Tami Simon: Welcome to Season Three 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 Releasing the Burden of Worry. 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% off any Michael Singer program available through Sounds True when you use the code Singer15 at checkout. That’s Singer, numeral one, numeral five. And now, releasing the Burden of Worry with Michael Singer.
Michael Singer: Jai Guru Dev. Ultimately, what it means to grow spiritually is that you don’t have to be there. You have to decide do you want to be there or not. It may sound like such a funny question, but it’s really not all that humorous. Eventually you will realize that you are struggling. You’re constantly, deep inside, behind it all, worrying, anxious, concerned, caring about what’s going on, what has gone on, and what will be going on. You can just cop to the truth, which is that it’s not all that comfortable in there.
Some people will say, “Well, no, I’m doing all right.” That alone isn’t all that good, doing all right, but what they really mean is, “I’m succeeding fairly well at keeping things from going wrong and probably the future looks bright.” What does that mean, the future looks bright? It means it’s not so good now, and it certainly hasn’t been so good in the past. It looks like it’s going to get better. And people think that that’s a positive attitude. Not to the yogi.
Yogi looks at it and say, “Wait a minute, how come it’s not OK? Why does it have to get better?” Eventually you cop to and realize that you’re not doing that well in there. It’s not as bad as it could be, if everything went wrong, if all the things you’re concerned about didn’t work out, but the very fact that you have to be concerned about them, the very fact that you have to struggle, the very fact that you’re carrying that burden is not really all that much fun. And eventually you look at it and you realize what’s really going on is that there are a lot of things that could go wrong and mess things up a lot.
And then on the positive side, there’s these few moments, that every once in a while, we hope we can get. And the difference between how many highs we expect to get, how many peak experiences, how many of these really just moments, they’re just moments, how many really high peak wonderful experiences do people have in a year and how long do they last, versus how much do they worry about what could go wrong, the difference is this, if your peak experiences have not happened yet, it’s not like you’re feeling joyous about that.
Before you have your baby and hold it, your first child, you worry a lot about whether it’s going to be OK, you worry a lot about what can go wrong, and so on. Then finally the relief of having it worked out and then you’re sitting there holding it, and then you have this experience. Then they grab it from you and, “What are they going to do with it, and is it OK? I’m going to examine it,” it’s like, it doesn’t last all that long. And the same thing with your wedding day and with this and so on. It’s like, they’re very brief moments.
The trouble with the negative stuff is—it’s very important to look at. The truth is, if I looked at the moments that you actually had truly bad negative things happening to you, there aren’t that many more of those than there are the positive ones. It’s really not. You don’t get into death-defying situations all the time, and somebody you love more than your whole life doesn’t die every day, your house doesn’t burn down, and you don’t get mugged, and they don’t steal your car. I mean it happens once in a while, but in comparison to how many minutes there are in your life, it’s very brief, but that’s not what matters. What matters is you worry about it all the time. The fact that all these things could go wrong weighs you down.
Why don’t we do that about the positive things? If it’s true that in the yin-yang situation, if you looked at it all, that the moments of actual experience of joy and the moments of actual experience of negative are about the same, the actual experience of pain. Like, a child’s going to go get a shot. Now, the child carries on for weeks before going to get the shot. The child carries on for weeks after having gotten the shot. “I never want one again. How could you do this to me? It’s terrible, it hurts so bad,” et cetera, et cetera. The actual time of pain lasts how long? Ten seconds? Literally. The actual experience of pain is very, very brief, isn’t it?
So if you really balance those out, the actual experience of pain and the actual experience of joy, I don’t know, maybe they balance out, maybe they’re very close, but that doesn’t matter because the truth of the matter is our mental anguish of concern and worry about having to go through the negative experiences, that they might have and they could take place, is constant. It’s there all the time. It’s happening to you all the time. It sits behind your every thought.
You are always concerned about what could go wrong and you think about it regularly and you think about what you’re going to do if it doesn’t, you think about how to make it. How much time did the child for two weeks worry about how to make it not happen and get the shot? How many times afterwards did he worry about how to try to it not happen again? Why not just accept the one minute, and then not have to worry about the four weeks? That’s what it means to grow spiritually.
That is really the difference between playing around with spiritual things, reading books, talking, and having nice things versus actually going through the transformation that it takes to grow spiritually. So you look at this and you realize that somehow there’s a tremendous imbalance, but the imbalance is not God’s fault. It’s not literally the imbalance of the actual negative experience versus the actual positive. For poetic purposes, we’ll make-believe they’re the same.
