E28: From Distraction to Liberation

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’re very sincere in your spiritual growth, eventually realize all the techniques. All the teachings are really about, are you willing to diminish and let go of your ego, which is a very, very, very serious task. It’s no joke. You can think about all you want and it’s your ego thinking about it. But seriously, while there’s ego and we’ll talk what ego is and talk about diminishing it and why and how, et cetera, et cetera, but while there’s ego, your consciousness will be distracted by it. Spirituality is about returning to the source of consciousness. The problem is consciousness is aware of things and it can get distracted by something that is distracting. That’s all You hear loud noise, your consciousness is going over there. You see somebody you love your conscious of going over there. It’s somebody you dislike tremendously. You’re conscious of going over there.

It just gets distracted by things that you care about and you care about things that you like and you care about things that you don’t like. Probably you care about things you don’t like more than you care about things that you like. So if you like something, your consciousness is drawn to it. It’s destructive. If you see a picture that you like, there’s 15 pictures laid out in front of you. Only one of them do you know the person I’m telling you, your consciousness is going right there, not because you know them, because there’s this distraction that that thing stands out here. I’ll use an example. You don’t understand more. You’re walking outside and all of a sudden you hear a rattle and there’s a rattlesnake in front of you, hopefully 10 feet away. I hear that’s a safe distance, but I don’t think any distance is safe.

But in any event, there’s a rattlesnake in front of you. Guess what? There’s also trees, grass, clouds, wind, heat. There’s lots of things in front of you. Guess what you see? They’re rattlesnake. They’re all equal. Are they? Listen to me. Some things stand out more than others. No, they don’t. They’re all just colors and shapes and things. There they are. But because your mind as focus on something more than something else, your consciousness gets drawn there. So what’s the importance of that? It’s being drawn away from the seed of consciousness. There’s the essence of the path. That’s all of it. In one sentence, God, your god’s self, which is God is the seed of consciousness. God is universal. Consciousness. Omnipresent, meaning what? Universal. Everywheres. Omnipotent. The source of all forces. The source of all power. Nothing that God can do anything. God is everything. So it’s omnipresent.

It’s the cause of all of creation and it’s aware of that. It is omniscient. It knows that. It knows that it knows. So there’s just this tremendous infinite eternal field of consciousness. That’s what everything springs from. Guess what your it. Consciousness is? Consciousness. If I go to the ocean and I take a cup and I dip it into the ocean, but don’t pull it out, what’s the cup full of the ocean? The ocean’s not a spot. It’s not this. It’s a whole field and it’s equal everywhere, isn’t it? Every spot of the ocean is the ocean. Consciousness is consciousness. There’s no high consciousness, low consciousness, better consciousness, God, consciousness, personal consciousness. There’s just consciousness. What is that? That which is aware. I actual you a question. Are you aware? Just answer me. Are you aware? How do you know? Because I’m aware that I’m aware.

That may sound silly to you those words. I’m aware that I’m aware. What did God say his name was when Moses asked him with a burning bush? I am that. I am I aware that I’m aware I am that which is I am the I am so that’s who you are. You are in there being aware. Awareness is a quality that’s incomprehensible. Nothing else is aware. You’re aware of hundred billion, trillion things you can be. It’s the same awareness, isn’t it? The exact same awareness is aware of what you like and aware of what you don’t like aware of. You look in the mirror, you see yourself when you’re young, you look in the mirror, you see yourself when you’re old. It’s the same consciousness seeing both. It did not get old. It’s not get young, it’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s not up. It’s not down. You want to see down, look down who looked down Consciousness. You want to see up, look up who looked up consciousness. Consciousness is the seer, the awareness, the essence of everything without consciousness. Alright, let’s say everyone in the room just disappeared right now. Would you know that? Yeah. How do you know? Because I’m aware they all popped back. Did you see they came back? How do you know? Because you’re aware. Now I’m going to turn off your awareness. What’s going on?

You can be aware of tons of things, but if I turn off awareness, there’re nothing. Mayor Bob said beautifully. There’s great mastery. He said Everything in the whole universe, all the form, all of creation is zeros. They’re just zeros. All of ’em are zeros. Consciousness is the number one. Put the one to the left of all the zeros and all of a sudden everything has meaning. What’s that one do? Just put that one in front of all the zeros. It becomes a hundred million, billion, trillion, trillion and take the one away. Zero. Consciousness is the meaning of everything. If you were not conscious, why are we having a discussion? Now, problem is not a problem. It’s part of reality. Consciousness does not look on everything equally. You don’t see everything equally. You see men, you see women, you see up, you see down, you see cold, you see hot, you see snake, you see grass.

You differentiate the zeros. The truth is we might as well get her over with. Every single thing you have ever experienced is the same. Every single thing that ever came in through your eyes, your ears, your nose, your touch is exactly the same. How can you say that? I’m not saying it. Physics is I have no right to say it. What do I know? I’m not a scientist. We need to ask a scientist what’s out there. Know what they tell you? Nothing. Now they’ll tell you nothing used to tell you. It’s atoms. There’s a bunch of atoms out there. Okay? Guess what? The atoms aren’t all the same. We have a periodic table, but they’re 108 or whatever it is, okay? 98 natural elements or something. Those are the types of atoms out there, so they’re not all the same, but what are the atoms made of?

