E46: From Attachment to Liberation: Redefining Life’s Purpose

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. You’re taught in your society by almost everybody, your parents, peers, teachers, everything that you’re to set goals for your life. What do you want to achieve financially, relationship wise, career wise, and they make it and you do too. So the choice you think you have choice. I have to choose where I want my career to be. Do I care about money more than relationship? I care about relationship more than this, that and the other thing. Make your decisions within that bubble. That’s your bubble and there’s a lot of anxiety, a lot of uncertainty and a lot of issues. Spirituality is not within that bubble. It’s a whole paradigm shift in the way you think about life, the way you think about yourself, the way you think about your time between your birth and your death, but it’s not about renouncing the other.

It’s about reintegrating your entire life into a intent. I don’t want to call it a goal, but into an intent is way past any of that stuff. You can have a wonderful relationship and not be happy. It happens all the time. You can be very wealthy and not be satisfied. You can be respected by tons of people all over the world and feel insecure, not feel whole. What’s the midlife crisis? It’s about the most rational thing I’ve ever heard of. You’ve spent half your life trying to achieve what you wanted. Happiness, joy, excitement, inspiration, fulfillment, and you dare to take a breath and say, uhoh, I’m halfway there. I had all the stuff that I thought would get me there and I won’t tell anybody, but it ain’t done squat. I still don’t feel whole. I still worry. I still feel anxious. I don’t feel complete.

I have insecurities. I have fears. Do you understand that? Maybe you’ve noticed there must be something greater and there is and there’s something greater people are afraid of. It’s called spirituality, but it shouldn’t be called anything. It should be called that which is greater there. Now you won’t be scared that which is greater. What does that mean? You have to understand deeper what it is that you’re looking for and what it is that can get it. There’s no question what everybody’s looking for. Looking for happiness, looking for joy, looking for love, looking for security and wellbeing and lack of fear and lack of anxiety. Just wellbeing. Just like what are you looking for for your body? You have a word for it? Health. Do you have it all the time? No, but you work for it. You work on it. You know what health is.

Health is your body not bothering you? How’s that? Alright, that’s a nice level of health. Your body’s not bothering you Well, you have all kinds of ways to work on that song. What does it mean to be fulfilled? What does it mean to be happy? What does it mean to feel love? What does it mean? It means your psyche’s not bothering you. Just like your body’s not bothering you, your psyche’s not bothering you. What’s your psyche? Your mind and your heart. You have a mind and you have a heart and the mind creates thoughts and your heart creates emotions. Have you noticed, okay, how are you doing with all that on a regular minute to minute, day-to-day basis? If your body had that type of health that your psyche doesn’t have, you’d be in the hospital all the time. You’d be going to the doctor.

Oh my God, my heart hurts. Oh my God, my mind’s bothering me. Oh my God, I’m having these thoughts that are disturbing. Oh my God, I want things that are not happening. I’m not okay. I know you’re not okay because you’re trying to be okay. Aren’t you? Got to check it out. Be honest. You’re trying to be okay. You’re trying to have a relation that does what makes you feel okay. You’re trying to have finance and make you feel what make you feel Okay? You’re trying to have a career that makes you feel important. Why? Because I don’t feel important. I’m not okay. I don’t feel love, so I need to somehow find things outside that made me feel good inside. Have I lost anybody yet? Is that not true? What you do in your entire life so far is try to find people, places, things, situations, et cetera, et cetera, that when they come in through your senses, they make you feel better inside.

You want to know why you’re doing that. You don’t feel good inside. You like that. That’s what it says. It says, I don’t feel good inside. Therefore, I’m doing the things that I think will make me feel good inside. Why? Because I don’t feel good inside. So if your body doesn’t feel good and you’re sitting there trying to change this and change that and change that, you’d be very wise to find out way. It doesn’t feel good. Your natural state of your body is health. It has this thing called an immune system. It’s a built in thing. It’s trying to be healthy. It doesn’t mean it’s always healthy. It doesn’t mean things can’t go wrong, but the general natural state of the human body is health. It knows how to do it. It can be a vegetarian, it can be a carnivore. It can live in a hundred degree weather.

It can live in minus 10 degree weather. It’s a pretty amazing object, isn’t it? And it adjusts and it adapts and it attempts to maintain health. Your psyche you don’t realize is the same. Your mind and your heart want to be healthy. They want to feel whole. They want to feel good naturally not having to compensate for the fact that they don’t feel good. That’s like one of the most important parts of understanding spirituality. It is not about getting what you want to make yourself feel good. It’s about finding out why you don’t feel to begin with and dealing with that one is compensating for the fact that something’s wrong. The other is finding out why something’s wrong and somebody says to you, well, it’s wrong. I’m lonely. I need to find somebody. No, no, no. I mean, yes you can. I’m not telling you enough to, but that is not why you’re lonely.

You’re not lonely. You don’t have somebody. You want somebody because you’re lonely. Doesn’t mean if you’re not lonely, you can still share your love. Don’t worry. But the net result is, I told you the example is this. You’re eating food that’s making you sick. Oh my God, your stomach is all the time. You have cases of Pep Bismol and Alka Seltzer throughout your medicine cabinets, and so you just had dinner and you go OMG, I’m out. I’m out of Pepd Bismol. You’re running around the house trying to find this, and so the friend comes in and says, what’s wrong? And when you say to your friend, I can’t find the pepd Bismol, that is not what’s wrong. What’s wrong is you’re eating food that’s giving you a stomach ache. That’s why you need the pepd Bismol. That’s what Buddhists mean when they say work at the root.

