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 “Experiencing Love and Joy Instead of Fear and Desire.”
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, “Experiencing Love and Joy Instead of Fear and Desire” with Michael Singer.
Michael Singer: Jai guru dev.
There is a life that’s available to everybody that is so beautiful. There are never any problems, never any concerns, no melodramas. There’s just always excitement, joy, love, challenge. It’s a divine life in every way. It has nothing to do with money. It has nothing to do with relationships. It has nothing to do with your past, your present, or your future. It’s all a state of being. It’s positioning oneself in a place inside that has all those characteristics and qualities. Almost everybody misses that. The traditions and institutions that are supposed to teach us—because what do we know? We just drop down onto a planet in the middle of nowhere. How are we supposed to know anything? The institutions that are set up to teach us—they don’t teach us. They don’t teach us—very, very few teachings exist. But they do exist. Not mainstream at all.
Our educational institutions only fill our minds with facts. That’s what they’re there for. They fill our minds with facts, which is interesting.
It’s nice to know things in the mind, but they don’t help you live this life that I just talked about. In fact, they take it away from you because they encourage you to live in your mind. Your mind can never ever live the life I just talked about.
Let’s stop for a second and look at that. Why? What is the mind? The mind is a computer. It is one of the great gifts that God gave you—that you were given when you dropped down onto this plane. You were given a body, a robot, so that you can walk around and experience with senses this plane. Otherwise, you would miss it. Your soul is not capable of seeing, touching, smelling this plane. It’s a very subtle high vibration. It lives in the infinite.
So it’s given an instrument, your body which has these senses that can pick up this plane. So you have a body, you have a mind, you have a heart. We’ve been through all these. And there’s you—the consciousness, the awareness of being that was given these gifts. So the gift of mind is an inboard, indwelling computer. It has all the characteristics of a computer. It has memory. It receives information and processes it. A computer cannot know joy, a computer cannot know excitement, a computer cannot know love. Computers are amazing things, but they know nothing about love. They cannot experience love. They are just computers. Your mind has never and will never experience love just like your hand can’t eat. You can use your hand to feed your mouth, but if you put the food in your hand, it ain’t getting where it’s supposed to go. It just wasn’t made for that.
The computer was made to hold memory, to process, to do different things—like if you need to know somebody’s name, don’t go to your hand, go to your mind, and it will tell you their name. It has these processes. Your mind has its nature. You must come to understand the nature of mind. And if you want to understand it, I’m telling you to look at your PC because that is the nature of your mind. The only thing that we have done is we’ve tried to create the processes of our mind in something external to ourselves. That’s what we do as human beings. It’s very great. We don’t walk fast enough, so we develop cars. We can’t jump high enough, so we made rocket ships. We try to extend the limitations of ourselves by building it outside, by making it out of nature.
It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a wonderful thing. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s fun. It’s part of the game. So when you built your computer, how did you know about memory? How did you know about giving it processes of speech and processes of optical input and auditory input, sound cards and all this stuff? Because you have that, and you’re just recreating that process you have and you’re trying to do it well. Net result is all we’re doing is creating externally more and more intelligent processes that mimic the processes that we were given for free—that every single human being was born with as a gift. It is an inboard computer. It’s really neat and you stop and think about it in your computer. You have to type in the input. You can have an optical eye. It picks up stuff, right? Likewise, that’s how your mind—your computer and your mind—picks up its data.
It comes in through your I/O ports, through your eyes, through your ears, through your nose, through your tongue, through your touch. That’s what your senses are: how the data gets in. And the only thing the mind can do is hold that data and rearrange that data. So all a computer does is it takes in data and it rearranges it into different—checks out different orders. And your mind has certain processes and certain experiences, so it just combines together the data it has and then tries every possible algorithm and comes up with the statistically best one. If your mind was really good at this analytical process, that’s what it would do. OK?
So that’s all the mind is doing. What has that got to do with love? Nothing. Zero. Zero. Literally zero. It knows nothing about experiencing love. What has that got to do with excitement and enthusiasm? Nothing. It’ll look it up in the dictionary. “Enthusiasm: a very good feeling that humans feel.” It doesn’t know it. It doesn’t know it.
So you come to understand that if you’re going to live the life I talked about—and every single person that’s capable of living that life—masters call it—you’re going to call it in the land beyond your dreams, just the high life you live, the high life. If you’re going to live that life, it is not going to be by cramming data into your mind and your ability to spout it back out. I don’t care how much you know about love, if you know all the poetry, it doesn’t matter. Love is an experience. It is not a knowing. It is not a knowledge that you pick up. What teaches it? If you want to find the teachings, you study spirituality. Spirituality holds the secret to the mystery of life and to the meaning of life.
