Tami Simon: Welcome to Season 3 of The Michael Singer Podcast. Michael Singer is the author of the widely influential New York Times bestsellers The Untethered Soul, The Surrender Experiment, and most recently, Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament. Produced in partnership with Shanti Publications, The Michael Singer Podcast brings you select recordings from the Temple of the Universe, a yoga and meditation center that Michael founded in 1975. This episode is on “Navigating the Ocean of Life.”
Sounds True would also like you to know about an extraordinary eight-part video course that we’ve created with Michael Singer. It’s called Living from a Place of Surrender: The Untethered Soul in Action. It’s an online course many people report to be utterly life-changing. You can find out more at michaelsingerpodcast.com. And you can save 15 percent off any Michael Singer program available through Sounds True when you use the code SINGER15 at checkout. That’s Singer, numeral 1, numeral 5. And now, “Navigating the Ocean of Life” with Michael Singer.
Michael Singer: Jai guru dev.
Someday, when you go deep enough within yourself and you get out of the noise enough, you’ll see that your life is like a ship on the open seas in a voyage. You are a separate individual at this stage. Different from the other boats, completely different. It’s your boat. It’s the boat of your life. It has its launch point, which is your birth. It has its docking ending point, which is your death, and it’s always going to be that way. Your birth is what it was. Your death will be what it is. In between, you are on the choppy seas. You’re on exactly the same environment as a sailboat would be in the ocean. There are forces all around you that—if you don’t do something about it—will determine where you go.
It’s not a matter of, “There’s nothing for me to be doing here.” The winds will blow you according to the wind. Where will you end up? Irrelevant. There’s no place meaningful. They will just blow you wherever they blow. Whatever causes the winds to blow will just catch your sail and that’s that. The currents will take you wherever they take you. They’re neither for nor against you. They’re just the currents. But between the wind and the currents, you’re not going anywhere. There’s nothing wrong with the reality of truth. It’s the reality of truth. There are forces of nature. They will unfold and they will hit your boat and they will hit your sails and they will turn your rudder. And if you’re not holding onto the rudder, probably at some point you’ll capsize. Forget that you won’t go anywhere that’s meaningful, you just capsize.
So that’s your starting position. It’s going to be very deep where we’re going tonight. This is very subtle stuff. You see, that’s your life. There are all sorts of forces that will blow you all over the place. So if you decide you’re sailing, you’re going to go to Australia and you don’t hold onto the sail and hold onto the rudder, guess where you’re not going? Australia. That’s as simple as that. Wherever the winds happen to blow, whatever the currents happen to do, you’re not going anywhere. It’s just nothing.
So it is the same with your life. Though we don’t like to look at it that way, it’s the same with your life. At any given moment, the winds will change directions. Something will happen. Your heart will go somewhere, your thoughts will go somewhere, an event will take place; it scares you. Something is going to happen all the time. Just like you’re on that ocean, something’s going to happen. Sometimes it’s little things, sometimes it’s big things. And if they’re big winds and you’re not sailing, they’re going to blow you off course but you are the one who set the course.
So we’re going to talk about all this. I just want you to see how it’s the same. All right? It’s the same. This is what’s going on. This is your ship. You are the captain. Only you—you are the captain and there are all these forces all around you. So how does one sail? One, does one sail? Yes, you have to sail your boat. Muktananda Baba said, “A bird has two wings. It cannot fly with one wing ever. No bird can fly with one wing. It requires two wings.” He said, “Likewise, your life, your spiritual path—there’s two wings: one is grace and the other is self-effort.” So don’t argue: is it grace or self-effort? You can’t fly with one wing either. No amount of self-effort can take you there. No amount of grace can take you there. It is a balance between the wings and the forces of self-effort and grace.
Guess what sailing is? I want to talk about sailing. You ever sailed? I’m talking about a sailboat, not a motorboat. Sailboat. When you sail, there are a lot of forces. Your job as the captain of that boat is not to make the currents be where you want them. Are you kidding? Since when is that the job of a sailor to be God and make the currents go the way they want them to go? It’s not your job and it better not be your job because you ain’t going to do it. Another thing: it’s not your job to make the winds blow the way you want them to, is it? It’s not your job. You can’t do it that’s why it’s not your job, OK?
I mean, I guess that if it were really true that I could just sit there and think, “Wind two degrees north, four degrees. Whew! There it goes,” then I better learn that sort of thing because that would make sailing very, very easy. But that ain’t what happens. The winds belong to the wind, the currents belong to the current. That is not your job. You must be doing your job if you’re going to balance this self-effort/grace thing. So there are forces but they’re not under your control.
Well, what is under my control? What is under your control is how taut you hold the sail, at what angle you hold the sail, whether you come about, which side of the boat is the sail going to be on as you navigate the winds. It is up to you to hold the rudder a certain way so that both the effect of the winds and the currents have an effect. There are things that are under your control. I wrote about this in The Untethered Soul a little bit, but I couldn’t really write about it enough for someone to realize, “This is exactly what’s going on.”
When Baba says, “There’s grace and there’s self-effort,” there’s wind, there’s current, there’s forces, that’s grace. It’s that forces that exist that are there that have nothing to do with you. They’re there for you to utilize. They’re free. They’re there, all right?