The root is not, I don’t have the pepd Bismol is it? The root is I’m not eating properly. That’s what makes me need the Pepto Bismol. So the solution of the fact that you’re lonely and insecure is not compensating for your loneliness and insecurity by finding somebody or something that makes you not feel lonely, conditionally, I mean conditionally. What happens when they leave? We don’t want to talk about it, do we? Okay. It’s a conditional thing. The problem is why don’t you feel whole naturally and just as eating the food that makes you sick is why you have a stomach ache and neither the pepd Bismol, there are things you not everybody else you are doing that are keeping you feeling whole and complete, feeling overwhelmed with love all the time, feeling filled with joy and inspiration. Every moment of your life there are things you have done that have made the psyche sick because its natural state is wellbeing, and that’s what a spiritual person finds out that your natural state is whole and complete doesn’t mean you don’t have relationships.

Doesn’t mean you don’t have to go to work. Doesn’t mean you don’t have money. It doesn’t mean any of that. It means you’re not doing it in order to be okay. You’re doing it to express your okayness a lot nicer. Why are you in a relationship? Because I’m filled with love. How were you before a family relationship filled with love? How will you be if the relationship breaks up filled with love? It’s just my state. I’m healthy. I don’t need anything. It doesn’t mean I can’t share and play and express the beauty that I have, but that’s very, very different than need. There are no psychological needs. You have some very basic physiological needs, food, clothing, and shelter. There are no psychological needs. Your whole and complete within yourself. You’re filled with energy, you’re filled with inspiration. You’re filled with waves of love that could knock you out anytime you want.

That is your natural state of a healthy mind and a healthy heart. You do not use your mind to try to figure out what to do to be okay. Use your mind to solve equations, to fight in the moon, to develop air conditioning, to create music. Use your mind for creative beautiful things. But that’s what we use our mind for. We use our mind to try to figure out what do I need to manipulate? How do I need to get it? How can I get what I want because I’m not okay? And the same thing with your heart. You don’t do it to try to be okay. They can be okay. So that is the paradigm shift I’m discussing is what are you doing with your life to bring about that state? No one ever told you that state existed, so what you’re doing is staying within the bubble.

Why don’t they teach you that your natural state is totally okay and you don’t need anything. They don’t know it. Your teachers didn’t know that, so they taught you, oh, you’re a social creature. You can’t be alone. You’re going to get lonely and freak out. You have the great yogi sat in caves and blissed out. They can only teach what they know. So basically the question becomes what do you need to do and are you doing it not to temporarily be okay? Like I said, it doesn’t mean okay, you work at that level. That’s the level you’re at right now. You’re not renouncing it at denying, I dunno, guilt, but please aim your goal. Your eyes need to aim higher, but there should be a part of your being that’s aiming above your humanness. Why? Because you’re not human. You’re not human. You live with one, but you’re not human.

What do you mean I’m not human? You are consciousness, you are awareness, and you are noticing that the human part of your being has needs, has all these problems and all these issues and so on. The trouble is you’ve devoted yourself to those. You devoted yourself to the lowest part of your being. You have to aim your eyes higher over the course of your life, not one day, not some quick thing. You just make sure that you realize you’re in there and what you’re looking at when you’re in there is not doing so well. Now, do you want to devote yourself to that lower part of your being or do you want to at least take your eyes and at least aim them up to the higher part of your being? What’s the higher part of your being? The highest part of your being is consciousness.

If you were not conscious, you wouldn’t know anything. You wouldn’t know what your thoughts were. You wouldn’t know what your emotions are. Your conscious of your thoughts, your conscious of your emotions, your conscious of your body, your you’re consci of the outside world. If I take away the outside world, you’d say, where did it go? How do you know? Because you’re still there. If I take away your thoughts, like in deep meditation, he’d come back and say, oh my God, there were no thoughts. How do you know if you are your thoughts? How do you know? There were no thoughts? Oh my God, I felt all this energy and spirit rushing up inside of me. It was so beautiful. How do you know? Because you’re conscious. Do you dream at night? Go there, have a dream. Let’s get this down to begin with. Solid line, right?

You go to sleep, you have a dream, you go flying, you flew in the dream, you hear, you went there, you travel around the world. You did all kinds of stuff, right? I had 16 children and three husbands and wives, and then you wake up and turn to the person next to you or call somebody, say, oh my God, I had this unbelievable dream last night. Ready? They want to analyze the dream. I don’t want to analyze the dream. I want to ask you, how do you know? Do I know what? How do you know you had the dream because you were there, weren’t you? Because you’re conscious. You’re conscious when you’re fast asleep, you’re conscious when you’re dreaming. What are you conscious of? Your dream. What are you conscious of when you’re awake the outside world, you’re feeling your body, your thoughts, your emotions.

You go to sleep. Same consciousness, isn’t it? He used the word, I had this dream. I was flying. Well, who’s talking now? I am. He said you were flying. I’m confused. That’s right. It’s the same you. There’s just one consciousness, right? It’s so beautiful and the yoga sus is a Patanjali. He raised a very interesting question. When you go to sleep, you have dreams. Is there such a thing as a dreamless state? Well, of course they all psychology. Every teacher. There’s dreamless state, not the rapid eye movement, whatever it is. Okay, well, I don’t understand what happened in a dreamless state. You come back and you have said this in your life, you hear me? You said, oh my God, I didn’t have any dreams last night. How do you know? How do you know? Because you’re in there. Patanjali says the following. He says, when you go into the deep dreamless state, you’re not conscious.