It is something you are doing with your mind. You don’t do it with the positive experiences. It is not true that if I go in there and inspect the back of your mind that at all times there’s this ecstasy and joy and excitement going on about what might go right. I know we like to think we’re positive, but be honest with me, this is your one chance in a million, is that’s what’s going on while you’re driving down the street, is that what’s going on while you’re taking a shower, is that what’s going on when you’re trying to read and you drift off?
Is that what’s taking place? You just can’t stop thinking about all these absolutely wonderful things that are going to happen that make you happy all the time and so you’re just happy all the time anyways at the thought of what might happen that would make you happy?
No, it’s not what happens. That’s where the imbalance is. But if I asked you honestly during all those magic moments I was just talking, about your personal moments, that if you drop back in there, are you worrying about something? The answer is yes. Are you worrying about two things? Yes. Three things? Yes. How many are you worrying about? “As many as can fit in at once and when I’m not worrying about those, another one’s popping in.”
OK, well, what happens if you solve this thing you’re worrying about? You are afraid Brian didn’t call in, and where is he? He calls and he says, “I’m fine. I was just a little late.” OK, good. Now we’re through worrying. No, the next one comes. How long does it take? It’s instantaneous. It sits on deck. It’s like a stack.
We program, we built stacks and then things pop off the stack, and you’ve got all these things to worry about on the stack, and just whichever one’s the biggest of the given moment is what’s popped off. And the moment there’s any room for anybody else, that just pops in immediately. Yes or no? That’s suffering. Isn’t it amazing? Just play with it, I want you to contemplate it later, that maybe—I’m not saying it is—but maybe the universe is such that the actual moments of peak experiences, from the yin to the yang, from the positive to negative, that those moments might even be close to balance.
This is what creates the imbalance. The mind creates the imbalance, not the world, and you have to decide whether you want to tolerate that because spirituality starts when you say, “No, no, I will not. I will not live like that. If I have but one life to live, I ain’t living it that way.” Right? “There’s no way I’m going to walk through this life and at all times be worrying about what’s going to happen. And just be constantly working trying to make not-negative things take place and then think I’m doing well if not too many bad things happen today.” It’s supposed to be to the other side.
So spirituality is about coming to grips with yourself and realizing that something is completely and utterly out of balance. And if you’re going to sit there and struggle with this world, so that it doesn’t disturb that part that’s out of balance, you are not going to grow spiritually. You’re just going to suffer. You have to somehow decide how to go inside, and fix what’s wrong. And what is wrong is your mind. And it’s not hard to see how it happened.
Your mind is a computer. Your mind is brilliant. It is very bright. I always use the example with you guys when I talk about, how bright exactly are you? You, the species. Your species is so smart, your brain is so smart that God took you guys, put you on a planet where there was nothing but these beautiful natural things, there’s rocks and dirt and trees and water and that’s all there is. Just walk around where the cave people are there, walk around this stuff, and there’s nothing on that planet but these natural resources.
And your brain was so smart that you took those elements, those natural resources, and you figured out how to put them together to build computers and rocket ships and fly to the moon. Didn’t you? That’s pretty smart. You got that straight? That is some serious smarts. It’s not like there was a rocket ship hidden somewheres in a cave and you found it, right? You took sand and taught it to think, didn’t you? You just took rocks out of the earth, carved them out, made them intelligent, and flew to the moon and beyond. It’s incomprehensible how smart your mind is—and that’s your mind. That’s not Einstein’s mind or somebody else’s mind. That is the human mind. And you happen to have one.
What exactly are you doing with it? Well, now that I got you all excited about how smart you are, let’s take a look. What exactly are you doing with that brilliant mind that is capable of doing these unbelievable things? It can think these phenomenal thoughts, it can abstract and solve these phenomenal problems. What you are doing with your mind, and you watch it—when you get out, you’ll watch, you’ll see it. What you are doing with that crazy supercomputer that you have inside of there, that is capable of doing anything, is you are going to it with your scared, uptight heart, and you are saying to that mind, “Oh mind, I am so scared. I don’t want to get hurt. I don’t want to feel sorrow. I don’t want bad things to happen to me and I’m scared of this. Will you help me?”
And the mind, being the servant that it is, says, “Well, of course, I will help you. What would you like me to do?”
And your heart says to your mind, “I want you to think with all your power of everything that could possibly go wrong and then think about what to do about it if it does.”
Your mind says, “That’s what you want me to do? You want me to think about everything that could possibly go wrong, and then think about what it could be like, and then think about what to do about it in case it starts to happen, to be prepared and figure it all out? How much of my time should I spend doing that?”