And then there’s self-effort. How you hold the sail, how you hold the rudder, how you go about your business of sailing. See? It takes both, doesn’t it? Right? If there is no wind, you’re going nowhere. If there is nobody sailing, you ain’t going anywhere. Ultimately, you’ll end up in the same place—drowned underwater—but you won’t end up in any destination. So you can see it with sailing, all right?
So the question becomes: how do you sail? Because I’m telling you, it’s the same. How you sail through your life, the same forces, how you work with this is very similar to learning to sail and to the forces that are going on with that.
So let’s just put life aside and come back to sailing. We see there are these forces and we see that there are these implements that you can work with. The sail, the angles, the rudders, et cetera, are things that you can deal with. The wind doesn’t deal with those; the wind blows into those. Same thing with the currents. So how do you sail?
All right. The first and very, very important part of sailing is you better decide where you want to go. I don’t know how to tell you to sail, even if you’re the best sailor that ever lived. If you want to go to Sydney, Australia, OK, we stand a chance. But if you don’t have any idea where to go and you do not have a polestar and you’re not headed anywhere, you’re not going to go anywhere, are you? So it’s pretty obvious that you have an intention. The Buddhists call it intention. You have an underlying intention. There must be an underlying intention. Otherwise, you have no direction, therefore there is no way to sail.
In fact, the definition of sailing is to know how to utilize the forces of nature in order to take you where you want to go. How’s that? I wonder if Webster calls it that. That is what sailing is. The best sailor that could possibly live is the one that knows how to ultimately optimize the way the wind is blowing, the way the currents are flowing, and the way the boat has its strength—to put these together in a way that best takes the sail or where they’re trying to go. That’s what it means to sail. So in your life, you must have this—you must have a direction.
Most people don’t. Most people don’t. Most people don’t do this. Most people are not far enough back to even begin to understand this. Most people are drowning or about to, and what they are trying to do is not drown. Now, that’s not sailing. If I open up Webster and say, “What’s sailing?” “Managing to not drown.” Wow, that’s weird. It sounds like somebody did something wrong already if that’s the best you can do is to manage to not drown. Do understand—most people, that’s what they do with their life. They manage not to get hurt too much and to have some good things happen. They’re not going anywhere. It’s all an attempt to avoid the negative and make it through without too much pain, too many problems, and every once in a while there’s something I want but it’s very short-lived. It’s something. “Oh, I want that. It caught my attention.”
But in terms of having a purpose-driven life, in terms of having an overall view, this is where I would like to go by the grace of God, meaning the forces that exist. This is where I would like to navigate my life—the boat of my life. Are you there yet? Of course not. That’s why you’re navigating to be there. That’s why this whole thing that people say, “Well, I’m not ready for that yet. I’m not ready for that.” Well, that’s absurd. Of course, you’re not in Sydney. You’re over here somewhere else, all right? It just is the question of, “Where do you want to end up?”
Is every part of your being ready for that? Of course not. You would already be there. It’s a question of having intention. It’s a question of having the clarity to see that based on what you know now, based on the clarity you have now, the clearest you’ve ever been, where do you want to aim your ship? Because if you don’t aim it there, you ain’t ever going there.
You have enough trouble going there if you do aim it there because you got to learn how to sail and bring all these forces together. But I’m telling you, if you do not aim at a polestar that is beyond this little thing that’s going on around you—because I’m telling you the little thing that’s going around you is just, “I don’t want to get hurt too much and what I want now.” What you want keeps changing, so you won’t go anywhere and what you’re afraid of keeps changing. So if you run away … Here, if you don’t do what I’m talking about, then what your life is—steer away from danger and steer toward what’s attracting you.
- I don’t want to lecture you. Where are you going to go if you do that? How many things have you been attracted to? How often does that change? How many things have you been afraid of? How often does that change? If you keep steering away from what you’re afraid of and toward what you want right now, where are you going? Do you see? The answer is nothing. Nowhere, you’re not going anywhere. You’re just piddling around. There will be no direction, no force, and do you see? The default is that’s what you do. The default is that the little self runs your life.
What is the little self? The sum of your learned experiences, the one I always talk about. There’s some scars, these impressions that have been made on my psyche. And because of those, I am attracted to some things and repulsed by some things and it keeps changing. It changes day to day, minute to minute. And then if anything happens outside, then that becomes it.
That is what is going to happen by default. The little self will do everything. It will determine everything but it doesn’t have any vision, it doesn’t have any direction. Its direction is the avoidance of pain and the experience of pleasure—that’s its direction. There’s no direction to that. You don’t end up anywhere. If you go through your entire life and what you try to do is experience as much joy or pleasure as you can and avoid as much pain as you can, you had a relatively OK life and I hope you did well at it. You didn’t go anywhere, you didn’t achieve anything; it’s just a non-negative. It’s what it boils down to.
So with sailing, it’s the same. If you just react, “Well, why’d you go over there?”
“It was easy. The winds were blowing that way.”
“Well, why didn’t you make it?”
“They stopped blowing.”
“Oh, are you helpless? Is that what’s going on?”
