, 80, 90, a hundred years, so what? Meaningless numbers. You have a limited amount of time between your birth and your death to live your life. To not continuously ask, what do I want to do with that? Time is ridiculous. It makes no sense. It’s your time. It’s not your parents’ time, not your preacher’s time, not your children’s time. Do you understand that? You get that out of your head. You just were given this time between birth and death, but we don’t ask that.

Why? Because we’re afraid. Constantly, constantly afraid from birth to death. Now, some people want to argue, I’m not afraid. I work out. I got a gun. Well, why do you have a gun? Because I’m afraid. Why do you learn martial arts? Because I’m afraid, but because I know martial arts, I’m not afraid. No, that’s not true. What you’ve done is put something out there to protect you from experiencing your fear, but you are afraid, period. Even you’re not afraid physically. You’re afraid psychologically. I’m not trying to curse you. I’m trying to ask you to be honest. You’re afraid psychologically, you’re afraid of being rejected. You’re afraid of someone saying they love you and then leaving. You’re afraid of saying something stupid. You’re afraid of dropping some ketchup on your pants and having to go back to work. You’re afraid that it will rain tomorrow or that a hurricane will come,

Aren’t you? You’re afraid of Wise person catches on that that’s in there, not in the end, but for now, what’s in there is fear and what you spend your life doing is attempting to create walls inside and outside and manipulate situations, people place and things so that you don’t have to feel the fear. Okay? I want to be accepted. Why? Because I’m afraid and if I’m accepted, I feel more secure. If you say you like me not to mention love me, I can trust you, trust you to do what? Do you really love me? Can I trust you? What does that mean? Trust you to be the way I need you to be so that I don’t feel afraid so that I can feel safe, right? I have to feel safe because I’m scared. All of it comes down to that primal fear. Every animal has it.

We love the deer. They run away. We’re not going to hurt ’em, but it’s just natural survival instinct. That survival instinct in the human as evolved, if you want to call it that. I call it devolved into the psyche. Also, you’re not just afraid of getting hurt physically. You’re afraid of getting hurt emotionally and mentally. Do you understand that? People do all kinds of things to protect their ego, don’t they? Do you ever defend yourself? I don’t mean with martial arts or a gun. Do you ever defend yourself? All the time? All the time. Somebody says something to defend yourself. Somebody says that. Somebody said something that they thought somebody had a dream about you and it wasn’t good. You’re defending yourself. Why I never did anything. I don’t even know the person that’s called defending yourself. What are you defending physically? No. This fear thing is very, very deep.

The entire ego is made, not made out of fear is made because of fear. I told you yesterday we talked about it. You’re in a relationship. Somebody threatens leaving you. What do you say? Oh, please, no, I can change. How do you want me to be? Wow, that’s intense. What does that mean? I made up a me. I’ve been developing it for years. It’s what I’m building. Some people have built buildings. I build a me and I’ve building it, and I build it based on acceptance and rejection, and so if I’m not behaving and being a way that you want to stay with me and love me and take care of me, I’ll just change, okay? That means your fear of that pain, that fear of rejection, that fear of being hurt, that fear of something happening that screws up your psyche, you are afraid of that aren’t you, is stronger than anything.

It’s the entire core of the whole thing. That’s where the ego came from. The ego came because you dropped down into this body who did the consciousness awareness of being dropped down into the body and it’s overwhelming. There’s all these senses and impressions and words and feelings and oh my God, it’s very overwhelming and you need to get it together so you can handle it. Fear, do you try to handle things because you’re afraid of it? You’re on planet in the middle of nowheres. What’s the difference? A great beam wakes me up like this. I’m back. What’s going to happen today? Who cares? It’ll be fun. You’re comparing your experience today with other experiences, other people’s experience. Why don’t you compare it to being on Mars where there’s nothing happening or Jupiter or the Saturn or out in empty space, oh, how you doing? Good.

It’s a good day at a really, really good day. You have the right to do that, but you’re afraid. You’re afraid that things will happen, that will bother you or that you’ll lose your job or that somebody will leave you or that somebody will criticize you or that you look stupid. Now they teach you, which is fine, positive thinking, which is a wonderful thing. There are times to use it, but to be afraid and build a wall to protect yourself and then be positive about it. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. I own a bunch of guns. I’m so rich, nobody can touch me. I have the best lawyers in the world. Why? Because I’m scared to death, and so you eventually catch on that deep inside. Everything you’re doing is to protect yourself from the inner fear that is in there and it is in there and you don’t want to go there.