You’re conscious of nothing. You’re conscious that nothing was there. You wake up and say that to people. I went so deep I didn’t have any dreams. It was so peaceful. I can’t believe you talk like that, and you don’t realize how spiritual that is. Who is saying this? Who had that experience and you realize it’s the same. You who went into the dreamless state and had that experience as the you who went to deep meditation and said, oh my God, I went to a state. There were no thoughts. First time I left, there were no thoughts. As you who wakes up and looks outside and says, oh, you’re still here. There’s just one consciousness and you’re it all the time. Now I’m not going any further until I see where you understand that. If you understand that, you understand more than 99% of the people that walk to face the earth, why aren’t they conscious?

They’re so conscious of what they’re conscious of, that they don’t pay attention, that they’re conscious. They don’t pay attention to what is the source of consciousness. The essence of spirituality is what I just said. Now you know you’re conscious. It’ll be fun to find out. Whoa, where are you in there looking out? Where you look down at your thoughts. You realize that someday you’ll understand. You look down at your thoughts, you look down at your emotions, you look down at your body. You look down at the world, and if you go deep into sleep, you have dropped the body. It’s not there. It’s there, but you’re not paying attention to it. You’re conscious not being distracted by the body, so therefore it resides deeper inside, deep and deep. In meditation. You’ll see where my hands are. That’s where you go. You go behind. You go back.

If you’re sitting here looking at your thoughts, you do look at your thoughts, don’t you? Okay. Where are you watching them from? If I watch a waterfall, I’m standing here, there’s a waterfall. If I watch you get up and go out, I’m standing here watching you go out, so you’re sitting in a place looking at something. Have you ever thought where that place is? Not what you’re looking at, where you’re looking from? That’s meditation, that’s yoga, that’s spirituality. What is the source of consciousness? Not just where is it, where you look from? Then eventually you go deepen up. What’s the source? Where’d conscious come from? That is the essence of the deepest spiritual question I could ever be asked. The fun part about it is it’s not about a belief. Do you believe your conscious? No, I don’t believe I’m conscious. I know I’m conscious.

You’re aware. You’re a conscious being, so eventually you get to a point going back to what I said, what are you doing with your life? Well, now we’ve talked about something a little bit deeper than again some temporary Alka Seltzer or some temporary Pepsi of Isol. You’ve sat there and said, I wonder who I am. Where did I come from? What is consciousness? Because it is the essence of my being. If I turn off consciousness, there’s no more discussion. Is anything else going on? How do you know? You don’t even know to know. You don’t even know to ask. You’re not conscious. If it take any object of consciousness away, you’re aware it went away. She gets up and walks out. I see that she comes back. I see that. I’m aware of that. Turn off my awareness. I don’t want to squat. The essence of your being is have you ever contemplated where that is?

Where do you see from and where did it come from? So this is where the great ones, and you are a great being, aim their life to questions that are very, very deep to pursuits. That turns out that if you were to find out, let’s start little by little. If you find out that you’re in there, of course you’re in there. I’ve never asked anybody, are you in there? And they said, no. How do you know? I asked, how are you answering? You’re obviously in there. Who is in there? What are you doing in there? What’s it like in there? You don’t want an answer, do you? Right? You know what your answer is. Same for everybody. Sometimes it’s really, really nice and sometimes I can’t handle it. It’s not nice in here. It’s so caustic in here, so disturbing in here. So who’s experiencing this and how is that all happening?

Like that? Those become the meaning of your life asking deep pursuits. They’re deeper than the other. Why? If you find out where you are in there, just that part from where do you look down at your thoughts? Have you ever had your thoughts bother you first? How do you know they’re bothering you? I’m the one in here being bothered. Notice English language thoughts are bothering you. Notice the you is not the subject of an object. Who’s that? You okay? My thoughts are bothering me. My is a possessive pronoun. Yes or no, right? You just say you don’t even think about it. My thoughts are bothering me. Who’s the my not the thoughts. They’re the objects. That sentence. Who is the subject and you’ve basically, if you can get back to the subject, then you can. That’s not even that difficult. We’ll talk about it. You get back to it’s called witness consciousness.

That’s what nowadays they call mindfulness. It’s a funny word because of what it really means is getting out of your mind. But in any event, it’s witness consciousness. Christian birdie called it objective observation. What does that mean? I am aware that there are thoughts. That’s as far as I’m going right now. Are they good thoughts or bad thoughts? I’m just aware that there are thoughts. That’s a very deep spiritual state. I’m aware that I’m aware that I’m aware of thoughts. I’m aware that I’m aware that I’m aware of emotions. Do you like the emotions? I’m not going there. I’m just being aware of them. That’s a very deep state. That’s a very evolved. It’s not enlightenment, but it’s a very evolved state to be able to sit there and say, yes, the emotions come and go. I’ve been watching them my whole life. They’re going to come and go based on what?