In other words, you don’t know there’s such a thing as sailing. You don’t know that for every single wind that blows and every single temperature and weather pattern and current, there is a way to sail optimally to get you where you want to go. Do you understand that? Or at least, to not take you off course.
Sometimes if the wind is not blowing in a given direction, your best bet is to take down the sail, lower the sails. Why? Because where the wind is blowing, I know it’s going to take me away from where I want to go. So maybe I don’t know how to use this wind to take me where I want to go, but I know where I want to go.
God, I hope you’re hearing this. It’s so clear. Because what happens is what you then did when you did that very act I just talked about of taking down those sails, well, why would you take down the sails because you’re supposed to be sailing? No, I’m supposed to be going to Sydney, Australia. I’m using sailing as my method of going to Sydney, Australia. My job is to work with the forces that be to go with the intention, with the direction I set. But then, you have to sit here in the heat for a while. That’s life and that’s the best I can do to sail in that direction—is to sit here in the heat for a while.
If I pick those up and say, “Well, there’s a nice wind going that way.” It’s easy to say and it’s fun for a while. Do you see why this is exactly life? It’s exactly what’s going on. It is forces and will balancing together, and what it boils down to is intention. What it boils down to is being wise enough that during a time of clarity, I’m going to be very … Let’s talk about that.
Well, how do I set my intention? Especially, Mickey, you’re always teaching. I don’t know anything. I only know some of my learned experiences, so how can I possibly set my intention? What’s nice about this journey in terms of self-effort and grace—you can only do the best that you can. You can never do better than the best that you can. That’s all that is asked of you in anything you do, including this.
So at any given moment, you look at the clearest that you’ve ever seen it. Maybe it was during meditation, maybe it was after a clear meditation, maybe it was a particular day you had where it’s just on a clear day—I can see forever. You have had more clarity sometimes than other times. How do you know? You know, don’t you? You know.
There’s no emotions bothering you for or against, there’s no personal noise going on, there’s just a sense of I’m standing higher up in the mountain right now and I can see clearer. What do you see when you look from there? That’s what I want to know because that’s where you should be headed. And guess what? That does not change every day. You hear me? It changes very slowly as you become wiser and get closer towards your goal.
When they shoot the rocket ship up toward the space station, they don’t spend as much time in the beginning as they do right at the end when they’re lining the thing up. They go real slow when they’re lining it up. Do you ever see them dock the shuttle at the space station? It takes a long time—those last five feet, right? Two degrees, one, everything got targets, they got the whole thing lined up. How come it doesn’t take that long when they take off?
Because when you’re on this long journey, you can adjust along the way. It’s not until you get to those final things, it becomes subtler and subtler. So of course, you don’t see where you’re going completely. And of course, not all of your being wants to go there all the time and if you wait around until the whole of your being wants to go somewhere, you’re going nowhere because you have many, many aspects of your being. All these different impressions you’ve taken up during your life are still influencing what you like and what you don’t like and where you want to go and what you’re afraid of going.
There is a thing called clarity. Do you have absolute clarity? Absolutely not. Do you have clarity all the time? Never. Not until the end. Are there moments of clarity? There are moments of clarity. There are times in your life where you are clearer than others, all right? That’s when you make your decisions. That’s when you navigate. That’s when you adjust your compass. That’s when you set the polestar—is during your clearest times. Nobody’s asking anything more than what you can see during your clearest times.
Now what? Now you need to learn to sail. I said the first thing you need to do is to set your polestar. What are you aiming toward? Because otherwise, it’s meaningless. That first act of sailing is having a direction. Then the second is, “OK, I can’t control the forces of the wind, I can’t control the currents, I can’t control the weather. Therefore, my job is to do the best I can with what is under my control, with what is given for me to do.” How do you know it’s given for you to do? Because your hand’s on the rudder, because you’re holding the rope, and because it’s up to you to call coming about when it’s time to come about.
And so the question becomes: how do you sail to get into that direction optimally under all the forces and conditions that are given to you? That is what’s meant by sailing and that’s what needs to be learned. That’s what you need to learn. Not constantly changing, “Where am I going to go?” Not wishing the wind would go somewhere else, not getting mad at the currents because they’re doing … That’s not your job. You must fit within your job. So it’s not a matter of no will. It’s not. It’s this whole thing about doing and not doing, this whole balance of those two forces of grace and self-effort. So you have a job in this, so you do your job.
These are like the principles of life. You do have a job in this. There is self-effort. There is a place for will. You do have the right to influence some of the forces around you. Not as big as the wind and not as much as the current, right? But at any given moment—and that’s a very important part, by the way. The only forces you have any influence over or—right now, the wind is blowing right now a certain way. How you hold that sail and how you hold that rudder better not be about how the wind was yesterday and it better not be how the wind will be tomorrow. That’s why “be here now” is all the teachings because it is the only place that your will really has any influence. It doesn’t make any difference to me that you guess what the currents are going to be like later and then you adjust and learn how to do what they’re going to be like later. Because 99 percent of the time, your guess is wrong and you capsize because you weren’t dealing with what’s happening now.
