UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Welcome to The Michael Singer Podcast, presented by Sounds True in partnership with Shanti Publications. For more information about Michael Singer’s work, access to all prior episodes, and information about upcoming releases, we invite you to join us at MichaelSingerPodcast.com
Michael Singer: Jai Guru Dev, Jai Masters.
Life can seem very complicated, but the truth is it’s not. It’s not. The mind makes it complicated. Reality is very simple. That’s the entire path of spirituality, to go from where one is caught to where one is liberated, is free. It doesn’t mean you don’t live your life. You have a life to live. You’re going to live your life. The question is how are you doing with it? And in most people’s case, not very well. I mean, sometimes things happen that you like and then you’re happy, and then things happen that you don’t like and then you’re not happy, and then you fluctuate in between.
That’s what people think life is, this fluctuation of yin yang, of liking and disliking and struggling. It’s a struggle. Why? You struggle to get what you want because that’s the only time you’re okay. You struggle to keep what you want. This is the only time you’re going to be okay. You struggle to avoid what you don’t want because you know you’re not going to be okay. You worry even when it’s not happening. You worry that what you don’t want might happen. You worry that what you want might not happen.
Well, by the time you’ve done that, forget it. That’s not much of a life. And people will say, “Well, if you get what you want, it is.” Yeah, but that’s just not the way it works, is it? Sometimes you get what you want, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes what you thought you want, you didn’t, and sometimes when you got what you want, it doesn’t stay, and sometimes you’re doing really well getting what you want and then all of a sudden something happens that you really don’t want and then what you want doesn’t even seem like, “Eh, I don’t even want it. It’s too confusing.” It’s much too complicated. All right?
So if you want to live like that, you are free to live like that. It is true that you have free will. I know people don’t understand that. You’re welcome to live like that. Is that how you want to live? You will be okay when you get what you want and depending if you really get what you want… I heard somebody just won $1.3 billion in a lottery. Probably they passed out. That’s why they haven’t called anybody. If you get what you want, it’s high. There’s not a question. Yoga does not argue that. True spirituality does not argue that.
If you get what you think you want… Ugh, I added a word in there. How do you know what you want? What you want is that which will make you high. What you want is that which will make you feel free. What you want is what will make you feel love. Right or wrong, that’s what you want.
Now, you don’t know what that is, so do you think what it’s going to be? If I get married, I’ll be happy. If I get divorced, I’ll be really happy. Basically, you think what it is that you need in order to be happy. You think what if it happened, you would be miserable. It starts with the thoughts. What makes you happy makes her miserable. What made you happy 10 years ago makes you miserable today. It just changes. It goes about it.
So how do you go about living that kind of life? You think a lot. First, you think, “What do I think will make me happy? What do I think will turn me on? Where do I think, if I go on a vacation, I’ll get the most out of it this year?” You’re thinking, and there is no question. I will never question that if you think you want something and you think it’s going to make you happy and it happens, you get happy.
I’ll go even slower. If you think you want something, you think it’s going to make you happy, and you think it’s going to happen, you get happy. There’s this marriage between thinking your thoughts, your concepts, your views, your opinions, your preferences, your hopes, your dreams. To me, you might as well just use one word. They’re all the same thing.
Let’s do that again. I call that the lit-me list. Your hopes. What is your hope? “I hope this will happen. I hope this doesn’t happen.” A hope is a thought. Do your hopes ever change? Of course they do. A hope is a thought. Your hopes, your dreams, your concepts, your views, your opinions, your preferences. These are thoughts. Nothing wrong with them. I’m not being negative. These are thoughts that you create within your mind or they create themselves. I don’t care. The point is they’re in your mind. They’re thought patterns in your mind.
If you have the predilection for that type of thought and it looks like that might take place, I’m telling you, you’re having a good day. You’re telling people, “I’m really excited. I’m enthused. I’m inspired to pieces. I think my ship’s coming in.”
So basically, if you even think, nothing’s happening, but you think that what you thought would make you happy is going to happen, you get inspired, you get happy. That’s really important. And then if it starts to happen or it looks like it’s going to start to happen, you really start to get happy. And if it actually happens, it’s your wedding day, right? It’s the $1.3-billion lottery winner. It’s like you won. It is just wonderful and you get high.
No one is questioning that. No one is denying that. There is nothing wrong with that, but let’s at least start there. Does anybody deny that’s what goes on?
