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: Ative, Jai masters. Acceptance and surrender are the essence of spirituality. Truly the essence of spirituality is in you’re done surrendering, are done having anything you need to surrender and you’re done letting go and you’re done accepting this. There’s nothing inside of you that’s rejecting. That’s true. Finished In the meantime, the path is one of surrendered acceptance, but people regularly misunderstand what’s surrender and acceptance are. Some people write us and they say, surrender and accepting doesn’t mean I should be sitting in my house waiting for a job to show up. Sitting alone, waiting for someone to love for something to do that is neither surrender nor acceptance. That’s a total misunderstanding of life of yourself and of the process of surrender acceptance. Let’s get it straight. Things happen outside. Have you noticed? I don’t like that you’re taught, you cause them. There is karma but not the way.
I don’t feel the way that they teach it to you. There’s a law of cause and effect. Absolutely throw a ball up in air. It comes down is that it’s karma, it’s a law. It’s every action has an equal and opposite reaction In the physical plane, Newton taught us that. Einstein taught us that. Everybody taught us that they just got down to finer and finer by new causes, their effects and then what those affected, that’s all science has done, has gotten closer and closer down to the beginnings of things. It’s all cause and effect. So to take karma on as a concept of a punishment, that’s like saying the ball weighed a certain amount, the other ball weighed less what was thrown with more force or less force. So it’s the karma of the heavier ball that was slower, less force to fall down sooner.
It’s ridiculous in my opinion. What does it mean? It means that things happen in this world. Why? Because of the causes that caused ’em to happen. Nobody by themselves is causing things to happen. Anything you did, there were thousands and thousands of millions of causes prior to that of which your action was part of that, such that it caused the effect, the overall effect. For you to sit there and say that you’re the doer’s totally unscientific and totally unspiritual, you have will. You can take actions now to try to study why you do what you do. That’s very deep. But to sit there and say that because you said something or you did something or you didn’t say something, you didn’t do something that you are the cause of the universe. That is just absurd because every other person is doing things too and it’s been going on for billions and billions of years and all those causes and effects consolidate together and they create the moments that unfold.
Of course you’re part of it, but you’re not very much part of it. You’re really not. What they teach you is absurd. You are not the doer. If you say something to somebody and they get insulted, you could have said it to somebody else and I thought it was neat. So which is it? Is it your karma for saying it or not saying it? Okay, I’m not going to teach you not to take responsibility for your actions, but don’t go over more. Don’t go ridiculous and carry guilt and shame because something you did. How about this? Anything you do, there are reasons you did it. I don’t believe in good and bad reasons. There’s just reasons Your mommy said this to, your daddy did this. Your first girlfriend dumped you, your second girlfriend loved you so much, you had to leave her. She was pestering.
You had all these experiences and those experiences molded how you see things and therefore you behave and acted the way that you acted. It’s not any one thing, not one thing you did not one thing she did not one thing the whole did. It’s the whole that’s what the universe is a whole. So you come down to understand this concept of action and reaction. It’s a natural thing and it is not a bad thing. If you play the piano and you’re doing a recital and you haven’t practiced enough and you make a mistake, that is a teaching. It is not a punishment. It’s teaching you that you could have practiced more. It’s teaching you how to do better next time. That’s what they go wrong with karma. It’s a punishment pay for the rest of your life. No, you learned a lesson and if you learn it, then you learned your lesson.
You have to go back to third grade. If you passed it, if you failed it, fine, then it’s a lesson to do it again. It’s for your benefit. It’s not a punishment. So you’re learning, you learn. You have the right to learn. So this concept of spirituality is you do your best. You just do your best. Is your best good enough? Good enough for what? Good enough to be enlightened in one minute, probably not good enough to never bother anybody. Probably not good enough to solve world hunger. Probably not. So what doesn’t mean good enough? You do your best. If you do your best at whatever you’re doing all the time, what comes back is your teacher. The results of the best that you can do are holy. You do your best when you’re interacting with everything you do, period. Then what comes back is your teacher.
If it comes back really positive, you learn. It reinforces you. If it comes back negative, you learn from it. I really didn’t have to do it that way. Would’ve been better this way and you keep going. This thing about guilt and shame and karma for the rest of your life and all this stuff, it just engenders guilt and fear of actions and so on. You’re a very great being and you’re not finished yet. And so you go through the experiences that are presented to you in life, doing the best that you can based upon the best that you can and then when something comes back you respect, you honor it. Now if something comes back and you see that you could have done better and you purposely don’t do better, now you can some serious lessons to learn and they will come back. You want to call that your karma.