“Until you exhaust the problem, until you’ve run out of things that could go wrong, until you run out of possible solutions for the possible things that could go wrong.”
Now your mind, being very fair, those disclaimers in the smallest print, says to the heart, “Now, heart, I’m warning you. I’m very good at thinking. I really am. I get down to the most intricate details and I think a lot and I’m very varied, powerful in my thoughts. Are you sure this is what you want me to do?”
Your heart says, “Oh yeah, you’re so smart. That’s what I need. And then that will protect me and then I won’t have to worry, then I won’t have to be afraid of anything going wrong because I know you will have thought of everything.”
So the mind kind of scratches his head a little bit because something seemed wrong there, but he’s just a mind. What does he know? He’s just a computer. So he’s gone about his business and he starts thinking of everything that can go wrong.
It is infinite, how many things can go wrong. How many things can go wrong with your body? How many things can go wrong with the environment around you? How many things can go wrong with the people you love? How many things can go wrong with anything and everything all over the place? You can get a tiny little bacteria, single-celled virus, a meteor could fall out of space on your house. It does it.
You understand that? It could go from the microcosm to the macrocosm. Anything and everything could happen, couldn’t it? Is your mind capable of thinking of those things? You bet it does, doesn’t it? It is almost as if anything it sees reminds it of something could go wrong. If it looks at it… Imagine, in looking, how many things could go wrong, all right? Anything, everything.
“That person could be a maniac. He looks a lot like one. I better watch it.” You start walking around people. Doesn’t it do stuff like that? Yes, right? You start driving, all of a sudden thinks, “God, I’m driving. How do I know…? These other people are driving so fast that they could go out of control, they could do it. They’re not even paying attention. They’re on their cell phones. I’m going to call somebody.”
It’s endless is what I’m trying to tell you. The mind is brilliant, and it can think of all these things and it does, doesn’t it? Yes, it does, and it doesn’t just think about what could go wrong now. Oh God, poor mind. I forgot to tell you that part. It’s bad enough how many things can go wrong now.
How many things can go wrong tomorrow? What about next year? It’s infinite in time and space, how many things can go wrong, and because the mind was given that job and because the mind is so brilliant, it does a heck of a job with it, doesn’t it? The problem is the heart was very stupid to go to the mind like that. Because what’s happening now, is that the mind is thinking of all these things that could go wrong.
How does it make your heart feel? [HEART POUNDING] When he thinks of one, does it make your heart feel, “Oh good, he’s thinking of it?” No, you feel like it’s happening, right? You get bit by a rattlesnake, “A rattlesnake. I’m not even going outside ever again.”
It’s like anything, anything, everything, and whatever the mind thinks about, the heart gets more uptight, doesn’t it? And because it gets more uptight, it goes back to the, “Oh mind, please help. Oh my goodness, you’re doing so good.” No, no, this is not good. This is not a solution. This is a problem. That’s what’s going on.
If you want to grow spiritually, you’ve got to go deeper than that. You cannot let this continue to happen. It’s talking about a complete paradigm shift in how you use your heart and how you use your mind. In essence, the soul, the self, the consciousness, who is aware, every one of you is smiling when I talk because you’re in there and this goes on in there, OK? It doesn’t matter if you ever thought about it. You’re in there and you’ve been watching it forever.
How long have you known that that’s going on in there, that the mind’s in there thinking about everything that possibly can go wrong and trying to figure out what to do about? And the heart’s scared to death while it thinks about it. Right? And then it thinks more to try to solve. You’re trying to solve the heart’s problem with the mind. You know that, don’t you? Even if it’s the first time we ever talked about it in your life, you’ve known it always, haven’t you, because you are in there. You are the consciousness, the awareness, the self who is watching what’s going on in there.
What spirituality means is that you get your act together, you’re the boss. You get in there and you take a look at what’s going on between the heart, the mind, the body, and the world. You look at that interaction and you decide, “This is not going to work. The kids aren’t playing well together.”
The world goes about its business. That’s what it does, doesn’t it? And every time it goes about its business, it hits something that the mind thought about might go wrong. Because the mind’s been busy thinking for a long time. It’s almost like everything that could happen in the stimulus from the outside world reminds your mind of something it heard about or thought about could go wrong. And so now you have the whole world stimulating your mind. And even when it’s not happening, your mind’s thinking it up anyways, and so you just wake up. You wake up and you realize this is not good. This is not going to work.
And what you’ve been doing about it is trying to make the world not do the things that make you feel scared. There’s not a chance in the world you’re going to control the world. And then you try to think more because you think you’re going to solve it through thinking. There’s a Sufi saint. His name was Sufi Sam. He had the most beautiful saying. He said, “You could get more stinking from thinking than you can from drinking.”
