E50: From Personal to Universal: Transcending the Ego’s Constraints

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. There are certain teachings that kind of try to help you get along better in life, stop having bad habits, fighting, arguing, get along with your family. Those are very, very nice teachings, but I would like you to go way deeper than that and if the teachings go beyond what you’re ready to deal with, I think that’s wonderful because as you grow, you grow into the teachings. Someone just wrote us and said they’ve read the until Soul 50 times. They just read it over and over and every time they read it, they get something new. It’s the same words. It’s because you go deeper, it talks to you deeper. That’s what deep spiritual teachings do. So I’m going to discuss since it’s a New Year’s, what I know you don’t like and that maybe you don’t understand, but at least you’ll understand when we’re done and then you can decide what to do with it and that I’m going to make a statement. Absolutely nothing is personal.

Absolutely nothing. Nothing is personal. Never has been, never will be, and it isn’t. Now, that’s rather foreign. Why? Because to us, everything’s personal. If you take a look at it though, if you look at it logically, I don’t know why I, it just blows me away and I try to communicate it. Alright, you’re sitting here now and maybe you’re afraid you’ve said something before you did this. Your clothes are messed up, your hair’s messed up, whatever. Just kind of being personal. Know anything about that over in France, on rou something, alright? There’s a restaurant. I don’t speak English. Very, very simple part of France rural and they’re doing their thing. You’ve never been there. You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know where it’s, how much of that is personal? How much of that is personal? How much of what is going on in there is personal.

If I asked you, okay, it’s not personal, why is it going on? They’ll say, well, people who go there, they got their stuff, whatever they’re doing, there’s people who are doing the thing. I don’t know anything about it. If I pick you up and drop you into that restaurant, I’m guaranteeing you. If you stand in a corner and never talk to anybody, you’re taking it personal immediately. It’s personal. That person’s wearing something similar to what so-and-so wore when you broke up. That person’s doing this. Those people are arguing, oh my God, I thought in France people don’t argue. I thought it was a love country. Your mind instantaneously is relating it to you. Yes or no, but you just told me it has nothing to do with you.

I’m daring you to pay attention. I’m daring you to be logical about something that everyone is completely absurd about. It was not personal before you dropped in, and I’m telling you it’s not personal. I drop you in and if I pull you out, you’re going to come back and tell everybody what was personal. That’s you doing that. That situation didn’t change. That situation is what it was and it was because of the way everything was and it happened the way it’s historical. Why is the restaurant there is that personal? It was built 30 years ago. Their parents built it. That always has nothing to do with you. Never did and never will. It’s just something that’s happening on the planet Earth in that little spot in France. There’s a history of things happening and you were never there. You don’t know anything about it. But if I drop you in and put you out, all of a sudden that moment was personal.

It’s not personal. You’re just taking it personal. It’s the same moment. The moment’s going on, whether you’re there or not. Very little changes there. You think it all changes. I’m there, it’s right, it’s wrong, it’s good, it is bad. They vote for what are they wearing? What are they talking about? Why is this happening? All of a sudden you are taking every single thing that’s happening in that moment personal. Do you see how absurd that is? It’s not personal. It wasn’t personal before you got there ain’t personal when you leave and it ain’t personal while you’re there. You just happened to be observing a moment on the planet earth in one particular time, in space. How did it get personal? You took it personal, but it’s not personal. So Einstein talks about the time space continue. So it’s basically saying there’s three axes of space and then there’s time.

So you want to just define a moment. You better say where up, down, left and when there. That’s the time space continue. How many moments are there going on on a planet earth on every single time space, continuum. Little point there. There’s not a number that’s big enough that was going on there in France down the road. There was something that was going on in Spain. Every single place there’s something going on. They’re all the same. They’re moments in time and space that are going on and they have nothing to do with you. And that’s tough, isn’t it? But I just showed you, I’ll pick you up, drop in another one. I’ll drop in another one, drop in another one. At what point you start saying, okay, stop. I get it. It was going on before I got there. It’s going on after I leave and my being there doesn’t change it.

I just sit there and say, you don’t say anything. It’s there. You’re still going to say something inside your mind’s going to judge it. You like it, not like it go kind of stuff. It’s none of your business and that’s just on the planet earth. Are there moments going on Mars? Are there moments going on Saturn? Are there moments going on Every single planet, on every single star, there are trillions of billions of them and on every one of them there’s something going on everywhere and every planet spinning around. There’s just a lot of things going on. Yes or no and you agree they have nothing to do with you. How come all of a sudden this one moment has something to do with you because I’m here. So what? It’s just a moment in time and space. The fact that you happen to be receiving it doesn’t change it.

It just says your consciousness happens to be experienced in that moment. In a moment it’ll be experienced in another moment. They’re not personal, they’re just what is happening at that moment in the place where you happen to be standing. So the moments are the result of all the things that cause ’em to be the way they are. This star is burning of a certain size and a certain temperature because of this and that and when it was made and how long it’s been there and gravitational pull of its sister star. Right or wrong, there are reasons things are the way they are. That’s why there’s this thing called science. It tries to know the reasons that things are the way they are. Just keep finding deeper and deeper reasons and explain more and more things. Okay? That’s one way to look at it. So now we understand though you can’t live it yet.