Fine, I just call it cause and effect. The combination of the outer action and the inner intention. All of that comes out. So as this got to do with surrender and acceptance, the world is the universe of all those cause and effects from the beginning of time. That’s the truth. It did not rain today because you were bad yesterday and this is your birthday. I don’t want you to think like that. I want you to think it rained today because of meteorology. I told you, if you want to find out why it rained on your birthday this year, when you planned your party, go to the university, take all the meteorology classes and show me which book knows your birthday, which book has your name and which book says it has something to do with your birthday because you’re not going to find one. So this is the starting point, believe it or not, of acceptance and surrender.
What do you mean you accept the fact that it rained on your birthday? No. Yes. Why? Because it did. It’s that simple. You don’t have to rationalize it, you don’t have to thank God or not. Thank God you can, but you don’t have to think God doesn’t love you because it rained on your birthday. No, this is not healthy. It’s not a good relationship with God. You start with reality. Reality is what unfolds in front of you and it unfolds in front of you because of all the forces that caused it to do physics, chemistry, psychology, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It’s just reality. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s a very holy thing. Reality. It has a tremendous history. You think you have a history. Your history lasts what? 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years. Reality is history as far as we know after the big bang, 12.8 billion years, all of which cause what is all of matter and every Do you understand that your great, great, great, great great grandmother affected the genes that you inherited and so did your mother and father and this and that.
All kinds of things have happened and they’re just, are they fine? They’re just what is? That’s very zen. Things are neither right nor wrong. They are. Why is that flower red? Because it is. Now, if you want to find out why it’s red, of course by all means study it, but don’t study it from a spiritual point of view. Study from an intellectual, scientific understanding of how the genes work and how this happens and it happens and all that kind of stuff. You’re welcome to do that. It’s a wonderful thing to do because then you understand you didn’t do it. So now you start with the fact that reality is reality. It is neither good nor bad, nor right nor wrong, nor better nor worse if an event happened, it happened because of the causes. This is how I teach it. You know why things happen because of the things that made it happen.
It happened because all the forces that came together in that moment made it happen. Well, why did they happen? Because of all the things that happened before them. It’s so easy, it’s ridiculous, but you want to get caught in your mind and start feeling guilty because the flowers red or because you got sick or because this happened or because somebody died or because somebody got hurt by what you said. Now, if you purposely with intention hurt somebody that was a cause and it’s going to come back by definition, they won’t like you to tell other people who did something mean. You don’t have to pedal. It all does its thing. So cause of effect is not just outside causes and effects. It’s the combination of inside intent will this that every single thing coming together to cause what happened. The point about surrender and acceptance is if you want to think about all that, you want to study psychology, you want to study, that’s wonderful.
Right? When it’s all said and done, nothing you’re going to study is going to change what happened. It happened and you can’t undo it and no matter what you do with all your rationalization, if an event happened, it happened, it’s done. It’s over. There’s no time machines to go back. It could affect the future, but you cannot affect the past. No one can affect the past. The richest person in the whole world cannot affect the past. No one can affect the past. Why? Because it already happened. That’s what reality is. Okay? In the new book, living Untethered, I define reality, it did not take a treatise is what it took. Reality is that what already?
There it is. There’s reality. Can you accept that? Not is it good? Is it bad? Is it just, is it right? Is it wrong? Is it better? Is it worse? It just is as very zen, but it’s a zen that you can understand. It is how do you know? What did Christ say? Let those who have eyes, let them see. Let those of ears let them hear there. How do you know? Because it’s there. Because it happened. How do you know it happened? It happened. There’s no fake news, whatever it’s called, right? Conspiracy theory. It’s right there. It happened. She’s wearing green and white. It doesn’t need your mind. You just see reality. So that’s not the question. The question is not, yes. When they’re doing all these conspiracy theories and this and that and telling story, that’s mine. That’s just mine. They’re trying to convince your mind about something you don’t know.
They’re going to tell you that. So because they said so. If you’re standing there looking at a blue wall and somebody comes to tell you the wall’s not blue, it’s red and everybody comes to tell you it’s red. Get your eyes checked, make sure you’re not colorblind and then don’t listen because reality is reality. That’s the point. That’s very deep spirituality to understand that things are real, that they exist. Okay? Now, what will you do about what happened? There’s the question, what will you do about the fact that in front of you something happened? You have two choices and only two choices except accept or resist.
See, it came into you. It happened, so it came into you. Now you’re in here. Now it’s in here with you. You can accept it. Come on. Let get this right. I’m going to do it this way. Accept it doesn’t mean you like it. Accept it doesn’t mean it’s good, it’s bad. It’s better. It’s worse. I vote for it. I don’t vote for it. I want it to happen again. I don’t want to happen. No, that’s nothing to do with it. Acceptance starts with can you accept that that happened or is it going to freak out? Can this come into you and you experience the fact that that happened and I’ll argue with it, fight with it. Just right now your starting position is did it happen? Yes. Can you accept that it happened? No. Well then you’re in trouble and so is everybody around you.