Electron, nin, protons. Are they all the same? Every single electron is the same. Every single neutron is the same and every single proton is the same. Exactly the same. So now we know what’s out there. Electron, nin, protons. Gee, is that what it looks like to you? Do you understand that science has told you this was back in the late 18 hundreds, they figured electron nuclear protons, right? We find out they were wrong, but anyways, that’s what they said was out there. So that’s what’s out there. The fact that you put them together and see people and see dogs and cats and clouds and no, there’s just electron neutral protons. The way I explain it to you, so you finally get it is do you have a flat screen tv? Everybody’s got a flat screen TV get up real close When you’re watching a movie so close, it’s getting harder because they have 4K stuff and so on.

Just get up real close. What do you see? Dots called pixels. That’s what’s really there. No, there’s a movie. No, there’s not. There’s just dots. RG, b, red, green, blue moving around. The dots are moving around. That’s what’s really there. The fact that you see a movie has a lot to do with your mind, has a lot to do with your senses, has a lot to do. What Einstein say, your senses are the problem. They’re lying to you about what’s out there. You have to look past your senses. That’s why we develop all these machines. All these devices right now, they can actually isolate electron nuclear protons, but it takes a 12 mile long cyclotron accelerator, how to discern underground to be able to bombard the atoms together. So they break up into electron protons and then they have these receptors that can see that stuff for a billionth of a second that comes out and question again, okay?

But that’s what’s out there. What’s out there is pixels. We call them atoms. I’ll call ’em electron nuclear protons. There are at least three right? Green, blue and that’s truth. Why don’t you see that? Because your mind and your senses average that stuff out. What happens when you step back from the movie? It averages all those pixels out and you start seeing form. There’s no form. There’s just electron neutral protons. Okay, very good. That’s reality. I’m also finish it. I said it was not, there are not nutrient protons. Wow, but I went to school. Too bad they taught you wrong. Why? We went further back further down and they found out that neutrons and protons are made of things. They’re not elemental particles. Forget atoms. Those are just combination nutrient and protons interacting together. Nutrient and protons are made of subatomic particles, but you get down to what they quote quantum physics and you don’t need to understand it aren’t a thing.

I just want you to understand what they found. You don’t have to do the math. It’s always so complicated, but what did they find? They found that there are not pixels, there are not particles. There’s fields. Fields like a field of light. It’s a field underlying those pixels when you stare at the screen are light emanated and it’s all light. It’s photons so that underneath the nutrient protons there are subatomic. I don’t want to use their particles. Going to find out they’re not particles, but there’s corks, leptons and boons and that’s what they find out. That’s the whole standard model of physics that exists now and then they get put together. So to Upworks and the down cork maker, proton and two downs and an up, make a neutron. You don’t need to know that. The point is what you’re looking at is a lie is your sensors are lying to you, is not what’s out there.

Then they went further and now they understand that there are not particles. That’s not what’s down there. What’s down there are just fields. Fields that get agitated and then they start to make waves like an ocean, a wave or drop a leaf in a lake. A lake used to be still. Now it makes waves. Those wavelets are what appear to have the properties of a particle. There are no particles, there’s just waves. The yogi said it was all made of light. Turns out they were right. Science is all the way down that level. There are no particles. They’re just waves and the waves behave as particles at certain times they’re properties and when we look at them, they seem like particles. They’re really just wavelets and if you ask quantum physicists, fine, what is the quantum field? What is it that’s waving? They will look at you and say, we have no idea.

Go to yogi, a deep meditator, an enlightened being whose God realized and ask him, what is the quantum field made of? He’ll tell you consciousness. Look how close physics is to spirituality. Pretty neat in it. Okay, so God’s pure consciousness and it vibrated in yoga they say the ohm was the original vibration. That’s just a vibration on the field of consciousness and it created what’s called a rti, a little wavelet and everything’s made out of that. Now we would sit there and say, how can everything be made out of a little wavelet of consciousness? Look how close physics has gotten. They’ve told you everything’s made out of agitation of a field, right? Not a particle, nothing. There’s no particle. It’s just a field, and by the way, physics will tell you that the quantum field is omnipresent. The first time I read that it was writing from nasa.

I was reading some stuff on the web and it said the quantum field is omnipresent. The only time I heard the word omnipresent used or for God, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient. Well, guess what? If the quantum field is omnipresent and all so-called particles came out of it, it made everything okay. Some nip it in and if it’s conscious now you have what you call God, okay? So that’s what’s going on out there, so why don’t I see that? And if I’m pure consciousness and you are to pure consciousness looking at something here, you’re looking at the TV and seeing a movie, it is not a movie. Underneath it there’s just pure light. You’re the light, you are that light. Consciousness is all the same. There’s once you get back to pure consciousness to its source, you have merged with God. That’s what the great masters told you they did When they went far enough back and stopped looking at their thoughts and stopped looking at their body and stopped looking at the senses, what was coming through senses.

Now stop looking at their emotions. We’ll talk about what that means and how one does such a thing and whether you want to, alright. Then the looker is what’s left. If you’re not looking at something, then you’re just there. Patanjali talks about that. Consciousness is contemplating consciousness and then they fell back. The drop of consciousness fell back into the ocean and merged. That’s what yoga means. Merger union quote, do Christ say, my father and I are one? That is the truth. What did he say to you as I sip of the throne of my father? In other words, as my consciousness sits within God, consciousness so you shall sit by my throne and these things which I do, you should do these and even greater things, you are God descended. You are the same thing as Christ in Buddha. Well, why don’t I experience that?

Because you’re busy being you. You’re busy being conscious of your thoughts, your emotions and what’s coming through your senses. Your consciousness is distracted away from the seat of consciousness. That’s why I started, okay, well what does that mean? We were talking about ego. Now that it’s distracted, that by the way is the fall from the garden. The garden is you’re sitting in the ecstasy of the divine consciousness. Form still exists. You can look at it. You don’t have to get lost in it, you don’t have to stare at it. It’s going by. If you watch a movie and something happens in the movie that you either really, really, really like or you really, really, really don’t like, guess what? You’re not going to watch rest in the movie. You’re lost in what you liked. I hope it comes back. Oh, she’s so beautiful I let’s see her again.