I hope when I’m done you’ll be enlightened and liberated. You’ll never touch it again. Well, we will talk about why you can’t do that, but just for a moment, understand things are happening because of the things that made them happen. If I say to you, why are you five foot six? I better be here for a long time for you to answer that question because your grandmother’s, grandmother’s, grandmother’s, grandfather’s grandfather, you understand that these gene are passed along for a long motor. Gene you’s got to go to all of science to explain why it is the way it is. What I like is there’s something inside that says, yeah, I always want to be five seven. What’s that talking in there like that? What’s that? Not respecting the miracle of what made your body. So we’re going to call that ego. We will get into what that is.

It is not real. It is just completely made up. It’s a mind game. Have you ever changed your mind? Well then it is not a very real thing. Reality. You can’t change reality. It’s what it is. So you’ve changed your mind. Has your mind ever been wrong? So what are you doing? Listen to this crazy thing. So you have a thing called an ego. I’m get very personal. I don’t know why I hope the answer is yes or no, but it can be what it is. Have you ever been in a relationship? Let’s go back to high school someplace you hadn’t grown so much and somebody’s going to break up with you, somebody you loved a lot or cared or needed and so on and the following words came out of your mouth. No, no. I’m so sorry. No, I didn’t have to do that.

Just tell me how you want me to be. I can be that way. What is that telling you? You made the thing up. He’s made up. Don’t change it. Change it. Can you, if somebody wants you to behave differently, can you, even though mommy was this way and psychologist says this and so on, can you if you need to, it’s made up. It’s nothing. That place in France is not made up. That’s real man. It’s got history. You got no history. You just make up whatever you want in your mind. Your ego is something you made up. You just made it up. We’ll talk about how you made it up. We’re going to get there, but right now, if I’ve just for one moment, understand there’s all these places at any moment you’re sitting in one of ’em, you’re standing in one of ’em. So what?

There’s 800 billion, zillion other things going on that are just equally as real as what’s in front of you. Can you even hear that? So hard to hear it. Why? Because you take it personal. Even though I’m telling you it’s not personal. It’s just the moment that’s happening based upon the events that made it happen. Now let’s talk about that. What are the events that make it happen? Let’s just take somebody standing in front of you saying things you don’t like. It is that personal. I’m telling you it’s not personal and they weren’t saying it to you. They’re in a bad mood. They saying it to somebody else. Hear me.

Okay. If the person who’s standing in front of you has a body living tether goes into this but not the level I’d love to person in front of you has a body, they think that body’s theirs. Watch make me an eyeball. Maybe a kidney, maybe a liver, maybe anything. Something like 30 to 35 trillion living cells make up your body. It’s not your body, it’s it errors. They’re making the heartbeat, they’re cleaning it, they’re that they’re doing every single thing. Every single moment while you’re sleeping is not your body. If one of those cells misbehaves, we call it cancer and you may not enter up with a body, you didn’t make the cells, you don’t control the cells. They’re just all doing a liver kidney. Oh my god, it’s unbelievable. It’s doing its own thing. It made itself, it used to be this big foot and a half.

How’d it get to five or six feet? Just stretch it. It does it by itself. The body makes itself. It started off by the way your, not you, but your body started off as a single fertilized cell. How did it make a body, a body with livers and eyes and kidneys and noses and a baby who did that? It’s a body that the universe made is miraculous. Well, I know what made it DNA made it Well, what is DNAA molecule? What’s a molecule? A collection of atoms. What’s an atom? S or protons? And I’ll go further down to quantum, but I won’t do it right now. And you eventually wake up. You use your mind for something other than ego. Your mind is capable of understanding what I’m talking about, isn’t it Right? It’s capable of like wow. It’s called the abstract mind. The impersonal has a name, the impersonal mind, the abstract mind, the intellectual mind, not the personal mind.

What’s the difference? There’s no difference like a computer. The computer’s capable of running. How many types of programs has managed to ask it to? Can it go to the dark web? Can it go to religious sites? Can it go here? Can it go there? Go anywhere you want it to. Your mind is an open field of intelligence. You are the one who ran the program called ego. It’s a program that’s running inside the mind, the exact mind that developed air conditioning and flew to the moon and does all these nice wonderful things that you can think about. You ran a program in it called Take It Personal, called I care about everything. I want everything to be the way I want. And you ran that program. They’re thoughts in your mind, they’re nothing. They’re just a program. We’ll talk about how it got that way.

It’s just a routine, a programming routine running inside your mind that says I me, mine, I, me, mine, I, me mine. I like this. I don’t like this. I want this. And it just keeps talking like that. The rest of your mind is capable of listening to what I’m talking about. The fact that there’s a single cell and it turned into a body. Tell me how. Go study it. Figure it out and you come back and I’ll tell you, there not a single thing in that book that says you did it. You can mess it up. You smoke and drink and do crazy things. So it doesn’t work really well, but it’ll try. By the way, it’ll keep trying. It’s amazing. It’ll fight you. You’re not the body, it’s not yours. It just evolving. You inherited this body. It is not yours. You didn’t make it.