It is always at that level. Now, why? Why is it that way? Because what spirituality teaches—and it is the truth—is that you must transcend your mind. You must transcend your heart. You must transcend your body and you must transcend the world if you want to live the type of life we’re talking about. It doesn’t mean you leave the world. It doesn’t mean you leave your body. It doesn’t mean you leave your heart. It does not mean you leave your mind. You transcend. What does that mean? What does it mean to live this deep life and what effect does it have?
The way to understand it is to look at the mess we’re in now. The mess we’re in now is very, very simple. Inside if you look, and you don’t have to look very hard, what you’ll find is predominantly the noisiest things inside of you are too polarities, fear and desire.
If you just looking there, you’ll see you’re scared of things. I don’t mean lions and tigers and snakes. Sure, you’re scared of those. I’m talking about what people think of you and whether she likes you and whether you said the wrong thing and whether you have a pimple on your face and whether you look good and what’s going to happen when you get old and who will take care of you and is your bank account big enough and is this person lying and what will happen if they do? You understand? There’s fears. Anybody have any those—or is it just me? Oh, OK, good. I want to make sure I didn’t get a broken one. All right. So there’s these fears inside and there are lots of them and they’re based on everything. You name a single thing. I don’t care what you say. Any object, any thought, any feeling, and I will tell you there are fears about it.
You understand that? Well, love—lots of fears about love, aren’t there? OK? It’s just amazing. It’s amazing. There are millions and billions of fears that exist inside and they come up at different times and they’re very powerful. And tell me a life of fear—is that the life I was describing in the beginning where you feel nothing but love and joy and excitement and freedom and you don’t have a single problem in your life? The answer is no. So one polarity, which is all this fear that exists inside steals that life from us. It means you will not live that high life. You’ll live a very low life if you are completely inundated and imprisoned by fears. Fair enough. You’ll live a life of avoiding your fears. That is what your life will be. The meaning of your life will be to avoid your fears.
Did I exaggerate? I did not exaggerate. And I’m telling you, most people, that’s where they end up. They end up with the meaning of their life. They’re not trying to find love, they’re not trying to feel joy. They’re not trying to go out and have exciting experiences. Some people do at least a little bit of that, but a lot of people—the whole meaning of their life is the avoidance of fear, the avoidance of problems, the avoidance of, “Hah, I’m scared.” You must look at that. So that’s one polarity.
Then if you look inside and if you haven’t given up yet and fallen completely into the land of fear, you will find desire. You’ll find what I want and hope and that this will be good. That’s what desire is. Don’t think of desire as lust in greed. Don’t frame it that way. Desire in its true sense means I need something, I want something.
What does it mean, really? This will make it better. That’s the clearest definition of what desire is—to achieve or have something that you think will make it better. All you have to do is think in your mind that this will make it better, and I’m telling you, you will want it. OK? And so it’s just like that. It’s very natural. If this money’s going to make my life better, I want it. If learning to play the piano beautifully so that people respect me and like me and cheer when I do—will make my life better—then I want it. That’s what a desire is. So the foundation of a desire is, “I am not OK. This will make me better.” The problem is that if you are not OK and that’s why you have a desire, it’s because you’re not OK and this will make me better.
I am not OK, this will make me better. You have to tell me again, it’s a little trickier, but you have to tell me again why that really works because you’ve been that way your entire life—since you [were] a little baby. Not OK, not OK, and whatever it was that you decided would make you better, you have done that your entire life. How much better is it? You have to be honest. You’re still out there having things you think will make it better and trying to make them happen. That is what you have been doing your entire life. Did you do in high school? Huh? Did you have a list of things you thought would make it better and try to have them happen? Did you do it in junior high, elementary? College? That’s it.
That is what inundates the mind. You either have fear, which you have to stay away from. Why? Because you’re afraid of it. You are afraid of your fear, aren’t you? You’re afraid of the things you fear, aren’t you? How afraid? Well, you freeze up to even think about it. You don’t even want to think about them. You’re scared to death of them. Make me the list of all the things that you’re afraid of and I’ll mention them to you and see what happens. That didn’t even happen. I’ll just mention them to you. You start getting all scared. You’re afraid of fear so that when you live in there and you have fears, that is not a life you want to live because you’re just afraid all the time. And then you have to avoid things and do things to try and not experience your fears.