Or oh my god, it was so scary. I don’t know if I want to watch the movie anymore. You’re busy lost in what you saw. Your conscious got distracted by some event that happened out there. They weren’t all equal. Everything in the movie wasn’t equal. Some things were the rattlesnake and now your consciousness is focused on that. It’s fixated on that. If it gets totally fixated on that, you didn’t watch the rest of the movie, you have to go back and rewind. Have you ever sat there reading a book and realized you turned five pages and did not read one single word that’s on that book and you have to go back and turn the pages back? Why? You were distracted by your thoughts. You were distracted by your emotions. Can you get distracted by your thoughts? Can you get distracted by your emotions? I’m telling you, you are always distracted by your thoughts and always distracted by your emotions. You just know the ones that distracted you from being distracted. You’re sitting there thinking, I don’t do today, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then something happened. Oh, I got distracted by the noise. You were already totally distracted.

I’m telling you what it’s like to be human. What is a human? The divine consciousness distracted by a particular set of thoughts, a particular set of emotions and a particular set of senses that are taking in. How much of the universe do you take in any given moment? Take a look what you’re taking in, what your senses pick up. Nothing. I like it when people say, I don’t want to miss anything. You are missing everything. Every single moment of your life you are missing 99.9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9 and that’s just on earth. Percent of what’s going on, right or wrong, it’s so limited, it’s ridiculous. And what is happening is these moments, and I’ll talk about where ego comes from, where it all comes from. These moments are happening and your senses are picking ’em up and your senses are very, very, very limited, but they’re the only thing you pick up.

You’re not experiencing all the other moments that you’re not experiencing. You’re not conscious of them because you’re not coming through your senses. Truth is let’s get somebody straight, but you are conscious of them. An enlightened master is one. Christ is one with the universe is conscious of all things simultaneously. You are in God consciousness. Why don’t I experience that? Because you’re very interested in a very small part of the whole. What part? Me. I, me. Mine. I am interested in me or interested in you. No, I’m interested in my children. There we are. My, I’m interested in where my husband is. I’m mentioned where my husband is. Imagine where my wife is. You check out how often you use the word I, me, mine. That’s what you’re interested in. Why? Because what happened is your sensors received a very small amount of the universe, extremely small.

It came in your conscious experienced that. Some of the things that came in, I’ve told you this before and tell it again. Some of the things that came in had a vibration that was pleasant vibrations. The electromagnetic spectrum. We think it runs from radio waves to what? Ultraviolet. It goes way past that. Those are just what our instruments could pick up. They didn’t know anything about ultraviolet infrared before, so they said it ran from here to here. Small little spectrum. Then they made an instrument that picked up radio wave picked up this, picked up that, and then they expanded the definition of electromagnetic spectrum. Well, were they going to someday get instruments that pick up your thoughts? You doubt that they will. They’re just higher and higher vibrations of energy that are subtler and subtler, but they’re there. How do I know they’re there? Do you have thoughts?

How do you know? You know you have thoughts. Prove it to me. Show me the instrument that is picking up your thoughts so you know have thoughts. It’s called mind. You have an instrument. You don’t even think twice about it. You have an instrument that picks up those high, high, high vibrations in the field of mind. Consciousness can experience all vibrations because it is all vibrations. It is omnipresent omni mission. It is God. Consciousness is God. Consciousness is God not there’s this thing I’m conscious of. No, that’s a symbol. Remember, don’t make images of me. One of the commandments says I’ve done it. Okay, don’t make false images of me. In other words, don’t try to put me into form. I’m not form. I’m universal. Infinite consciousness, pure energy, a field of pure energy consciousness. So it’s not that you put your consciousness on somebody to make of God.

Consciousness itself is God. So basically it come down to you’ve had this experience of very small experience and they have vibrations. Every single a rattlesnake does not feel the same as a butterfly. I don’t mean touching it, experiencing it does it. Somebody you see that you love, that you had nice experience before does not feel the same as somebody you just strange or somebody you don’t like. They don’t feel the same. There’s vibrations, you know that. So basically they come in your senses, pick up the little bit. Don’t forget how tiny what you pick up is when you sit there and say to someone, Hey, I’ve been around. No, you have not, but what have you experienced during your life? It rounded to nothing. You experienced statistically insignificant amount of stuff. If it’s true that you’re only picking up this right now in this room, how many other things are going on that you’re not picking up of what?

Meaning what statistically is what you’re picking up compared to what there is to pick up Nothing. Are you willing to be humble enough to finally that’s how you grow spiritually. You catch on nothing because you only can know what you’ve experienced. How much do you know about what you never experienced? Nothing And how much of what you’re experience is in relationship to everything that there is. Not to mention the universe, oh my God, 300 billion stars in one galaxy and 2 trillion galaxy. How much are you experiencing of all that? Nothing wake up. And the fact that you’re going to let my say in that we’re getting toward ego. It’s the truth. Did I tell the truth or not? Is it truth that you’ve experienced nothing in reality? Okay, nothing you’re experiencing comes in and it has different vibrations because everything in creation has a vibration. Different vibrations, alpha to omega, it comes in.