The trouble is it goes the other way also. If you decide in your mind, “Oh my God, I would just die if that happened. I would just die if I saw them together. It would destroy me. It would kill me. I’d be so jealous. It would. Oh my God. Oh, I hope that doesn’t happen.” Some people wake up from a dream. They say, “I had a dream last night. Something terrible happened. I’m so scared it’ll happen.” Man, just get it in your head and wait until you see what happens. Now you’re scared. Now you’re not turned on. Now you’re afraid. “I don’t want this to happen. I don’t even know why I had that dream. I hope it wasn’t a premonition. How do I know? Oh my God, it probably was a premonition. What do I do?” And you start looking to see what’s going to happen, who’s going to do it? Oh, you can get neurotic, can’t you? Can you get anxious? Can you get all weird?
The mind did that. The mind decided, “I don’t want this to happen,” and now you are thinking it might happen and you are getting anxious, you’re getting scared, you’re getting upset. It goes both ways, doesn’t it? Notice the commonality was the word mind. Okay? I’m going to finally get through to you. Watch this.
Let’s say you had that dream and you thought it was a premonition, but what happened in the dream was this: something terrible started to happen. Terrible. It’s just terrible. It started to happen. You were so scared in the dream and then all of a sudden it morphed into pure beauty and light and everything you ever wanted started showering all over you.
Okay. That was your dream. Now watch. Now I’m going through life. I start to see things and something starts to go this terrible. You get all excited. “Oh, boy, this is the start of the terrible part and it’s going to blossom into the most wonderful thing. I’m so excited.” You’re telling all your friends, but they said, “Look what’s happening to you.” “I know. Wait until you see what happens next.”
Can that happen? Can that happen? I’m begging, I’m begging you, pay attention. That is the power of your mind. That is the power of your mind. Sit with that.
So yoga and spirituality does not say something’s right or wrong or good or bad or better or worse. They sit there and say, “You’re doing that, the very thing that you thought would turn you on.” You meet somebody, you go on a date and it looks really beautiful. And I have to be careful. I try to use things that don’t upset you so I’ve been using slurping soup lately. That’s pretty innocent, I hope. And you go there and he or she, your guy at the dinner is wonderful. “Oh my God, this is my soulmate. I can’t believe I met that. He looks just like my dream,” but he slurps his soup. “No, not a soup-slurper! Uncle George used to slurp his soup and I didn’t like Uncle George.”
I’m telling you, that’s all it takes. All it takes is your mind to say, “I don’t like it,” and then you don’t like it, and then you don’t like the person, then you don’t like what’s happening.
Sit with it. Wake up. This is what it means to wake up spiritually. It does not mean you renounce it. It doesn’t not mean you deny things. It means you accept truth. The truth of the matter is your mind’s got a lot to say with how you’re doing to say the least. Whatever it decides is what it is. So what spirituality says to you is, “Okay, start there. That’s wonderful. Notice it.”
Have you ever noticed that your mind worries about a lot of things that never happened? Just look back in your life. Look at the things you were so scared of. Look at the things that it was concerned about and everything like that. It’s just amazing. It’s amazing. And you start noticing, “Maybe I need to do something about this.”
To me, it is no different than saying, “I need to do something about my diet.” We all are pretty conscious people. You probably deal reasonably, or at least try to, with your diet. So if you’re eating something, you notice it’s really messing you up and you’re getting sick. Yeah, it tastes good, but I’m getting spacey and it’s freaking me out and too much sugar or whatever it is. You try to work with it.
Your mind is causing you way more trouble than anything your diet could ever do. In a split second, your mind can make your life miserable or wonderful. That’s all it takes is a thought. “No, I thought I wanted to get married, but I like my career and I’m just not ready. Now what do I do now? Now what do I do? I’m engaged.” The mind can do that. Yes or no? I rest my case. The mind is amazing.
So you wake up and you realize what? What do you want from your life? Don’t tell me, “I want to get married.” Don’t tell me, “I want to have children.” Don’t tell me, “I want to be rich.” Those are not what you want. That is something your mind has decided, “If I get that, it will make me happy.” It doesn’t always make you happy and it doesn’t last.
What are you really saying? Why don’t you admit what you’re saying is, “I want to be happy”? Not, “that will make me happy,” or, “I think that will make me happy. I want to be happy. I want to feel love. I want to feel inspiration.”