If you can’t accept reality, it causes a lot of trouble. If you sit there and say, no, I don’t want it to be blue, so I’m going to tell people it’s not blue. Look at all the trouble it causes, causes confusion and all kinds of stuff, so the question is not did it happened. It happened. You know it. There it is now. Nobody told you you saw it. It happened. You experienced it. It was an experience that you had. Can you accept that that happened and I see that the human mind and human personality can’t differentiate liking it or not liking it from accepting it. Accepting happens prior to like and dislike acceptance from a spiritual point of view as follows. Did it happen? Yes. Can you accept it or not? Right now at that moment, can you accept that it happened or do you have to become psychologically screwed up because that happened?
No, I can accept that it happened. Doesn’t mean you don’t do anything about it there. They misunderstand. Just because you accept that it happened doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to do something about it. Nobody ever said that, but if you can’t accept that it happened, you know what you’re going to do about it. Try to make it not happen. Try to make it go away. Try to practice denial, suppression, repression, rationalization. No, she didn’t really say that she really loves me very much. She just said that she hated me and couldn’t stand my guts because she loves me that much that she can’t even bear to talk nicely to me. Okay, thank you. No, no, no, no. Reality comes in and you accept it. That’s the I’m saying is that’s what acceptance is. Don’t do something else with it. What a surrender. If something comes up in you that can’t do that and it does, that feels resistance, that doesn’t like it, you surrender that.
You let go of that. Why? Because you didn’t accept reality and you have to surrender the part of you that can’t accept reality or what happens? You’re a mess. If you can’t even accept what your mother did when you were five years old, you’re a mess when you’re 55, go ask Freud. It pivots right there on can you accept reality and if you can’t, there’s a part of you that can’t. Can you willfully surrender that part so that you can accept reality there? I’ve showed you what I mean by acceptance and surrender. It does not mean that you don’t go and get a job. It doesn’t mean you don’t do your best to do this or do that. That’s not what surrender means. It doesn’t mean just whatever God wants that will happen and I don’t have to do anything. No, it means you’re here.
Life unfolded. What is it going to do When it comes into you, life comes into you. Not very much of it comes into you. I told you, you miss almost everything. You missed almost everything you missed. 99.999999999% of everything that goes on. Can you handle the point? Oh, whoa, 1%. No, and we’ll talk about why if at first I want to get down to definition for clarity what is meant by acceptance and surrender. It is an inner state. It is not an outer action. So if somebody comes up to you and says, do this, do that over there, I’m making you do this. You’re my servant, do that. I guess I better surrender to them. No, it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with can you accept that they said this to you? I’m not telling you you have to do it.
We’re going to talk about how you make these decisions, but if you can’t even accept that somebody said something and you go bananas inside, you’re not going to interact very well with things. You’re not going to make good decisions and I’ve taught this to you time and time again. There are two ways that you can act in this world. One is I can’t handle what happened, therefore I’m going to interact with this world to try to make it so I can handle it. It’s all about me. Every word I say, everything I do, every motion from then on is I’m doing this for me. I’m not Okay, apologize. Apologize for what you said. Are you doing that because you think it will help her? No. You’re doing because I can’t handle what you said. You see the difference. If however, I can handle that you said it, I can accept that you said that.
It’s not freaking me out. I’m okay inside right now. I can look and see, is there something I can do to raise this situation including help you not just help me. Can I raise the situation by acting? That’s what ally means. By the way. That’s a word that we don’t have translation for in English way to ally interact. You are not interacting because of you. You’re interacting to serve the situation, including someone that said something and insulted you. That by the way is what Christ meant by turning the other cheek. He did not mean you can’t defend yourself. You have an obligation to defend your body, okay? But if somebody insults you and you can’t handle it first, let it go first. Turn the other cheek, not physically inside. See a difference, okay? I’m not saying the outside, they can teach you what they want, but I’m telling you that inside if somebody says something that bothers you inside, if you react to that, it just escalates and helping the world because your entire interaction is to try and make you feel better and the other person’s doing the same thing.
So here we are, head on if you can handle that, they did this inner slapping and just turn your head away, turn the head go of the party that reacted and now be able to look into the world and see how can I help this situation? How can I raise the energy of the situation? How can I help? Not how can I protect myself and defend myself and do this because I don’t want this happening to me, but that requires acceptance and surrender, acceptance that it happened and then surrender by letting go of the part of you that had trouble handling it there. I’ve defined it for you. It’s an inner state, it’s an interaction, but what does it mean about what I do outside that can’t be defined? It depends on the situation, depends on everything. The question becomes what is your intent? What is your motive as a good word?