That’s what’s going on in there. You drive yourself completely nuts. To grow spiritually means you wake up, you look at this process, you realize, “There’s no way in the world I’m going to control the world so it doesn’t stimulate my thoughts, so it doesn’t freak me out. There’s not a chance in the world and there’s no way I’m going to think my way out of this.”
You are not going to think your way out of it. Thinking makes it worse, not better, that’s all. And so you wake up and you realize, “I have to stop this destructive pattern that I have.” And your destructive pattern is there is something wrong with your heart. It’s scared. It has gone to the mind who’s brilliant and asked it to figure out every possible thing that could go wrong and how to solve it. The mind then looks outside and reads into everything that’s going on, what should or shouldn’t go on based on what it decided could go wrong. And then you just drive yourself crazy.
And so you decide to stop that and that’s what spiritual growth means. It’s hard to believe. You can stop that entire process. You do not have to live like that. What is the alternative? The alternative is just so simple. It’s very Zen.
It starts like this. There’s a world outside. It’s not yours. You didn’t make him. You didn’t make her. You didn’t put the pictures on the wall, you didn’t make the wood, you didn’t make any of it. It’s all here. It was here before you got here, it’ll be here after you leave. It’s going on in every direction all over the place without you even being there, isn’t it?
I ask you all to contemplate for me, how many things are going on right now without you having anything to do with them throughout the universe? 800 billion, zillion, quillian, fatillion is how many things are going on right now without you having anything to do with it. If that’s how many things can go on without you having anything to do with it, why do you think you have to do with any of it? Is it or is it not true that the entire universe is going out without you even knowing anything about it right now?
Then there’s this tiny little room with a few people in it. Is it not part of the same universe? If you weren’t in this room but you were out there, wouldn’t this room be part of the part that was all going on by itself without you knowing anything about it? So wherever you are is exactly and totally a part of the same universe that goes on by itself when you’re not there. Why then are you so busy? How can you be so busy? What are you so busy doing?
You just get through telling me the whole universe goes on by itself. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard of. You have to contemplate these things because you’ve gotten yourself into a complete nonsensible mess. It is going on by itself, you are observing it. That’s the start of your spiritual growth. You are the witness of the world. You can look out through your eyes. There it is. “Whoa, look at it. Interesting.” You can hear it, taste it, smell it, touch it. Congratulations. That’s the end of it.
Yes, I know you can affect it a little bit, but really very little compared to what’s going on. An amoeba has about as much of effect as you do. There’s very little that you’re affecting in this universe. Why can’t you cop to that? Look at this world and once and for all say, “I did not create you, I do not sustain you, and it won’t be me who destroys you. It has been going on forever and it goes about its business and it doesn’t need me.” Why can’t that be your relationship with this world? It’s something you get to see. It’s something you get to observe. It’s something you get to dance with. It’s not yours. It doesn’t belong to you. You didn’t make it. You don’t control it.
Christ said, “My burden is light.” If you are just looking at it and seeing, “It’s not my burden,” it’s just life unfolding. Here, it’s going to rain tomorrow. How burdensome is that? “Well, none, really.” What if you don’t want it to? What if you really don’t want it to? “Well, then it’s driving me crazy.”
The burden is not the world. The burden, again, is your mind. Your mind has decided how you want everything to be is where it all ties together. Your mind has decided how you want everything to be based on what? Based on the fact that you were scared to death, and you had your mind think about everything it needed to be OK, and now it wants the world to be the way it needs to be so that you’re OK. That is what’s going on and that’s the truth.
Your mind has decided how the world is supposed to be. And the basis for that decision was not any divine enlightenment or any great rational thought of philosophy. It was, “What do I need in order to not be scared? What do I need in order to not have the heart be so uptight? I need you to sit over here, and you to dress like this, and you to never say that, and you do not get so close to him, and it’s supposed to rain tomorrow or not supposed to rain tomorrow.”
And it was like, “I got it all thought out of how the outside needs to be for me to be OK.” That’s that brilliant mind. I told you it was brilliant, didn’t I? Has it not built a model of the entire world and every single person in it? At least in your world and how it’s supposed to be all the time and what they’re supposed to say and what they’re supposed to wear and what they’re supposed to do and what they’re not supposed to do.