I do this in the new book, Living Untethered. Let’s get down to what you really want. Let’s be honest. What I want is to wake up in the morning and feel, “Oh my God, this is going to be so much fun. I am so excited and I can’t wait to go to work. I can’t wait to not go to work. I can’t wait to look for a job. I can’t wait to whatever. This is just so much fun. I can’t even believe it. It’s unbelievable.” And in every single moment of your life, you’re filled with inspiration, you’re filled with joy, you’re filled with love everywhere you look. How would you like that?
Then you go to bed at night and you’re not worried about anything. You’re not thinking about anything. Everything just happened in the moment. Whatever. Tomorrow will be another day. Whatever it is, it’ll be a lot more fun. You have fun. You have fun being young. You have fun being old. You have fun, you have fun, you have fun, you have fun, you have fun. How would you like that? And it will never stop.
Then ask for that because your mind doesn’t believe that can happen. Your mind has limited the concept of enjoyment down to what it said has to happen. “I better look as good when I’m 60 as I do when I’m 16.” Good luck. I guarantee you you’ll try, all right? And basically it just sets these parameters for you and says, “I’m only okay if I get raises. I better get as much raise everybody else. I work just as hard. I don’t want to hear that they got a raise and I didn’t, do I? And then there’s a certain point I have to be in the corner office and a certain point I should become a VP and I got a schedule going on here. What happens if it doesn’t happen? I’m leaving. I’m upset. I’m worried.”
You limited your ability to be okay to what your mind set. You formulated concepts, views, opinions, preferences, hopes and dreams. Didn’t you? You think your hopes and your dreams are your answer to life. Your hopes and your dreams are your limit as to what can happen and you’d be okay. “It better match my dream. It better match my hope.” Well, somebody else has a different hope. Well, okay, they were lucky. It matched theirs. Mine didn’t match mine. You’re limiting your ability to be happy. You’re limiting your ability to feel joy, ecstasy, love, inspiration, to it matching what you decided it had to match.
Now we’re going to get really radical. What if you didn’t do that? What do you mean? What if you said to the mind, “You don’t know squat.” They said, “What, was I born yesterday?” You weren’t even born yesterday compared to the 4.5 billion years that this has been going on on Earth. 13.8 billion altogether, right? I mean, yes, you were born yesterday. It’s amazing.
And at some point, we get down to this. Where did your mind, each one of you, where did your mind decide what it wants? That’s a good question. If it’s really important to understand that you can only be happy if it happens what your mind wants and you’d be miserable if it happens what your mind doesn’t want, maybe you want to ask where did it get those notions? Because I’m telling you, you did not decide. You had experiences through your life that programmed you.
B.F. Skinner, the behavioral psychologist, said, “Man is the sum of his learned experiences.” You are not the sum of you learned experiences. You are the consciousness that is aware that your mind is the sum of your learned experiences. Do you know that all your opinions and preferences and hopes and dreams and concepts and views are the sum of your learned experiences?
If you dated a redhead when you were in high school and you were madly in love and then she had to move or he had to move, you have an affinity toward redheads. If you dated a redhead and they were some wild maniac and basically it was just totally neurotic, crazy stuff, you stay away from them.
You’re wrong in both counts. Your mind is programmed with the experiences it had. Your mind is a computer. It’s a brilliant computer. It takes the data of his experiences and it puts together concepts and views and hopes and dreams. You don’t sit there and decide, “I think I’ll decide to be neurotic today.” No. You get programmed with good experiences and bad experiences, mostly totally neutral experiences. All the trees you drove by throughout your life, the white lines on the road, the people who just walked by that you don’t know, the cars that drove by. You’re not doing anything with those, are you? They just come in and they go through.
So an experience has to be strong enough, positive, negative, good experience, bad experience for you to bother programming yourself based on it. Is that a truth? That’s by basically 0.0001% of what came in through your senses. Isn’t that amazing? And it’s programming your preferences. It’s programming who you like and how long you like them, and don’t kid yourself.
Do you know you go see a movie? It’ll program you. “I want that to happen to me. Did you see that car? I want to have a car like that.” Then you see a car. “Oh, man, I don’t have a car like that. Well, I wonder where he bought it.” All of a sudden, your mind’s thinking like this and, “I’m not going to be happy unless I can get a car like that.” Can it happen? It happens all the time.