You don’t want to feel it. You do whatever you can. You dress a certain way, act a certain way, look a certain way, cosmetic surgery, just do all kinds of things to make it so that this thing you’re putting out there feels safe and feels accepted and you take wedding vows. I know the vows say for better or worse till death do us part. That’s why there are no divorces because they really hold to that. The statistics were the 50% of all marriage in the United States of America ended up a divorce, so what is this? As long as I feel safe in your presence, as long as I feel acceptance and love and things that I need to feel, I’ll hang out here and if I don’t, oh bye, and I told you important. That trust thing is really big. You don’t look at it that way.

You think it’s a really great thing to trust somebody. Well, it’s better than not trusting them. I agree, but that’s not a very high bar. What it means I trust you means I believe that you’ll behave the way I want you to. What? You trust it. You know what true trust is here. I trust you will be who you are because you will, but that’s not what you mean by trust, is it no going to be the way you are? You’re going to be the way I want you to be. You love me enough and you’ve changed it all and you just don’t hurt me and just be good, okay? And so you wake up and you realize there’s fear in there and you got choices that is either go outside and by the way, to me outside means different than what it means to most people.

If you’re in here seated in the self witness consciousness, your mind is outside of you. Your emotions are outside of you. There are things that you experience, so one way to protect myself is to rationalize, use the mind to make things be okay and to protect the emotions. Then I go outside and try to get all you guys. I’m having trouble getting me together, trying to get you guys to behave the I want you to so that what I made up inside to protect myself works. If I sit there and I’m an instrumentalist and I play really well and everybody claps when I go back out there next time you best clap. I don’t want no booze because it’s going to destroy my self concept. It’s going to destroy what I built or protect myself. Your entire self concept was built to protect yourself. Mommy, mommy, what does that mean?

She better be there. I don’t want a different woman or man every single night Put me to bed when I’m a baby. I need solidity, don’t I? Why? Because I’m scared. I don’t know who I am because I’m clinging, but just call it clinging. I’m grabbing for things that I can hold onto and say, okay, this is who I am. That’s my mommy. That’s my wife, that’s my husband, that’s my daughter. That’s my job. That’s my boss. That’s the success I had in fifth grade playing Dorothy and Wizard of Oz here. I still kept the pamphlet. You’re defining yourself because you’re not okay, and so you define this self and you put it out there, but that’s very dangerous. Why? If it’s not accepted, you fall. Has anyone ever fallen apart? Has it ever fallen apart, literally fallen apart? You don’t know who you are.

You don’t know it’s real. You can’t even relate to what’s happening. Yes or no. What is that all about? It’s about the fact that I built this false concept of myself in order to protect myself. The ultimate proof that is there to protect yourself is have it fall apart. How do you feel? Good. It’s like the worst experience you’ve ever had in your entire life. You’re scared to death of that, okay? That’s because you’re scared inside. I told you, how’s a great being lived their life? They wake up in the morning, I’m back, hi, what’s going to happen today? It’ll be fun. Things will happen. I’ll get hired. I’ll get fired. It’ll rain. It’ll be sunny. People will like me. People hate me. People are kind to me. People yell at me. I can’t wait because there’s no need to protect yourself. You’re able to handle whatever happens.

It’s so deep that people understand what true spirituality is about. True spirituality is not about you have a strong ego that you’re capable of attracting to yourself what you want. You’re capable of doing whatever you want. I’m a free being. No, it’s not about being free for yourself. It’s about being free from yourself. It doesn’t mean to be free from yourself. I can handle reality. What does that mean? I’m not afraid. Well, what if there’s fear? I’m not afraid of fear. Fear is a perfectly normal human emotion, isn’t it? Animals have it. Your body came up that way. There can be fear. Can you handle it? Sure. It’s fear. Can there be pain? I’m not talking about excruciating, but can there be pain? Can you hurt yourself? Can something happen? You’re playing volleyball, you go to blocking, you get a black and blue mark on your wrist, you going to quit?

No, you go back and play. You can handle things not because you’re so strong. I told somebody the other day, it’s not that you have a thick skin. It’s that you have no skin. Way greater. Everything’s able to pass through a thick skin means I’m able to handle it. I can protect myself even though it’s very strong what’s hitting me? That’s not a great state. You have to spend the rest of your life protecting yourself the rest of your life, behaving a way that nothing will bother you. If you’re open enough and you’re not in the resisting and fighting and filled with fear, it comes in and it passes through. It’s like the white lines on the road. They’re there. You see them, but you don’t have nightmares about ’em. You don’t think about ’em all the time. You don’t like ’em or not ’em.

They’re just things in the universe. Can you be that way about everything? Can you love somebody with all your heart, with no protection and realize at any moment they could leave you or they could change or whatever it is, and that does not change the love you have for them or your ability to stay open and feel love. I’m challenging you. That means you have dealt with fear. You’ve dealt with an understanding that if you love somebody and they leave you, it’s going to hurt fine. It’s an experience. It’s an experience in life. If you really build yourself upon a platform of expecting this job and the people and this and the other thing and it starts to fall apart, it’s a learning experience. It proves that it wasn’t real. If it can fall apart, it wasn’t real. It was built on top of sand as Christ put it.