You’re not in charge of it, but I’m in charge of what I eat. Big deal. Let’s 0.0001% of what’s going on. It’s in charge of the blood and what’s going on inside the blood and breaking down the food here. You ate very good. You ate vegan or you ate junk. I don’t care what happens when you swallow, you don’t know. It has nothing to do with you. Your cells don’t get fed because you’re stuck it in your mouth. There’s a whole thing that has to go on down there. The whole digestive system has to break it apart and distribute it. Oh my god, if one thing goes wrong, you ain’t here. So you’re sitting here with this body, but guess what? That’s not just true of your body. That’s true of everybody’s body. Nobody made their body, nobody is their body. Everybody’s consciousness living in here and there’s this body they see and the same as you identify with that place in a restaurant in France even had nothing to do with you.

You identify with this body a lot. It’s mine. It’s not yours. It belongs to the universe. It belongs to. What made it and understand well, does that mean I shouldn’t have one? No say thank you. When’s the last time you thanked your liver, your kidneys, your probably knee gland, your blood? It’s like if it ain’t doing the same man, you ain’t got a body. But no, you just care about if it looks good. No, by the way, if you’re in a foreign culture, every culture has different ideas of what is attractive. So your ego, you don’t care what your body, you care about people being attracted to your body. You care about ego, you care about ego. That’s like the thing every place I put you is just take it personal, take it personal, take your body personal. Get a little sit on your chin for the prom in high school.

How you doing? Everything you take personal. Alright, I’ve been going back and forth. You take it personal because you have a routine running inside your mind called the ego and it takes everything personal. I mean everything it takes things that haven’t even happened yet. Personal for what if I mess up? What if I get rejected? If I ask her out on a date and she says no, well you’re freaking out. It didn’t even happen. It freaks out over things that happened 20 years ago. They’re never happened again and they can’t happen again. The people who were involved died. They’re gone and it still takes it personal. Okay, I did that. Shoot. Why did I have to do that? I hadn’t done that. Are you getting the picture and painting you? The whole universe is impersonal. It has always been impersonal. It just is creation, doing its thing and wherever I stick you, it’s personal and you build this model inside your mind.

Might as well do it. Now, where did you ego come from? Why do you like what you like? She doesn’t like what you like. She likes what he likes today. Tomorrow she doesn’t even like him. What’s going on? Where did all those thoughts come from? I told you it’s a routine running inside the computer of your mind. You are not your ego. It’s something that got built inside your mind and then it talks to you and it does things and it reacts all the time. But there’s a whole mind. The mind is as big of the universe. What does Microsoft say? Where do I want to go today? I want to go to the faraway galaxy. Okay, go there. I want to go to Mars. Turn on the web. I’m going to go look at Mars. Your mind is not limited at all to anything.

It’s completely free. Your body’s not. Your ego is part of your mind, but it’s not completely free in any way, shape or form. It has a little box that built that says, I’m okay if this happens and I’m not okay if that happens. Come on. Do you live inside a box or do you live inside the universe? You live inside a box and you take everything personal and you just build this box. Where’d the box come from? How’d you decide what you like? How’d you decide what you don’t like? How you decide who you like? How’d decide who you don’t like? How you decide what you want to be? How’d you decide what you don’t want to be? How’d you decide these things? You think you made them up? There are no way you made it up. The world is unfolding. We already said that.

Every single place at Einstein’s FaceTime continuum, there’s nothing happening, but you are only where you are. You’re just in that moment on that space. Guess what? Because you took it personal. You owned what took place on that space. That was what you’re experiencing, that you started doing this thing of letting it teach you influence you program you really, that’s how a program race programmed you. What does psychology say, man? As if some of the learned experiences, you’re programmed by the experiences you’ve had. If you had a nice experience, that’s just something that happened in a time space continuum. Not to you. No, no, no, no, no. It’s not okay that it happened. What do you mean it happened? Yeah, but I liked it. I want it to happen again. There you go. Now you’re in trouble right there that you go. You build a model inside your mind based upon the experiences you’ve had.

Don’t you have likes and dislikes based on your past experiences? Something happened to you. You’re driving a car and almost got in a car accident. Now you’re afraid of getting in the car, especially with that same driver or a car that looks like that or it’s not safe. You float into airplane. There’s tons of times. Then you turn on a tv, you see this massive crash and everybody died saying little jumpy about getting an airplane again. Especially if it’s the same airlines. Some of your learned experiences. That’s what that means. Your ego, not your mind. Your mind can do anything. It can go anywhere. There’s no borders on your mind. It’s infinite, it’s eternal. It just for anything you think, anything you want. But these experiences you’ve had take priority over that because you gave that to them. You took it personal. I watched this movie and airline crashed.