Some of the vibrations are pleasant, some of the vibrations are not pleasant. They’re just experiences. Can you experience something that’s pleasant? Yes. Can you listen to some music that’s in harmony and experience it? Can you listen to some music that’s in total discord and disharmony and experience it? Yes or no? Can you experience them both the same meaning that your reaction to them, your interaction with them is the same. Here I’m experiencing something pleasant hear, I’m experiencing something very unpleasant, very disharmonious. It’s an experience. It’s just an experience. Different type of experience. Here’s a note, it’s a C, d, e, sharp. They’re just experiences that come in through your sense, you experience them. Why do you like some and don’t like others? It’s just an experience. And by the way, every one of you like and dislike different things. So it’s not like things are naturally likable and naturally unlikable.

Oh, again, interesting. So the stuff comes in and has different vibrations, okay? We’re not an ego yet. We just have consciousness. Experiencing creation. That’s the garden you’re sitting in. God, consciousness, experiencing ecstasy. That’s the nature of God. Consciousness. Such eternal conscious ecstasy is that field, that field of eternal infinite. It’s ecstatic. That’s what it’s experiencing. The most natural experience is ecstasy total. Alright? All right. Now things are coming in from creation and ecstasy is experiencing the dance of creation. That’s where a master is. It’s just all coming in the same. There’s no difference. It’s different, but you don’t experience it. You experience it as the variety of life. The beauty variety is the spice of life, isn’t it? So in other words, you’re letting it come in, it’s passing through, it’s all coming in. I quote you, I can’t help myself, but the Gita has a beautiful, beautiful S soka concerning that.

Krishna says to our juah, there are enlightened beings out there. There are beings who are one with me. Krishna speaking is God. They’re one with me. They’ve merged with me very great beings. And Arjuna Christian’s disciple says to him, wow, far out that’s modern life. I didn’t say it like that. This is sixties talk. Wow. Far out Krishna. How will I know such a person? What if I meet them? Do they walk, talk, sit like any other man? How will I recognize this enlightened being? And Christian says, no, you’ll not recognize him like that. He sits, he talks like any other man. If you would recognize him, recognize him as such. He lets goodness exist when it must, it comes and when it goes, it goes. He lets darkness be when it is and when it goes, it goes. He walks as a sojourner, a stranger in the midst of the qualities of nature.

Those vibrations I talked about as a stranger in the mystic qualities of nature, just as all the rivers and streams of the world pour into the ocean, but the ocean has not overstep its bounds. So the world of sense pours into the yogi and leaves him as a found himm at peace. Serene content. Equanimity is yoke. That’s what we just talked about. If you’re completely open and you’re clear and you’re just conscious, yes there is creation, yes, and it comes in and it feeds you and every experience you have makes you a greater being. Do you understand that? I just said if you never experienced it, you don’t know anything about it. If you experienced it, you’re a knower of things. So it’s feeding you and you’re having these very good that’s living in the garden. Adam and Eve had form. There was trees and so on.

It wasn’t the Unmanifest Bramo form was created and God was experiencing the creation and was loving it. It’s beautiful. There were snakes, there were things. What happens? The fall from the garden is as follows. Here you are in that state. Now something comes in and you paid a little too much attention to it. It was either too uncomfortable for you to not be distracted by it. That we’re distracted is so in fact they talk about original sin. That’s the original sin is distraction is differentiation. Creation is all God. It’s just God having created every aspect that could possibly be everything that could possibly be exists. Alright? And it’s coming in and you’re experiencing it, but you differentiated the snake from the grass. What does that mean? I paid more attention to it. I focused on it more so now everything’s not even to me. That stood out.

How did it stand out? By putting more attention on it than I put in anything else. I focused on it. When you focus on something, you miss everything else and something else happens. When you focus on something, it makes a deeper impression on you than if you didn’t focus on it right or wrong. Look, you are already 99% enlightened. You listen to me, 99% of every single thing that ever came in through your sense and went right through the clouds, the trees you’re driving by, the cars you drove, by the people you don’t know the sounds. Almost everything just comes in, goes right through. It doesn’t freak out, doesn’t do anything. It just you experience it. Did you experience it? Yes, you drive by white lines every single day of your life. When you’re driving they freak out. No, they just come in. You deal with them and they pass through.

If indeed they distract your consciousness, that means they pulled your attention to them. You’ll remember that white line. If all of a sudden it wasn’t white, it was delow, you go, whoa. And then you tell everybody about it. You didn’t tell everybody about the other white lines you drove by. You put your consciousness, you concentrated your consciousness on that. Therefore it made an impression in your mind that stave because you put conscious on it. So now everything’s not the same anymore, not to you because some things you separate it out from others. Did you separate the same thing everybody else? Of course not everybody has different experiences. Every single person is experiencing something different. Right now, every single of the 8.3 billion people on the planet earth is experiencing something different. Everyone in this room is experiencing something different. You’re looking for different angles. There’s light different things.

You came in with different patterns in your mind, experience. You’re all experiencing a unique experience of the moment. I like to ask this, that moment you have just experienced, will it ever happen again? Will it ever happen again? Not a chance in the world you are being given a unique experience that never happened before, will never happen again and you’re the only one experiencing it. Will you please contemplate that? People say, I want to be special. You’re pretty special. That moment you experience has never happened before. No one else saw it and it will never happen again. And you missed it because you’re distracted by your thoughts. You’re distracted by things that happened before. So you can’t be here now. That’s what be here now means it’s a very sacred thing from now on. Understand that every moment you’re experiencing it’s so sacred. It’s ridiculous that God made that moment for you must have been, it never existed before.

