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 Masters, there are so many stages on one’s spiritual growth, they’re all honorable, but there are higher and higher stages. It’s very good even if you’re not there to know about them so that as you get there you recognize them and you can. They sign posts along the way. So the first stage is a person is completely lost. What does that mean? It means they’re so fixated on staring at their ego that they think that’s who they are. When they use the word I, they’re talking about that, the mental construct of thought patterns that are made up of the past experience you’ve had that you held onto good experiences, bad experiences, didn’t make it through you. You clung to them. We talk about it all the time. If it’s a bad experience, it doesn’t feel good, you push it away. It’s staying in there. Anything you ever push away, ever any of the tiniest thing that you push away, that the experience can’t make it through you.
It’s still in there until you let it go. It stays in there. Your will keeps being asserted. It tries to come back up. You push it back down, something reminds you of it. You push it back down. You don’t want to deal with it. Then the other thing is if you really like something, a real law, it’s rare in your life, but if you do, you want it to happen again. You don’t want to let it go. You don’t want to push it away. You want it to stay in your conscious mind so that you can keep feeling how good it felt. The other you don’t want it to stay in your conscious mind because you don’t want to feel how bad it felt. So this thing about liking and disliking, pleasurable and unpleasurable and so on, these are the things you keep trapped in your mind.
You don’t keep them trapped outside world, the things aren’t happening anymore. You may want it to happen. You may want it not to happen, but it’s not happening. Events happen and they move on. The atoms are doing something else in the next moment, but you didn’t let it move on inside your head and so you kept this thought pattern. It’s just a thought pattern. Ego is just a thought pattern. It’s not who you are. It’s a thought pattern that defines you as a self concept. It makes up who you are based on the experience that you’ve had, not out of all experiences. You see lots of trees, you see lots of clouds, you see lots of lines in the road. You see lots of cars drive by. You don’t make those part of your ego, they’re just going through. But if something hits you and it either bothers you or it feels really good, you either resist it, repress it, suppress it, whatever you want to call it, I call it resist it, push it away, or you clinging to it, hold it.
Then those things stay. Why? Because you told them to. They don’t stay naturally. Nothing stays naturally. Events happen. They come in, you experience them and they pass through. What do you mean the next event happens? The next event has as much right to exist as the event before and the event that hasn’t happened yet has no right to exist. It hasn’t even happened yet, but you don’t do that. You depending on whether it hits you that you like it, you dislike it, you clinging to it or resist it in both cases, it stays inside your mind. So now you can experience the next moment because you already got this stuff. Attracting your consciousness inside your head instead of experiencing the reality of life. That’s what here now is about. It’s about the fact that events that are happening right now are the only ones that are real events that happened yesterday, two days ago, your childhood, they’re not real anymore.
They’re real inside your head because you held onto ’em, but they’re not real in reality and the events of the future haven’t even happened yet. So they can’t be real. They’re just stuff you make up in your mind that you either want it to happen, you don’t want it to happen. You project the stuff you store from the past that you held in your mind onto your future. You’re afraid that this might happen again. You hope this happens again. So let’s not be here now, but here now is this is an event that’s taking place in the universe. How do you know it’s in front of me? That event that is in front of you, I’m talking about each one of you individually. That event that is in front of you is not in front of anybody else. They’re standing to the side. They’re busy shopping.
That event is happening to you and only to you. It has never happened before. It will never happen again. Not what you’re actually experiencing has never been here before. It is a private moment that is being created just for you. How do I know it’s just for me because you’re the only person seeing it, the only person that will ever see it. Do you understand how holy that moment is? People like to be special. You’re pretty special aren’t you? Can’t even hear what I’m saying. If you could, you’d just cry. A moment is being created in creation that only you experience. It was meant for you and then it goes past and it never comes back, never existed before. Do you understand what I’m telling you? That’s pretty far in it. You want to be special. I think you’re pretty special. Okay, so that moment is there.
If you let it happen, it comes in and you experience it and then moment comes in and you experience it and you learn from these experiences, it doesn’t mean you don’t have a memory. You have a memory. A memory is not the same as resisting and clinging. That’s an act of will that you’re doing. The memory is it comes in and your mind is brilliant. It happens to have a storage system that is 800 billion zillion gig or terabytes. It can hold everything. It comes in. You don’t have to do anything to remember. How hard do you have to do to remember something to bring it back maybe, but it gets stored automatically. Alright? It just stays there. It’s there. It’s in your memory. Banks. That’s not the same as a samskara. A samskara is. It came in and before it made it all the way back and through to let you experience it and store it.
You don’t have to do it. It stores by itself. It just stores naturally, okay? And so basically sometimes later in life it doesn’t always do that. But basically it comes in and passes through and you experience it and that’s that. You can bring it back if you want to, but it doesn’t come back by itself. It doesn’t just all of a sudden pop up there. The ones that pop up by themselves is just you didn’t let them pass through, you resisted them, you clung to them and they’re trying to get out. I’m telling you the truth. That is not natural to hold onto things like that. The natural state is be here now is to exist in the present moments being presented to you. Honor it, respected by all means, interact with it, give to it, raise it, love it. Do whatever it is. Not that you don’t do anything, but you don’t grab it, clink to it and hold it when it’s not there anymore.