Oh my god, that affected me. It crash all over the place. What if you didn’t turn the TV on at that time? I’d be fine. That’s embarrassing. So you have these experiences, which I always tell you and I know you don’t like it and I’m afraid I have to say it. Your experiences are meaningless. Why? They’re one in a trillion, zillion. Every experience you have, there were a hundred billion zillion other things going on that just happened to be where you’re standing at that moment and you let that determine your life. That’s embarrassing. That’s ridiculous. If you’re somebody else somewheres else, you have a totally different experience now. You’re a totally different person. I can’t even relate to it. I can’t relate to doing that. It doesn’t make any sense at all. Fine, you had an experience. Don’t own the experience. It’s not yours. It’s just something that happened and you happen to be president at that moment, but you don’t do that.

You build this model inside this beautiful. Everyone has a beautiful mind, truly a brilliant beautiful mind. You have the human mind. It flew to the moon. Your mind, it invented this, it made it’s nice and warm in here now it did everything. Your mind is so brilliant. Your mind, the human mind. I don’t care that somebody’s a little more brilliant than you. What’s a big difference? Stop comparing yourself to Einstein or some of these guys. You hear me? Your mind is brilliant. Every one of you, you have the human mind. Okay, what did you do with it? You ruined it. Wow. By limiting it to the self learned experiences and by the way, you didn’t limit your mind to that. You go to work and maybe you get busy, you do creative, constructive things, but in the meantime you think, can I get the raise and why’d he get the raise?

I don’t like this. Oh my god, my kids aren’t doing good. You still got to that junk going on inside your mind. What is the purpose of that? It’s just ruined your life. You can’t experience the moment you’re in because you’re too busy being full of the mind of your past experiences holding onto ’em. Oh, I hope when I go home this happens. That’s the personal program running inside this brilliant intellectual mind. You have a brilliant mind. I don’t care what they tell you. I don’t care what they say your IQ is. I don’t care what you got an SAT. That’s your question. I’m talking about the personal mind. You’re about to take your SAT for college, your junior year of high school or whatever and you just had a beautiful experience with somebody, met somebody you really liked and you get along really beautifully and you’re so inspired and so open.

You’ve been studying so on and you go in there, take that test as opposed to you just got dumped and you’re depressed and rejected. Okay, now going to take the test. Which one of you is going to do better? We really measured our intelligence, not a chance in the world, not even close because you have this personal thing inside that limits your intelligence, it limits your ability to be all that you can be to be the greatest. Alright? So what happens is you have these experiences, you have trouble with ’em. Either you like ’em or you didn’t like ’em and you store them inside your mind. It’s not your memory. Your mind has a memory. I have to make that distinction. People don’t get it. Your computer has a memory. It doesn’t come back by itself and haunts you for the rest of your life.

Yours does, doesn’t it? That’s the difference between what we call memory and a samskara, but the samskara something that you were not able to let coming go, something you were not able to store in the memory bank and bring it back when you want to. You have that. That’s part of your great mind. Something that you couldn’t handle but even I couldn’t handle it. I can’t handle what you said to me. I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want to talk to you again. And by the way, your beard looks like somebody else’s. I don’t want to talk to them either. You stored this garbage inside your personal mind and it keeps coming back up and it determines what you like and what you don’t and it’s all based on these meaningless experience that you had. Why are they meaningless? Because I told you they’re statistically insignificant.

There’s 800 million things going on and woman’s going on and you made your life be about that one. You don’t have to do that. You know what liberation means? Enlightenment, liberation. You’re not doing that. We limit our consciousness to our ego. It’s all about what I want and what I don’t want and what I like and what I don’t like and what I want to happen when I don’t want it to happen and what shouldn’t have happened. You hear me? By definition, that’s all built on one experience. You had in one experience in a given moment and there’s billions of things. So you’ve limited your consciousness to your ego, to your ego, mind your mind’s capable of everything. The universe is capable of everything but not for you. If you were to stop doing that, you would reach this point called enlightenment. What does that mean?

It means you got the rest. You got to use the rest of your mind. You got to be part of the whole universe, not just the part you liked and didn’t like from the meatless experience you had when you were two years old or 10 or 20 or three. You are a great being. What you’ve done is limited your greatness to the sum. You learned experiences which are nothing. They’re just random experience you happen to have. And then you build the model of yourself, your ego, your self concept, and you’ve got this likes and dislikes and now you devote your entire life to get in the next moment, to be the way you like and not ever be. The way you don’t like spiritual growth is listening to a talk like this and saying, I don’t think so. If I’m going to drop down on this unbelievable planet in the middle of nowheres first time, 80 or 90 years, I don’t think I’m going to do that.

That doesn’t sound like much fun at all, does it? That’s where suffering comes from. You do not have to suffer. You are not meant to suffer. You are not meant to suffer. Go to Mars. See what’s going on. Nothing. Go to Venus, Jupiter anywheres. We have these telescopes. They see, oh my god, there’s burning fires and rocks and dirt and gas. There you go. That’s all they see. But here, there’s always something going on every moment. There’s colors and shapes and sounds and things and music and people in computers. You won the lottery. Somebody just won what? $2.5 billion of lottery. You won 7,000 of those, a hundred million of those. What are they going to do with their money? They did, by the way, what are they going to do with their money? It’s stupid. They don’t figure it out. They’ll suffer. Everyone wants it.