Will never exist again. No one else saw it. It’s sacred. It’s just for you. So it comes in, you experience it and some of the things you get distracted by. I said, does everybody have the same collection of stuff? They distracted? Of course not because nobody else had the same moments and everybody got distracted by different things. So now you have patterns in your mind. The mind holds onto those things. In fact, I just didn’t say it right. It’s not true that the mind holds on to those things. You your will. Consciousness focused is the force of will you all know you have will in there. Can you push things away inside your mind can clinging to things you have will. When you focus consciousness, there’s a power. It’s called Shakti, right? In fact, in a yoga tradition, God is called ti, not Shakti, not is consciousness.

Shakti’s energy. It’s one word ti, consciousness, energy, the same thing. When you focus your consciousness on something, you have put energy onto it. So now you held onto it. Does it come back up? What you held onto? Does it come back up? You never suppressed anything. Now you don’t have anything that you held from your past that keeps coming back up. Periodically, yes, it comes back up. Why? Because it’s trying to pass through the natural state of things is these experiences happen. You experience them, you learn from them and you get to your next experience. You get to your next experience. If you go there and take fifth grade math and have trouble with it, but you finally pass when you get to sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th. I hope you’re not still thinking about fifth grade math. I such trouble with it. But then you’re not going to do good in sixth, seventh or eighth.

So the world comes in, you experience it, it passes through. When it doesn’t pass through, you use your will, you focus on it and you held it. You held it into your mind. I said your mind held it. No, you held it in your mind. How do I know that when it comes back up, you push it back away. If something had happened to you in your childhood or your first marriage or yesterday when you got embarrassed, it comes back up. You see something reminds you of it and therefore it comes up and you push it back down. If it wasn’t comfortable or you clinging to it, if it was, I like thinking about it. You are the only doer in there. Consciousness is everything and consciousness is the doer. So when you focus on it, you send energy to it, it stays within your mind. Fine. Now I got some stuff stuck in my mind. How much stuff you got stuck in your mind? How even do you see everything all the time? Not a chance in the world. Somebody says something, somebody doesn’t say something that gets stuck in your mind. What? That they didn’t say it.

Okay, so you got a mess in there. You got a collection of messes, but what you have in there are not the things that were neutral, the things that you just experienced, they’re the things that you couldn’t just experience. They were either the vibration was too distracting, not nice or too distracting. Nice. That’s what you held in there and every single one of you have a different collection. Alright, so now what’s it like to live in there? Impossible. Why? Because things you didn’t like stayed in there. I always ask you guys what kind of smart thing is that you the highest species on the planet and you decided to store that which was the most disturbing things in your entire life inside so you can keep them.

They happened 20, 30 years ago, they’ll never happen again If you were dead, you grow up. There’s nothing but why is that still in there? There’s no reason for it. None. And that’s what I’m going to teach you. How do not do that? How do you like that? You know what spirituality is? Don’t do that. So you get distracted. You hold these things in there. They were either, I don’t like to keep saying they’re either really nice or not nice. Do you know the ratio between what’s in there that you kept in there? It was so nice and what you kept in there because it wasn’t nice and not even close and you could count on your hand how many times in your life you had an experience. It was so beautiful that you couldn’t let it go. It just keeps coming back up. It changed your life.

It was so beautiful. You can have ’em. So a life-changing experience, but you ain’t had many of those. How many experiences have you had that you didn’t like? That’s still in there? Somebody said something. You didn’t say something. You dropped something in your pants, you had to go to work, you said something to somebody and now you’re embarrassed by what you said 20 years ago. You got a lot of junk in there, don’t you? And most of it’s negative. Most of what you got stored in there is stuff that bothered you and therefore you pushed it away. You didn’t want to experience it fully, right? Things that are nice, the hug or the beautiful sunset. I told you I can’t help myself. Alright? You had experiences that you told somebody. Oh my god, it was so beautiful. I just melted. It melted me. I like I was in the presence of God.

It touched me to the core of my being. Have you ever had an experience like that? Yes or no? How many be honest doesn’t happen very often, does it? But you’ve had them. That means you let it all the way in. It did touch you to the core of your being. It came into your consciousness, unaltered, unfiltered. It was really unbelievable. It blew you away, didn’t it? I mean, love can do that. You can hug somebody and just melt, can’t you? You can just melt, melt in their arms, melt completely, melt, not be there. Where’d you go? You went back into the, were you having the experience? Yes. Were you thinking about it? You better not be thinking about it or you didn’t go back there. It’s not even an emotion, it’s beyond an emotion. It’s a state of experience of total being. People do drugs.

It’s like d to try and get to those states. I feel sorry for them. Why? Because you should live in that state naturally. Do you understand that? It’s your natural state. So instead of trying to get there, try to figure out why you’re not there. That’s the deep teaching. So now you’re sitting there and you know can have that experience that’s beautiful but you don’t, you push things away. All the psychology is based on the fact that you’re in there using your will to push stuff away that you don’t like. Freud was not down there trying to find out what you liked about your mother. You’re trying to figure out the problems you had, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s the suppression. You don’t suppress good things, you suppress bad things. So that whole thing about suppression and repression and fixations and denial, it’s all about the fact that you are in there not liking what you experienced.

So now you’ve shoved all this stuff down there. It’s very hard to live in there. How do you learn to live in there with all that junk coming back up and everything reminds you of? And how do you interact with people how to do anything? Well you better find a way. What you do is you build in your mind out of those things. Each one of those things is a brick, a building brick, that thing you stored in there that’s floating around. You need to put them together into a package that you can live with and you build an ego. You build a thought pattern. It’s just a thought pattern, a pattern of thoughts build out of the stuff you stored in there. Your ego’s not built out of stuff to pass right through. Not one. They’ve had an ego built out of the white lines. I always have to qualify that. If you were the white line painter that sat on the back and used the, you’ve seen it. They use a little turn thing and you dripped. Sometimes they drip and you dripped too many times and got fired. Now it comes back up. The white lines come back up and if you see you’re driving down the road and you see a little dribble that somebody else put there, did they get fired?