So your mind is a computer that is programmed with the data that has come in. I’ve met people who say things like, “Oh my God, I’ve wanted to do this since I was three years old.” You’re 43 years old. You want a three-year-old’s mind to decide what you should be doing? That’s just the weirdest thing I ever heard of. What you thought when I was three? I mean, are you kidding me? I mean, gosh, leave it there. I wanted to be a fireman.
And so you start noticing that these thoughts that are in your mind, which are running your life, what I like and what I don’t like, were programmed due to the past experiences and they just jumble all together. And then you question, “Well, has every one of my past experiences been consistent with my other past experiences or are some of them at odds with each other? I like this, but I didn’t like that at one point in my life.” Now what happens? You become neurotic, you can’t make decisions, you don’t know what you want. It’s hard to live in there because there’s all these different things that keep changing.
How do they keep changing? If I have concepts and views and opinions and preferences, for now we’ll just call them likes and dislikes. Anybody got likes and dislikes? You did not choose your likes and dislikes. I guarantee you, if your uncle or grandfather who you didn’t get along with at all ate chocolate ice cream all the time, you don’t like chocolate ice cream. It goes right over to what he looked like, what his hair, what kind of car he drove.
The mind is programmed by the experience it’s had and all of your likes and dislikes and preferences and opinions and views and all this kind of stuff, you put them together and here’s me. “This is me. This is what I like. This I don’t like. This is who I like and who I don’t like. This is what I like. This what I like what who I like did. This is what I don’t like who I liked did, and now I don’t like them anymore.”
And then you wonder why life is a struggle. Do you see it now? You got all this stuff programmed in there. Then what you did is build what psychology calls a self-concept. That’s what you mean by I. What I like, what I don’t like, what I believe in, what I don’t believe in, what are my views, and what are my opinions? They’re just one from column A, two from column B. Put them together, use a little super glue. You wish it was super glue. It might stay. You ever change your mind? How hard is it? And so you end up with this concept of yourself, the self-concept, and it is walking around thinking it knows what needs to happen for it to be okay and it knows what better not happen or it’s not going to be okay.
All right, fine. Now we painted this inside world. Now what do I do? Make it happen. Go out there and make it happen. That’s what your mind says to you. “Go out there and make it happen.”
I’m sorry. I laughed my head off. You made up this stuff in your head. The world existed way before you ever showed up. It exists everywhere you’re not. Right now you’re having an experience. How many experiences are you not having? How many experiences are going on right now that you’re not having? Every house, every person, every conversation, everything. Well, you’re not getting programmed with those. You’re only getting programmed with this 0.0000000000000001 to the minus billionth that you’re experiencing and you think you know something. Now let’s get the rest of the planet and let’s get the universe. That’s how much you know.
You only know what you’ve experienced, which is nothing. Then you built this concept of what I want and what I don’t want. And then you built it inside your head. You thought about it, you got it all put together, and now you go out into this world that has nothing to do with you. It exists everywhere. There’s a moment going on everywhere, but you just step into the moment you happen to be in and you project these concepts and views and opinions onto it and say it should be that way.
What if it’s not that way? “It’s wrong. You shouldn’t have said that. You shouldn’t have done that.” Where did you get that concept? “I made it up.” And that’s what the world should be in front of you, what you made up in your head based on your past experiences? Yes.
So true spirituality is about sooner saying, saying, “Where did I even get the concept of what I want? I made this up.” Because you are making it up. You understand that. Who are we that we think the world’s supposed to be the way we want it to be, the way we make up? And what we make up isn’t even what we make up. It’s the sum of our learned experiences, at least how I can put them together because they don’t all line up. So now I’ve put it together, “This is what I want. I’m going to be married by the time I’m a certain age so I can have children by a certain age, and I want to have a certain amount of money in the bank account by the time I get to this age and I want to do this, I want to do that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
So will you admit to me you’re making it up and will you admit to me you have trouble making it up? You even have trouble making up what you want and then you make it up. I dare you to look at this once. You dare to make it up and then you really believe that that’s what’s supposed to happen. And what if it doesn’t? I get upset. Of course I get upset. It’s not what I wanted.
We started the conversation with, “Life can be easy. Life can be really hard,” right? There. What did Buddha say? “All of life is suffering.” This is why. He didn’t mean you broke your arm every day or somebody died. He’s not talking about that. He’s saying, “The way you built this thing, you’re going to suffer.” Just that line I just talked to you. If you think you have the right to make up, based on the sum of your past experiences, and that’s the only way you know what’s going to make you happy, the sum experience that came in and you made up in your mind what you think will make you happy, that’s okay. But then you said, “Therefore, it should happen.”