Then the other is you are not OK and you have these things that you need in order to make you happy—in order to make you be OK. The problem is it doesn’t work. The problem is you’ve been doing your entire life and you’re still not OK. And you know lots of people that are older than you—how are they doing? Because they’ve done it their entire life. Are they still doing it when they get to be 80? You have parents or grandparents—80, 85 years, years old—they still have things that they want that they think will make them OK. They still have fears. They’re just caught in this polarity and no one is ever OK.
So you look at this inside and you see clearly that this is the life I’m going to live if I don’t do something about it. I’m going to live the life completely, totally all the time [in] the avoidance of my fears and the attempt to decide what will make me better and try to get it and struggle to try to get it. And the fears are easy for you guys to see that it doesn’t work. But man, like I said, you’ve done this every minute of every day and you’re still not OK—because remember how I’m defining OK?
I’m not saying “OK” is better than somebody else. I’m saying OK is you wake up in the morning, you’re giggling. It’s just fun to be alive. You’re just there and then all day there’s not a worry in your mind and not a problem. Nothing can ever go wrong. You don’t even bother thinking about the future because the present’s too much fun and you just deal with, you go to work and you get married, you don’t get married. It’s just whatever the heck it is. It’s just fun, fun, fun, and it’s just fun. OK? You’re just here on the Planet Earth having fun.
So that is what it means to be OK. You are OK all the time. You’re completely open to every experience you’re having. If you fall in love, you fall in love and you experience the love. And if the love is expressible because of the situation you’re in, then you enjoy expressing and experiencing the love.
If you fall in love at a place in your life that it doesn’t work for what’s happening due to your situation, then you enjoy the pain of too much love and not being able to express it and whatever it is. You’re just totally open to every single experience you’re having and it’s fun and it’s exciting and there’s no fear. That is what it means to live and have no problems. What does it cost? Nothing. Who’s stopping you? No one.
So the thing is you look at this life and then you see what is keeping you from living that life because I’m telling you, it’s not your money, it’s not your health, it’s not the people around you. It’s not because those are just experiences that you get to have. It is this inner state of fear and desire. As long as that is what inundates your consciousness, how can you be free?
It’s the opposite of freedom. How can you feel love? It’s the opposite of love. How can you feel excitement? It’s just this, “Oh my God, how do I stop this from happening?” Or, “I’ll be OK when this happens,” but it never does. Or if it does, I don’t want it anymore. I want to ask you honestly. Now look down because I know you want to look in my eyes. Have you ever noticed that when you get what you want, you don’t want it anymore, that there’s always something else you want? It’s a very deep truth. It’s because you’re not OK and you have decided mentally—your mind has thought about all these situations. You’ve decided what it is that’ll make me OK. As long as you believe that this will make me OK, it gives you this sense of hope. It gives you this sense of excitement.
It gives you the sense that maybe someday I’ll be OK. When you get it, without noticing—you don’t do it consciously—you’re not OK. It is very easy to say, “Oh my God, if he ever paid attention to me, that would just thrill me so much that if I could ever just even get to know him, he’s so special and so on.” Right, well, sometimes I know it’s rare, but sometimes he does suddenly pay attention to you—or she does—and then you say, “God, if he asked me out …” Then it’s, “Well, if I could have just him and we were just together all the time.” Then it’s, “Well, if we had a nicer house.” Then it’s, “Well, if we could express our love through children, but I can’t have children. Well, what do I do? I could adopt or I could go through all the fertility.” Then it’s, “Oh my God, I’m having so much trouble with this.” You said that if he paid attention to you, not to mention if he married you, that that would be the beginning and end of your entire life.
So I don’t understand. You have as many or more problems than you had before. So in other words it was a lie. You don’t do that with yourself. You’re not honest and that’s why you miss it. It was a lie. It was not true that if he loved you, you’d never need anything else for the rest of your life and that would be the beginning and end of everything. It’s because you know you’re not OK. It’s really simple. Please don’t ever forget this. You know you’re not OK. You live in there. It’s not bubbling, joy, love, beautiful things, blossoming all the time inside. There’s issues, there’s problems, there’s closing things and fear things and there’s problems. And what you’re trying to do is solve those problems. And so you go to the mind, and what the mind does all the time—it does just what it was programmed to do.