First thought is, well, it supposed to be worth $2.5 billion. Well why do I only get 750 million? The rest is taxes. No, I don’t want it to be taxes. There you go. Suffer. You drop down onto a planet and we’re given this robot body that takes care of itself. It’s unbelievable. It can eat plants, it can eat meat, it can live in a tundra. It can live in the rainforest. That’s quite a thing you were given there and all you do is complain. That’s because you took the experiences you’ve had, which were nothing. I know you don’t want to hear that. They hate when I say that, but you don’t understand. My parents got divorced. That’s an experience. Lots of people whose parents got divorced, if something had happened with your father’s mother, they might not have got divorced. There’s just events happen. Have you noticed it’s a happening place and wherever you’re standing, the events that happen before cause those events to happen.

But you take it personal. You take it personal. What is a divorce? Something that happens that people do because of their past experiences. They don’t mesh well anymore. Irreconcilable differences. What does that mean? Irreconcilable differences. It means you’ve had all your past experiences, they made you the way you are. He’s had all his past experiences made it the way he is and never the twain shall meet. They seemed like they were going to work out but they just didn’t. Or another experience happened to one of you or both of you and it made it so they don’t fit anymore. It’s not so complicated, but we can’t handle it. And because you can’t handle it, the ones you can’t handle either because you liked them so much, you want it to happen again and you won’t accept anything that isn’t as good as that. That’s a problem.

It’s called a positive samskara or you didn’t like it or ever wanted it to happen again. It was so terrible. It hurts so bad. I make sure it doesn’t happen again. That’s a negative samskara and those things are running your life, but I built the foundation for you to show you that itself is absurd. It’s just a moment that happened to happen. So on the planet earth, you’re not bored. It’s an amazing thing. What’s going on here? So when you’re standing in front of a person, pay attention to what you’re standing in front of. One their body is something like 30 trillion individual cells talking to each other, interfacing with each other, doing all kinds of stuff. You should be sitting there going, wow, look at those cells did. And even you’re looking at it and you say, this thing used to be a foot and a half and look at it now what do I care?

It’s yelling at me. So it just cells use your intellectual mind. It’s called ana yo, it’s the truth. It’s not a word I’ve said to you yet. That’s not the truth. But you won’t listen to me. You listen, but you just somehow it doesn’t deal with your everyday reality. It does. So it is your everyday reality. Go to New York and see everybody running around at lunch hour all over the streets. Each one of their bodies is made up of those 30 trillion cells which are shaped and doing what they did because of the cells from their parents that oh my god, you know about it, holy mackerel, genetics. I mean the whole thing is just phenomenal. Well, you’re standing in front of that. Is that what it looks like? No, you’re taking it personal. Is their body personal? No, that’s nothing to do with you. It has to do with the cells and the whole process and evolution.

Alright, but you take it personal. Well, okay, I won’t take the body personal, but I’ll take what they’re saying. Personal. What they’re saying is the sum of their learned experiences. What do their learning experiences, those moments that they had, what has that got to do with you? Nothing. No more than that restaurant in France. Were you there when they were growing up with you with their parents and every single conversation they ever had? No, it has nothing to do with you unless ’em standing in front of you. Someone has nothing to do with you. But we got married. How long did you know you got married? Two years. Congratulations. How old were they? Well, I was 25 or 30 and she was this. Okay, what happened before you met them? Well, they told me some things. How many scenes did they tell you? Because 700 billion of other things happened to them. Every moment they just kind of summarize a little bit.

So you don’t know some of the learning experiences do you? And the really big ones, they didn’t tell you all that right now. You didn’t tell them either. So just see it for what it is. These moments, there were moments that are happening and they took ’em personal and built some of their learning experiences and you took personal built to some own experiences. So now these 35 trillion cells are standing in front of each other. Okay? Very interesting. And now this mindset that got programmed by all these experiences is standing in front. You should go, wow, wow, this is unbelievable. It’s incomprehensible that are standing here with that all these cells and thing and then this thing saying something. I’m going to give you a piece of the lea experiences. They give you a piece of their mind. They give me a piece of the Lea experiences. It has nothing to do with me. People’s reaction to you are about them and not you.

I can say it again. People’s reaction to you, to what you look like, to what you said, to what you do has to do with it’s the sum of their learning experiences. What were you one moment at one second. Oh, you changed everything. No, the sum of their learning experiences have nothing to do with you. But we’ve been married for two years. How many moments were you not part of the sum of learning experiences way more than what you were. And while you’re married and you know them so well, did you go to work? Did they go to work or stay home? Did you have the same experiences during those times? But wait a minute, it’s some experiences wake up. It’s not personal, is it? It’s not personal. If you’re excited about going out tonight, you made a special dinner or whatever and they come home from work and they’re all riled, they had a bad time with the boss.