He built your house on sand. That’s what he means. By the way, didn’t he say that? Don’t build your house on sand. He’s not talking about construction. He’s talking about in there the house you built to live in. You built on sand. You built a made up stuff. I just made it up. This is who I am. Oh, you don’t like it? Well, hell change and it a great being has learned how to let it go, not protect it. That’s what we’re talking about, this protecting thing. Do you protect yourself about everything? If somebody says they’re going to call you in an hour and they don’t, you worry. Where were you? Why didn’t you call? What’s happening? I trusted that you said you’d call and you wake up and you realize I’m sitting in here filled with fear and I’ve either successfully or unsuccessfully built a model inside myself of thoughts and emotions that are strong enough or not strong enough to handle what’s unfolding.

Plus, I manipulate and control the outside people, places, and things so I can handle them. Do you understand that? I ensure myself when I get this. I say unbelievable what we do because we’re scared and it ends up running our entire lives. Spirituality is learning how to deal with that, not protect yourself from it. There is a way that you can live in this world between your birth and your death that is nothing but exciting and educational and evolutionary and oh my God, filled with love, filled with joy, filled with inspiration all the time. Some people teach you in order to feel love, you have to know what it’s like to not feel love. In order to be happy, you have to know what it’s like to be sad. It’s not true. It’s called duality. It’s not true. There is a state inside of you that you are completely filled with love, joy, inspiration, energy all the time.

Well, what if something happens that ego doesn’t like you, like that you like going through in the Olympics? What do they do? They take the most, my God, what these people try, so they take the most challenging thing that anybody could ever do and they try to do it. Why? To dig down inside yourself and be inspired to handle and try and do the best that you can there. That’s a good way to live your life when your birthing or death, in other words, every single day, you’re a greater person. You were the day before. Are you willing to do that? Of course not. Why? Because you’re not willing to deal with that stuff deep inside of you. What you want to do is protect yourself so you don’t have to deal with that. Spirituality is a totally different attitude. It’s basically saying, I’m not there yet. I have trouble with myself. Therefore I have trouble with you. You don’t have any trouble with anybody. You have trouble what happens inside of you when you face them? I’m afraid of what you’re going to say to me. I don’t want to see you. I’ll walk around the block and avoid you. Why? Somebody doesn’t know you. They’re not afraid of you. Okay, but yesterday you said somebody I didn’t like.

Okay, you do it all the time. So spirituality is saying, I don’t want to be strong enough or rich enough or powerful enough to control you and everybody else so that I don’t have to deal with myself. Spirituality is about I don’t want to have to control you. We’ll talk about later about how you interact with the world. When you get to that state, you’re still going to interact, but you won’t interact to protect yourself. You won’t interact to make sure that things are going to be the way you need to be so you can handle ’em. Okay? So you sit there and say, I want to be able to handle reality. Then people say, I want to meditate. I want to do a mantra. I want to go to Tibet. I want to be to guru. No, I want to be able to handle reality.

You can do those other things too. They’re fun, alright? But I’m telling you it’s about I want to handle reality. I want to be able to wake up in the morning and know that whatever happens today, I will be fine. Now I’m ready to deal with it. You have to sit there and look at it that way. You can’t love if you’re afraid of getting hurt. You can feel relative love as long as everything’s the way you want it to be and people behave the way, expect them to. You can feel some openness, but if you’re afraid of being hurt, you’ll never know what real love is. Real love is something inside of you has nothing to do with anybody else. It has to do with the fact that I’m open and I’m not going to close, and if there’s fear inside of me, it’s not about manipulating you.

So I don’t feel the fear. It’s about letting go of the fear. It’s about me learning to handle the fear so that I can feel love. I’m trading fearful love. It’s a negotiation, a transaction, and a really good one. You understand that to trade fear for love, who would want to do that? You don’t do it. You let the fear take your love away, so you have to decide, do you want love or do you want fear? It’s a decision we’re talking about. Again, what do you want to do with your life? Do you want to live your life protecting yourself from the fear that you refuse to deal with? Or do you want to live your life filled with love? Do you want to live your life filled with inspiration? No matter what happens that nothing can take it away from you? You’ve reached that state because you’re all capable of that state.