So you now have an ego that part of it is built around the white lines because you stored that. So you laugh about the white line painter one talk about director husband or the fact that your kid did this or the fact that your neighbor does that and you said something about when you were in kindergarten, go back to your high school reunion. I do not advise it. You go back to your high school reunion. You tell me that as you see those people again, whether the stuff doesn’t come back up, this one stole your girlfriend, that one got better grades than you. You competed against ’em all this 23 years ago or that was your best friend. She’s now a serial murderer to let her out just to call the reunion. I thought it’d be good for her, but you just experienced the same old stuff, don’t you?

Because stored it in there and then what you did with these stuff you stored, God, if you understand this, I’ve done my job. Alright, you stored this stuff, you know did and you can’t live it. It all just shoots up and all. They don’t necessarily line up. You met somebody who was a redhead. You got along great when you were young, but then you got married to one. I found out what they’re like and so emotional and this and that and now would you like redheads or not? And it goes for everything. You built a self concept out of this stuff that you stored and it’s just a collection of thoughts that you glued together and said, this is who I am. I’m the person that likes Burnetts because I don’t like redheads and I’m the person that likes this sort of thing and this is the kind of job I want to have.

I don’t want to be doing what I’m doing. I don’t like either. All based on those bricks. I’m telling you, you did not make one single decision in your entire life about like and dislike that you made. You were programmed. What does psychology say man is a sum of his learned experiences. I heard that a person is a sum of their learned experiences. What else could their mind be? And it can’t be the sum of their not learned experiences, right? I’m the sum of what I never experienced. You’re a great being, then you’re empty. Buddhists would like to meet you Zen, okay? But no, the sum of your learned experiences, what else could it be? But your learned experiences aren’t ever experience you ever had. They’re the ones you held onto. The other ones are still back there. You can bring ’em back. It’s called memory.

You have memory, it’s fine. You can bring back the white lions. They don’t come back by themselves. You didn’t push them down. You let the energy come in and pass through. It got stored in your deep memory. Fine, but this stuff that you resist, that’s a key word. You resist it, therefore it stays because you are holding it. It doesn’t stay by itself. There’s no super glue in there, but there’s your will, the will of consciousness and it resists and builds these blocks, keeps them in there. That’s why the mind is not pure. That’s why the mind is not empty. Empty mind. When the Buddhists talk about an empty mind, it means they’re not distracted by this garbage that you stored inside. They have full access to mind, to think purely to create all of it mind’s a beautiful thing. You cluttered your mind with the garbage that you couldn’t handle and now you’re distracted by the ego by that this little thing you built in there.

If I watch, I wouldn’t do it and you wouldn’t let me. If I put a stethoscope in there that could listen to your thoughts all day, what I’m going to find out is that, and I’m going to give a percentage, I don’t want to blow you away. A very, very, very, very, very large percentage of every thought that’s created in your minds about you. What do I like? What do I do about it? How do I get this? How do I going to like me? How do I get out of this relationship I came with in this relationship? I thought I loved him. I really don’t. My God, I’m embarrassed to say anything about it. All my parents say, oh my friends, oh my God, I can’t do that. I feel so guilty of nobody thinks like that. Right? Those are your thoughts. The thoughts are about you.

What I want, oh my God, I like them. I wonder if you pay attention to me, what should I wear? What kind of carb should I buy that other people impressed with? Should I get a Tesla or thing or should I buy a Ferrari? Well, they use gas and the Tesla use electric. Yeah, but there’s just all this garbage, meaningless garbage. What about you? It’s all because you stored this stuff in there. When the Buddhists talk about empty mine, we’re having a nice talk here. It doesn’t mean you’re stupid. It means it’s not cluttered with that garbage. There’s no ego in there. Therefore it can think clearly. It can do math really good, right? Because there’s nothing and you’re distracting from what you’re doing. If you try to make a blackboard in your mind and write down 1,433 times 12, draw a line under it and multiply it out. Some people can do that. You can’t. Why? Because when you try to do it, it says, I can’t do this. That’s a distraction.

That’s a thought, isn’t it? I can’t do this. Why should I have to do this? I’m embarrassed. I should be able to do this. What are those? Those should help you do it. They pay attention to the mind. What’s going on in there? They’re distractions. Therefore, you can’t be as brilliant as you are. You are way more brilliant than you think you are. Why? Because you’re busy with those personal thoughts of stuff you couldn’t handle and then you built an ego and what the ego says is, I, no one likes this and no one doesn’t like this and no one who wants this and no one who doesn’t want that. It’s called a self-concept. It’s not who you are. It’s a concept that you built. Who are you? The one who notices the concept. You are the consciousness, the witness, the indwelling consciousness, and you do have an ego.

That’s what the ego is, a collection of thoughts in your mind. Your mind is infinite. Think of Saturn. They have a galaxy far, far away. They of a boat. It can do anything. The mine is so great, but yours is busy thinking about you. This tiny little thing on the planet, 1.3 million Earth inside the sun. How much room do you take up? I’m trying to tell you, you have to be willing to be nothing, to be everything. When you’re busy thinking, I want to be something that’s your ego. I want to be noticed by people. I want to be loved. I don’t know why people don’t treat me properly. Me. I mean mine. I mean mine. I mean mine, right? The consciousness, God consciousness. That which is the whole universe is lost staring at your stuff. Array of divine consciousness has focused on your thoughts, your emotions, what’s coming through your senses. That’s pretty small stuff compared to the universe and you want it to be spiritual. You want to be enlightened, you want to grow. You want to do something great with your life. Stop it as a yogi yoy. You understand? I’m in here and I held this stuff in here. How do you know? Because you keep doing it here. Somebody says something to you yesterday, kind, a friend of yours pretty much that bothered you. It can happen, right? It comes in, it didn’t feel good. Okay, it happened yesterday. What happens when you see ’em today?