It’s like marching into the house and slam the door. Don’t even say hello to you. It’s not personal. It seems personal. Of course it does. What’s happening at where you’re standing in the moment? This is what’s happening, which was some of their learning experiences. They hit something that daddy said or mommy said. They saw somebody that reminded them of the fifth grade girlfriend or boyfriend and it got all emotional and weird. Do you get weird? Do you get weird sometimes? Can somebody say something, you see something? Or do you think something you get weird. The sum of your learn experiences. So you have locked your consciousness into this sum of your learn experiences thing called your psyche, your ego. What is the psyche part of your mind? It’s not your whole mind. Your mind is still there. It’s still capable of creating and doing and thinking, but not when it’s buried into the summer learned experiences.

That’s what the ego is, the sum of your learned experiences and that is what is ruining your life and you’ve devoted your life to it. You’re able to come down onto the planet earth and be here on this planet in the middle of nowhere back there, there’s a picture hanging on the wall when it comes through the door right there. I stared it every single morning and every single evening for years and years and years. It looks like a black eight by time. There’s nothing there. Yeah, there is. There’s a little tiny little.in the middle and it has to be a photograph, not an artist rendition, a photograph of the planet earth from 2 million miles out. Cassini took it on her way to Saturn, she turned around and you are on that and it ain’t personal. You’re taking it personal because you built this ego and stuff comes in and it hits your ego, it hits your stuff.

And so you say, don’t you dare talk to me like that as opposed to, well look, he’s talking to me. That’s what learning experience was talking. I didn’t know that was in there. Hi, welcome. Come on out. Is that not what’s coming out of their mouth? Some of their own experiences. He said this is what it means to wake up instead of letting your consciousness is all about awareness. Your consciousness being drawn down into this thing. A tiny part of your mind, you devoted to this eagle thinking stuff really is very small. It’s like Einstein. Look at him. His hair is all over the place. I care about relationships and things. He didn’t live in there. And his ego, alright, he had one, but he sat in his armchair and seriously he sat in his armchair. Most of his great theories came through thinking, not math.

He proved them afterwards with math. But he sat in his armchair and thought like, well what if I was in space and I was inside? Literally I was inside an elevator and it was falling down fast, falling down through space. There was nothing pulling it. It was falling down through space. And I’m in the elevator, I’m going to float up. I’m going to feel that motion, aren’t I? Or if it’s pulling up going even better, it’s pulling up very rapidly. I’m going to be pushed down, aren’t I? Inside the elevator? In his mind I made me cry. Your mind’s so brilliant. His mind said maybe that’s what gravity is. Maybe there really is no such thing as a force pulling you down. Maybe the acceleration of going up of movement like take off on a plane. Is that gravity pushing you against the back of the seat?

No. Is the acceleration the motion? And he dared to sit there and say maybe that’s what we experienced as gravity. It’s not a pulling force, it’s just an accelerating object being pulled toward a mass. It just gets pulled toward the mass and the motion is what feels like gravity. That is the general theory of relativity. He said that mass has the ability to bend space time so that anything that goes near it falls down toward it. And that’s what you feel is gravity. And they have not only not disproved it, they’ve completely proved it. Every experiment they did to try to see, alright, it held up completely. So there’s your mind, it’s brilliant. It’s unbelievable. And you have limited yours to Does he like me? Well, how can I get a house that I feel more comfortable with? Oh my god, my neighbor’s lawn, they don’t even mow it and I keep mine so nice. What should I do? I don’t know, Mickey, what should I do? I’ll write you. I want to let go but I can’t let go because I have to deal with the neighbor’s weeds and they might get onto my lawn. When they get onto my lawn. Do I get to say something or am I supposed to surrender?

I love that you’re laughing. Is it not the way I painted? Now do you see why? Because that part of your mind is a summary of learned experiences. Your neighbor grew up with the Beverly hillbillies, these things along is great man, and those junk cars and you just wake up and you realize it doesn’t mean you don’t do anything. We could talk about that. But the sum of your learned experiences is what your mind’s talking about. And guess what it’s worth. Nothing. Flip a coin. If you had different experiences, you would talk differently. If you had different experiences, you would’ve voted for somebody else when you voted this year or might’ve voted instead of voting. Don’t you dare think that’s not true. Don’t say no. Mine’s the truth. Well they say there’s the truth too. It is just that whole part of you that mind, that ego mind is the sum.

Your learned experiences all put together, but not all your experiences. Just the ones that either bothered you, you really liked and that’s where your desires or fears come from. So you basically realize when you’re interacting with this world, it’s complicated because that’s what you’re interacting with. You’re interacting with 20, 30 trillion cells that are working themselves together to create a body and then inside the mind, which is just brilliant, it’s as big as the universe. There’s this little program that’s running that is a sum of the person’s learned experiences that you’re standing in front of and you’re taking it personal. Did I even come close? To let you understand why I say it’s not personal. Is it personal? You’re taking it personal. Why? Because it doesn’t match some of your learned experiences or it does if it matches some of your learning experiences. I was love at first sight.