The problem is, and people won’t say this to you and teach you this, you’re not even trying to do that. You’re spending all of your energy, all of your mind, all of your emotion, every money, everything to try to protect yourself from the fear you have inside. You don’t even admit you have a fear so far away from it. Here’s your fear. I got to get a job that’s secure enough with an employment contract that guarantees me a golden parachute, et cetera, et cetera. Why? I’m not afraid. You are so why do you need to need all that? What’s going on? You’re devoting your life based on your fear, but you’re not looking at that. You’re looking at how here’s success. I managed to avoid my fear. I managed to have a relationship where we all got along how to be afraid and I trust completely every single thing.

I succeeded in it. Therefore I’m success. No, you’re not a success. You have to struggle constantly to protect it, to keep it together. You know that when you think stress is, when you think worry is here, take the richest people in the world, politicians different stuff. They sleep all night, right? It’s hilarious nowadays. It’s just a constant battle to try to protect yourself, isn’t it? To try win, try to succeed. You just, you’re afraid. You’re afraid, and so you wake up and you say, what am I’m going to do between my birth and my death? I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to sit there and harbor deep inside fear that I then have to run through my entire life trying to protect myself from I told you, you’re not protecting yourself from somebody else. You’re protecting yourself from what they can make you feel inside. But a great saint who brought us the through statue by ti, it’s very great saints, hardly talked a whole lot. Very, very quiet. Very, very holy lady filled with Shakti. She once leaned over to me, we’re very close, and she said, Mickey, I said, yes, mother. She said, don’t you just love when they yell at you? There’s so much energy.

It’s hilarious. You just see just the Shakti was coming in. Energy, I think is energy when it comes in and it just center into ecstasy. It just case you’re transmuted it up to the highest possible thing. You are capable of that. I know you can’t do it now. I know it seems impossible because you devoted your entire life to the drug of protecting yourself. There is a way to work with that fear inside of you so it doesn’t run your life. So instead you wake up in the morning and you’re excited because you woke up, you’re excited to brush your teeth, you giggle at the lecture toothbrush, you’re excited to have breakfast, you’re excited to have lunch. You can’t wait to go to work. You can’t wait to come home. You’re excited to see the kids. You’re excited to not see the kids. You’re excited, whatever it is, you’re just constantly enthused.

You’ve reached a state, you understand I’m seeing a little plan in the middle of nowhere for a few years. I’m going to have a good time. I’m not going to spend my life protecting myself and manipulating everybody else and then being afraid they’re going to do things that I don’t like. Can you relate to that? Do you understand that? Well, that means you have to be willing to face the fear and learn how to get rid of it, learn how to work with it. And by the way, I say get rid of it. I don’t teach that anymore. You don’t have to get rid of it. You just have to be comfortable with it. Do you understand that? For example, sickness is not fun, but you can be comfortable. People get sick and they’re fine. They live their life beautifully. You can learn to be comfortable with things.

So it isn’t that you make them not happen. I can only be comfortable. They never get sick, but nobody ever leaves me. If everybody, I’ll move out to the woods. I did that. Move out to the woods and protect myself and blah, blah blah and have complete control. How about the control? There’s the keyword I just said, anybody have control issues? Everybody has control issues. It’s just a question of to what degree, alright, but otherwise you have control issues. Of course you have control issues. You want to feel that things are going to be the way you want them to be, aren’t you? And they’re never the way you don’t want ’em to be and you try to control things so they’d be like that. How would you like to never have to do that again for the rest of your life? How would you like to never have to do that again for the rest of your life?

Why? Because you know are totally okay. No matter what happens, you will be fine. So it doesn’t mean you don’t interact, you interact, but you interact because it’s fun. You interact because it’s expressing the beauty of yourself, not you interact because you can’t handle things, so I have to control them. You’re capable of that life. Every single one of you are. It’s not just from great sayings from great master, it’s not years and years of and intense yoga. Instead you say, why am I afraid? And you look at it, you can look at it rationally. I’m afraid first because I have built an ego that is extremely sensitive. What does that mean? Everything has to be exactly the way I want it to be for me to be okay. If I sit there and turn to you and say, God, I love you so much, I’ve never loved anybody so much my entire life. Say back to me. Are you sure?

Can you say it again? I didn’t hear you. Or if the person says back to you, yeah, I love you too, let’s go. Oh, we ain’t going anywhere. That’s that. It’s that sensitive. Why? Because it’s built on top of the fear. It’s so thin has to be exactly what you want it to be in. Otherwise you get upset. Otherwise you close down to feel love and inspiration have to be open, but you’ll only be open if the conditions are exactly what you need to be. Go to lunch and have them serve for this little cold, little too small, little too big, a little this, a little that. A road run across the floor. That’s it, man, you didn’t have a nice lunch, did you? Or if it looks a little pale, the color or the waiter didn’t serve it on the right side, they put it on the left side.