Maybe you avoid seeing them. Have you ever walked around so that you didn’t have to see somebody that you had an interaction with that wasn’t pleasant in the past? See, it comes back up, doesn’t there? It stays in there. It’s in there because you held it in there. You’re the only doer in there. There’s nobody else in there. Mommy not in there, daddy not in there, preacher not in there. You’re the only one in there and what you’re doing is doing this and then you build it. You’re not always better. If you held this stuff, then you built an ego out of it that you could live with. As long as I’m getting what I want, I’m okay and just don’t. I told you I don’t like when you talk about that. I’m not comfortable when you talk about that. Congratulations. Let’s manipulate everybody. Should they fit your garbage?

How can you have a nice life? You can’t. Why is there anxiety? I can see why. Because everybody has to be the way you want them to be. Are they? Have you found out that everybody’s the way you want them to be? Have you found out that every moment, the weather, all the situation in life that drive in front of you, have you found that they’re all the way you want them to be? No. What are you doing or not the way you want to be suffer Either you suffer little, it’s hot. He’s driving. Come on, I’m in a rush. You drive the speed limit. You suffer or you really suffer. I can’t believe you did that. I never thought you’d do anything like that. I thought you’d love me. Oh my God. Wow. That’s some serious suffering it. Okay? You built out of this mess that you stored in there.

You built an ego and if things are not the way that little mental concept wants them to be, you are in trouble. Have you ever actually experienced the thing break that something happened and you couldn’t get up from down. You couldn’t even see straight anyway. You didn’t know what was going on. You couldn’t even relate to it at all and you felt completely lost. Like I had some solidity in here and now I don’t. It’s like yes or no, answer me. I love you to pieces, but I hope you have. I hope you’ve seen that thing can break well. Why? It’s not real. It’s a false thing. You built in there. You say, you’re my wife. These are my children. That’s my house. This is my job. These are my finances. This is my plan for the future. This is who I like and who I don’t like.

This are the things that happened in the past that I’m not going back there. I’m like, no. These things that happen that I like, I look forward to. You’ve built all that, haven’t you? Well, what happens when the husband leaves? What happens when you get fired from the job? What happens when the investment you put in bitcoins fell apart? What happens? It can get broken in there, can’t it? Why? Because it’s fake. The ego is fake. Of course it can break. It’s only okay if everything’s the way it wants it to be and it can learn to tolerate some stuff. Some people have no tolerance. They could freak out over anything and some people take a little more room. Still. Somebody wants ask yoga. What is the ego? Enlightened master. You say an enlightened master of what is the ego, what he said, the masquerading self.

In other words, the self, the consciousness isn’t comfortable being who you are because you stored all this stuff and you’re distracted by it. You’ve lost your sense of self, so you’re distracted by the garbage and you’re holding it like a mask in front of you, your ego. This is who I am. No, it is not. You’re God descended and not even descended. You’re God looking at you. I love telling people that it’s not I have to get back to God. Stop leaving. It’s a whole nother understanding. The source of your conscience sitting right there, but you’re staring at your ego. You’re staring at your stuff. You can’t get away from your ego. What you do instead, you don’t try to get away from your ego. You try to make everybody and everything in your world match your ego. What do I want? How do I go get it?

What a waste of life. You are the greatest thing that ever existed. You are so great. You have no needs. You’re in ecstasy all the time. Your oneness with all of creation. Come on down here and serve, but you can’t. Ego always takes, that’s all it knows to do because it has to keep itself together, alright? Spirituality is about understanding what you’re up against. I’m the consciousness that was not able to handle the experience of reality, and so I built this mess inside my beautiful mind and you all have beautiful minds, all of you, but you built this mess in there and all your tendencies of prejudice or liking and dislike, all that stuff are based on that. How do I get out? Can you get out? Can you get out? Can you be liberated? Gianna Muta, a liberated soul. Can you just drop back into your seat of oneness, of conscious reality and let that stuff fall off?

Yes. Yes. Every single one of you, if you took human birth, you’re capable of socialization. You’re capable of knowing who you are, not what you made up. How do you do that? I can do it. I swear to God in two minutes people say, I don’t teach techniques. Oh, I do teach techniques. You don’t want to do ’em. If the problem is I’m distracted by my ego. If the problem is I built an ego out of the events that happened in my life that I couldn’t handle. If your ego’s built out of, well, what if I really like something, you can’t handle it not happening anymore. You are in there thinking about how to make it happen again. You can’t handle the events of reality. Well then how do I stop doing all that? Learn to handle the events of reality there. That’s the highest spiritual path.

It will cover everything, period. Learn to handle reality. Why? Because it’s reality. If it happened, it happened. You can’t make it not have happened. It happened. It came in through your senses. Either you can handle it or you can’t. If you can handle it, it is an experience that you had and you grow and you become a greater being because you had that experience. What if somebody I love died? It’s a deep, deep experience. You have the experience, you feel the pain. You feel the loss for how long? The amount of time that it naturally takes for it to pass through. What if I don’t want it to pass through? What? I don’t want it to have died. What if I can’t live with the fact that we’re not here anymore? You’re going to be screwed up for the rest of your life. You couldn’t handle something that happened.