Now is when the forces are happening and that is when your interaction has an influence. What influence does your action have on the forces that happened before? None. The forces are already over. That’s why I always teach you—don’t dwell on the past. I don’t care what the past did, good or bad. It’s not now. It’s not affecting what’s now except in your mind. So you better be conscious and be present about what’s happening now because that’s where your force and your influence can have an effect. What I care about is how the wind is blowing right now and what you are doing about it to head toward where you decided to go, that’s what it means to sail. There’s not a single part of sailing that’s about the past and there’s not a single part of sailing that’s about the future. It is about now.
Does everybody see that? OK? It’s really neat to see how true this analogy is. It will take you the whole way.
So now, we have done the following things: we have aimed our ship, we know where we’re going, and now we see we’ve come to the present and we experience the forces that are blowing. We’re wise enough to be present to experience now—reality. Now is called reality. That’s what it’s called and you better be sailing with reality. Well, I go, “That’s the only place there is.” All right? So now we’re here. So I’m telling you there is … And this is what I want to talk about now that we [have] framed it—what is my job? What can I do?
Well, first of all, you can only do from within the envelope that is yours. I can only do from within the envelope that is mine, that is under the reach of my will, that’s under the reach of my interaction. And what you’re going to see is it’s really very simple, but we don’t make it simple because we don’t adhere to all those things that I just said so far. Even though they all are the truth and you know it, we don’t adhere to not wishing it was the past. We don’t adhere to not running away from the past or trying to sail to the future. We don’t adhere to that and plus, we don’t adhere very well to our polestar. That’s why it gets so complicated.
But let’s make believe just for tonight that you have picked that polestar during your time of clarity and you see what it is and you are able to delineate the difference between want, not want, and reality. And you have been wise enough to see that the only place that your will makes any difference is when you’re dealing with reality. The forces that are happening now—how do you interact with them? And you’ve asked to learn how to sail.
Well that’s technical stuff, but the answer is very simple. What do I do when the wind seems to me to be blowing in the direction of Sydney, which is where I picked? What do I do? Well, you make hay when the sun shines. We call them favorable winds. You have favorable winds. Learn how to angle the sail and how taut to pull it, to optimize how you are going in the direction that you wish to go during favorable winds and hold the rudder just right and enjoy the beauty of the experience of moving towards your goal. There. I don’t know how to do that. You can learn how to do that. I don’t know exactly what the angle of the sail is but you’ll feel it.
That’s another thing you’re going to find—is there’s this thing called “the sweet spot,” where—just perfect—that wind is hitting that sail at the right angle, you got the right tautness, you’re sitting in the right position on the boat, and you’re holding the rudder just right. And all of a sudden it goes, “Whoosh!,” and you can just feel it. It’s like a rush of Shakti. You’re just there. You’re in it. You’re in it. Very good.
And you’ve got your navigation going on, you got your sexton, you’ve got the polestar, everything’s working. Good. Does that mean that it’s always going to be like that? No, that is not what it means to sail. I think any of us could play golf if every time we hit the ball and it went in the hole. That’s not what it means to play golf—to get hole-in-ones, right? It means you can always do this thing called sailing. So there’s the first scenario.
Now, let’s take the other extreme, which is the winds went dead. All right? Or the winds are blowing in the opposite direction. What am I going to do? They’re blowing in the opposite direction. I’m trying to go south; they’re going north. Well, let’s see. You have two choices. You have few choices, actually. One is, “Eh, let’s go north.” All right? In other words, let go of your polestar. Why? It’s easier. Yeah. It’s easier right now, you’re not going anywhere. We already talked about that. It will go nowhere. It won’t go anywhere. It will not optimize anything. You will just be lost at sea. So that’s one possibility—is change your polestar and just go with the flow and take the easy way.
That is never ever the right thing to do in terms of optimizing your whole life—in terms of optimizing what you achieve in the direction of your life. You let go of your aspiration, you let go of your intention, so you can’t get there. Basically, you get down to the fact where you’ll catch on very quickly that the wind is blowing the wrong way—I’m not willing to compromise where I’m going so the best I can do is take down the sail. The best I can do is batten up the hatches and sit this one through. And there are times that that’s the best that you can do.
And believe it or not, even though you may not feel like you’re going towards your goal, you are. I told you: you can only do the best that you can. Sometimes non-negative is positive, all right? So you’re not going in the opposite direction, you’re not going away from where you know you want to go, therefore it’s the best that you can do. And then you sit that through and the next thing you know, the winds come, you pick them up. So those are the yin and the yang. And then, in between there’s all these other—what if the wind is blowing a little bit to the southeast and you wind up going to the south?
Talk to sailors. I’m not a sailor. I don’t know. But you talk to sailors and I guarantee you that’s what sailing is—that wind is not always blowing exactly where you want to go and you don’t let down the sails just because it’s not exactly northwest two degrees. There are ways to angle that sail. There are ways to bring up more sails. There are ways to put the higher sails, not the lower sails. There are ways to hold the rudder. There are ways to do all kinds of things so that you can offset the fact that it’s not blowing in exactly the direction you want to go and get the most out of it that you can get. The point is you are staying true to your aspiration, you’re staying true to the polestar, you’re staying true to your goal. Therefore, what’s going to happen over time?