So silly. So be here now is your natural state, but we don’t live that way because we have things we don’t like and things we do like and I’ve told you a million times, I think the most interesting things about a human being who’s supposed to be the highest species on the planet is you actually have things that happen to you that you don’t like. Well, what do you do with ’em? You store them. Why would you do that? Why would you store the thing you liked the least? So it can always be there bothering you. I don’t know, but you do, don’t you. If you didn’t do it, there would be no science of psychology. There’d be no therapists. You stored the worst experiences you ever had inside your mind so they can bother you and your heart inside your mind and your heart.
They can bother you the rest of your life. Think about that. Please contemplate that. You may not know how to not do it, but you can not do it. Alright, we’ll be talk about that a little later. So what’s happening is the stuff comes in, you hold onto to the stuff you really liked and you really didn’t like and you build an ego out of that. You say, I’m the one who likes this. There’s the eye. I’m the one who doesn’t like this. I’m the one that this happened to. That happened too. And so you built this what’s called a self-concept. That is your concept of yourself. It is not who you are. You are the awareness, the consciousness that you have one of those in there that does stuff come up when you don’t want it to. Does it bother you? How do you know?
You know it comes up. How do you know it bothers you and eventually you yell at me because I’m conscious, I’m aware. I feel it. I see it. That’s right. That’s who you are. If you’re feeling something nice, you’re feeling something not nice, it’s the same. You feeling it. There’s only one the consciousness that’s in there and has been in there. Were you in there yesterday? Were you in there last year? Were you in there last year? You in there? See, it’s not hard. Spirituality’s not hard. It takes no beliefs. It’s not difficult. Yes, you’re in there and you’ve been in there. Your experiences have changed and what you’re staring at has changed because you kept building different aspects of your self concept based on the experience you had. So you’re not having the same experience you had when you were five or 10 or 20 or 30 or however old you are.
And so you’ve stored these experiences, but the consciousness, I said the first stage of I’ll call spiritual growth is really spiritual, is that the consciousness is staring so hard at the self-concept at ego and what it wants and what it doesn’t want, what it likes, what it doesn’t like, and what happened to that. It doesn’t like what happened to it, it does. It is more the reason people do drugs and drink alcohol and get addicted is because they’re addicted to this inside. If they were not addicted to that inside, no one would do it. Then what do you want to do it for? What do I get drunk for? What fun is that? Well, it’s more fun than staring at this garbage I stored in here. Okay, fine. I understand. If you didn’t store that garbage, nobody would’ve these problems. So that’s the first stage.
The first stage is you’re lost. Your consciousness doesn’t know who it is or what it is or where it is. It only stares at the ego at the self-concept and is busy trying to figure out with the intellectual mind how to get what I want and avoid what I don’t want. And that’s the normal state of the human being and the heart behaves accordingly. If it thinks of something it likes the heart opens up, thinks I don’t like the heart, the mind and the heart and cos with each other other’s a conspiracy that’s called your psyche and you are staring at your psyche. You have to understand it’s your first stage of awakeness to realize OMG, I’m staring at my psyche. I’m not the psyche, I’m staring at the psyche. Alright, so first state is you’re not awake at all. You’re staring at the psyche. That’s who you are. You’re putting all of your effort and all your will into getting what you want, avoiding what you don’t want and thinking about how to get what you want and how to avoid what you don’t want and that’s your life and it’ll be that way for your entire life. Has it been that way your entire life? Answer me.
Okay. It’s just that’s the default state. Why? Because the psyche’s made out of this garbage. It’s made mostly out of the things you didn’t like. The ratio between the things that you really liked and blew you away in order to keep versus what you didn’t like isn’t not even close for every 10,000 things you didn’t like the weather. What somebody said, there’s one that blew you away. Oh my god, I’ve always watched since kindergarten. I love this person now they paid attention to me or in between the kindergarten, the time they paid attention. How many things didn’t you like somebody said, somebody didn’t say the weather that this the way somebody drove in front of you didn’t use your blinker. Every single thing. You don’t get high on things that don’t happen. You get down on things that didn’t happen that you thought might happen.
You have made this ratio ridiculous. Do you understand that? That’s part of waking up. Alright, that’s what you’re staring at. You’re staring at this broken thing made out of a mess, made out of stuff you stored in there. Okay? So the first stage of spiritual growth is you don’t know any of that. You’re just busy doing that. You’re busy be in the eye. You’re busy doing what it is it tells you to do going where it tells you to go. Saying what it tells you to say. Not saying what it tells you not to say, but feeling weird because you wish you hadn’t said what you said. Come on, what’s it like to live in there?
That’s why it’s made out of the garbage is stored in there. So now let’s get the first stage and there’s many stages in between, but the first stage is you awake enough. It’s a good awakening where you realize I am conscious in here and I’m seeing all these thoughts, all this tucky tucky going on in there and I’m seeing my heart open and close. That’s the beginning of waking up. That’s the beginning of witness consciousness. It’s not deep witness consciousness, but it’s at least the beginning of realizing I’m not what I’m looking at. I’m the one who’s looking. I am not depressed. I’m looking at a depressed psyche. It could change in a minute. Do you understand that you’re depressed because your boyfriend or girlfriend left you and you take a shower, you’re asleep, you can’t even sleep, you don’t talk to anybody and he or she calls on the phone. I do this in, I tell the soul calls on the phone. Hello? Oh my god, I’m so sorry. The biggest mistake I ever made in my life was leaving you. I never realized how much I love you until I have to live with the pain of knowing how I hurt you. Can you ever forgive me? Can I come over? I want to see you. You’re not depressed anymore.