What’s going to happen? You’re going to be a mess. You can’t think about it. Every time I think about him or her, I cry. No, of course I’ll never marry again. I don’t have any relationship with anybody with so beautiful. The reason I have with, okay, you ruined your life. They didn’t ruin your life. You ruined your life. Why? Because death is a natural thing and loving somebody and having them die is a totally natural thing that happens all the time is a natural thing. That doesn’t mean you don’t feel sorrow. That doesn’t mean you don’t feel pain. That doesn’t mean you don’t feel lost. You love feeling the sorrow. You love feeling the loss. You love feeling the pain. Why? Because it’s real. It touches you to the depth of your being. You let it all the way in. You let it all the way in, and what happens?

It doesn’t get stuck there. Then it process it naturally. It goes through and you can talk to people about it. Oh man, I was so beautiful in my relationship with Mary. It was so beautiful and she died young, right? And it was so painful. It was one of the deepest experience of my life. I honor so much. It was one of that has to be one of those gifts she gave me to go through that and grow through that. I feel closer to her there. That’s the whole being. You’re not suppressing it. You have to denying that. I feel pain. You’re open to experience all of life, so you see a rattlesnake, it’s scary. It’s supposed to be scary. It’s rattling. It wants you to not go to it. Alright? That’s it. And you experience it and you tell me, oh my God, I was walking.

I saw this rattlesnake. It was so scary. It was so beautiful. What an experience. It touched me the depth of my being. All of life there. That’s how you get rid of your ego. Stop storing stuff because you can’t handle it. Learn to handle things. Don’t do the big thing I told you about. You can’t start with those. You start, how do you play the piano here? She never touched the piano in her life. She wants to play Beethoven. She doesn’t really like Beethoven. I sit down and play. I can’t. I know you can’t start with the scales. Can you play the scales? Don’t worry me. Yeah. Alright. Do it better. Do it faster. Try different scales. Eventually you’ll play trickle. Trickle. Eventually you’ll play backfield. It doesn’t mean you’re a concert pianist. You don’t have to be a concert pianist, but you can enjoy playing.

Same with a sport. Gone play lacrosse. I don’t even have anything about it. Learn. That’s how you learn to handle reality. You start with the simplest things in life, such as the weather, the driver in front of you, what somebody said, what somebody didn’t say, and you start handling it. You practice handling it. You just relax through it and offer it up. Do whatever you need to do to let it pass through. Instead, it gets stuck in you and you’ll learn how to do that. The next thing you’ll know, something bigger will happen because you learned how to play the scales. You can play twinkle twinkle because you learn how to handle the hot weather. You learn how to handle this, that or the other thing. Next thing you know, somebody had a bad day and they’re kind of mean off the cuff and somebody was your spouse and all of a sudden, okay, fine, they had a bad day.

You know how to let go. You know how to let go, learn to let go, learn to handle, relax, release. You don’t want it in there. You just let it go, so learn to handle it and then the ego starts shedding itself. It’s just stuff you stored doesn’t want to be in there. That’s why it keeps coming back up, trying to push up and then I will stop Now. Eventually you’ll catch on that the more you let go, the less it’s in there and the less it’s in there, the more this energy starts coming up and Shakti, you start feeling this waves of spirit, of joy welling up inside of you from where down underneath where that stuff was, you had shoved all that stuff on top of your divine energy on top of the top of the Shakti, and it just comes up by itself and then it comes up stronger and stronger and eventually you feel this flow all the time, every moment of your life.

There’s this upward flow passing through different centers of your being. You start saying, well, that is really nice. I used to have people like me to feel that I used to need somebody to hug me, that I would love you so much. I’ve never loved anybody in my life. You sure? Yeah. I’m sure I’ll never leave. You sure? Yeah. I’m really sure. Okay. I feel good now. Right? How about if that’s going on all the time with nobody doing anything? Not bad, right? And then you start realizing all it took was for me to not push stuff down on top of it. I ain’t pushing stuff on top of it anymore, but that’s something really big happens. It used to break you. Okay, we’ll use this one to go to God. Okay, okay. I can handle this. I can handle this. It hurts. I can handle the pain.

Not I can make it not hurt. No, no, no. I can handle that. It hurts. How? By letting it pass through, by releasing it, by honoring, honoring, and respecting that this is part of life, part of the experience. And then the shahi gets stronger, then it gets stronger, then it gets even stronger, and then you start to realize it’s pushing you out of yourself. Ego used to pull you down into you. This is lifting you up. It’s called the ascent. It’s lifting you up, pushing you out of yourself. And eventually it gets so strong that it challenges your existence as a separate being, as a ray of consciousness that’s staring at you and you let go. And that’s where the merger takes place. That’s where the great ones went. I let go and I became the whole universe, right? Well, you are the whole universe.

So that’s your choice. Live for ego or live to get rid of ego. Live to let go of ego. And when you do, by the way, when you’re whole like that, you’re the most beautiful thing to ever walk to face of the earth. Why? It’s not that you’re not taking, you don’t need to take from anybody, even your spouse, even your children, even your boss. All you’re doing is interacting with reality. It’s feeding you and you’re serving the moment in front of you. You don’t have to be a servant. You are a servant. There’s nothing left to do, but to express the love that you feel, to express the beauty, the compassion, everything you are that you are that great, and you’re making yourself a little beggar by buying into the ego. So little by little. You won’t get rid of all the ones. Don’t even try. Just take the simple things in life and dare to honor them and respect their right to exist and let them go, and you’ll learn to do the next and the next. And where do you see what happens to you?

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.