Tami Simon: Faced with life’s challenges and uncertainties, many of us feel quite stressed and overwhelmed, but does it have to be this way? With his newest book, Living Untethered, Michael Singer has written a follow-up to the spiritual classic The Untethered Soul, taking us within to our still and liberated center. To learn more about this book and Michael Singer’s other offerings, please visit living-untethered.com.
Michael Singer: How much time? Completely irrelevant. If you are always doing the best that you can and you’re staying true to the direction that you aspire to, it doesn’t matter how much time it is. It’s the time it took. It’s what it is. You did the best that you can, that’s what’s going on. You aim that way, you are true to it, and that’s the best that you can do. By definition, every moment you did the best that you could do so you can’t do any better.
So this mind that’s sitting there measuring time and worrying about this—you don’t do that. You just worry about that when you let go of your aspirations or you do something crazy. So instead, you look and you see what [the] sailing of your life is—is you have a job and the number one part of that job is to understand, “I set a goal long ago. It is still the clearest that I’ve ever been. Therefore, I will make every decision,” I mean every decision, “in sailing to do the best that I can to aspire toward that goal.”
Well, what happens if as you go and you get closer, you notice that your clarity becomes, “Oh, God. I didn’t see that there was this before. This is how I should adjust that.” That’s what’s supposed to happen. It’s not a matter of being dogmatic. You don’t sit there and set a goal and never budge. And when you get more clarity, you adjust accordingly, right? In other words, there’s nothing unholy about having more knowledge and getting more clarity and making adjustments.
Ultimately, what was your aspiration? To go to the highest, most beautiful place I can go with my life. That was it. You picked it before the best that you could and now as you get more knowledge and more clarity … Which you should get more knowledge and more clarity, if you’re not, you’re doing something wrong. You get more knowledge, more clarity; there’s an adjustment. And generally not a 360 or 180. It’s generally you get more and you adjust. And you see, “I’m still headed that way but now I see better how to get there.” That’s what happens. If you were clear, you set your aspiration for something very beautiful but you only know some of your learned experiences so you didn’t know it all.
So as you get more experience, especially as you get closer to your goal, then your adjustments—you make the adjustments. So it’s easy, it’s simple, if you are willing to do your job. Now, sounds so easy. You just sail the best you can to where you want to go. What’s so hard about it? Because there’s going to be a wind that blows, that really looks like fun, that looks interesting, that catches your attention. How much does it catch my attention? Enough to distract you from where you were headed. Well, what will happen? Did I do something wrong? If something blows across my bow that distracts me positively or scares me. I’m afraid to go that … Either one. Did I do something wrong? No. How could you have done anything wrong? It is what it is. There’s no guilt. There’s no anything. It’s just this is life—this is the unfolding of the forces, and this is the reaction that took place inside of you given the level of evolution and consciousness and clarity that you now have. That’s what happened. That’s what’s taking place.
That’s not the issue. The issue is not, “Did something happen? Did something catch your attention? Did something scare you?” The question always is, “What’d you do about it?”
And so, it comes right down to: how committed are you to that polestar? That’s what it comes down to. That’s more important than knowing how to hold the sail. Why? Because if you’re not committed to the polestar, it doesn’t matter how you hold a sail. You’re not going where you want to go. So that’s why I laid them out in the order I did.
The number one is that you are committed to your clarity. Well, what should that be? I wouldn’t touch that with a million … Notice I have not said one word about what that is. That’s for you to see. Because unless you see it, you ain’t doing it. It’s not something the Bible said. It’s not something somebody taught you, right? You can get some clarity. Others can help share their clarity. You can absolutely be inspired and see stuff, but you got to come there within yourself.
There’s two things required here. One is that you have some clarity—and you all have some clarity. Everyone has a relative amount of clarity. That’s not a matter—whether somebody has more than somebody else, that’s irrelevant. You could have tremendous clarity in one area—way more than him—and he could have more clarity in one area than you. Not could; you do.
Everybody has some scars to work through. Everybody has different blind spots. Everybody has different impressions that will cause them to see and not see. Each man is within himself his own path. So it’s not like that. What it’s like is it’s yours. You’re in there. What do you want to do in there? Well, at least you better be committed to your clarity or you ain’t going anywhere.
And so, you see this and so the question becomes based on what clarity you have seen, where you set your direction. Can you hold on when you don’t want to? Will there be times that your lower self shadows [and] obscures your clarity? Yes. Yes, by definition. That’s why we call it your lower self, because it can do that. Right? It’s not like the whole of your being is committed to your clarity. There’s no way. Your goal was set during one of those terrible moments of clarity and now, you saw too much. Careful, right? You saw too much and you saw that it could be very beautiful or whatever it was. And so, you aim that way.
Well, it’s not going to stay that way. It’s not that it might not stay that way, it is not going to stay that way. You’re going to go through times of darkness, through times of un-clarity, through times when fear starts to overcome you and it starts to cause you to question whether you’re willing or able.
So, it doesn’t matter. It comes one of two ways. “I can’t do this. I thought I could but I can’t do this.” Or the mind’s much trickier than that. It says, “I didn’t really ever want to do that. I was kidding myself. This is really what I want to do. I see it now.” Obviously, we’ve all seen all of it, haven’t we? That’s what’s going to determine where you end up. What? How you steer through that.