And didn’t it project it out for tomorrow and next week and two weeks later, ad infinitum? That’s a heck of a computer, guys. It’s got that down pretty good, doesn’t it? And it’s not just about the present and the future. You might have any views about the past? How about judgment of every single thing that ever happened and why it happened and what to do about it and how it was never going to happen again, right? It’s just stored every bit of that stuff in there and judged every bit of it and built an entire view. Just like a computer system that would run you to the moon, has it not built an entire view of life, past, present, and future of everything and everybody? It’s really amazing, isn’t it? That’s your mind. That’s the mind I was talking about. You do have that, don’t you, your model of reality and of yourself?
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: So now you build this model. And I’m telling you what you do is you superimpose it upon life and now you feel your burden. That is your burden. Your burden is that life won’t be the way you decided you need it to be match this whole thing you built. And that creates anxiety, doesn’t it, the thought that life wouldn’t be the way it was supposed to be? I think that’s awful interesting of you. When we talk about ego, there’s ego. You make up a model and then that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
There’s a whole life here that always existed. That’s rather irrelevant, isn’t it? It goes on forever everywhere. “Well, I don’t care about that. I only care about the part I’m looking at.” So you’ve got to think about the part you’re looking at, the part close to you, about how it’s supposed to be all the time and everything and it’s right.
And if anything happens that doesn’t match what you built, then it’s wrong, isn’t it? It’s being done wrong. That person’s wrong. They shouldn’t have said that, should they? There, that’s the definition of ego. Ego is not about somebody who’s huffy-puffy and thinks highly of themselves. That don’t mean nothing. Ego means egocentric. It means you, this little thing, sitting right there had the audacity to make up something in your mind about how everything and everyone is supposed to be, including the weather… and bugs. [LAUGHTER]
Right? You know where bugs are supposed to be, where they’re not, and what they’re supposed to look like and what they’re not supposed to look like. Yeah, you just got it down. You got the whole thing down. You had the audacity to just make up your own universe, didn’t you? Come on, let’s admit it. We made up our own universe. And then you literally think you’re right to where if reality unfolds, you look at reality and say, “You’re wrong. You shouldn’t have done that.”
But to grow spiritually you stop that absurd behavior. You look at the world and say, “Hello. Hello, world. Wonder what you’re going to do today? Because I have no idea. And I couldn’t care less what you did before because I was just watching you, and there you were, and that’s what you did. And I don’t know what you can do tomorrow, but whatever it is, we’ll deal with it. We’ll be there. Because I don’t run this place and I don’t know nothing about nothing.”
Right? It’s way big and you admit it, you really don’t see any of it and you don’t have any control over any of it. Why can’t it be like that? Why can’t you have a healthy relationship with creation, with life, with the universe? This is not your universe. It’s not even your life. If it decided to stop— your lungs stopped breathing, your heart stopped beating, your liver stopped secreting, what are you going to do about it? Not one of you would know what to do about it, not one of you would sit right here going… You know what to do about it. “Help!” That’s what you do about it. Call for help because it’s not your life, it’s life’s life and you’re just here, aren’t you? Give it back. I’m telling you that’s what you do.
You give life back to life. It’s hers anyways. You’re just playing a stupid game, trying to make-believe you get to make one up and then superimpose what you’ve made up on top of reality. It doesn’t work. So your first step in your spiritual growth and your paradigm shift here, getting out of that crazy way of being, is you look at life every single day and you remind yourself, “This is life and I am a visitor, a sojourner. I’m the witness of the experience of life.”
And whatever is happening in life is what’s happening in life. There’s nothing more to say about it. There’s no good or right or wrong or bad or worse or judging or anything like that. It’s just, “There it is. There it is.” It’s raining when it’s raining, it’s not raining when it’s not raining. I told you it was very Zen.
People are nice to you when they’re nice to you, and they’re mean to you when they’re mean to you. Sometimes they’re nice, aren’t they? And sometimes they’re mean, aren’t they? Anybody figured out yet how to make that not happen? Ever in the history of humanity? It’s just the nature of things, yin-yang. Everything has its yin and its yang.
Why can’t it just be that way? That is the start of your spirituality. You are no longer using life to make yourself be OK. Because it’s not going to do it. It will never behave, and it will actually make you worse. If you are not OK, in a moment, we’re going to deal with that. But you don’t deal with it by trying to force life and everybody in it to change so that you don’t have a problem. It doesn’t work. It’s just in essence projecting your problem out to other people, places, and things. And now you got to fight with it outside instead of inside. So first, you let life be life, which is fun.
Second, you stop this craziness of going to your mind and telling your mind to solve all your problems. The mind can’t do that. And because it doesn’t even know what your problems are, it just starts thinking. It just starts thinking of all the possible problems that could ever happen, doesn’t it? It thinks it’s serving you. It’s making you worse, not better. So you tell your mind, “I’m sorry I asked, don’t do that anymore.” You know how beautiful that is?