How long did it take? You didn’t need a therapist. You just needed to realize you’re staring at a psyche that didn’t like what happened and didn’t like her leaving. Now it got what I wanted. We’re not depressed anymore. We’re filled with energy. So you’re not depressed. You’re staring at a depressed psyche and eventually you wake up enough to realize that’s what’s going on. I am in here aware of what’s going on in here. It’s not hard to realize that. Do you thoughts? How do you know? Do you have emotions? How do you know you care more about the emotion than you care about how there is the emotion? Spirituality cares about how there is an emotion. It really doesn’t care about what the emotion is. They make believe they care the right, polite and they listen. Robert used to talk like that. He said, you come and tell me your problems.
Listen, listen. 15 seconds, 20 seconds try to be nice, right? And then I just tell you, we all got stuff. The question is whether you’re caught it or not, are you awake enough to realize you are staring at a thing that has serious problems? You don’t have problems, the self doesn’t have a problem. The light can shine on something that’s beautiful, gorgeous, structured and then the thing starts to break. The light doesn’t change. The light can shine on something beautiful, something ugly, something whole and something broken. Okay? This is what your consciousness is, so that’s your next stage. You just start to wake up and you start to realize I got to get out of this place minute. This is crazy to living in here, right? And I’ll give you a slice of that stage. You think at that stage that you’ve been wronged that mommy, daddy, boyfriend, girlfriend, high school, junior high, Dayton college, this and that.
You didn’t make the team and everything else it did and you deserved it in the business and you should have got the raise in the corner. That’s why I’m a mess. You seen the mess but you think other situations did it? No, no, no, no, no. The situations happened but you’re the one held them in there. If you hadn’t held them in there, they wouldn’t be bothering you. If somebody says to you, I don’t like what you did, I don’t think that’s right. I can’t believe you did that and you get all weird, how can they say that to me? That’s ridiculous. Oh my God. Then in other words, you got pulled down into it as opposed to, well I guess they’re having a bad day. If people have bad hair days, the person had a bad emotion day. Fine and let it go. Do you understand you’re capable of that?
Not suppress it. If you say I can handle this, it’s too late. I talked you that yesterday going really deep, I can handle this. It means it bothered you. You’re aware that it bothered you, you caught it, but you decided I can let it go. I can let this go the next phase of your awake, it’s a good phase. Do it. Breathe the mantra, let go do whatever you can. The next phase is there’s not, I can handle this. There’s nothing in you that can’t handle it. Understand that I can handle the car driving by. I can handle the white lines on the road. You don’t do that. I can handle, there’s a cloud in the sky I can handle. It’s not raining. I can handle, it’s raining. You don’t do that. You just handle it. I would like to be that way about everything.
Not I couldn’t handle it, but I caught it and now I’m going to handle it. It’s good. Don’t think I’m about telling you that’s a stage in it. You hear me? And most people don’t really get to that stage. They say I can’t handle this and they dump all over somebody, right? So that’s a good stage. I can handle it. But you understand it did bother you. You understand? You were aware that it bothered you. I understand that you bothered to stop it so you can decide to let it go. You’ll reach a point in your growth. I’m encouraging you and you’ll get excited, right? That isn’t what happens. What happens is to the bottom of your being, I am not going to do anything about this. Why? Because it bothered me and I’m going to do things about things that bother me except let them go.
I don’t have to think about it. I have to analyze it. I have to understand why I did it. I did. You say that doesn’t matter. I don’t care not to start with. It comes in, you feel it, get a little weird. It’s not that it doesn’t get weird. There’s humanness in there. It comes in, it feels a little weird and you’re just like, oh, you don’t even know what it’s, you don’t know why I felt weird. You don’t care. It doesn’t matter. If I’m not going to do anything about it, why should I even think about it? I already know I’m not going to do anything about it. Why? Because I’m not going to do anything about it. You practice enough to realize, I’d have to decide should I store this in here or not? I’m not going to store it in there. So would a mess storing the stuff in there.
My whole life’s stored in there. I’m put another thing in there. That’s the next stage. You already know I am not going to hold this in here. And that goes for positive things too. I’m treating you very mature. You meet somebody, you go somewhere as you do something good. I’m so glad it was beautiful. I’m so glad you had a beautiful experience and you start to see a part of you, you want to clinging. I want it to happen again. You go a vacation, you don’t want to leave, you don’t come back to work. Then your vacation screwed you up. Don’t you dare make it sound like a great vacation because you couldn’t come back to your life and enjoy your life. You want to be back on a vacation, you get your vacation. It’s one of ’em. Nobody says you don’t take it. Nobody says you don’t go somewhere.
Nobody says don’t meet somebody. Nobody says anything like that. Alright? You just be mature about it. You sit there and say Thank you for this beautiful experience. Now I’m going to take this beautiful energy that I got from my beautiful experience and bring it back to my home and bring it back to my work and bring it back to my friends and bring it back to my lover. Not I can’t wait to get back. Oh my God, it was so much fun. He saying you’re not enjoying your life, enjoying them. It’s nice the kids come to you. It’s nice different experiences, right? Can you let them go? That’s harder for you than letting go of the negative things. Why? Because you had so few truly positive experiences in your life. You drive down the street and you turn the corner and this gorgeous sunset is setting them, blows you away and all these colors and everything like that.