Wow, there’s a real world out there. Heard about that? Study physics, study chemistry, study meteorology. There’s reason it rains on your birthday and it’s not because it was your birthday. Okay? And everything is that way, right? Think about what you have pitted yourself against when you say, “What I made up is what should happen.” It’s just, it’s a problem. It’s a problem. It’s a problem that you make up what you want and then decide that should really happen because every… Wait a minute. You want to know what’s your problem? Because nobody agrees. Everybody’s making up what they think should happen based on their past experiences. Nobody has ever had the same past experiences as anybody else.
Right now you’re having a unique experience. You’re looking from a different angle. The light is different. Plus, you had, before you came in, something happened that made you feel good or bad. You’re having a unique experience every moment. Nobody else has ever had that experience nor ever will they. You are unique. You’re the only one that ever had the experience that you had all linearly tied together moment by moment. Wow. All right? And no one ever will.
Now, based on those unique experience that you had that no one ever did or ever will, make up how you want things to be. No one will agree with you. Why? They didn’t have the same experiences. They can find yours interesting, but when it all comes down, there’s a psyche going on in there and it’s got suppressed stuff and open stuff and preferences and past experiences and someone’s going to step on one of those at some point.
So what Buddha’s saying to you when he says, “All life is suffering,” he’s not being negative. He’s saying, based on the discussion we just had, which is deeper than most people want to talk, “You built this thing inside your head and you have said, ‘I’m only going to be okay if I get what I want and I won’t be okay if I don’t get what I want or if I get what I don’t want. So therefore, the moment in front of me better match what’s going on inside of me.'”
Well, what if it doesn’t? “I’m going to get really upset.” Will the moment get upset? The moment just keeps moving. It just moves. It’s a motion picture. Every moment, every atom in creation isn’t making what it made a moment ago. It’s making what it’s making now and that’s been going on for 13.8 billion years. So it keeps moving through, but you don’t. You know what you want. I don’t care if the moment’s changed. “This is what I want to happen and this better happen, otherwise what? I will suffer.”
So you have pitted yourself against a force. You pitted yourself against God. You pitted yourself against reality. You pitted yourself against a force that is so… It’s not even discussable, right?
You walk into a restaurant. You’ve never been there, you’re in a foreign country, and you walk into a restaurant. How should the music be? How many people should there be in the restaurant? Should they smoke? Should they not smoke? Should they be this? Should they be that? How close should the tables be? What should the waiter or waitress be like? You got it all figured out, don’t you? And if it matches, “Wow, that was the nicest restaurant I’ve ever been in. It was unbelievable. Everything was right. They played the right music and they served properly. It was just amazing,” or, “I ain’t never going back there. That was terrible. They got everything wrong,” right? It should be the way I want.
So what does that mean? What does one do? What does spirituality say? It says go to the root of the problem. What’s the root of the problem? My mind. My mind has decided when I can be happy, my mind has decided when I’m going to suffer, my mind decided these things. Maybe I need to work with that.
Can I work with that or am I hard-coded with these neural pathways? “Since I’m born, they’re just…” Don’t go there because it’s not true. Can you change your mind? Yes, therefore it’s not frozen, is it? You’re just not doing the work in order to bring about the state that we talked about.
Are you capable? Every one of you are capable of being happy all the time, feeling love all the time, feeling inspired with everything you’re doing. Even getting old is fun. Okay? Enjoy your life. For God’s sakes, you’re born and then you die and there’s this time in between. What do you want to do with the time in between? You want to have fun, you want to enjoy yourself, you want to be inspired, creative, open, loving. Let’s have fun.
“I can’t.” Why? “Because it has to be the way I want for me to be okay.” That’s a problem. “Yeah, I know. It won’t be the way I want.” No, that’s not the problem. The problem is the “I want” part. All right? That’s the problem. “I got a lot of wants. What do I do about that?” And you start looking at everything.
“I got married and I thought he or she would be a certain way and now it’s not exactly like I thought it would be. I thought we’d have this little breakfast in bed thing all the time and it’d be this and it’d be that and we’d grow flowers outside and work together and work in the same place. We’ll get jobs at the same place. That’d be fun and then we can have lunch together. I’m just going to think it all out and now it’s not exactly like I thought it would be.”