You just ruined your dinner, okay? It is so sensitive. Why? Because you’re scared. And so you build these concepts and views and opinions and preferences and hopes and dreams that things will be the way you need them to be. So you don’t have to be scared. So you feel okay and they’re never that once in a while they’ll be that way. Sure, but they don’t stay that way. It’s not a chance in the world. People sometimes say, why did it have to happen? What did I do? You didn’t do anything. It just happened. Do you know how many factors have to happen for something to happen? Your hair is blonde, okay, how’d you get that? Well, your grandparents, the genes are genetics. This, that, or the dye, whatever the heck it is, right? There’s 8 billion reasons why everything is the way it is, isn’t it?

Each moment is a coalition of all the events that ever happened coming together into this moment, and that’s why it’s raining. That’s why there’s a hurricane, and that’s why the person said what he said, and that’s why every single thing happens and what your attitude is. I don’t like that. Why’d you do that? To me? It’s not wise. It’s ignoring all the science. It’s only psychology. Psychology says Man is the sum of learned experiences. That’s your psyche. So if you say something to me, you just express the sum of your learned experiences to me since you were born. Freud will tell you, mommy, daddy, this, that everything bad experience, every single thing just express themselves in front of me. And I said, how can you say that to me? How dare you? It’s obvious how you can say it to me. It’s a sum. You learned experiences not to sell my learned experiences.

Therefore, I can’t relate to what you said. Is that wise? You’re in trouble. If everybody’s psyche is the sum of the learn experiences and you have your experiences and you think, I love the fact that you think you’re right. You think that the way you think is meaningful and rational, no, it’s the sum of the learn experiences. You had different experiences, you’d be thinking differently, die to get married. Dream your entire life. We’re going to get married. Then have the marriage from hell, war the roses. Now you don’t have nothing to do anything. Some of your learned experiences, that’s what everybody is, who has had the same experiences of you from the time they were born to where they are right now. Nobody ever in the history of the universe and nobody ever will because the moments never happen again. So there’s no way in the world that things are going to be the way you want.

And if you’re little and you say, why? Because they’re not supposed to be. Your stuff is some of your learned experiences. Every single person all over the world is some of their learned experiences and nobody had the same experiences. And the one I’d like to explain to you, and I don’t know if you get it, the physics and chemistry and just total reality of the moment in front of you is not the sum of your learned experiences. It didn’t grow up in Massachusetts and go here and take that. It just here a moment. It’s the sum of its learned experiences. The moment of folding in front of you is physics, chemistry, science. There are events that happen throughout time and space that cause that moment to be what it is. Just like your thoughts of some of your experiences, the world, each moment is a sum of its learned experiences.

Is it not? Right? Aren’t all the forces that, well, why is the hurricane coming? Well, okay, there was a warming in the ocean. It was this and there was that and El n la, Nina, blah blah blah, blah, blah. Go ask some meteorologist. They’ll tell you exactly every single reason and used to say, well, did I have to have a hurricane? That’s just completely ignoring reality. So the moment in front of you is the sum of its learned experiences, your head, some of your learned experiences and they don’t get along, do they? And that’s why you’re scared. You know, don’t have control of that thing. You think you do. You do not go on, do a relationship. You all had relationships, right? You meet somebody date for a few weeks, a month, two months time like that. Start thinking, oh is a perfect relationship. Do you think you know that person?

That person is 32 years old. They’ve had every minute of their life for 32 years. They’ve had experiences, nothing about you didn’t have those experiences and now you’re meeting what seems to be expressing itself right now, probably because of you, you’re a learned experience and they like you, so that’s coming out. Have you ever found out that people aren’t who you thought they were? Is that their fault or yours? You don’t know anybody. You can’t possibly. And so you start getting wise and you start catching on that. This fear thing is running everything and this ignorance and manipulating and controlling everything so you don’t have to feel the fear. You hear me? Okay? People sit there and say about body language, why are you looking? Why are you trying to interpret what somebody is doing with their body language? Because you’re scared. You’re trying to figure out what they really mean when they’re telling the truth, when they’re lying.

What do you care? Because I’m scared and I need to protect myself. Would you like to know the future? A great being has no interest in the future in any way, shape or form. If there’s going to be a car accident, I don’t want to three years earlier be afraid. Every single moment that maybe the day the car accident will take place. You understand that? I want to handle the car accident. It takes place. I want to live my life. I’m not saying I don’t do things to rationally drive the car properly. Nobody’s purposely ignoring stuff, but I don’t want to sit there and think, okay, you’re getting married. I’m a psychic, I’m not. Alright, the marriage will last two and a half years and three months and then there will be a very, very ugly divorce, alright? And the children will get really, really screwed up.