And you just get so high. Good. That’s beautiful experience that you say, oh my God, it touched me the death of my being a fellow in the presence of God. Beautiful you were because it touched you. The depth of your beef it came through. That’s wonderful. Good. Go home. Enjoy the rest of your day. No, no. There was a little house on the corner. I want to buy it. I want to have this experience every day in my life. Shoot, I can’t afford it. I’m going to quit my job. What don’t you do? You let that beautiful experience screw up your life. Anybody listening, what’s wrong with appreciating and enjoying the beauty, the experience that was given to you. You didn’t know it was there. You didn’t take it. You didn’t bump into somebody at Publix to the supermarket, your car hit each other and just love at first sight.
You didn’t do that. It happened to you. Say thank you, say thank you. Don’t grab and clinging and need all this mess you make out of things that you like. And the reason is because there are very few experiences in your life that you really like. Do you understand that? Compare the experiences every single day of your life that you don’t like. I don’t like the weather. I don’t like this. I don’t like what somebody said to me. Somebody didn’t say to me, I don’t like these people are closer than with her than she’s with me. And why is it on the phone for so long and why didn’t he call when he, how many things going on during the day? Oh my God, I dropped some catch up on my pants. I don’t want to go back to work. Come on, be honest. Now compare that with how many things where the sunset blew you away and you felt all this joy.
See? And that’s why you clinging to the positive stuff. You don’t have any. And the reason you don’t have any, the reason you don’t have any is because your ego, the ego steals your life. It tells you it’s giving you life by telling you what it wants and how to get it. And then if you get it, you’ll have a nice experience. How well has that worked out? How long have you strove to have nice experiences your entire life? How are you doing? Well, I went on a vacation I liked once I met somebody for a while that worked. I’m so sorry. If your ego was not there doing this, you would feel joy all the time. All the time. All the time. Now we’ll talk about the next level. So this concept of getting lost in your preferences, in your, how do I talk about it?
You know how few things you really want that will make you happy. You’d probably count ’em on one hand. If I told you to make a list, everything that would just blow you away to the core of your being, what would you write down? You just wrote down the things that are destroying your life more than anything that possibly could. Why? Because you wrote down five things. How many things are there in the universe? How many things are there in the world every day? They weren’t on your list. Therefore, you can’t be happy unless those things happen. When you write down the list of what you really want, that’s the list that’s destroying your life. You know what the list should be? Bring it on. Let there be. I dig them.
This is going to be fun. I told you ti this beautiful saint right there, Bo Aru statue back in the seventies. She wants leaned over to me, Mickey. I say yes. Mother says, don’t you just love when they yell at you, there’s so much energy she got high and people yelling at her. So it is your ego that is keeping you from joy all the time. It’s making a conditional joy. The conditions that your ego wants have to happen for you to be okay and the conditions your ego doesn’t want better not happen. So what’s like in there? You worry that what you don’t want, what’s going to happen? You worry that what you do want won’t happen and you end up being a worry war about one thing or another and you get anxious about things. What’s it going to be like and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so basically you wake up, the next stage is you wake up and you realize, no, it’s not that mommy and daddy and boyfriend did this to me. I did this to me. I couldn’t handle the reality, the situations that were unfolding in front of me. So I stored them, suppressed them, resisted them because they’re negative or clunked them because they’re positive. And now I built this person in here, this thing in here, this self-concept in here that limits my joy and limits my life and makes me feel worry. And if you could handle here, let’s say you’re driving down the road and get a flat tire, some people say got flat tire. Oh boy, this will be fun. I haven’t changed for a long time. Hope there’s a spare. I don’t know if they keep spares in the cars anymore and you get out and you have some fun and change your tire and some people are scared to death.
What if somebody stops and I can’t trust them? What if someone I know sees me changing a tire? That’s embarrassing. I just bought this new car and you hear me. You couldn’t handle the situation and it’s going to stay there. Okay? Somebody can handle. It’s not going to stay there. There’s another thing that happened today. You want everything that happens to you to be just another thing that happened in this beautiful universe that you were passing through time and space and you got to have this experience. That’s where great beings exist. Okay? So now we’re at the point where we understand it is not that everybody else screwed you up, you screwed you up. And I’m telling you, I do take that so personal because you’ve had really bad things happen to you. Everybody has. Do you understand that everybody, some people worse, but you’ve had bad things happen to you and you know it.
It is because you couldn’t handle it that it’s still there. If you could handle it and say, okay, this terrible thing happened to me, okay, I grew and let it go, then it doesn’t affect the rest of your life. But we don’t know how to do that. We haven’t learned how to do that. We’re not even told that we’re allowed to do that. We’re kind of told you’re not supposed to do that. Somebody hurt you, resent them, tell everybody about it. Write bad articles about ’em. Do something to get even. In other words, keep it in there and let it run your life. So the next stage is you start to realize that no, I did this, not that I caused the event. Don’t get into this karmic. I don’t want to talk about karma that way. I deserved it. I did something wrong once.
No things come back to teach you. If you hurt somebody and weren’t conscious enough to understand you’re being self and you hurt them, it will come back and you’ll feel at some point you’ll realize how absurd it was what you did. That’s not your karma, it’s your teacher. Life is your teacher and stuff comes back so you can learn. It’s a positive thing. You like that? Do you understand that? Don’t let them sell you this stuff. You start waking up that it’s not that you did the event or that you deserve the event. Don’t do that. It’s that you couldn’t handle the event. You couldn’t handle what somebody said. You got all weird, started throwing things around, getting divorced, running around. Can’t believe you did that right? Next thing you know you made a royal mess out of everything because of what the person did.