Well, how does one steer through that? This is what all of the entire spiritual path is about—is what we’re talking right now. That is what Sadhana is, is the willful practices you do to make it through and keep your goal fixed. So how do I be sure, as much as possible anyways, that I am doing my best to stay true to the polestar? Well, you start this way. You start by understanding that there are going to be times when it doesn’t look like you want to. Do you understand that? I don’t care how much you wanted to once, there are going to be times that you don’t want to, period.
There are going to be forces that unfold that cause your mind to want to do something else and look at it a different way and et cetera. So the question becomes, “OK. Now, I understand. I’m a wise being. I really, really have set my polestar and I see that’s where I want to go and I’m going there. I see it and I am going there. Now, to do that, I have to understand the forces that are around me and I have to admit there have been and will be times in which I don’t feel as much inspiration as I feel now. I don’t feel as much clarity as I do now. What do I do now?” Now, in the present, not later. Don’t ever put it off. “What do I do now to assure that I have a higher probability of making it through those currents?” You’re not looking for the future; you’re doing it now, but it’s still with a right understanding.
And so, you start to understand, “Well, this is a tough journey.” You’ll be going through a lot of stuff. It’s a lifetime. And so, you set patterns. It’s one thing to have intention; it’s another thing to apply that intention by setting patterns now. Habits—habits can help you or hurt you. If habits are just the flow of the junk that’s going on, habits will destroy you. If you set habits based upon clarity, ones that will aim you toward where you’re going and you adhere to those habits when you don’t want to, guess what will happen? You will have made it through the choppy seas and you’ll see, “Geez, I don’t know what happened. I just kept my head down, kept doing what I was doing.”
So you aim not just your vision, you aim your environment. You be sure to establish an environment around you that, should you go through times of non-clarity, is strong enough to carry you across. It’s like a bridge over troubled waters. You understand that?
Now, you’re understanding how to sail. This is sailing, right? You’ve become an expert, right? So there is stuff you can do now that will help later, but it’s stuff you do now. During times of clarity where you feel inspired and really clear, those are the times to break the bad habits and make the good ones.
One, because you see the clarity, so you can see how your behavior patterns either will or will not take you where you want to go—where you really want to go, not where your little self wants to go, but where you really want to go. So you have this clarity and you also have the inspiration.
There are times you could take on a mountain. There are times you’d be scared of a fly. Don’t make decisions during your times of weakness and you get to start catching on. But what about if I really get caught up in something? Is it a good time to change my habits and my patterns and make decisions? What if I’m really scared of something? I’m just scared to death and it took over my whole being. I’m just afraid that I’m going to miss something. Should I be adjusting my course? What are you? Crazy? This is how clear it becomes. It’s almost as though you get to the point where you say—almost, there’s no absolute, so I can only say almost—“I’m watching my lower self.”
There are times that it is clearer than other times. When it really wants something and needs something. “Ehhhh. It ain’t doing so good, I might as well be drunk. I am. I’m drunk with that.” When it gets scared and it’s … Anything, “I just don’t want to deal with that. I don’t want to deal with that. I’m so scared. Take it away. Ugh ugh.” Not very clear.
So obviously, there are degrees of it. And so, you set down a rule for yourself. This is what it means to be a great force, a great sailor. While that noise is going on, nothing will change. I am not changing the patterns of my life based on what I know is not going to take me where I want to go. Fear and need, fear and desire will never take you where you want to go. They will take you away from your long-term goals. Fear is very short-lived and desire is very short-lived. Need, desire, whatever you want to call it. All right? Attraction, that sort of stuff.
So you just catch on. You say, “Those are the times that try men’s souls. Those are the times that I’m going to adhere just by wrought.” I don’t know how else to say it. Sometimes, that’s the best you can do and you just understand, “That noise inside of me—I know it has done nothing but cause trouble my entire life and it will do nothing but destroy my long-term goals of where I want to go.”
And so, I’m not going to adjust the ship. That’s why people do Sadhana. I understand why that’s taught as a core—keeping regular morning and evening meditations and regular times ultimately at the same time during the day at various times—not whenever I want to.
You don’t want to leave things to your own personal self and to just the winds that happen to be blowing right now. You want to set the course where you want to go and you hold onto that. You hold to that. You don’t hold to it to the extent that if you get some more clarity, that you’re afraid of the clarity because it could change your course. That’s dogma again, and path is very dynamic. You got to be willing to keep your eyes open. But you don’t ever change those basic principles of, “I know that my lower self and what it’s afraid of. And what it wants will never ever take me where I want to go. See, it doesn’t even want to take me where I want to go. It wants to take me where it wants to go. That’s all it wants to do.”
What your lower self wants to do is right now avoid fear and right now, [and] satisfy need. “I don’t want to wait one minute, I’ll make any adjustment.” That’s what your lower self’s got to say. It will never ever take you anywhere. And so, you make no decisions based on that. You hold onto that rope. It’s not a matter of, “How do I know exactly how to sail?” I’m telling you—well, someday you get to the point all you have to do is not blow it purposely. How about if I go to that extreme? It’s not true. You’re not clear enough. You aren’t clear enough. You just don’t do it. You know darn well that thing’s not going to take you where you want to go. You said it 63 times. You know. You understand habits. You understand how it works. That something you know is taking you off course and 63 times in your life you said, “Ah, I’ll just go off course a little and come back.”