I guarantee you, if you ever actually sat down and had that conversation with your mind, you would feel like this tremendous release inside of you. I’m serious, I’ve done it. I remember the day I had that conversation with my mind and that was 30 years ago. And I can remember the spot and the moment and the place when he actually got it, that I didn’t want him doing that anymore. It was sort of like [WHEW] a billion pounds got taken off of the whole system.
You are to go to that mind and tell it, “I don’t want you doing that anymore. You don’t have to do that anymore. It’s not your job anymore to think of every single thing that could possibly go wrong and figure out what to do about it. I would rather get the shot when it’s time for the shot than worry about it two weeks in advance and two weeks after. I will take the risk that life is going to have times of great joy and times of sorrow, all right? And I don’t mind that. I will appreciate the times of joy, and I’ll appreciate the times of sorrow. I would rather live that way than worry all the time, than every single moment of my life have to be uptight, worrying, anxious about the fact that it might be time for sorrow.”
“Well, Mickey, why’d you have to say that there is going to be time for sorrow? I could handle there would be time for joy, but I don’t want there to be time for sorrow. Now I have to worry about the fact that even he said that it can be times for sorrow. Oh my God.” You can handle a little sorrow, it just happens once in a while.
Remember we started in the beginning, how many times of just great ecstatic joy are there, actually, and how many times, actually, do you lose an arm or something happens? I said it’s just nothing that often, OK? It’s like maybe you are worried about going to war and dying in war. Maybe you’re worried about your husband going to war and dying in war, right? Maybe you’re not even married yet. Maybe there’s not a war going on. Maybe he’s not even drafted, maybe he’s older. I don’t know. Why are you thinking about it?
Let me tell you, it’s like that’s a stupid thing to do with your mind. And you’re going to find out that you may not be the kind of person that ends up with a husband that goes to war. And therefore you wasted all your time thinking about that, and the fact that he might have a heart attack if he doesn’t go to war. And the fact that how many other things could happen. I already told you they’re infinite.
And so you decide, “I’m not doing it. I would rather just experience life, real, than worry about it, than think about it, than do all that. I’m willing to take the risk.” That’s what it is. That’s a risk, isn’t it? “It’s a gamble, that I am better off experiencing the reality of life than I am playing this stupid game I’ve been playing, which is attempting to protect myself from the reality of life.” That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? And that’s what the mind’s doing, pretending to stay a step ahead of it, to think it all out, to think of everything that could go wrong, to protect yourself?
But in the name of protecting yourself, you’re making yourself sick all the time. You’re making yourself worry all the time. Every possible thing that could possibly go wrong you’re thinking about even though it would never happen. So it’s very interesting, something really worth contemplating. It’s really worth looking at and thinking about.
And so first you say to life, “Go about your business.” Then you say to your mind, “Mind, oh mind…” Don’t yell at it. It’s not its fault. You’re the one who asked it to do this. “Oh mind, you don’t have to do this anymore. You don’t have to do it anymore. We transcended your job, you’re out. We’re just going to experience life, and see what that’s like instead of worrying about experiencing it.” It’ll take a while for your mind to get out of the vibe, the habit of always worrying, of always thinking it’s supposed to think about it. But if you do work with this, you will get out.
And what you’ll see is what those before you saw, which is not even close, the anguish and suffering that you are causing yourself on a constant basis is 700 million times beyond any suffering you will feel by letting life be life. It can’t not be—because you’re doing it every minute. There’s no way that every minute stuff’s going wrong, right? But the potential for stuff to go wrong is every minute, that I got straight. But the fact that it’s actually causing all this trouble…
You ever see people drive? “Why are you driving like that?” “Somebody could run a light, somebody could do this.” Yeah, I know. “And the car could break down.” I know. “Somebody could hit me.” I know, what a way to drive! Somebody else is driving, enjoying, top down, having a fun old time talking, driving a car. What a difference. What an amazing difference.
You want to know who gets in the accident? This guy. Because they’re so uptight, they don’t get out of the road when they turn, they don’t do anything. What are you doing? That’s what I’m talking about. What kind of driver through life are you?
Because if you are sitting there worrying about every possible thing that can happen, you are one uptight person—and it’s going to show up. It shows up in your body, it shows up in your mind, it shows up in your heart, it shows up in your world, shows up everywhere. You’re just uptight. Can you get yourself good and uptight? Whoa, I told you how brilliant your mind is. Why would you take something that brilliant and tell it to do something that stupid? It’s crazy.