No, because you couldn’t handle what the person did, how many relationships you screwed up because of that. I can’t believe you did that. I would’ve never done something like that. No, you would not have. You had different experiences in your life, therefore your mind thinks differently. Your emotions feel differently, right? Your ego is different and theirs is different. But I never thought you would do something like that. No, I’m sure you didn’t. Don’t think like I do. No one thinks the same. No one thinks the same. Psychology says man is a summer of learning experiences. I already showed you no one had the same experience as you at all. Not to mention all of them. Therefore they don’t think the same as you. Can you handle that? Can you handle that? Can you be comfortable with that? Understanding it? No one thinks the same as you. They can’t possibly think the same as because they had different experiences throughout their life and they’ll have a different experience tomorrow. I thought I knew you in the morning, you came back different.
Well yeah, had a fight with somebody. I got fired or I met somebody. Whatever it is, something happened. One stupid thing happened and all of a sudden that person’s mind thinks totally different than yours. It always is different. So this is what’s mean. Now we’re talking about waking up. You hear me? So you realize it is not the events that happened to me that built my ego and screwed me up and made me nervous and anxious and scared and worry and needy and all that kind of stuff. It’s the fact that I couldn’t handle the experience I couldn’t handle. I stored it inside and then use what I stored to build a self-concept and say this is who I am and you all better straighten out and that’s what you’ve done. And now you woke up and realize as a very important stage that you woke up.
You realize there’s an ego in there, you got to live with it, Andre live with it, but you think everybody did bad to you, right? And you realize, yeah, there’s bad out there and there’s good out there. Question is, can you handle it? Can you handle it? Can you let it come in? Give it a kiss on the forehead and let it pass through. Let it pass through. First thing you do is let it pass through. What anything? Everything. People look at me when they write me, oh my God, how can I do that one? I know you can’t do it now, but you can learn how to do it. But the question is, do you want to do it? And so people say, no. Of course I don’t want to do it so it’ll hurt me again. I can do something about it. Make sure I don’t do it again.
Wait to see what that does to your relationship. Have you ever done that? So scared that it’ll hurt you again as the entire relationship got ruined because of one thing somebody did by mistake or this or that, or you misunderstood what it was about. Who are you with? I started holding hands with somebody and you told me you didn’t do that kind of stuff anymore. It was my brother, but you already messed yourself up. You’re dumpling that person. Sit there and say, God, how do I live with her? She’s jealous. You mess up your relationships. Why? Because you can’t handle things and that’s when you, there’s a couple of points I want to say. Come visit me When you get to that point that you’re centered enough and clear enough to realize you’re doing this, guess what? You the one in there, yes or no?
Anyone else sitting there with you, parents, father, sister and brothers, kids. You’re the only one in there and if it’s a mess in there, you did it because you’re the only one in there. That’s your house. Now I realize, like I said, I’m not non-compassionate. I’m compassionate. Things happen outside that are difficult to handle, but the price of not handling them I just showed you is being screwed up for the rest of your life. Who wants to get into a car accident? They’ll be afraid to drive in a car ever again. Who wants to watch a plane crash on TV and be afraid to ever get on a plane again? Why? Because planes are so dangerous. They’re way more safe than cars to go Check the statistics. Way less people die in plane accidents every year and who die in cars is not even close and you’re just silly the way you think. Let these things make impressions on you and then you devote your life to what your stupid mind thinks because you had one experience, you had one experience. How many miles did you drive with no car accident before your car accident? Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands. Well then put it in perspective. No, no, it hurt me. I broke my arm. I’m not driving a car anymore and if I’m driving, I’m driving. You’re not driving, I’m driving. Nobody else is driving. I’m going to get in a car and anybody else is driving.
You ruined your life by not being able to handle the events that are happening to you now just because you handle what somebody said what somebody did, you better handle it because it happened. The alternative is to let it screw you up. You don’t, I let it screw me up. I’m talking about a state of spiritual growth, right? You reached a point where you realize that mind could get you a really mess and I’m learning and practicing meditation and breathing and mantra whatever it is you’re doing to try and be okay. Heck, if I’m going to create another mess in there because of what you said to me, it doesn’t matter if it was right or wrong or good or bad, I am not going to have you noticed. It takes one second for something to get in there and it could take years for it to get out. Who’s noticed that? Freud,
All the psychology is built on top of that. Somebody say one thing to you after all these years, a bad day to say one thing, it hurts you. You wait to see how hard it’s to get that out. Some people could never, ever again love that person the same as they did before. They said the thing that hurt them, they could stay with them. They stay here for the kids. They can put a nice smile on their face, but the concept of that heart opening is completely as it did may not happen again. That’s because that one event, I can’t trust you. He uses words, I can’t trust you. Yes or no. Anybody ever said it to anybody? I can’t trust you anymore. You know what you mean by trust? I trust that you’ll behave the way I expect you to. I trust that you will do what I expect you to do and not do what I don’t expect you to do.