Based on people’s behavior, based on things I like based, but all kinds of things. I don’t care. I don’t want to study it. Clouds come and go. I don’t want to study where they come from and why they’re shaped the way they are. Their clouds, their thoughts, their emotions. They’re just things that I’m aware of and they don’t pull me out of my seat of awareness. That’s called your center, the seat of self. These are spiritual words. You’ve heard of the seat of self. That’s not a weird statement. You are the self. You are the self. That’s what they mean by self, alright? You in there. The core of your being is the self and you are aware of what you’re looking at, but you get pulled down into it so strongly you get distracted by it that most people never think about who’s in there looking at it.

They’re just trying to change the thoughts, change the emotions, change the world to where it’s not so hard to live in there. Well, you’ll get to a point. You will if you listen, you’ll get to a point in your life where you’re able to sit back there actually effortlessly and have thoughts and emotions be created and you’re aware of them. You’re not aware of them, but that’s all you’re aware of them. My god. You’re aware of cars that drive by you, curve of trees you drive by. You’re aware of white lines that drive by. Look how high you are. I haven’t calculated it that I would estimate that 98 to 99% of every single thing that came through your sense over the course of your life, you were in that state. You’re just, oh, you have white lines, dogs, this, that. You’re just aware of them.

You didn’t do anything about ’em. Oh my God, where did that dog come from? He’s just running in front of me. I don’t care. This didn’t distract me enough to have to come down out of this seat of peace, this seed of wellbeing in order to deal with the stupid thing. It’s just life and life flowing by. But then all of a sudden a car drives by doing unto her soul. A car drives by and it looks like your girlfriend or boyfriend is cozy up next to the driver. Guess what? That one pulls you down. This is the car. You pass thousands of them all the time. Why did that one pull you down? Well, we’ll have that discussion, okay? But it does, doesn’t it? So now you’ve left the seed of consciousness, the seed of consciousness. Are you conscious? Yes, but you’re conscious of that.

You’re conscious of jealousy. It comes of insecurity. Just wait until he comes home. I can find out what’s going on, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so it pulls you down into it pulls who down? You. You the consciousness. Do you leave the seat of consciousness? No. I’m sitting here looking at that picture. Did I leave the seat where I sit? No, because consciousness like light has, they call it the light of consciousness. It’s more like a beam of consciousness. It can sit right there and be aware of something at a distance without moving. Okay? That’s what you’re doing inside. You’re sitting in the seat of consciousness, getting distracted by thoughts and emotions and paying attention to them, but you did it from the seat of consciousness. You do not leave the seat of consciousness, but your awareness, the center of your awareness is now on the picture.

Is now on the thought. I can stare at that picture enough to where you all go away. If I was a great concentrating, I’m not. But if I was theoretically I could stare at that picture enough to where you guys are not here. Right or wrong. You could put your hand in front of you, stare at it. So total that the line, the lifeline, and look how short it is. Oh my God, what was that one about? To where there’s nothing in my world with that hand because your world is made up of what you’re conscious of. It’s not made up of the world. You don’t see much of the world ever, okay? It’s just what you’re conscious of. So you have the ability to focus your consciousness down to an object and then get lost in that object to where the rest doesn’t even exist.

You do it all the time with thoughts and emotions. Ever get lost in your thoughts? Ever have an emotion so strong that you can’t stop it? It completely takes you over. You lay in bed all the time and cry. You got lost in the emotion. You’re still back here. That’s what so funny. You’re still back here in this beautiful place that you’re going to find out. The seed of consciousness is love. The seed of consciousness is they call it such an eternal conscious ecstasy. You’re a great being, but you are focusing on something that’s not so great. Your psyche, your thoughts, your emotions. So the first state that I’ve talked about is you can get back to witness consciousness is that the highest spiritual state is not even close, not even close. The fact that you can’t get there, it doesn’t mean it’s the highest spiritual state.

What happens from there? Now that we’re discussing setting the pole star of your life a little bit higher than finding these things that make you feel a little bit better and avoiding the things that make you feel bad, which is what you’re doing with life, isn’t it? So basically you get to the point where you say that’s not much of a life, not being okay and trying to be somewhat okay, I’m talking about higher goals in your life. I’m talking about setting that polestar to something meaningful. So if it’s true and it is that you happen to be a very high being, no what you’ve ever done, no, what you’ll ever do, no matter what people think of you, no matter whether you’re young or old or sick or healthy or poor or rich has nothing to do with it. Those are things you’re conscious of.

The consciousness itself is very, very great. It’s great. That’s the greatest thing in the universe. It’s not just if I turn off your consciousness, you’re not there. If consciousness is not here, the world’s not here. That has no meaning. If you’re not conscious of it, what meaning does it have? None. So your consciousness is the greatest thing there is, and you are conscious. That’s the greatest asset you have. It makes you a very great being. That’s your conscious. If you get back to the seat of consciousness now, you don’t have all these problems anymore. Why? Because you start experiencing the nature of consciousness. It has a nature. Yes, it is awareness, but it has a nature within itself. Just like a light can shine on an object, the light is not the object. The object can be broken. The object can look rich. The object can be dressed beautifully.

It can get old. That has nothing to do with the light shining on it. The light has a source. If you come back to the source, no matter where it’s shining, it’s the same source and it’s beautiful. Well, it’s the same thing with you. Your seed of consciousness is where love comes from. What do you mean? It’s where love comes from. When you feel love, where is it out there in your hand, in your eyeball? You feel it in your heart, don’t you? What does it feel like? Does it feel like energy coming through your heart? Does it feel like an uplifting, joyous feeling emanating coming up from your heart? It’s inside. How do I know? Because when you’re in the embrace, your eyes are closed. You ever melt back into the love That’s really beautiful, isn’t it? Because it’s inside. It’s coming from inside.