Okay. The problem is not that it’s not happening like that. The problem is that you did that with your mind that made it so that it’s not okay the way it is happening.
So what’s the solution? You need to work with yourself. What do you mean? Your mind is the sum of your learned experiences. It’s a true statement. You are not. You are the consciousness that notices that your mind’s the sum of your learned experiences, but your mind is the sum of you learned experiences. An experience in and of itself is just an experience. When it comes in, you do something with it. You like it or not like it, you judge it. You do all kinds of stuff with experiences, don’t you?
There’s a rattlesnake outside. “No, no! Oh my gosh! Wow. Look at that snake.” Which one is it?
See, the experience is not just what happened outside, it’s what you did with it inside. That’s the complete experience. It comes in through your senses, then you do something with that experience, and then you store it accordingly. So you store it as, “God, I saw this rattlesnake. Thank God it was a good distance from me, but whoa, what an amazing creature. It was scary. It was naturally scary. And then he coiled up and I saw him rattle. I was safe at a distance, but I actually saw a rattlesnake rattle. Man, you want to talk about something scary? You know that thing doesn’t have no good intentions when it’s sitting there doing that,” and you get to have that experience, or you’re neurotic. “I’ll never walk outside again. I don’t want anything. I want bodyguards. I’ll carry guns with me.”
Which one? The experience was the same. An experience is just an experience. It’s something that happened in the real world. It happened to happen in front of you. Don’t worry. It’s happening everywhere else different. There’s 800 billion, zillion, quillion, trillion, other things that are happening in the universe. And that happened in front of you. Wow, isn’t that pretty neat?
So the event happened, then it comes inside and you’re in there, aren’t you? Are you in there? I forgot to ask you. Are you in there? You’re in there and you did something with the event. You did. And then you stored, not the event, you stored the event plus you did with it. “It was a bad experience. It freaked me out. It was so beautiful. It was so exciting.” You did that. Otherwise, it’s just an experience.
So if we want to have a beautiful life, you wake up and you realize the world is going to unfold in front of you. That’s not the question. You have 100% control, 100% control of what you do with it. You are the only one in there. There’s nobody else in there. Not your mother, not your father, not your kids, nobody. You are in there. The experience comes in.
Have you noticed that if you store it negatively, if you store it as a terrible thing, it stays in there and it keeps coming back and haunting you? If you store it as a beautiful thing, it’s light, it’s fun, it comes back easy, it comes back, nice. All right? If you store it negatively, if you store it traumatically, if you store it as a bad thing and bothered by it, it’s going to stay in there as bad and as negative. You stored it that way and therefore it’s going to come back up.
Why? It doesn’t want to be in there. You think when you have nightmares and stuff, you think they’re terrible things. You’re wrong. They are terrible things you stored in there that don’t want to be in there. That’s what the nightmare is. It is the things you stored in there that were dark and negative and scary, not wanting to be in there. Your body throws out impurities, bacteria, and viruses, and all kinds of stuff, doesn’t it? Well, so does your mind. So does your inner self. And what do you do? You push it back down. It bothers you just as much when it comes back 15 years later as it did 15 years ago.
So what’s the solution to this? You are in here. You are conscious. An event takes place and it comes in. I always use this example because it’s a very neutral example and most people have this problem. You’re driving, you’re in a rush. It’s a single-lane road and the person in front of you is driving 20 miles an hour below the speed limit. How are you doing? You can’t control the way the guy’s driving, but you can control how you process it.
That is the essence of spirituality. What? “I’m in here. Check. There’s a world unfolding out there. Check. I decide how I process it.” So this is where I want you to work and this is what will change your life. It’ll change it very quickly, then you’ve got more work to do.
There’s this honeymoon period where it seems like, “Oh my god, it works.” It does work. But then you’ve got some bigger stuff to deal with. I call it in the new book, I call it low-hanging fruit. The weather, the driver in front of you, what you think somebody said that maybe wasn’t nice. I like that one. Come on, let’s do that again. I think they said something that wasn’t nice. I’m not sure. Okay. If you decide it wasn’t nice and you store it, it’s going to bother you. If you decide it was nice, I was wrong, it won’t bother you. Which one do you want? Choose your diet.
You have a choice. Right now, it’s going to happen by default. It has a default because you store all this junk in here and you’ve never dealt with yourself. You deal with your diet. What would your diet be if you have a default diet, just eat whatever you want? You don’t want to be there and you don’t do that.