Alright? You want to get married? No. Why would I want to get married? You see what I’m telling you? It’s because you want to control things that you want to know the future. You’ll get to a point in your life if you work with your spiritually that all of this is meaningless, that everybody else is doing is meaningless. You’re just fine. I’m okay. I can handle reality. It will rain when it rains, it will be sunny. When it’s sunny. People will be nice and they’re nice. People are in a bad mood when they have a stomach ache. People will go through what they need to go through and I can help and I’m there, but I don’t take it personal. You don’t have to be a certain way for me to love you. How’s that? I’d like to be around that person. You’d be how you are.

It’s beautiful. Okay? We can work together, work at it. If I some help, I’m glad to help. If you just want me to be there, be there. Right? You have nothing. It’s called nothing going. Why? Because you’re not afraid. Now, how do you get to a state like that if I’ve convinced you that it’s capable? I showed you how absurd it is that you have this time between your birth and your death and you run around being afraid. So you wake up and I’m begging you at some point you wake up in your life. Do I want to waste my life living that way? You are. You’re wasting your life. You’re not enjoying your life. You’re trying to enjoy your life. You’re trying to have moments that you feel safe. Moments that feel good moments. There’s love. Instead of, I got some work to do, I got some serious work to do and I got to deal with this fear.

I got to deal with this fear. Okay, how do you do it? Well, people teach you different ways. I just like the fact that you’re willing to look at it and realize you can transcend this fear. You can learn to get higher behind the fear. So the fear is not running your life. Now, just to make sure we’re on the record right, that does not mean you don’t go to work. It doesn’t mean you don’t get married. It doesn’t mean you don’t have children. It doesn’t mean you don’t have money, it doesn’t mean anything like that. It means the motive for your life is to express yourself, to feel inspiration, to be creative. That’s what you’re doing all the time. You’re not trying to find something that turns you on. You are turned on trying to find something that makes you passionate. You are passionate about everything.

Okay? Now how do I live my life? Express that, come out and give, come out and just be okay. What a rarity, right? Come out and just help everybody and do whatever it is, but you’re not doing it for you because you don’t have to do it for you because you don’t have any fear and you’re fine with whatever happens. I want you there. That’d be great. That’s called liberation mta. A liberated soul is able to live like that. I always quote you from the Gita favorite parts of the gah and it talks about exactly this Christian is Godhead. He’s talking to Arjuna, his spiritual son, and he told him about the fact that there are great beings out there, beings who reach very, very, very high states and Arjuna said, how well I know such a person. How could I recognize when he meets someone like that sits, he walks, he talks on the end of the man, how do I know?

I want to know how to recognize him and want Christian answered back. He’s just so beautiful. He said, you’ll not know him like that if you would know him. He sits, he talks the end of the man if you would know him, enjoys. He’s not overjoyed and sorrows sorrow. He lets goodness come when it will and when it will depart. Let’s darkness come when it will and it will depart. He walks as a sojourner, a stranger in the midst of all the qualities of nature as life changes. Just as all the rivers and streams of the world pour into the ocean and leave the ocean as it found him, it doesn’t overflow. So the world of sense pours into the yogi and leaves him as it found him at peace. Serene content. That’s what we’re talking about. There is a state like that doesn’t mean you don’t work with the world, it just doesn’t screw you up.

You just understand I’m fine, not because I’m strong, I’m fine because it all passes through. How do you get there? We can spend 50 minutes of the hour, four or five minutes, talk about why you would want to. I hope we’ve talked about that. It’s nice to know you can live like that. It’s nice to know it can be like that inside. Every single one of you does not have to be a scared little puppy running around begging to be, okay. Alright, so how does one get like that? Well, we said it means not that you don’t experience things, but that you’re able to handle what you’re experiencing. That is the essence of spirituality. If I can handle what I’m experiencing, I don’t have to be afraid of it. If I know that I can handle it fine. I can go my business, be the best I can and not worry about anything ever again for the rest of my life.

Well, how do you learn to handle things? You practice? That’s what I teach you. You practice being able to handle things. What the really big things, my wife leaves me and my kid dies. No, no. Please don’t touch those. They may happen and you’ll have to handle ’em, but you’ll be ready if you sit there and want to play tennis. You never played tennis before. Don’t ask me how can I play the Williams systems in doubles? You can’t. Can you practice playing tennis and then maybe become good enough to be a good tennis player? Yes, but you have to learn. It’s the same thing with this. You have to learn how to handle reality. How’s that? That’s the deepest teaching you’ll ever hear. That is the meaning of your life. Otherwise you’re wasting your life protecting yourself from it. You sit there and say, I want to learn how to handle reality. Then practice how. Stop complaining about the weather.