What’s the motive that you’re coming back and interacting with the world after it came into you? And if your motive is protecting yourself, defending yourself, I’m telling you, that’s why I give the whole talk about don’t say you have karma and you can if you want to, but what’s going to happen if you are upset, had a bad day or somebody told you something about me and then you came back and dumped it on me and I can’t handle that and I start to protect it and defending myself. You better say you’re sorry. I’ll never talk to you again and then I never talk to you again. What I get back is what I put out that’s coming back, not a punishment, a teaching. Eventually you’ll catch on. That was not the right place to come back from. But did I have to just let somebody walk all over me?
Of course not. But did you have to honor and respect that fact that they did that they said something and it bothered you and can you let that go inside? Then see how you can raise the energy outside. So there is a foundation of right action. You don’t ever react based upon your inability to handle what came in. You act based on the best clarity that you can come up with. So what is my action at different times? If somebody is abusing you physically, and I always teach this, if somebody is abusing you physically, literally abusing you physically, you leave the relationship, can I give ’em a second chance? Sure. Give ’em a second chance. Good luck. You have an obligation to take care of your body. It’s a gift that was given to you. It’s 25 or 50 trillion cells, living cells interacting and talking to each other all the time and you have responsibility to take reasonable care of it.
And if somebody is because of their problem, because nobody abuses somebody else other, they have a problem because of their problem, it’s physically harming you, damaging you leave the relationship. But if you work with people and you do social work like that, you’re going to find out don’t. Why? Because they have emotional problems themselves and they’re afraid of finance. They’re afraid of this. They’re afraid someone won’t like ’em or their neighbor’s going to think, do you understand that what’re going to do with the children? In other words, they have problems that they can’t handle within themselves and therefore they externally tolerate being mistreated. Well, the spiritual teachers do not teach that acceptance of surrender do not mean that. In essence we’re acceptance of surrender in that situation, accept that it happened, surrender the part of you that doesn’t want to deal with it, and once somebody believe it didn’t happen and then deal with it properly there, there’s acceptance, surrender.
Notice it didn’t mean you accepted somebody beat you. You see your difference. It’s an inner state and so basically there it is physiologically. Now, psychologically, if somebody bothers you psychologically, that’s a little more subtle. There are many levels of why you get bothered. Why you people say, I’m being mistreated by my husband. I’m being mistreated by my wife. My children mistreat me, my parents mistreat me. My boss definitely mistreats me. Okay? Right? What does that mean? They’re beating you. No, it doesn’t mean they’re beating me. If it means at the lowest level that you have a way you want things to be and they’re not being that way, let go of you, you have to be able to accept and honor reasonable behavior that is different from what you want it to be because you have a way you want it to be. I told you before, that’s the sum of your learned experiences.
What you want, well, they’re the sum of their learned experiences. If you’re going to sit around and not be able to live in this world and think of the way you want, you’re in trouble and so is everybody around you. So you start right there. There’s another level, right? It came in. I see myself getting insulted. I see myself getting jealous. I see myself having a problem with this. I’m embarrassed because they got the corner office and I didn’t, and it’s an affair. All garbage going on inside of you. Ego, how we call it ego. And you can’t handle what happened outside because of you. It’s not because what happened outside, you can’t handle it. It’s a psychological problem that you have. You should be able to handle that. Somebody else got the corner office instead of you. You should be able to handle somebody else got the raise instead of you should be able to handle that.
They did a downsizing, you got fired. It’s not personal. These things are not personal. Now we’ll go to the next level in which they are, but I’m talking now, just a simple situation that life unfolds and it isn’t what you want. Well, it’s going to be like that a lot of times because life has nothing to do with you. It just has to do what unfolds. Did you cause the downsizing? Did you cause the fact that now the competition in the industry means that what your company’s making isn’t necessarily needed anymore? No, no, no, no, no. It didn’t cause anything. Did you design the computer that was able to figure out AI that was able to get you fired? We don’t need you anymore. No, stop it. It’s not personal. It’s life. So now it comes in and that type of what you call abuse, that the world is not behaving the way you want it to.
You use that for your spiritual growth. That’s different than somebody hitting you or being harmed externally. You look at that and you say, I should be able to handle reality. There’s a line in the new book, the moment in front of you is not bothering you. You’re bothering yourself about the moment in front of you. The driver in front of you is not bothering you. He doesn’t even know you’re there. You’re bothering yourself about the driver in front of you. The fact that it’s hot out. It is not trying to bother you, it’s not bothering you. You’re bothering yourself that it’s hot out. It’s 180 degrees, I understand. But if it’s 97 degrees out, dig it, enjoy it. And so you just start to catch on that. If I’m calling the fact that I’m troubled and bothered and abused because things aren’t the way I want, you got some growth to do because things are not going to be the way you want.