And every single time you went off, it took you halfway away and you never came fully back. It just keeps adjusting you further and further away. And you’ve seen this and you know this, and you see other people that sit there in good intention and then go off and try to grab something that’s off course and think, “They can have both, right?” You will find out you can never have both.
Now, life might blow things a certain way that looks to somebody else that you got everything, you got both. You can never have both. You can never both aim toward where you’re going and also steer the other way when you want to. It will affect your course. So you just decide each time. It’s in the moment. Things will come up, it’s not your fault. The question is, what do you do about it? And a wise person knows exactly what they’re going to do about it, stay on course. Why? Because that’s what I decided and these little things are not going to take me where I want to go. So as much as possible, every time, that’s my choice.
And there’s no more confusion, there’s no more anything. And you will have times of more clarity and you will know that there [is] more clarity and you will adjust your course. It’s as simple as that, but that will not happen due to fear or desire. You want to know what the hardest times on the spiritual path are? The hardest times in this journey are when you set your course and you know how to get there and you know what you’re supposed to be doing. And for some ungodly reason, all the forces that are and all the balance of going in that direction is where your lower self wants to go—that’s the most confusing of all times. It’s like you’re sailing and used to sail away from him or her, but for some reason, God set it up to where that what you’re afraid of and you’d want to run away from is exactly where you would go—is in the direction of where all the forces towards your goal are going—and you go, “Ehhh.”
It happens sometimes. Rare, but it does happen. What do you do? Hold fast to the clarity that you cannot … It’s not a matter of not doing what your lower self says; it’s a matter of sailing towards your goal. So if it looks like that’s the sailing toward my goal, that’s where I wanted to go, but somehow my fear or my desire happens to be lining up, just turn away from your fear. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. I know it gets confusing during those times but you just absolutely, to the best of your ability—that’s all it takes. God asked for nothing more than that—to the best of your ability, you aim that ship and you stay firm on that course. All right?
Well, what if I’m wrong? You can’t be wrong if you’re doing it to the best of your ability. The rest belongs to nature, the rest belongs to God, and you’re going to see that if you are sitting there aiming towards your goal and forces are coming up, you’re making the best decisions you can, and you missed it not for any reason. You weren’t weak, you didn’t give into something else, but it just got a little cloudy and you aimed a little bit. I’m telling you: every single time, you don’t know where it’s coming from, a wind will blow you back on course. You earned that right. It’s not a matter of you’re doing it. It is the balance of self-effort and intention with grace.
Now, you see what’s meant by that? So you don’t have to worry about that. Here’s all you need to worry about—is that you purposely don’t adhere to the clarity that you see. And it will happen where you somehow play with fire a little too much and the desire or the fear purposely are confusing the clarity, and you know what’s going on but you don’t want to see it.
“Oh Lord, oh Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace but not yet. Not right now. Teach me Your will and how to do it, but not right now.” That’s what I’m talking about, and you will see that. Do you understand that? You will see that game will get played inside of you. Right? So it’s not a matter of always getting it right. You just have to not purposely get it wrong. There’s a lot of room and every one of you know what I’m talking about. I’m hoping I’m taking away your hiding spaces. I can’t teach you anything other than what you already know, but I could put a spotlight on it—that which you’d rather not see.
And so, you just look at it. And so it strictly becomes a question of: how much trouble do I want to cause myself? I can actually remember the stages of my growth where I saw that clarity which was, “I don’t have to be that strong. I don’t have to always listen, but I sure suffer later because I know I’m not going to give up my course. I know I’m not. I know that’s really where I want to go, period.”
So this question of: how much room is there to play around? What you see is if you don’t stay on your course, you go off course and then there’s pain and it’s hard. You made it hard. It’s always easier to stay on course. When you’re sailing, it’s always easier to stay on course. Right? It’s not really easier to go off course and then come back. It takes a lot to do that. And so to me, that’s what karma is. I told you guys, “Don’t worry about karma, just worry about doing the best you can.” Karma is that you will fully went off course. Now, your penalty, your karma, your problem is to get back on course.
Well, it’s hard. It could be so hard you don’t do it. And then, you go further off course and you eventually get to the point where you realize, “It’s not worth going off course. The cost-benefit analysis doesn’t work out well. Therefore, I am better off doing the best that I can …” Notice it’s not the best—I said you could, it’s not the best your parents said you could. It’s the best that you can and you know what that is. I’m only asking for that, but you don’t give that. You understand? There’s numerous times where you see, “Eh, I’m not going to do the best I can.” All right? It’s hard to admit, isn’t it? Right? You just don’t take a breath when you’re supposed to take the breath. You don’t keep your mouth shut when you’re supposed to keep your mouth shut. You don’t let your heart go to a higher level when it needs to go a higher level. You don’t step back when you should. It’s just—you know what’s going on.