What difference does it make of playing about the weather, right? That’s like saying you’re not playing your scales in a piano. You’re not practicing tennis practice being able to handle things. I do it with the driver in front of me. Nice blinker buddy. Have you rid the speed limit is 55, you’re going 40, come on, right? Is that doing any good? Have you ever talked to the driver in front of you? Have you ever talked to the driver in front of you? Did they hear you? Then why are you doing it? Because you can’t handle it. Just take those things. Call ’em the cost benefit analysis. The cost is a hundred percent. The benefit is zero. Getting upset and uptight because you get a red light three in a row. Practice there. Practice every moment of every day where there are moments where you are bothering yourself about things that don’t do any good to bother yourself about you or do you not bother yourself about things that you can’t change.

Practice letting go of that and as you practice that, you’ll get better at something a little bit bigger. Start with the weather. Start with the driver in front of you and next thing you’ll know, your spouse will come home and walk right through the house and you slam the bedroom door without even saying hello and you look at it, it’s kind of like the driver in front of you. It’s kind of like it’s hot out. It’s kind of like a hurricane’s coming. Must have had a bad day and it don’t bother you. It made it through that situation, made it, but it’s disrespectful. No, it’s not. They just had a bad day and so that part of you will start vomiting into your mind and your heart and you work with yourself. If you will work with yourself with those things all day, you will change your entire life.

It’s so simple. If you’re going to bother yourself, you’re going to be bothered. Oprah, when I did the interview for Living Untethered, she said, it’s one of the favorite lines I wrote in the book. The moment in front of you is not bothering you. You’re bothering yourself about the moment in front of you. Right or wrong. How come the person next to you is not being bothered by the moment, but you are? Moments don’t bother you. You bother yourself about the moments. Even big things. What if your spouse leaves you? There’s a note, you come home and there’s a note taken there, dear John, and you’re Catholic and you just can’t stand the guy, but you can’t get divorced, your parents won’t let you and preacher will let you and for 15 years you put up with this junk and all of a sudden there’s this letter sitting there.

You are ecstatic, right? The moment in front of you is not bothering you. You’re bothering yourself about the moment in front of you. It certainly your inner state decides how you’re going to be about what happened. Alright? So you start learning to work with yourself. Then it’d be that big, but you start working with yourself and sitting there saying, I would like to reach the point of being okay with everything. Just literally, I’m just okay with everything and I’m beautiful. Alright, now I don’t have to worry about me. I can help everybody else. Alright? How do you do that? Practice, practice, practice. You constantly catch yourself bothering yourself about things you can’t do anything about. They’re not meaningful, they’re nothing, and yet you’re bothering yourself about ’em, and so what you do is you work with it. How do you work with yourself? Ultimately, you attain a seat of witness consciousness.

What does that mean? It’s not that hard to see. You’re bothering yourself about the weather, so you’re in there watching. You see it the moment you see it, be conscious enough to say, do I want to be like this? What is the purpose of me getting upset because it’s hot out or because it’s raining or because the driver in front of me or because I got caught in traffic? This is a good one. Get caught in traffic. You’re not going to go anywheres. I don’t care how you complain. I don’t care what you do. You’re caught in traffic. Do you have to bother yourself about that? Can you learn to not work with yourself so that at that moment you just do things to raise yourself? You do things to let go. I use the example. I don’t care how many times I’ve done it, I’ll do it again.

I learned this back in the seventies. I stayed straight through any problem, right? It’s hot out. It’s Florida’s hot. I had no air conditioning, the car, the house, anything, and the summer it’s hot out and he would complain out here trying to meditate and he just complain and he took him outside and said, Mickey, why is it hot? Let’s have a discussion. I talk to my mind, why is it hot? He said, because the sun, it’s hot, right? I said, what is the sun? I asked him and he of course likes astronomy a lot. I said, what is the sun? He said, A star. I said, you’re close enough to a star to feel his heat. The little twinkly things out there at night, read different, all that stuff. You’re close enough to a star to feel its heat. That’s pretty unbelievable, isn’t it? Wow.

And how much heat is it? It’s 93 million miles away and you’re feeling its heat. How far away is Miami? 360 And you start working with yourself and at some point I now, if I get out of my car and I feel the sun, I stop. I think, wow, look where I am, a little flat and spin around a star that’s hot as hell. Okay? If it’s that hot 93 million miles away, what’s it like in there? Whoa. Okay, and you start appreciating and being, I told you, you do not get sunburned. You get star burned. Who doesn’t like stars? You got a star out there giving the heat and you use your mind to raise yourself. You can do that with everything. If you get caught in traffic, you can go make yourself in a rock mess. You’re saying, I didn’t meditate this morning. Time to meditate, time to do a mantra, time to sing, do some music, time to have some fun.