And people ask me, why can’t it be the way I want? Ready? I’m going to shock you because it’s not supposed to be. Nobody asked you when you woke up in the morning. Surely not God nor reality. How do you want it to be? What did it do? It continued to be what it is. Things are what they are. They’re it is not personal. Things are not personal. They’re just the result of cause and effect and how things manifest. So if you’re having difficulty accepting at that level, surrender the part of you that is resisting, it’s not going to hurt you. It will hurt you because you’re not used to it. It’s like breaking a habit, okay? Stopping drinking is not going to hurt you. It’s going to help you, but you got to go through withdrawal saying there were drugs. So you look at it and you say, should I be able to handle this?
And the answer is almost always, yes, you should be able to handle reality. Now, again, what you do about, it’s a separate question, but the fact that you think you have the right to not handle the fact that the company had a downsizing, you got fired and now you’re going to never work worse in your life when you hate everybody. You’re just intolerant of everything. You understand that or you got sick, buddy gets sick sometimes. Take care of it and be respectful. I want you to take every single second you’ve lived. How many were you not sick compared to how many you’re sick? Some people, it’s not a good answer, but very few. The vast majority of humanity has a system that takes care of itself. It’s phenomenal. When was the last time you appreciated that? No, but you don’t. You just get mad because you got sick.
You change your attitude about things. You start respecting and honoring that things have the right to be and I can accept them. It doesn’t mean you don’t go to a doctor. It doesn’t mean you don’t talk to the boss about your job. How you interact with it is a very individualistic type thing, depending upon the energy of the situation. So first you accept, you must accept from inside. Now, if something bigger is going on such that people are lying and cheating and stealing, that’s not beating you up, but that kind of junk’s going on and that’s coming in, what do you do you first accept? What do you mean I can’t accept that you did that. I can’t handle it. I can’t accept it. Well then you’re in big trouble. You’re going to make really bad decisions about how to deal with it. You have to be able to say, okay, this happened.
What do I do? Not, I can’t handle that it happen. What do I do about that? About the fact I can’t handle it? Scream, yell, pull my hair out. I don’t know what you’re going to do, but if you can’t handle that happen, you’re not going to do anything fruitful. So it still starts with I can accept. I can notice I don’t like that word because you misinterpreted. Accept means, okay, he did it. He stole my car. I better accept it. No, no, but you better be able to handle that. The car’s not there. If you get weird, start running around and screaming and crying and yelling, man, nobody one wants to deal with you, okay? If you can calmly understand, hey man, how many cars get stolen every day? A whole lot. Okay, well guess what? It was my turn. I didn’t think what happened to me, but it did.
It happened to me. Alright, and then you’re calm and you’re centered and you’re clear and you let go of the personal aspect of the thing and you deal with it. How do you deal with it? Then? Normally you call the police. Maybe look around first and see if you can see it all right? Or maybe you got something that can bring the horn when it’s at a distance. I don’t know. Based upon, as I say, there’s a situation based upon the situation. What if you’re in a place that’s very, very scary, scary place and your car is going well, get out of there first. And so you just make a decision based upon clarity, not upon reaction, not upon the inability to handle what happened. You handle what happened, accepting the reality it happened and surrendering the part of you that had trouble handling that it happened.
How’s that for the definition of acceptance of surrender? It’s an inner state that you’re doing within yourself now. You’re not going to get it perfect. Just means you decided to accept and surrender. Doesn’t mean you’re not bothered that somebody stole your car, but it means you’re able to handle it. And so now you come back and you center and then decide how you want to deal with it. Just need the right nor wrong, just do your best. Subtle. There’s no absolute answer about what you do about things except you start by accepting, surrendering. But what if I can’t accept or surrender? That’s why you took birth here on earth. Earth is a place of souls are sent to evolve. It is not here for you to get what you want. If you got what you wanted every single day of your life all the time, why bother coming here?
If you go to school and every question they ask you is one you already know the answer to, why are you bothering going? No earth is a place with souls, a sin to evolve. What does that mean? It means it’s not so easy to accept everything. Is it? Even though I’m defining accepting that initial state, there’s reactiveness there, there’s trouble down there and it comes up because things happen. You’re here to learn how to not have that happen. You may not have trouble. No, you learn to handle the trouble. It’s okay if something happens and you feel angry. The question is, can you let that go? Can you see that anger is a fairly normal reaction to certain situations, but you don’t be angry. You just experience the beginning of a tendency toward anger or toward jealousy or toward fear. There’s a perfect one. The lion jumps at, do you feel fear?