Well, if it’s inside, when on the feel all the time I should be asking you that. That you know it’s inside. You feel it inside. Why? Because you close to it. You close your heart, don’t you? To protect yourself, you close your mind, you have negativity, you of closing things, and if you close it, even though it’s there, you don’t experience it. If I have blinds on the windows and the sun is shining in, that’s really beautiful until I close the blinds, where’d the sun go? Where’d the love go? That’s inside. You can’t feel it because your consciousness on the other side of the blockages you put there, so you can’t experience the love when you go deep enough inside, as you will do over the course of your life, if you set your patterns high enough, your goals high enough, you’ll feel the love inside and you’ll watch yourself turn it off.

Congratulations. You’ll watch yourself say, no, I’m not going to feel love of you dress like that. No, I’m not going to feel love if you don’t open the door for me. You are doing this. You are closing your heart, you’re closing your mind. You’re doing these things and then you’re wondering where the love is, and then you go out there and say, you know what? The love is you looking a certain way and treating me the way I want to be treated. Now, I love you. That’s a pet abysmal, isn’t it? You made yourself sick, you closed off the love. Now you need something from outside to convince your mind and your heart to open so that the love that was always there can flow and as long as that person placed your thing is doing what you want, you can feel love or joy or happiness, all the same.

They’re all inside. Ever feel inspiration? Ever get inspired by something so much you can’t wait to go there and do it. Where’s the inspiration out there in your hand, your foot on the paper. You feel his energy inside. It’s all the same thing. It’s all Shakti yogis. Call it Shakti. It’s just energy flow. It’s beautiful. Everything you’re doing is to try to feel the Shakti. If you eat food that really tastes good and you really like it, you feel better. Not just your senses feel better. Your heart can open. You say, oh my God, I love this. I felt so wonderful eating this. It brought such peace. Where’s peace? Inside is in the food. There’s food of peace. Some people ate it got sick. What’s happening? What’s happening is it is distracting you from yourself. You’re in there bothering yourself, complaining, worrying, anxious, blocking all your beautiful energy because of all that garbage you store inside yourself.

Now all of a sudden something is happened outside food, music, sound. They distract you. They can distract your consciousness from focusing on yourself and what happens? You feel the shock. You can melt into music. You can melt into an embrace. You can melt into food. You can melt into smells. Oh my God, we have all these scents. We make them right or wrong, doesn’t it? You say, oh my God, it feels so much better. You smelled something the other person next to you said, get that perfume out of here is making me sick and you’re melting. So what’s happening is that the particular sin, the particular touch, every kind of stuff, it pulls your consciousness down to that. Therefore, you’re not focused on the garbage going on inside your psyche. You need it, okay?

Now you understand what’s going on. You’re in there. You’re a very great being. Your consciousness. What you’ve done over the course of your life is have experiences that when they came in turned you on or turned you off. They felt good. They felt bad. They brought peace. They brought fear. Okay? Why will be Buddhist? Because everything has its nature. A rattlesnake in front of you, rattling when it comes in does not feel the same, not physical feel, but vibrationally does not feel the same as a butterfly flying around and landing on your arm. Does it? That is not something you are doing. Everything has its nature. Everything emanates its vibration when it comes in and it’s not a nice vibration. What do you do? You try to push it away. You try to not. This is the essence of everything I’ve learned in 52 years, so doing this stuff, it’s not comfortable.

Well, if I sit in a chair, it’s not comfortable. Get up. If I’m around you and I don’t feel good, I leave. What do you do if something came in? The rattlesnake didn’t come in, the vibration came in, but I don’t want to feel it. Obviously you’re feeling it or you wouldn’t not want to feel it. There’s nothing you’re going to do about the fact that you’re now experiencing this. Yes, there is what? I can push it away. I can use, which is a power of consciousness. I can use will to push it away so I don’t have to experience it. Even though I experienced it, I don’t have to fully experience it. How’s that? I can marginalize the experience by keeping at the distance from my consciousness there. That’s the second most important thing I’ve taught you. Do you understand that? Do you do that?

Do you do that? Freud had a name for that. Suppression, repression, denial. Those are what we’re talking about, isn’t it? But we don’t have to go down to that. You do it because it’s too hot out. You do it because the driver in front of you, it’s not driving the speed. You want them to drive or they use their blinker. Nice blinker buddy. You push things away. You don’t want to experience them. What happens when you push them away? This is again, most important spiritual thing you’ll ever learn. When you push it away, it does not dissipate. It does not. It gets stored where in your heart, in your mind, it literally yogi understands. It gets stored in your Shakti flow. You have literally pushed this on top of that beautiful energy that is your natural state and now all of a sudden you don’t feel so good and then it doesn’t stay down there.

It does. It keeps coming back up in your dreams. It keeps coming back up. If somebody says something, it comes back up and you have a thought. Can you have a thought that makes you feel bad? Not an event, just a thought. Think about something that happened before that you didn’t like that you pushed away but it comes back up because you thought about it or somebody said something. This is teaching you what’s happening. What’s happening is you stored this garbage. It is there. It needs to come back up. It’s trying to, and you keep pushing it back down. That’s why you don’t feel love all the time. That’s why you get so distracted and have to control things because you have all this garbage down there. You don’t want to coming back up. That’s why you like some people and don’t like being around other people.