I can’t believe I never met anybody that was so close to me. I was so open. I felt all this love. You want me to feel love, I’m taking all the romance out. I’m in trouble now you want to know you feel love because it matched the Lea experiences. There’s no one you love. That is the opposite of the Lea experiences because what happens is, now let’s get there. I’ve talked about you in there, resisting, clinging, building this model. I talked about you in there not realizing that the moments unfolding in front of you are one in, one in a trillion, one in a zillion, go to the ocean and take a drop of water. Alright, now I understand the ocean. You do not understand the ocean. You take a drop of water. Yeah, but it’s just a bunch of dry. Yeah, I understand. You have to take the hole.

Don’t you don’t understand ocean. Take the hole. See how great it is? You have to take all of life. The parts you don’t see, the parts you do see the parts past, present. You’re here experiencing life makes you cry. You’re here experiencing life on a tiny little planet in the middle of nowhere, but you’re part of the whole. But no, it’s all part of you for this little tiny myopic thing that you built in there causing you to suffer and have problems. And so basically, who is this You in there that’s having the experience. That’s why I usually start my talk. You’re the consciousness that’s noticing the mind. You’re not the mind. Do you have an ego? Can it get hurt? Have a heart that can open and close. How do you know?

Because you’re in there and you notice it. Do you see when I say that your egos are some of your learned experiences? Do you notice that? Do you notice that some of your learned experiences aren’t so nice and they keep coming back up and bothering you? Who’s noticing this thing called awareness consciousness? That’s who you are. You’re not your ego, you’re not your body. You’re not the moment in front of you. You’re the experiencer of the mind that talks ego talk. You’re the experience of the body that sends messages up and has senses that communicate with you. You’re the experiencer of the moments you’re experiencing. You’re not the moments, you’re the experience of the moments. Close your eyes. You miss what if your eyes happen to be closed when something terrible was happening in front of you. You didn’t see it then it didn’t have any effect on you.

It’s crazy, isn’t it? This is everything. This is the most important talk you’ll ever hear in your whole life. Things are not personal. You take them personal based on what? Based on the sum of your learning experiences. Well, why are they the way they are? Because in a sum of everything else is experienced, the moment in front of you is the way it is because of all the things that made it be that way. How’s that for a nice scientific statement? The moment in front of you, including psychology, what’s happening, people’s behavior, form, color, every single thing and the moment in front of you is the way it is because of all the things that made it be that way, not because of you. There’s a lot of history. So eventually you catch on. I’m the consciousness and I’m addicted, completely addicted to looking at me, to looking at my ego, what I want, what I don’t want, what I like, what I don’t like, who I like, who I don’t like.

And not only looking at it, acting based on it. If I like something, I’m going to get it. If I don’t like something, I’m about going to experience it and going out there and struggling with life, which is the sum of its learned experience. Go mess around with it. It is the way it is. Of all the things. He made it be that way. I don’t care. I don’t want it that way. There’s this thing that Christ said. He said, not my will but thy will based on the talk we just had. Don’t worry about some of my learning experiences. Just let reality be reality. That’s not my will, but thy will. You can be the biggest atheist that ever lives say, not my will but thy will. It’s very scientific. So basically you’re in there and you are distracted by that one collection of thoughts going on inside your great mind and you only pay attention to that and that’s your ego mind.

And then because it’s not comfortable, ego mind is never comfortable, never will be, never has been. Nobody’s is temporarily. It can be, oh, I got what I want. I got what I want. What if she leaves? Have fun because you won’t are the greatest thing in the universe staring at this beatless, some learn experiences and worrying that the sum of somebody else in learning spirits might bother you and yet you’re great. So I asked you why do you feel love? You are love. Someday you’re going to find out that you in there, the you in there. Not the ego, not the mind. You who notices the ego in the mind, not the body. You who notices the body, not what’s happening outside you who notice what’s happening outside you. The consciousness. You are so far beyond what you call love. It’s nothing to be talked about.

You’re the most beautiful thing ever wanted to face there right now. Right now you’re the most beautiful thing. You’re the most beautiful thing that could ever be. Well, why don’t I experience that? Because you’re staring at the garbage. You’re staring at what’s left over from some of your learned experiences and it ain’t so happy. It ain’t so good. It’s very conditional. It’s only okay when it gets what it wants and it’s never okay if it gets what it doesn’t want. And that’s what you’re staring at. So of course you don’t notice who you are. You’re too busy being addicted and distracted by what you’re looking at and you don’t know how not to and what they teach you, since everybody else is in there too, they teach you okay, if you want to be okay, you better get what you want. You better get what the sum of your learning experiences programmed you to want.

And if you’re getting it, you’ll feel better. Of course you’ll feel better. It matches. The mind gets quieter and that’s how your heart opens. The love that you feel comes from self. It’s there all the time. 7 billion times beyond what you’ve ever felt when you’re open. Oh my God, it can flow. Can’t it? Have one person that you’re just blissed out feeling love? Have them say one word or not say one word and see how long you stay open. How fast can our heart close a billionth of it? I’m teaching you everything. It’s because the summary learn experiences are keeping you locked into the summary. Learn experiences and the world hits the summary, learn experiences. And therefore everything seems personal. Everything seems personal. If you’re in an intimate moment and you’re filled with love, you’re melting. You melt. You melt where you melt, you melt back into self. You start feeling more love and so on. And you tell somebody, oh my God, I love you so much. And then you wait to see if they say it back and if they don’t or if they don’t, say it with a tone. Yeah, I love you too.