But if you see something that looks like a snake over there at 20 feet and you can’t handle it, you better work on that a little bit. But the fact that you felt fear is not a problem, the question is were you able to let it go? Were you able to look at it objectively and release it? That’s all fine. It doesn’t even affect you. You get to a point it doesn’t affect you. It’s like a mosquito bite you. But if you’re really weird about bugs, oh mosquito. But if you’re a normal person, you say, yeah, you got a mosquito bite, what are you going to do about it? Nothing. What do you do about it? Alright, well it’s the same thing When you feel little anger, you feel a little fear, a little jealousy. Yes, you said that to me. I started to feel a little jealous.
What’d you do? I let it go. I let it go and see what happens next. I gave it some space inside myself and outside, right? You see what I’m saying? So it’s nothing wrong with feeling things. The question is are you reacting based on the feeling? Is it taking you over? Is it running your life? That’s what you’re here for. You’re having experiences on this planet and they are challenging you and they challenge you to be able to handle relationships, handle finances, handle this, handle that, handle people think about you, handle what you think they think about you. You can’t even do that. If you think that someone might think something not nice about you, you have trouble sleeping. Well, that’s ridiculous. And so you start realizing I got some growth to do. I have some work to do in here, and that’s what your spiritual growth is.
So you have situations outside that challenge you to let go of the garbage that you’ve collected inside of you. Now, if you honestly believe that what life and praying to God is supposed to be about is that nothing challenges you, nothing bothers you. You just walk in the light all the time and everything’s the way you want it to be and you practice the law of attraction. Oh, I want a house. Oh, I want a girlfriend. If you think that that’s what your life’s about, being able to get what you want, you are sorely wrong. You haven’t grown up one single iota. Life is about letting go of the part of you that des things. You mean renunciation? You don’t need anything. You are so filled with joy and love and bliss pouring through your being all the time. Now come out and share it.
Not I’m not okay. How do I get what I want to be? Okay, so life will teach you that. It will keep hitting you, it will keep taking things from you, keep giving things to you and then taking, have you noticed? Right? Lord, give taketh away. Mayor Obama said it was like sandpaper. Life is sandpaper. It’s sanding off your ego. This works. That doesn’t work. It’s they’re all saying the same thing. You are not supposed to get what you want. You are not supposed to get what you want and you’re not supposed to avoid what you don’t want. It doesn’t mean you have to go renounce something you want or purposely throw you into something you don’t want. Don’t worry. Life will do it for you. And by the way, you’ll catch on someday. We’ll do it exactly what it needs to and exact way it needs to at the exact intensity, the exact time, and you’ll get the book first before they teach you about it.
You say, oh my God, I just read a book about this. It is teaching you. Life is your teacher, isn’t it? There’s no teacher that you ever had or will ever have that will teach you more than life does. You go through what’s called life experiences. Now the question is do you go through them and get scarred by them or do you go through them and say, yeah, God, we were in love. I know what happened, but we ended up getting divorced and it was not so nice a divorce and it made me look and see. Maybe I had something to do with that. I kept blaming him or her, but I’d learned a lot from that. The next time I get in a relationship, which I don’t have to rush into because I see why I needed that and I grabbed, but next time I am way more capable of being, giving, being open, understanding how to interact with another person who’s different than me.
Wonderful. That’s what life taught you. You couldn’t buy the learning that the divorce gave you that that whole situation gave you. You climb the al, find some master, you will get it as real as that. You went through it and you learn from it. Now, if you go through it and you don’t learn from it, that’s your fault. You didn’t accept and surrender and eventually you get to the point of realizing life is your teacher. It’s a wonderful thing. Every single thing in life is your teacher. Everything. If it presents itself to you, it’s meant for you, but terrible things happen. Can you accept and grow through them? But the biggest one is death. I don’t want to die. I’m so sorry what? That you’re going to die. And if you don’t want to die, you’re going to carry throughout your life fear of death and it will ruin your life.
Someone who’s afraid of death is afraid to live, have to watch everything they do and have to be afraid when it’s going to end, et cetera, et cetera. No. So life will teach you all these things. She’s a great teacher, but you have to be willing to accept that this lesson came to you. There it is. How do I know? Because it’s in front of you. Does it mean none of your business? You know what it means? Can you handle it? That’s what it means, right? You’re fairly well to do family, you live in a nice neighborhood, et cetera, et cetera. You got friends and all of a sudden you get a call from the principal at this classy, classy private school that your kid goes to saying they found drugs in his locker and it wasn’t marijuana. It was much heavier. Whatcha going to do?