That’s why you like this and don’t like that because you have past experiences and you stored not just bad things. When something happens that you’re really nice. See the deep teaching. Nobody wants to hear and I don’t like saying them. Do you understand that things you really, really like, screw up your life is bad as the ones that you don’t like. What do you mean? Oh my god, you’re so beautiful. Just being around you. I’ve never felt so much love in my entire life. I want to be around you all the time there. Experience comes in, experience come. It can be a car, could be a dog, could be anything, not just a person. Experience comes in. Do you want to let it go through? No. I want to cling to it. That’s a Buddhist word. I want it to stay. The other one, I didn’t even want to have come in this one.

I’m glad it came in, but I don’t want it to go away. Don’t go away. Come back. You said you love me. I don’t know what to do. Oh my God. When will you be back at what time I’m watching my watch. Well, what are you doing during the three hours watching my watch missing the rest of life. There’s still life unfolding in front of you exactly as it was before you met this guy or gal, but you don’t see it. I only have eyes for you and you think that’s romantic. It means you missed the rest of your life. Maybe there were better things going on during that time. How will you ever know what you did was clinging to this experience and say, I want it to happen again and again and again and don’t ever want it to stop. Go have the best meal you ever had for us ever in your entire life.

Do you want it again? Will you compare every other meal that you eat from then on against that it ruined you because now you can’t have new experiences. They’re all relative to the one you held onto. Okay, there’s a higher life than this and we’re going to find out that the stuff you, let’s not worry about what you clinging to. I hope you have nice experiences, but worry about those later when you’re done with your bad experiences of storing them. You can worry about letting go of your good ones. I can’t help myself go to somebody’s house and they have this picture album on the coffee table and as all the vacation spots they went and all these different things and you look at it, they’re all melting, but I want to ask the question that represents what percentage of your life 0.001, what happened to the rest?

Well, it wasn’t that I wanted it to be that, and so I was trying to get back to that. So you wasted your life. You wasted your life. You had a good experience, you wasted your life. You had a bad experience. Why don’t you just open up and have the experiences that you’re going through with life and not suppress them and not clinging to them and just be so open that every single experience, wow, wow. Every experience can make it all the way back there to where you are and wash over you and you become a greater being because you had that experience and even a bad experience. They’re not easy to deal with, but they teach you, don’t they? You learn. You become a greater being, so that’s where a highlight. The reason I’m talking about this is we said, what are you doing to the time between your birth and death?

Because what you’ve been doing and what people are doing is meaningless. It’s ridiculous. I’m trying to get what I want and avoid what I don’t want having fun. Yet, once in a while, if I get what I want, I feel great, and if I don’t have to have what I don’t want, I feel relieved. Okay? What about the rest of your life? What about every single minute of every single day that you’re alive and going through this whole journey on this amazing planet in the middle of nowheres, right? You miss it. You’re trying to avoid what you don’t want and get what you do want. The alternative is to learn to be open, not store your negative stuff so that now everything that comes in is new. It’s new. Don’t raise your hand. How many people ever got hurt in a relationship? Don’t raise your hand.

There’s so much wind will happen over here. I won’t be able to handle it. Alright? Okay. Now you’re afraid of the relationships. Don’t lie to me. You’re afraid to open. You’re afraid to give your heart, you’re afraid, so there I’m not stupid. I’m not giving my heart good. Don’t feel love because you’re not going to feel love if you close your heart. You understand that if you keep your heart closed, you’re not going to feel love, so what you’d rather do, protect yourself from getting hurt or feel love, okay? Believe it or not, that’s your choice and you know that you watched yourself be cautious and careful and not get hurt and to protect yourself, so on, right? A great being feels love unconditionally. It is flowing all the time. They didn’t close themselves. Do they get hurt? They just have experiences, be they emotions, be they thoughts and they come and they go.

They just come and they go and they get to keep the love and they get to keep this life that’s rich and whole without protecting yourself or clinging or resisting, you’re just living my God. Imagine living life at that level that every single minute lemme ask you a question. Have you ever had an experience? It was so beautiful that you melted into it like a sunset you turn, you say, oh my God, and you use the words as follows, it touched me to the depth of my being. Has anything ever touched with the depth of your being? Is that a yicky experience or a nice one? That’s a nice experience. Ready? Every moment of your life can touch you to the depth of your being. Well, now only the really nice ones touch me. That’s because you only let the really nice ones touch you. You protect yourself from the other. You push them away. If you don’t want to have it, it’s not going to touch you. I would use the example. I don’t know if anybody gets it, but I do ever heard the funeral march? I mean death’s not beautiful. I mean death is loss. It’s this dying. It’s a death, right? And so there’s this march.

Ever heard it? Sad, isn’t it really pulls you down? Who wrote that? Chopin, one of our greatest composers caught the emotion of death of that dark feeling of loss and put into music so it could be shared. It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t feel like the rites of spring. It isn’t the rites of spring, it’s the funeral march. It’s part of life. Are you willing to feel that feeling completely to the depth of your being? Then death is not ugly. It’s an experience that we humans get to have. But what if somebody you really love dies? You feel lost. You feel sorrow. You feel heaviness in your heart as completely natural. Are you willing to feel that? Are you willing to experience the rich now? Get into it, let it flow over and were you willing to let it touch with the depth of your being?