And so, you relieve it of its duties. And I say it’s a habit, but over time, just keep letting it go. Just don’t buy into it and it will stop. Now you’ll be left in a very holy place. You’ll be left where you should have been to start with. You’ll be left with the problems of your heart.
Remember, you went to the mind to try to solve the problems of your heart. Your mind went to the world to try and manipulate and control it so the heart doesn’t have any trouble. Now you left the world alone. Now you left the mind alone. Guess what you’re going to be left with? You’re going to be left with the human heart and there’s nothing wrong with that. And what you’re going to see is that the human heart is very scared, it’s very sensitive and it’s very scared. But that isn’t truly its true state.
And if you’re willing to sit with it and tolerate, ultimately— and this is where the essence of all the teachings, no matter what we talk about, no matter where you go, or what you do, when it is said and done—if you want to transcend yourself, you must be willing to sit comfortably with the anguish, the fear of your heart because if you’re not willing to sit comfortably with it, you’re going to do something about it.
And the only place you can go is the mind. You’ll go to the mind and say, “What should I do about it?” All right? And there you go again. You went the wrong way. If you cannot sit with the pain and the disturbance of your heart, and you know what I mean, then you’re going to want to do something about it. And what can you do? There’s no place to go. You go to the mind and you’d say, “Mind, what should I do about it?”
And guess what the mind knows about? The only thing the mind knows about is what it was programmed with. It was programmed with the world. All day all the world pours into the senses, doesn’t it? And the mind picks it all up. So if you are not OK sitting with the heart, then what you do is you go to the mind and say, “What should I do about it?” And guess what the mind’s going to say? “Get divorced, get married, go over here, do this. Get a new job. Get more money. Get more money. Get more money. Get more money.” It’s like a broken record. [LAUGHTER] “Get more money. Get more love. Get a new friend, get a relationship.” It’s love, money, this, that, something like that, right?
It’s always outside. Do something outside. Fix something outside. Change something outside. That’s what the mind says, because that’s the only thing it knows about. And so you can’t blame the mind, you can’t blame the world, and you can’t blame the heart. I’m blaming you. Blame it on the soul. We’ll make that one of these songs, blame it on the soul.
It is the soul, the consciousness that is sitting in there and is not capable of keeping itself together when the heart has a problem. The day that the soul can relax, you just relax yourself in the face of what the heart is feeling, you should be able to sit comfortably with your heart. Ultimately that’s what you have to learn. That is the essence of your sadhana by the way. You have to be able to sit in whatever state the heart is in. And when you can sit and relax and be comfortable with whatever state the heart is in, guess what? You won’t have to go running to the mind for some solution.
What will happen then? What will happen then is very, very beautiful. I’d rather have you experience than talk about it, but I’ll give you some clues. What will happen then is, all of a sudden, you’ll be there instead of not being there. Because right now when the heart has a problem, you’re not there. You go running to mind, you go running outside, and you go run around like a chicken with your head cut off, right?
When the heart can have a problem, and you know what I mean, I have to discuss that. And by the way, it can have two kinds of problems. Don’t think that I mean by problem, jealousy or fear and insecurity. You could fall madly in love when you don’t want to be. You could decide that you really like something, you’re drawn toward it tremendously, and you can’t get it.
The heart can cause problems positive and negative, right? It can be for something or against something and you’re in trouble, aren’t you? All right? That heart is a very interesting thing. Can you sit comfortably inside, relaxed, calm, conscious while the heart runs its gamut? The day you can is the day you will find that something happens that is very different than anything you ever imagined.
Instead of getting all involved in the heart, and going out to the mind, and going out to the world, when you can just sit there and the heart does its thing and you don’t react, you just relax, you will start to get pulled in, naturally, all by itself. You don’t do it. You’ll start feeling that because you didn’t get involved in it, you are drifting back behind it. A force will start to pull you back inside and you’ll start to feel some strength inside that you didn’t know was there before. Not the strength of solving the heart’s problems, not the strength of hope that maybe you’ll be able to. Those things are too down there. It’s just an inner strength from behind you that starts to pull you into it, and starts to sustain you. And what you realize is that because you no longer have to tend to the heart, you get to know yourself.
Right now you can’t know yourself because you have lost yourself in the problems of your heart, which then led you to the mind, which then lost you in the world. When you do not have to tend to the heart—not because the heart is OK, but you are OK with the heart, that’s the only OK that’s going to exist.