It’s just there’s a part of you, your lower self—that it’s a habit. It’s a habit that it wants its way, that it wants what it wants, and you will eventually see that’s the only thing that keeps you from sailing. It is not the way the winds blow. The winds blow the way they blow. There will be yin, there will be yang; there will be favorable winds, there will be unfavorable winds. There’s still a way to sail. It’s not true that the unfavorable winds blew you off course. They can’t blow you off course. They can only slow it down a little bit, but that’s how it’s meant to be. And someday, you’ll find out that they didn’t slow it down. You know how perfect it is when you talk about nature and grace? You’ll find out someday that there are favorable winds and that there is grace for you to help you along your way.
And there are unfavorable winds, and you’ll find out that they’re grace and they’re there for you because you need to go through and learn the talents that are necessary during those unfavorable winds. And that every single thing that took place in terms of the currents and the wind and the nature of things was all the highest it could be to take you to the goal. That if they had not taken place, you would not have been able to get there as quickly as you did.
So it’s not even true. Even when you’re sitting there in the doldrums and the wind’s not blowing, you will later see that was the highest thing that could happen to you at that time. When it’s all said and done, every single force of nature—of life that unfolds around you—is for the purpose of you going beyond yourself.
The trouble is, you don’t always use it for that, do you? And so, you start to set certain rules, which don’t sound interesting to you. But once you get inside of them, they’re very beautiful. Little things like if it’s just for me, I ain’t touching it. Your lower self will not take you where you want to go. It’s not a matter of a balance. It’s not a matter of, “Don’t we have to adjust spiritual and non-spiritual?” and, “Don’t I have natural needs?” or, “Aren’t I human?” That’s how people talk that will never, ever reach their goal. It’s called compromise and weakness.
You just sit there and say, “I can see whether this is part of the forces of nature and unfolding of things or this is just some scars. It’s just me. It’s just something I want,” and you’ll really start to taste it when it starts saying, “Well, I don’t care what the penalty is.” That’s how lower self talks. “I don’t care. I don’t care what happens. I don’t even care what happens. I want this.” And that’s a two-year-old’s talk, right? And you just look at it and you realize, “This is not going to take me where I want go. There’s no way it’s going to take me where I want to go.”
And so, do you have the will … See? Self-effort. Do you have the will to at least not go where you know you don’t want to go? Forget anybody else, right? Do you know what the answer is? No. That’s what Sadhana is—is gaining that commitment and that self-effort and that strength. And it does it by doing mantra, it does it by keeping satsang, it does it by whatever. All these things build within you a strength that says, “Yes. I may not always know where to go but I know where not to go and I ain’t playing around with it, especially when I want to. Especially when it says, ‘Oh. This time, play around with it.’”
And you just get to the point where you build the strength and commitment inside yourself where what you are about is, “That’s where I’m going.” And then all of a sudden, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years go by, you look around you and everything around you is in harmony. Everything—your entire environment, all the people, everything around you is a force, a vector that’s taking you where you want to go. God did that. You did that. If the forces of nature weren’t helping you, you’re just going to sit there and go nowhere. If you weren’t willing to let go of yourself and hold on to that commitment and that clarity, you’re not going to go either.
Now, do you see what Baba meant? Grace and self-effort—those two wings. All right. So I hope you understand some of these things and you become great sailors. You are the captain of your ship. See how beautiful it is? It’s not that you’re not the captain of your ship, it’s just you’re not the captain of the wind, you’re not the captain of the currents, you’re not the captain of the weather, you’re not the captain of the temperature. You understand that? You’re just the captain of the ship.
But it’s not that you’re not the captain of the ship. You see the difference? All right. So there’s no guilt, there’s no shame. No this, there’s no that. There’s just—are you or are you not willing to pick that goal? You have to set it beyond yourself. You have to set … It has to be an aspiration, an intention. It has to be something great. It has to do with what’s the greatest part of your being that you’ve ever seen? Aim it at that. If you saw it for one second, aim at that. Be where you end up fully and totally, the purest you can reach. Always reach beyond yourself to reach the unreachable star.
So you have to decide: do you want to do something great with your life? Do you want to do something great? Do you want to make yourself into something great? There is no end to how great you are. Do you understand that? But if you aim below yourself, then how could you ever achieve? I once gave a talk on this. It’s all about how high you aim. If you aim high and you don’t get there, you still reach to the highest. If you aim low, you’ll never get there. You can fall a little short of the high you aimed, but you can never go above where you aimed because that’s where you aimed. It’s not going to happen.
So always reach for the highest, always dream the impossible dream in terms of what you can become and in terms of who you are because you’re something very great and you just aim toward that. And then, you learn how to sail. And I hope you learned something tonight about sailing. All right. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE].
Tami Simon: You’ve been listening to The Michael Singer Podcast, produced by Sounds True in partnership with Shanti Publications. Sounds True is the co-publisher of Michael Singer’s newest book, Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament. We’ve also joined with him to produce an extraordinary eight part video course. It’s called Living From a Place of Surrender: The Untethered Soul in Action.
You can find out more at michaelsingerpodcast.com. And you can save 15 percent off any Michael Singer program available through Sounds True when you use the code SINGER15 at checkout. That’s singer numeral 1, numeral 5, at checkout. The music you heard on this podcast is the song, “Giving It All” by Be Still the Earth. Thank you so much for listening. Sounds True: Waking up the world.