No. Okay, miss that part of life, you are capable. It doesn’t mean you’re smiling and giggling because when you love die, that’s not what it’s talking. I’m talking deep to you guys tonight, sir. It’s not what it’s talking about. It’s talking about are you willing to let life with all of its richness and all of its experiences flow over the core of your being and let it touch you to the depth of your being so that you become a knower of death, you become a knower of joy, become a knower of love. It’s completely part of you and you have no fear about it. There’s no reason to resist it. It’s just an experience in life, so you are capable of reaching that state how? By not resisting, by learning how to be open by setting the goal of your life to live in ecstasy and totally experience.

If you go to Disney World, you’re afraid of the rides, you’re not going to have the experience. If you’re afraid of who might sit on the ride next to you, I wanted to sit next to her and not him. You’re not going to have a very nice experience, are you? Well, that’s what you’re doing down here, isn’t it? You’re sitting there limiting the times. You can be okay by the ones that match what you decided you wanted based upon your past experiences, so you start setting your goals higher than that. You’re not ready to do it right now. Are you ready to set the goal higher, but you’re not going to go there just because we’re talking about it, but at least don’t sit there and say, I want a relation, I want two, two and a half children. That’s the average. Two and a half.

I never saw the half. I don’t want to see the half and I want this kind of car and I want to live in the house of this size and I want that. I want that and when I get older I don’t ever want to go to a nursing home. How old are you? 15 and you think about a nursing home at 15? Yeah, I ain’t going a nursing home, right? My children, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to have two boys and a girl and basically they’re going to be rich and they’re can take care of me and I won’t ever go to a nursing home. Hello. You have now screwed up your life and their life by sitting there saying, I’m not okay and I’m having kids to make me be okay, right? Great being I’m filled with love and joy and we shared our love and these beautiful flowers came out there with the expression of the love and who cares whether they go to se or what they do because none of my business, I’ll guide them, I’ll give them fight, but they’re individual souls and they get to blossom in their own way.

I like that first that, are you hearing me? The whole purpose of this is to say, where are you setting the polestar of your life? What are you bothering to think about When you wake up in the morning about where you’re going and at the start of a new year, where are you going? What do you want to happen this year? What’s the new year? What’d you do last year? Guess what? It only takes me a second to hear you tell the story a second. If you’re telling me the truth, what did you do last year? You did a 360 around a star. That’s what you did last year. Not the details. Details. Give me a break, right? You just circled the star. You circled the sun once. What did you achieve? What did you do? What was the experience? It should be ecstasy. It should be unbelievable.

You’re on the nicest planet. No one’s found any planet like this anywhere. We flew all over the place, said Voyager out there. We went to all the planets. The Hubble and James Webb are looking thousands, millions of light years away. There’s not a single thing they’ve seen that you want to go to visit and yet you’re on this place that is just phenomenal. Every minute of your life, there’s experiences, there’s color, there’s sounds, and all you do is complain because you want I need, where’s my Pepto Bal? Where’s my Pepto bal? Where are the events that will happen that will make me feel better? And that is no way to live your life. That’s a way to waste your life because guess what? I want to ask the question. Haven’t you been doing that since you were born? Blanky, dolly, boyfriend, girlfriend, every minute, every minute since you’re born, you’re in there trying to get what you want to make yourself feel good.

Well, if you’ve been doing it your whole life and you’re still doing it, maybe it doesn’t work. This is what it means to wake up spiritually. It’s not about believing in God or this or that. How about we deal with the core of our being? You’ve learned this yourself. I don’t have to tell you. They said it with spirituality. It’s not something you learn, something you realize. You always knew, okay, so there’s another way to live your life. How open, rich experiencing I am in here and I do not need to control everything. In order to be okay, I need to let go of the blockages that are keeping me from being okay. How do you do that? One? Stop putting more in. I’m giving you your path this year. If you’ve got a bunch of blocks in there, you do a bunch of stuff that you couldn’t handle.

There’s lots of things in there that you don’t want to talk about and I don’t need to talk to you about ’em. I’m not a therapist. I know for a fact they’re going to come up by themselves at some point. They’re coming up. They you know that and all I want to say is welcome them. That’s your work. Welcome them. You don’t want them in there. They’re ruining your life. They’re limiting your life to avoid what you don’t want to happen again. That’s why you have fears and anxiety and all this kind of stuff because you held this stuff in there. So basically start by not putting more in as your formula. I’m giving you the formula for the new year. Wake up in the morning and say to yourself, okay, there’s going to be another, not cycle around a star, but rotation on your axis.

That’s all you do today. One little 360 on your axis, and guess what I’m going to do on this 360? Not store more stuff in there. Just take a little tiny thing. They started to learn to play tennis or the piano. Do the scales. I’m going to go through this day and not store more garbage inside of me because things happen that I couldn’t handle. In other words, you have a new mantra instead of I can’t handle this, I can’t handle it. Your mantra is, I can handle this. It’s a very good mantra. I can handle this. I can handle this, but he didn’t use his blinker. I can handle it, but the light turned red. I don’t likes to suffer. I don’t like to suffer red lights. I see him, right? He’s driving, he likes driving, moving and he sees the light up ahead.