The human heart is like a rainbow. It runs the whole gamut of colors, doesn’t it? You’ve been in there, right? It can do anything. So what? Learn to be comfortable with whatever the heart is doing, and you will no longer have to babysit the darn thing every single second of your life, and then go try to find all these solutions. When you no longer have to be there to tend to the heart, it releases you. And guess where you go? You go back to yourself. Since you are yourself, you pull back to yourself. You cease to be the keeper of the human heart.
When you are no longer the keeper of the human heart, you be the self. That is the self. That’s what’s meant by the self. You drift back to the consciousness itself, to your being. And as you pull back into the consciousness, you’re pulling back into spirit. You’re pulling back into the essence of your being. And that’s your entire spiritual journey is the journey back up from inside. But you cannot go there when you are preoccupied with the human heart.
So first, you let the world be. Second, you unburden the mind by telling it, and you’ll have to tell it numerous times, like 700 million a day, that it’s no longer its job to think every single thing that could possibly go wrong. I want to see, now that I talked about it, how often you catch it doing that, thinking about what can go wrong and what to do about it, right?
“Not your job. Remember you were fired. OK?” And just let it go. And then you will face your heart. I talked about it because I want you to face your heart, I want you to be comfortable facing your heart. Is there pain in your heart? Answer me, is there pain in your heart? Of course, there’s pain in your heart. You know there’s pain in your heart, don’t you? You’ve been running away from it your whole life, haven’t you? You don’t have to run away from the pain in your heart.
No longer do you have to run away from that shot. That kid shouldn’t have run away from that shot, should he? He just should have not thought about it, take a stupid shot, and then not think about it again. It’s another year for you, it’s another 20 seconds of a shot. You should not have a problem with the pain in your heart. Just relax. Be comfortable with it. This is the heart, it has pain, good. So, the heart also has joy, doesn’t it? Great joy, great pain, so what? Yin-yang.
That’s your work. I can’t take you any closer. You’re afraid of your heart. Who will admit that? You’re afraid of what your heart can feel. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of what’s in your heart. Some people are even afraid of the positive, aren’t they? They’re afraid to fall in love. They’re afraid to expose themselves. They’re afraid. You have to stop being afraid of your heart. As long as you’re afraid of your heart, you’re going to do the whole process I’ve been talking about all night. You are going to go to your mind, get lost in your mind, you get lost in the world, and you’re going to have a lot of trouble.
Maybe you won’t do it until you realize that it hurts more to do what you’re doing than it does to just be there with it, because it’ll only hurt it once in a while and you’re making yourself hurt every second. And you can’t even live your life. You can’t even enjoy your life. So once you decide that that’s what you want to do, then just do it.
The heart will go through its changes, work with it there. And someday you’ll ask me, “Well, what do I do about the heart?” The answer is nothing. You do nothing about the heart. You’d be comfortable with the heart and just keep relaxing and relaxing. And the rest will happen. Isn’t it beautiful that it’d be enough if the reward was that you don’t have to be anguished in your mind and don’t have to fight with the world? That’d be enough of a reward, wouldn’t it? Right?
That’s not even close. That’s not even close. Not only do you not have to do all of that, and then you get comfortable with your heart, now I got nothing to worry about because I can handle it. The worst thing the world can do is hurt your heart, how do you like that? Really, that’s what you’re trying to stop from happening. “Big deal, so the heart hurts a little bit. So what? I’d rather have that than go through this craziness.” If that was the reward, it’s worth it. That’s not even close to the reward.
The moment you are comfortable with your heart, you do not have to stay here like this. You are not a human being. You are the spirit, the self, tending to a human being. And as long as you cannot handle the heart, that’s right where you’re staying because you’re going to go out from there.
If you get back to that point and you relax, you’re going to start to find out who you are. You who’s been taking care of the heart, you who went to the mind and hired it, you who looks out through these eyes to figure out what to do about it, which is what you do, don’t you? And so when you get back there, you’ll start to pull back into the self and that’s when real spirituality starts.
You’ll start to feel all the strength, all the spirit, all the shakti pulling you back into it. And ultimately you merge back into a force that is behind your comprehension and this becomes your whole inner journey. And you become a spiritual being instead of a human being. That’s what it means to grow spiritually. Truly not so complicated, is it? And every one of you knows it’s the truth. You don’t have to believe in it, do you? I shouldn’t ask you, “Do you believe what we talked about?”
You don’t have to believe in it, do you? You’ve lived it, right? That’s what’s so neat about truth is, like, you’ve always seen it, but it’s not true that you’ve always known that there’s an alternative to trying to live this life where the mind tries to solve everything. Jai Guru Dev.
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% off any Michael Singer program available through Sounds True when you use the code Singer15 at checkout. That’s Singer, numeral one, numeral five 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.