Well, why is this happening to me? It doesn’t matter why. What matters is how are you going to deal with it? Are you going to sit there and get weird and say, I didn’t deserve this. Not what I do. I didn’t do anything. What the neighbor’s going to think? Oh my god, I can’t go in there and meet the principal. They’ll see me going in there and people will know what that’s about. That’s all about you. That has nothing to do with your kid. It has nothing to do with the situation that’s unfolding. But you’re not capable of doing that because you’re too caught in yourself. So life will teach you. So if you say, why is it happening to me? Well, because you need to learn to handle it. That’s why it’s happening to you, okay? It’s just natural things happen. Kids do things and this is what this one did, and you can’t put a finger on it and you can’t.
Oh, your husband’s fault. It’s your fault. If you had sent him to a different school, stop it first. Accept it because everything you try to rationalize to explain is to try to protect yourself and have it not be the way it is. Oh, if we hadn’t sent him here, then that wouldn’t have happened. It’s that girlfriend of his. We shouldn’t have let him date her, right? You’re just trying to rationalize around why it happened. No, you start with can you handle that? It isn’t that the starting place otherwise. You’re sitting here trying to get around the way fact that it happened. You have to start with the acceptance, okay, this is what happened. It doesn’t matter if I understand it or not, it’s what happened. So now what am I supposed to do? You’re supposed to find out now that you can accept that it happened.
It shocked you. Of course it did. Nobody said it shock you. This is nice, but you handled it. You accept that it happened and you surrender the part of you that had resistance and wanted to just deny it and do all that psychological junk about it. You let that go. You gave it to God. Do whatever you want right now what? Now you have to deal with it. How do I deal with it? You’re going to see the best way as you walk through the situation. You the best you can, but at least you’re not denying and avoiding and rationalizing, justifying and getting weird about it. You’re dealing with it. It’s just very, very beautifully. If you deal with different legal situations in life, sometimes we have legal situations we have to deal with, and you have a really, really good lawyer. How many people come to that lawyer with problems that seem completely unsolvable, major problems and they tell him, oh my God, he did drugs and he is getting thrown out of school and how much school?
So everybody and the lawyer just sits there and very calmly looks to see through all of your words and all of your garbage. What is the law and what can we do here? And does not get involved in your junk? The lawyer doesn’t get involved in your junk, okay? They just listen. But they’re not listening to hear your complaints. They’re listening to see where’s the solid ground of how I could help you in this situation. See a difference. Be the lawyer. Get yourself a lawyer in there, in there. Get a perspective within yourself where you’re able to handle and listen to these terrible things that happen to people or that people do, and then find themselves in these situations. But your job is to stay calm, clear, centered and intellectually and analytically. See how you can help the situation. Does that make sense to you?
How do you develop something like that inside yourself by learning to accept and surrender? That’s where I ended up with acceptance. A surrender. Give me a break. It’s everything. So I told you, you’ll learn how to accept and surrender. How if you can’t accept the driver in front of you and surrender your anxiety and rush and anger because they’re driving 10 miles hour below speed limit, you’ll never handle that. Your kid that they found drugs in your kid’s locker because you didn’t learn how to do it. So you start practicing teaching this all the time. How do I learn how to be the lawyer and inside? How do I learn to be clear? How do I learn to be centered? Stay centered by staying centered. How do you learn to play the piano? Play the scales. Then twin, the twinkle, then something else. How to learn to play tennis.
Pick up a racket, get a coach. Practice. Alright, practice handling reality. Start with a low hanging fruit every single day. Practice accepting and honoring and surrendering to reality. Notice that doesn’t mean you don’t deal with it. If it’s 102 degrees out and you have to go from the car to the air conditioned house, by all means go to the air conditioned house though. No, I’m going to accept this. You go there. But on the way there, don’t freak out. Find ways to raise yourself. I’ve taught you tons of times. Little example, back in the early seventies when I dropped out and moved out here in the middle of the woods to be alone, I had a VW van, the whole hippie van, no air conditioning. I lived in a house that had no air conditioning and it’s Florida is in the middle of Florida. In the middle of the summer it gets hot.
And he used to complain and I remember clearly I could be right there having it happen right now, right back in 72, that kind of thing. And I finally sat him down and I said, okay, because I’m working with him, working that voice in my head complaining. I said, why is it hot? He likes astronomy. Why is it hot? He said, because the sun, the sun’s hot, right? He said, what is the sun? He said, A star. You like stars. I love stars. There’s lots of stars out there. I like stars. Okay? You look out there at night and they twinkle. It’s one of those, you start standing there, say, wow, I’m feeling a star. I told you, you don’t get sunburned, you get star burned. It changes everything when you do that. You can do that with everything little by little. Raise yourself instead of complaining, instead of denying the reality.