Same thing here. This stuff comes in. You are conscious. Work with yourself. Start with the low-hanging fruit. I don’t want people saying, “Well, I don’t know. I got a terrible divorce. You don’t know how bad it was, Mickey, and my mother was terrible and you don’t understand. Let me tell you bad it was.” No, I will not. I have compassion. I care. We all have our things, but I don’t want to reinforce you just sitting here saying how terrible this is. I want you to work with it. I want to help you work with it, not get into it and be negative about it and just reinforce, “Mine’s worse than yours.” Start a blog. Who had the worst mother?
So basically, what do you do? You don’t start with the big stuff. That’s a real important thing I’m telling you. Don’t even try. What, are you kidding me? It’s been in there for years. It’s traumatic this and that. Leave it alone. It’ll go through its stuff. Don’t worry. We’ll work with it later. So what do I work with?
Believe it or not, it matters that you complain about the weather. It matters that you say, “It’s so hot. Oh my God, I can’t handle it, and I don’t want to go outside. This is awful, but I have to go outside, but I don’t want to go outside.” That’s where you work.
How hard is it to just sit there and say, “I love the heat. I love it. It’s a sauna free of charge. I just stand out there and feel those rays”? And then all of a sudden, you had a nice experience. It was the same experience. You are deciding whether it’s nice or not. Well, then decide it’s nice. Why? You already told me in the beginning that if you get what you like, you like it. So say you like it.
It matters how you store this stuff. If your mind is going to be the sum of your learned experiences and you don’t have complete control, and you don’t, over what experiences you’re going to have, but you do have complete control over how you process them, 100%, you just haven’t applied your will. You haven’t tried.
So then what if I do, if my mind hates the heat? “I hate the heat.” So now we step outside and we remember Mickey’s teachings and we sit there and say, “I love it.” Now, I’m telling you right now so you don’t come back and tell me, that other part of your mind is going to keep saying, “Why are you lying to yourself? You hate the heat. Be real.” It’ll do that. Won’t it do that? The first few times, three, four or five times.
In other words, your mind doesn’t have to be the sum of your outside learned experiences. It could be the sum of how you process the experiences. You get to say, “I like it.” You get to. There’s no law yet. There’s no law yet about this kind of high. You have the right to enjoy your life. Just talk to your mind, “There are going to be some changes around here. We’re going to enjoy things.”
So do that with the weather. Do that with the driver in front of you. What do you mean? It’s driving slower. You are not going to get there any sooner by not liking it. You’re in a rush. The light’s yellow. “Should I go? Oh, I should stop.” You sit there with a light or a train goes by. You’re not getting there any sooner by not liking it.
That’s called low-hanging fruit. I define it in the new book as 100% cost, zero benefit. The train is there. You’re going to sit there. Count the cars, have fun, be a little kid. Wonder how many cars there are, wonder where they’re going. One engine up front pulling all those cars? Wow! Have fun. Why? The alternative is to not have fun, and why would you choose that? And all of a sudden, the sum of your learned experiences raises up because the experience you’re having now is positive. You’re having fun with it. You’re enjoying it.
I keep wanting to say it’s like I taught you once what I do with the sun when it’s really hot. I sit there and say, “How did it get hot?” There is a star 93 million miles away. How far is Miami? 360? 350? How big would a fire have to be in Miami for you to feel it here? If the whole city caught fire, you wouldn’t feel a single thing. That thing’s 93 million miles away and it’s giving off enough heat so you feel it here on the planet. That is pretty neat. It’s not sunshine, it’s star shine. You didn’t get a sunburn, you got a star burn.
You get to do that, don’t you? Now you’re using your mind for something constructive, for something beautiful, for something important. Do it all the time. And if you do this with the low-hanging fruit, the weather, the driver in front of you, the everyday experiences of your life, and wait until you see how many are negative about you. You will be shocked. You go out to eat and you drop some ketchup on your skirt or on your pants. “Wow, sitting on a planet in the middle of nowhere and there’s ketchup on my pants.”
Enjoy that there’s things here on the planet going on. And again, it’s not Mars. You get to do this. Earth is pretty small. 1.3 million Earths fit inside the sun. That’s how small it is. That tiny, little thing is circling a star. 1.3 million Earths fit inside the sun and there are 300 billion stars in your galaxy and you have some ketchup on your pants.