It stops. It’s teaching you something. You’re closing because you collected these concepts and views and opinions and hopes and dreams and preferences and likes and dislikes based on the similar experiences. And now if somebody just didn’t respond the way you wanted it to and so you gave up the love. I can remember exactly the point in my life very long ago where I said, no, I don’t think that’s a good exchange. I’m going to give up the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced because somebody didn’t match to some of my garbage. No, I’m sorry if I call the ego that that’s what the ego is. It is a leftover sum of your learned experiences that you couldn’t handle, things that you couldn’t handle in life. You stored and made it ego out of it. I couldn’t handle it. I wanted it to happen again. It’s happening again.

I really liked it so much I couldn’t handle it because it was terrible. I didn’t like it. Now let’s go store it inside and it’d be there all the time. It would be fun. So you just start deciding what’s the bottom line of all this? You got a new year, let’s live it a little different. Let’s sit there and say if indeed it’s true that this thing I’m looking at is meaningless, it’s meaningless just happened to be that way because of the experiences you happened to have at that moment. If they were different, it would say different things. So how can you marry that thing? How can you get so involved with it? So you learn to let go. You learn to let go. You just learn. Say, okay, I see you the someone learning experiences. I understand you’re talking that way and you’re a small brat.

I always gave you exactly what you want. I killed myself to get it the way you wanted my whole life. I did everything I could to get everybody outside and everything outside to be the way you want it to be. Okay, that’s like a spoiled child, right? We’re going to change the relationship gradually nicely, but we’re not going to do that anymore. You’re welcome to talk. I’m not going to shut you up, but hey listen, I haven’t listened my whole life. I got to be another way. There is let go. Just learn to relax and let go. Things happen. They hit your cellular experiences. You realize that just happened to be a past experience I had that left this remnants in here. I don’t want it in here. That’s what freedom means, liberated soul. I don’t have this stuff stored in here that’s making me act the way it’s making me act and so on. I’m letting this go. Just keep letting go. Don’t fight it. Just let go. Just relax. You’ll find out there’s more love. Why? Because you’re not closing to the love that you happen to be. The love is back here When you open, it flows when you close, it does. It don’t close. No. You find love. You have to find just the right person who some of their learning experiences matches to. Some of your learning experiences have fun.

So you wake up and you let go and you learn to be open and you learn to not hang out with this thing that you built in there called the ego. And what will happen is you’ll start feeling your consciousness expanding. Why? Your consciousness is the whole universe looking down at you makes me cry. I’m telling you that which is looking through your eyes, is God is the entire universe of consciousness that has created everything. That energy, that consciousness is the same consciousness. It’s just staring at yours and yours and yours and yours. It’s just focusing on your thoughts and your thoughts and your heart and your body and your thing. But if you let go, it expands. I don’t like to expand. That’s a 60 talk expanding consciousness. No cease to constrict your consciousness. It’s already universal. You don’t have to reach universal consciousness.

Make your consciousness universal. Stop focusing down on your thoughts and you’ll find that it expands. It just naturally expands out. And where the great ones win, there are beings who have let go sufficiently to where they popped out. What does that mean? They merged? The word yoga means union, union of your individual consciousness with the universal consciousness, atman with a lowercase a into Atman with a capital A. That’s who you are. There are beings who reach that state. Buddha did. Christ did. And you have that capability. You are that. And now you decide, do you want to go out there and suffer? By marrying your ego and limiting your great consciousness to this, you have a great mind. So the Buddhist Zen, they don’t talk about God as a thing. They use the word mind with a capital M. They say empty mind have heard the term empty mind.

And so they try to reach that state. What does that mean? It means you stop filling your mind with this garbage and all of a sudden it’s completely expansive. Krishna, great Hindu, not Zen. Great enlightened master said the purified mind is no different than the self. The purified mind is no different than the self. It means you let go of the garbage you stored in your mind and all of a sudden consciousness and mind are the same thing. They’re both eternal, they’re expansive. You are so great and you’re wasting your life by focusing yourself on the stupid thing. That’s some of your learned experiences. And then taking everything personal based on that. Alright, have I come close to making the statement? Nothing’s personal. Do you see why you take it personal? Do you understand? You don’t have to. You can let go. You don’t have to marry that thing and your consciousness will naturally, you can do techniques and so on. But if you let go, it naturally goes up. If you cut the tethers on a hot air balloon, what happens? It goes up. You have to pedal, it goes up. That’s what’s going to happen to your being. It as descends, it goes up. Jai.

Tami Simon: You’ve been listening to The Michael Singer Podcast, produced by Sounds True in partnership with Shanti Publications. For more information on Michael’s body of work and all back episodes, please join us at MichaelSingerPodcast.com. Thanks so much for listening. Sounds True: waking up the world.