Learn to accept reality. If you can do that with a driver in front of you with a temperature, weather, so and so forth, then basically eventually you’ll find out I can handle the fact someone was in a bad mood and when they interacted with me, they had an edge to it. Can you handle it? Fine. I can handle the edge. It doesn’t have to be round. And you start realizing you can handle things while you practice. Just I, you practice the piano, just they could practice tennis. You practice acceptance and surrender. It doesn’t mean you don’t interact with the outside. I told you, if you’re driving behind someone driving 15 miles, the slow of the speed limit and there’s a dash line and you look ahead and there’s nobody coming in the other direction, pass them. Nobody said, you’re here to suffer. You just have to first accept, I’m not going to do it if it’s double line and I’m not going to do it if it’s a giant truck and I can’t see around it.
Why? Because it’s more important that you live than you give into the party that’s a little bit frustrated. You make rational decisions. So basically this is what life is about. Earth is a place where souls essentially evolve. As you do this, as you practice these and don’t think it doesn’t matter, it matters. If somebody’s trying to talk to you and you see yourself resisting, you don’t like what they’re saying, worse yet, you think you know where they’re going with what they’re saying and you don’t want them going there. Someday you’ll wake up and you don’t want to do that ever. You are not psychic. You don’t want to be psychic. You want to listen to somebody, feel the energy, try to see what you can do to help, not try to stay ahead of it, to protect yourself. Anybody listening, because we all do that.
Don’t ever believe any part of you that is telling you why somebody else their motive for doing something. Don’t do it. It’s not worth it. It’s crazy. First of all, you’re wrong. All is why you would be doing it. That’s all you can know. You know why you would be saying this? Because that’s the sum of your learned experiences. Your mother talked to you that way. Your father talked to you that way. Your first boyfriend did that before he left you. That’s how you think. That’s not how somebody else thinks. And don’t you dare think you know how somebody else thinks in people’s body language. Everybody has different body language. If I’m sitting here like this, you’re telling me, oh, he is covered his third chakra, he’s not happy with me, right? I have a stomach ache. Leave me alone. The question is not, can you read somebody’s body language?
Why do you want to? So that I know what they’re thinking and I can protect myself from them so that I can get what I want and so I can avoid what I don’t want. Otherwise, it’s none of your business. We just accept the person. It’s all because we can’t handle life and we can’t accept life that we’re trying to manipulate it and predict it and so on. Now, if somebody asks, well, what about you have a job in business where you’re supposed to be planning for the future, then that’s your job. That’s not future. That’s now in fact, I wanted to give election wise. Maybe I will. So I’m not going to do it. Now, what is the difference between planning and worrying?
Meditate on it. Somebody, they’ll talk about it because that’s a vast difference. And so you just start to catch on. You have work to do on yourself and life is helping you. And every interaction you have with life is a chance to get higher, chance to get clearer chance to evolve inwardly. So basically what we talked about is acceptance and surrender. But main point I wanted to make, and I’m glad I did it is it doesn’t mean you’re not doing anything outside. It has nothing to do with that. It has to do what are you doing inside? Then you deal with the outside. Well, what if I worried that I didn’t get it right? Oh, people write me that way. How do I know exactly what to do? What if I get clear and there’s a choice and I make the right choice? If you get clear, do the best you can and don’t be afraid to do the best that you can actually used to say.
Be sure you’re right. Then go ahead. Get clear. Look at it based on the information you have. Now, it may happen later, you have more information. Find out that wasn’t a good decision. Fine, you learned something. What’s wrong with that? Don’t ever be afraid to learn. You’re here to learn. So you look at it, you do the best you can. I used to teach, even when I ran the big company, alright, I used to teach. You don’t make decisions. You gather information. Information makes decisions. That’s what a wise person understands. Otherwise, you’re trying to guess for yourself. How do I want it to be? I have to decide what will make it be that way. Just put your energy into gathering as much information as you can about the subject, and then look to see what it says to you rather than letting your mind say what it says to you because your mind is all warped by your past experiences and all that.
But the net result is you don’t sit there and try to guess and predict and worry and so on. Instead, you work on yourself to say, I can handle reality. If you can handle reality, you win every single time because reality always wins. Alright? So instead of what you want and what you don’t want, I want to learn to honor and respect reality. It has the right to exist. And then I would love to learn how to work together to raise, heal, whatever I could do to make the energy better. So now you understand acceptance and surrender. I hope better than the concept that you’re not supposed to do anything. Thank you. Jai Guru Dev.
Tami Simon: You’ve been listening to The Michael Singer Podcast, produced by Sounds True in partnership with Shanti Publications. For more information on Michael’s body of work and all back episodes, please join us at MichaelSingerPodcast.com. Thanks so much for listening. Sounds True: waking up the world.
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