There. I like that laugh. You better laugh at yourself. Okay? So wait until you see what’s going on in there. You’re going to go, “Whoa.” Nope. Time’s up. You had your fun and you just bring this thing up. You get to do this with your mind. It’s called a constructive way to use your mind. And you’re going to find out that if you do that, and then we’ll close down here, if you do that, you actually developed a technique. You learned how to raise the energy when it comes in. You learned how to make things positive. If my mind’s going to be the sum of learned experiences, I guarantee you it’s going to be positive. I guarantee it’s going to be beautiful and so you work with it.
Next thing you know, something comes up from before. You’re driving down the street, you see a poster. You used to see that with your ex or something, and this thing goes like that. You know what I’m talking about when I go like that? It gets a little weird inside. The weird, little energy goes like that. And you sit there and you look at it and you do the same thing. Hey, come on. That’s 15 years ago. Why is that still in there?
I honor the fact that I went through that experience. I’ve learned a lot. I’m a better person. You’re a better person for every experience you had. Why? Because you had the experience. You learned, you grew. All right? Bring it up now, and all of a sudden you can start to work with these past things that you weren’t able to work with before because you develop the consciousness, the awareness, the center, the strength, the will inside that learns how to transmit energies, how to raise energies.
And the next thing you know, something really big is going to happen. You’re going to start feeling, “I can let go of all of this. I can let go of all of this. I don’t want this inside of me. I want beauty inside of me. I want love inside of me. I want light inside of me. I want to feel inspiration all the time. Well, I can’t while I got these anchors pulling me down and doing all this. Well, I’ve learned what to do with them.”
Let them go. Let go. “What do you mean?” Let go. “How can I let go? It won’t let go.” Well, that’s because you’re holding onto it because you’re pushing it away. It can’t go away when you’re pushing it away. “Well, what do I do?” Relax. You relax. You relax. Give it the room to come out. And then eventually, you will reach a state where you start getting high for no reason. You just wake up in the morning, you’re happy. You go places, you’re happy. You see somebody.
Like I told you, you want to know when you’re there? You’re with some friends and somebody’s walking across the street over there. You point. “Oh, here comes George. We are so close. He loves me to pieces. Really, he’s amazing. One of my best friends. Really thinks the world of me.” Next day you’re standing with the same friends. “Oh, look over there, there’s Frank. He hates my guts! Wait until you see when he comes over. He doesn’t [inaudible 00:40:20].”
Now you got somewhere you can play. It’s play. It’s just play. And your energy inside will flow all the time because nothing’s holding it down because you are the only one that’s holding it down. Why? Because you’re the only one that’s in there. Don’t sit there and tell me, “Yeah, but you don’t understand what happened to me yesterday.” Well, that was yesterday and today’s today. I don’t understand why what happened to you yesterday is affecting you today. You’re supposed to let it go and you start processing. “Oh my God, it’s so beautiful,” and then now it’ll stop.
All this energy will start flowing up inside of you. It’s just the Shakti. They call it Shakti Chi spirit. It’s real. And it’s like the rush of holy waters pouring inside of you all the time. You’re a being of light, you’re a being of energy, but you’ve blocked it with all this junk that just stored in there. Let go, let go. Keep letting go. Keep letting go. And it’ll get higher and higher and eventually something will come up that’s hard because you’ve got some serious stuff down there. Don’t you? You know you do. You’re basically afraid of yourself. You’re afraid of yourself. You’re afraid that something will happen that will hurt you. If you let go, there will be none of that. There’ll just be total openness.
So none of that. None of that. Nothing holding you back. You’re a high being. And I even talked about high. The reason we have pictures of masters around there, they mastered all this. That’s high. When it gets so high that the energy that’s coming in is so strong that it intoxicates you and just washes your consciousness up into it, and then ultimately, Meher Baba said, “The drop of my consciousness that used to look at me got washed away and fell into the ocean of consciousness.” And you become one.
Every one of you is capable of these heights and you’re down here worrying about getting hurt and manipulating and thinking everything has to be the way you want for you to be okay. That’s quite a joke, isn’t it? You’re a very high being. You’re a very high being and nothing can take that away from you except you.
I hope you understand these things. I hope you work with yourself. Start with the little stuff. Don’t worry. Just little by little. Every day be a little higher. Every day let go a little bit more and wait till you see what happens.
All right. 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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