I can’t get there. Anyways, is raise yourself. That’s what we’re talking about. Yes, it’s great that you meditate. It’s wonderful, but you don’t meditate all day. Some people tell me, you don’t seem to teach meditation. No, I don’t teach meditation. Well, everybody else does. That’s fine. I’m going to teach you what to do when you’re not meditating. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t meditate, but I want you every moment of your life to do this, to raise yourself whenever you can. I told you, you’re walking down, you see a friend, you go, Hey Sally, how are you doing? She doesn’t even turn her head didn’t even say, hello, you get hurt, don’t you? What did I do? Why is she treating me like that? She has a earbuds on you, your words you said, and you went through all the perturbations and why she didn’t say hello and who told her what and oh my God, who she doesn’t tell somebody else what the other person told her.

Like, wow, why don’t you just make yourself a mess and you start catching yourself and sitting there saying, can I handle that? Sally didn’t say, hello. There are 8.3 billion people on the planet Earth. They didn’t say Hello, either you can do this. Are you willing to work with yourself to raise yourself? That is true. Spirituality, if you will do that, I’m telling you, if you practice, you’ll get better. You may not be a great pianist, but if you practice your scales, you’ll be better than if you didn’t. If practiced, you’re going to be better than you were. Same here. It’s exactly the same. Working with yourself. If you practice being okay, you’ll get better at it. If you practice handling reality, you’ll get better at it and getting better at it means you can handle bigger things than bigger things, and eventually you’ll get to the point that I’m talking about, which is, you know what?

I’m fine. I’m fine. And guess what? I’m always going to be fine. Why? Because I said so. If I don’t let it bother me, it doesn’t bother me. If I have fun when it bothers me letting it go, it’s like a video game. Can I go to level seven? And you just have fun with yourself. Have fun letting go, have fun, being positive, have fun figuring out what you need to do so you’re not an erotic mess. Instead of saying, you guys have to behave differently. So I’m not an erotic mess. My sure enough to be different. My husband has to be different. My job has to be different. My boss has to be different. Everything to my health has to be different. Every single thing has to be different. Otherwise, I worry, I get upset and I’m neurotic. No, I need to work on myself.

And now you understand what that means and understand why you do it, and you can reach this beautiful state if you do it enough. Just work with things. Work with things where at some point you realize I’m fine. You know what happens? I have to tell you a secret. All that noise in the psyche that creates all that disturbance and anxiety and fear and all that, when you learn to handle it and let it go, you’ll realize that was energy being wasted. How many times have you worried about something that never happened? How many times throughout your life have you worried about something that never happened? That didn’t happen? The vast majority, every single worry you have doesn’t happen. What a waste of energy. What a waste of psychological, mental and emotional energy. When you stop wasting that, you’ll start feeling Shakti. So many people say to me, what is Shakti?

That what you feel when you’re not wasting your energy doing that, that energy becomes liberated. Where does it go up? You’ve been holding it down, using it to worry and figure things out and protect yourself. Use a lot of energy. When you stop doing that, not because you suppressed it, not because you pushed it away, you just said, I’m fine. I’m fine. I can handle things. Then the energy starts being released to do other things, and what it does is it goes up. I mean, literally, you ever feel tremendous love that’s so high, you’re going to keep your eyes open like that. That’s Shakti. It’s just no reason unconditionally. It just starts flowing up. There’s a reason it’s not being wasted going down, and every one of you’re capable of that and now it gets high. Now you’re feeling all this energy going up and it’s more beautiful.

Robinson said that you reach a point where you realize that what’s going on inside of you is higher than anything that can come in from outside. You’re only feeling more love than you could ever have for anybody, but then you share it with people. It’s beautiful inside you are a beautiful being. You’re filled with Shakti, filled with spirit, filled with energy, but you’re wasting it doing this stupid ego stuff, keeping yourself, you’re wasting your energy, holding it together, that what you think. If it gets what it wants, you’ll be okay. Instead of letting the stupid thing go and being okay, period from the bottom of your being totally okay and eventually it will get so strong, and people talk to me about this. It starts flowing up so strong that you get scared. A different type of fear. Now, it’s the fear that Christ talked about.

It must die to be reborn. That’s now it’s beautifully a beautifully human being, but you’re not human. You’re divine to let go of your entire conscious relationship with this, the body, mind and emotions to where the spirit, the shakti, the consciousness is liberated completely. You will learn then to let go of that, and that’s where the great ones went and they merged with the universe. How do yogis know that? It’s all made of consciousness because you’re conscious and they went to the root of your being and they all went to the same place. It was, I am the universe. My father and I are one. Okay, we talked about a lot of things, but mostly what we’ve talked about is do you understand how much fear you got in there? Do you understand how much energy you waste protecting yourself, trying to manipulate and control everything and worrying and thinking and doing all this kind of stuff? You don’t have to do that because you have to be willing to practice being okay with reality. 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.