In other words, you’re the same as me and I’ve projected myself onto you and I trust you that you’ll be the way I expect you to be. Well, guess what? They won’t. Why? Because they’re not you. That is not what trust means. You want to trust. I trust that you be true to yourself. Ah, it is going to happen anyways while I was trusted, right? I trust that you’ll do your best to be the best you. And it’s not my definition, it’s your definition and if you fail, I trust that you’ll work on yourself to be the best you that you can be, not the best me and not the best me that projects onto you because that ain’t ever going to work. Is it? So wake up and you do wake up. You wake up at this stage and you realize, wait a minute, the problem is that I couldn’t handle the events.
Not that they happen, events happen. Have you noticed? What did John Lennon say? Life. What happens to you when you’re busy making other plans? Have you noticed? Have you noticed it doesn’t always be the way you want it to be. Raise your hand. Don’t bother. It’s not going to be the way you want it to be. It’s not supposed to be the way you want it to be. Listen to me if it’s true that your ego and your thought patterns are the sum of your learned experiences, they are right. Psychology says they are and they are. What else could they be? The sum of the experiences you didn’t have, which is everything else. I don’t get into that all. It’s the sum of your minuscule learned experiences. The moment in front of you is not the sum of your learned experiences from a scientific point of view.
It’s the sum of it’s learned experiences. It’s called cause and effect. Events happen through time and space that all coalesced together into this moment and express themselves as that expression. That’s what science says. What is science? I’m going to study the reason for the hurricane. The truth is there are forces that cause the hurricane that have nothing to do with you. So your inner mind is a sum of your learned experiences and the outer world, your experiences, a sum of it’s learned experiences including the people involved as a sum of their learned experiences. You’re all excited for someone to come home but they had a bad day. That’s nothing to do with you. That was the sum of their learned experiences today. You had the sum of your learned experiences today and the car and everything else in the universe had the sum of its learned experiences and you all collided.
You all made it the same moment and you just get down to the point you realize it’s not the way you want it to be because it’s not supposed to be. Guess how. Oh God, I can’t. I’m going to say it. There’s the worst thing I ever teach, right? You know why it is the way it is because it’s supposed to be that way. Not supposed to moral, not supposed to ethical, not supposed to, right and wrong and good and bad. No, it had to be that way because of all the forces that made it be that way. It’s not that it is good or bad, it’s just the moment in front of you is the culmination of all the forces that coalesce together from the beginning of time to cause that moment to be what it is. And that is true for every other moment in the universe.
The moon is where it is. Not because you want to be romantic tonight or because you’re sleeping in a place that it gets into your window. It has nothing to do with you. Things are not the way you think they are because they’re not supposed to be and they’re definitely not the way you think they are. Your thoughts are so limited. It’s ridiculous. You’re having an experience. How many you’re missing, how many things are going on right now that you’re not experiencing all over the place? What’s the ratio of what you’re experiencing versus what you’re not experiencing? Well, guess what? Reality is the sum of all the forces that ever were through time and space. It’s all balanced. It’s all happening. Doesn’t make it right or wrong or good or bad. It just is zen. It is the way it is. Therefore it’s not the way you want it to be.
The question is can you handle reality? Can you handle the moments unfolding in front of you and eventually when you wake up to this next stage I’m talking about and you’ve worked your way back and you realize that the stuff you’re storing in there because you don’t like it and clinging to as you did, it’s causing a lot of trouble. It built your crazy mind, the preferences and hopes and dreams and concepts and views and not likes and fighting and knowing and you realize if I had to store this stuff in there, it wouldn’t be in there like that and I’d be okay with the moments. And then you start realizing, okay, I need to do that. Need to do what? I need to learn to be okay with reality. That’s the essence of spirituality. I need to learn to be okay with reality. How do I do that?
Alright, I was going to wait till later when I was, well do it now. Guess what? The key word in that sentence was not reality. The keyword you learn have to learn. You pick up a tennis racket, you know how to play golf club. You know how to play. Sit down a piano, you know how to play or any other instrument. Does that mean you can’t play it? No. You don’t expect I need to learn, I need to learn. You need to learn to handle reality. Exactly. Like you learn to play the piano exactly like you learn to do a sport. You can learn, you can learn how practice. That’s how you learn a sport, isn’t it? That’s how you learn to play the piano. Practice, practice, practice. Well what do you mean? How do I practice learning how to handle reality by practicing learning to handle reality?
It’s not rocket science. Well, what do you mean? I always use the same examples. People write me say, why do you use the same examples? I want you to see how simple it is. Alright, you’re driving your car and the driver in front of you is driving 15 miles an hour below the speed limit and you’re in a rush and it’s a single lane highway and there’s other cars coming in the direction and you can’t pass. How are you doing? How are you doing? Because I’m telling you, it is not the moment in front of you that’s bothering you. You’re bothering yourself about the moment in front of you that driver’s not bothering you. You’re bothering yourself about how the driver’s driving. You’re bothering yourself about the temperature, the weather. It’s so hot. Oh my god, I’m melting. No, you’re not melting. You’re bothering yourself about the temperature.
Therefore you’re bothered. Learn not to do that. Like learn to play the scales. Learn to play. Twinkle, twinkle. Learn to practice tennis. Learn. Learn how to handle reality. Seems too simple, doesn’t it? That’s the most important spiritual thing you’ll ever do. How do you learn to do it? Work with yourself. Use affirmation. The driver in front of me could be my grandma last year she gets to drive and I’m not going to tailgate her or beep her poor little thing. Now protect her and you just make it nice. Make it nice. Learn to raise yourself. The Edith says one should not trampled down the self self, but raise the self self. Your higher self needs to raise your lower self so you start working with yourself. That’s how you learn to handle reality. How by handling reality, bother doing it. It’s as important as any spiritual thing you will ever do.