He goes very slight because I’m very conscious, very slight hope. The light doesn’t turn red so I have to stop at it. He doesn’t say it, you just feel, but the difference is when I look at that, I relax. I just say, it’s okay, little boy. It’s okay if the light turns red. It is not worth skipping a heartbeat or feeling an anxiety or anything like that. Just the tiniest little thing. You can work with yourself that way. I’m begging you right down to that simple level. Oh, in my rain, in my rain, I don’t like driving the rain. I hope it doesn’t rain. There you are, you just screwed up your day. Who cares? It rains, but I have to deliver this thing. Well, what’s going to happen? Well, it means I have to get up and then go into the water. In the rain.

You take a shower every morning, big deal. It’s a free one. Stop bothering yourself about stuff that doesn’t matter because you do bother yourself. When I did the interview with Oprah in the latest book, living Untether, she said her favorite line in the book was 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 or she’s just driving. The way they drive, you are bothering yourself about the way they drive. The rain is not bothering you, the wind is not bothering you, but it’s messing up my hair. You are bothering yourself about the fact that it’s messing up your hair. Somebody comes and punched you in the face, okay? It’s bothered you. It’s bothered, okay? There are things that can happen out there that bother you, but most of them are things you chose to bother yourself about that do not need to bother you.

Stop it. Practice is spiritual practice. They all teach you meditation. Meditation is wonderful, helps you stay centered, but if you don’t use that centeredness throughout every minute of every day of your life, big deal. You had a deep experience, congratulations. I want you to live there. I don’t want it to be an experience you had. I want it to be your state of being. This is how you make it your state of being. You do this work on yourself regularly. All day you let go. You learn to let go. Instead of pushing stuff away and clinging and holding and building this garbage inside of you, you become an open being and you do that by practice. Practice. I can practice a piano, practice a sport. You can’t get good without practicing. Practice letting go. Somebody’s walking by and they’re talking to somebody and your mind says, God, how not talking about me.

What if they saw what I did over the practice? Letting go of that. Let’s let go. Relax through it. Keep relaxing through it. Now you’re learning not to store stuff on top of your Shakti flow and people write me from all over the world, every, it’s hard to keep up with ’em all and most of them are thank yous. I practiced this and everything changed. I was on a verge of getting divorced from my husband. Now we’re getting along. I wasn’t getting along with my kid and so on. Now I realize it was me. Just keep letting go inside and you’re going to find out it’s a mess in there. In fact, at first you’re not going to like that. We had this talk. It’s a mess in there. You practice not putting more in. Now what happens by itself, stuff will start coming up.

Don’t sit there and write me and say, oh my God, it’s worse. What happened? What I do wrong? You didn’t do anything wrong. You stop pushing stuff down. Therefore, there’s less in there. Therefore, it’s easier for the other stuff to come up. Well, what do I do? The same thing you did with the small stuff, but now you’re better at it. You’ve learned how to let go and what happens. You start being able to let go of that stuff in there that just stored your entire life and now you start feeling Shakti. Now all of a sudden just feeling joy for no reason. Absolutely no reason. Every little thing knocks you into a state of love, a state of joy until you start to feel love all the time for all of nature and for anything. For everything. A leaf falls off a tree and you can’t even not look at it.

It just blows you away. Music, this, that people more and more you become a great being. Why? Because you are a great being. What you did is learn not to distract yourself with things that don’t matter, and guess what? Doesn’t matter anything. What matters is that you’re having a beautiful life. This is your life. Don’t waste it not being okay. Why would you want to come down here to the nicest planet that we ever found? Spend 80, 90 years and be miserable? Why would you do such a thing? There’s so many things happening, so many things to do, and you are suffering. Why? Because you cost yourself to suffer, so you just learn to let go and let go. Then you open, then it gets higher and we’ll get our way up and it gets higher and higher and eventually you get to a point where there’s so much joy inside that you wouldn’t trade it for what’s going on outside.

No matter what’s going on outside, something happens. Somebody says something, start to fierce and start to close, and you have to ask yourself, am I willing to give up this Shakti? Give up this beautiful flow of energy that feeds me, bathe me day and night in order to close down because somebody said something, somebody did something, and eventually you’ll say, no, I’m not willing to then don’t, but it hurts. Of course it hurts. It was stored with pain. It’s going to come back with pain. Someone was asking me, does it have to be like that? Yes, you stored it with pain, it’s going to come back with pain. The difference is you have now grown inside your depth of being is able to handle the discomfort. All of a sudden this stuff starts coming up. You breathe, use all the techniques they teach you, but the main point you say, I’m pushing this back down.

I don’t want to sit here and you can let every single thing that’s in there go period. What if I need help? Then get help. I’m not telling you how to go about it. I’m just telling you there isn’t it Okay. And all I wanted to talk to be about not techniques. I want to be out. Where are you sitting? The poster of your life. You set the poster of your life on what’s called liberation. Liberation, freedom from yourself. Freedom from this garbage you stored inside, right? And when you do that, it works. And you’ll eventually more and more come to a state where you’re always okay. And guess what happens? Somebody say, isn’t that selfish? Aren’t you living for yourself? No, I’m not living for myself. Before I was out there hurting everybody, taking, grabbing, manipulating, getting what I want Now. I’m not doing that. Somehow everybody seems to be doing much better around me. It’s a gift to everyone You will ever deal with, anyone you ever dealt with. You’re now a giver. You don’t think you’re giving, but because you’re not taking, which everybody else is doing, it’s a natural flow of things. Alright, I hope you get it. It’s a big talk. It’s about direction of your entire life, the direction of the rest of your life, and what you’re capable of. So work on these things.

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.