Once you can start handling these smaller things, you’re going to be shocked. Somebody will say something to you, somebody won’t say to you and the mind will start and you’ll do the same thing. You’ve now learned how to not get caught up in this trivial garbage that’s ruining your life. You hear me? It ruins your day. Now the next thing will happen, then it’ll be next. And you keep raising the level that you can be comfortable with discomfort, right? It’s not that the heat’s not still the heat, it’s not the driver that’s still the driver. It’s that you can handle it. How would you like to be able to handle things? Practice. Practice doing it. Okay, so now we’re going more spiritual states. Now you’ve practiced handling it enough to where some big stuff happens. There can be some big stuff that happens. We all know about that.
And it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t cause some trouble. It means your attitude is I can handle this right? Why I want to handle this. It’s just like handling the heat. It’s just like handling the driver. If I can handle this one, this big one, I don’t have to worry about anything for the rest of my life. I just like that one of those. I know you don’t want it, but you do want. Alright? And you go through it now how long it takes, you go through it, you get to the other side, you’re a very special person and all of a sudden you realize I can handle anything. I don’t have to be afraid anymore. Now you’re getting there. It’s not that you’re not afraid, it’s not that there’s not fear, you’re not afraid of the fear. Somebody ask Roman a Christian, a fully enlightened being.
Does an enlightened master ever feel anger? He said yes, but it’s like writing on water. You just go write me an essay on water. See who can read it. It just goes right through. There are human emotions. It’s perfectly reasonable. There’s fear, but you guys are afraid of everything. There’s one thing to be afraid of, a lion jumping on you. That’s a survival. It’s another thing to be afraid. What somebody thinks of you afraid that somebody talks about you afraid you don’t look as good, they won’t like you anymore. Everybody’s afraid of that stuff. How would you like to not be afraid of that? How would you like to start seeing that self-consciousness come up and just look at it and just let it go. Let it go. Teacher calls on you impromptu. I didn’t tell I was going to do it. Give a lecture. What? Yes, give a lecture. Come on impromptu lecture. You’d be scared to death hear me. What if you felt the fear, but because you handled the son and you handle the driver and you handle the boyfriend and the girlfriend and you handle the boss, you handle all these situations. You just stood up there and you let that go, let it come through, pass through. You just had fun doing the best you could talking.
That’s called being free. Freedom doesn’t mean freedom to do what you want. It’s not freedom for yourself. It’s freedom from yourself. This one who wants all this stuff and wants their freedom to get it. She’s the bane of your existence. She’s the problem, not the solution. The more you give her what she wants, the more she’s like a spoiled brat crying for a toy and then in the toy store, right? Go on, give the kid everything they want every time. See what happens. That’s what you’re doing with your ego. You start to step back. It’s not renunciation, it’s wisdom. You’re wise enough to say, I don’t want to be listening to this thing all the time. Well, it does complain. What does cause trouble? And you start working with yourself on these bigger things. That’s your next stage and you’ll reach a stage or you realize you don’t need to worry about anything. Why? Because you can handle it. Not that it won’t happen. You don’t know what’s going to happen, do you? So I can’t say, don’t worry, it won’t happen or don’t worry. What you want will happen and you go start attracting to yourself what you want. I’m sorry, I have to talk like that. I don’t want to talk like that. Fine. That’s a stage of spirituality. Go on. Attract to yourself what you want. Feed your ego.
How’d you decide what you want? Want a house? Want a boyfriend? Want another child? I want, how’d you decide? Because I’m not okay. And my mind told me based on my past experiences that that will make me be okay. Good. Go for it. Okay, I’m serious. Go for it. Eventually you’ll catch on. You’ll say, okay, I got what I want. And do you want something else? Of course you do. No one’s ever got what they want and never wanted anything else.
I’m talking about growing. I’m talking about getting okay inside to where you don’t have these wants. What do you have? What takes the place of all that noise? All that worry, all that anxiety, all those efforts to get what you want and complain. What takes that place as that falls off, Shakti, I’m telling you, this energy starts flowing inside of you. That was busy doing that. It was busy worrying. It was busy being anxious. It was busy desiring. It was busy fearing all that’s energy. When that’s no longer happening, that very same energy you feel as a Shakti flow, you feel as free energy pouring inside of you just like you did with the sunset. We’ve talked about just like you did with the boyfriend or girlfriend, you fell in love with. I love of first sight. You hear me? That experience you had was so beautiful.
It was shockti, you opened, so energy was flowing. Now you’re not closing. You learn to not close. Why? Because you’re going to accept reality and you eventually you get to the point where you realize I will never close. Why? Because I will never close. I don’t care what happens. Why the trade off of giving up this beautiful energy flow? That’s your next stage of growth, is the Shakti. This beautiful energy is so beautiful. I ain’t trading it. Someone come to say, Hey, I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you a dollar if you give me a million. Wait a minute. No. Something’s wrong with that, right? I’ll tell you what, if you get upset by what I said, you can never feel love again. No, no. I’d rather feel love and you go say what you want. Now it doesn’t mean you don’t deal with it.
I told that first you get clean first. You, you will get it perfectly, but you get reasonably clean. Then you look to see, okay, I’m okay. I’m not going to go out here and interact because I’m not okay and I’ll make sure it never happens again. And you’re sorry. You understand? That’s not the motive behind my interaction. The motive behind my interaction is okay, I’ve handled it. I’m fine. Thanks for the growth. Now is there something I’m supposed to be doing about this? What do you mean supposed to be that can help the other person, that can raise the world something good. Can I bring some good energy out now that I don’t need things to be a certain way? Is there something I can do that can help the situation? Then by all means, you do that. You can be an activist. You can be an activist.
We get a political time. Now you can be an activist, a real strong activist, but not because you can’t handle the reality or the thought of the reality. So you’re taking your fear and dumping it through your activism. You’re just bringing fear and anxiety and dumping it out into the world. But if you can handle the reality, that reality will unfold and you do your best and then you see that there’s something I can do to help what I can do to raise the energy, not for me, not I can’t handle it. I would say you want to get that right. If you can’t handle the sight of blood, please don’t be the first person in my car accident because you can’t handle it. You have to be able to handle things then come out and work with them to raise them to help them.
Sure, it’s your opinion of what raises them, but it’s not that you can’t handle it. You now are coming out here and bringing love to the best of your ability, bringing service. You’re serving. You see a difference as opposed to I can’t handle it, so I need to protect myself from it. It’s all about me. So now you’re at the next stage of spiritual. These are deep spiritual growth. Why? Because they’re permanent. It’s not like some trip you took. It’s not like some deep meditation you had, which is wonderful. Tell me, I tell people not to meditate. I do not. I’m here to talk to you about what you do when you’re not meditating, okay? You can get some serious growth when you’re not meditating. And so now you reach a state and you will reach a state where the inside is beautiful when always, why?
Because you stop making unbeautiful. You stop blocking the energy and making it get all weird in there and now the flow will come up inside of you. You’ll be fed by this. You think, well, how come nobody else talks about this? I don’t know. Christ talked about it. He did not. Yes he did. You know what he said? Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that leaves with the mouth of God. That’s what the Shakti is. In other words, you don’t just be okay because what’s coming in from outside the bread, but by every word that leaves the mouth of God. In other words, there’s the shakti flow inside the spirit. Call it what you want and you start living off of that. And once that flows, you’re not going to trade it off. Now let’s finish it out because I’m out of time.
So what happens now? Now you’re clean and you’ve got this beautiful Shakti flow all the time. It’s there all the time. It’s just pouring up inside of you, feeding you all the time. You don’t have to do anything. Anything you do makes it stop. It’s not something you’re doing because you let go. You feel God. You experience that inside of you. It’s pouring up and now you get to this nice point. I always like to finish at the end with the full picture where you’re back to realizing, wait a minute, this is beautiful. Who’s experiencing this? There’s still consciousness experiencing this beautiful love, this beautiful energy. First you’re intoxicated with it, but then you realize, wow, who am I in here? You don’t think that it’s not thoughts, thought will make it stop. It’s just realization that I’m still back here. I was experiencing a human going through all the junk.
Now I’m experiencing this flow of shockti. Who am I? And you take a step back and start realizing what’s more important than even the ecstasy of the Shakti flow is the consciousness that’s experiencing it. That’s the highest thing there is in the universe is your consciousness. And all of a sudden, because you’re willing to, it starts pulling you up behind. And the concept that comes up is what is the source of consciousness? We explain the source of all the garbage you’re looking at and now you understand there’s this beauty in there too. Pure spirit. What is the source of the consciousness? And the great ones fell back there. They stopped even looking out at the Shakti. They stopped even looking out from the self at all and fell back, backwards back. We king his will. Then you’re still there. You have to let it pull you up.
What happens is that’s not so easy. Why? Because you’re used to being there. You really used to being there and what Christ, again, went to Christ say, he must die to be reborn. That’s what he’s talking about, die of. Even looking at the ego die, of even looking down enough to know there’s something down there, inside or out. Sharking pulled back into the source of consciousness and the great ones, thank Mayor Baba, fully enlightened being said, my consciousness was like a drop of water staring at me. It let go and it fell back into the ocean of water. Take a drop of water. You can do it home with your sink. You don’t need the ocean and drop a drop of water into the ocean. Find it. Find that drop. You can’t. Why emerge? The word yoga means union merger. That’s the state. Who else said that?
My father and I are one. You understand that Christ taught yoga. That’s all he taught. The highest states. So that’s who you are. That’s who you are because you’re staring at this stuff that you built in there and now you’re thinking it has to be okay for you to be okay. No, you have to learn to be okay with reality so that you can let go of the stuff. It will happen naturally. Start with the small stuff. Other stuff will come up. Practice breathing through it, letting go the best you can. You’re not going to be perfect. Doesn’t matter. It’s a lifelong journey and you just keep letting go. You keep letting go. It’ll tell you. The Shakti will wake up in you. People write me from all over the world like, oh my God, all this joy is coming inside of me, but you still got to cleanse. And then the high states, that’s why their pictures are great masters. That’s what an enlightened being is. Don’t say I’m enlightened. You had an enlightening experience. You enlightened. Enlightened being is merged. They’re individual consciousness has merged with a source of consciousness and you become a knower of God. Work on these things. Jai.
Tami Simon: You’ve been listening to The Michael Singer Podcast, produced by Sounds True in partnership with Shanti Publications. For more information on Michael’s body of work and all back episodes, please join us at MichaelSingerPodcast.com. Thanks so much for listening. Sounds True: waking up the world.
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