It takes all of its past experiences and scans them and rearranges them and comes up with what looks like if it could get it to happen, I’d be OK. “If I won the lottery, if I could just get married to the most wonderful person that took care of me.” And the truth of the matter is no, but you won’t say that. You won’t look at that. Look around. The statistics say 99.999 percent no. You’ll just have a different problem.
So when you went to your mind and said, “I’m not OK. What needs to happen?” the mind should have said, “How the heck do I know? You’re the one that’s not OK. Leave me alone. Oh, I’m having fun reading Google. I’m just doing my mind thing. I’m not in charge of you, OK? Go to your heart. Go ask the heart.” And it’s amazing, but instead we ask the mind and no matter how often we find out that it doesn’t work, we just find the next thing, “Oh, it’s perfect. Except …” And then you go there and you will do that for the rest of your life.
So OK-ness—you must define it right. I’m saying it to you: have you ever felt love? Have you ever felt overwhelmed by this rush of love that just comes up inside of you? Hey, I felt excitement. Even as a little kid for Christmas where you’re just beside yourself. There’s just all this energy coming up inside. You’re just like, “Whoa.” you can’t hold yourself. I would like that going on inside of you every single second all the time, regardless of what was going on outside. There. If I got to give you a gift or pray for you for something, it wouldn’t be for a husband, it wouldn’t be for a wife, it wouldn’t be for money. It wouldn’t be for a child. It would be for that—because that’s why you want the husband. That’s why you want the wife. That’s why you want the child. That’s why you want the money. That’s why you want those things—is because you think it’s going to make that happen.
Well, I guess it does maybe for a minute, OK? Just the thought of it makes it happen. But then when it all takes place, somehow the rest of you manages to overcome it. You become overcome with yourself. Which of you know what I’m talking about? That’s because you’re yogis and yoginis, right? It’s just your little personal self manages to come back and take over and you don’t feel all that all the time. You are capable of feeling that all the time. You are sitting on top of all that energy. It is capable of rushing up all the time. It was meant to be that way. It was meant to just be no effort, nothing. Your heart is full, your mind is clear, spirit is soaring. That’s the beauty of your life.
What is stopping that from happening? Your fears and your desires. The mind has become a burden that is telling you all the things that could go wrong and telling you all the things that need to go right for you to be OK, and it tells you that all the time, 24/7. Sometimes you can’t even sleep at night because it’s busy telling you. And when you do go to sleep and it tells you in your dreams—your fears and desires show up in your dreams. So what is this telling you? It’s telling you that there’s a major change that needs to take place if you want to live the high life. So what you need to do is to decide: what life do you want to live? Do you want to go for the gold?
If I have but one life to live, I want to live the highest life I possibly can. Well, you have every right to do that. It’s your obligation. That’s what you should be seeking. That is what it means to seek spiritual. Isn’t that neat? Spirituality is about, “Wow, I have experienced in my life moments of awesome beauty inside. And they were inside. The love I felt was inside. The joy I felt was inside.” Where is that? I’m going to spend my life seeking that. You want to go climb a mountain? I’m going to climb a mountain, but my mountain’s on the inside. You want to go out and try to have great things happen so you’re OK? I want to go to where OK is independent of what’s happening. Because if you even found OK-ness because something happened, it’s what we call conditional. It can be taken away and your mind will remind you of that all the time.
Should you fall in love and have this awesome relationship, your mind will remind you how bad it would be if he died or if something went wrong. It will worry if he doesn’t come home on time. If your joy is conditioned upon something outside, it is not joy and it will not last.
These are the pure teachings of spirituality. Why? What you’re experiencing inside during those moments of high is spirit. That is spirit. You’re experiencing this rush of Shakti, of ecstasy. Every single one of you are capable of experiencing that all the time. You’ll have to learn, “How can I be experiencing that and go to work? How can I be experiencing that and be married? How can I be experiencing that and bring up the children?” You’ll have to learn how to do that. It’s a real pain. It’s a major problem. OK?
People have to learn how to hold their liquor. You have to learn how to hold your Shakti. You have to learn how to be an ecstasy and still be a father, and still be a husband, and still be a wife and still be a businessperson—or whatever it is. And you will learn how to do it just like you learn. Don’t worry, you’ll handle it. You’ll learn how to ride a bike, you’ll learn how to do this. That should be the worst problem you have in life. How do I handle this ecstasy? What do I do when I wake up in the morning and I’m intoxicated and just pouring through me out of every chakra? You just feel it pouring out. How do I get out of bed? You’ll figure it out, OK? That is the life you are capable of. If you are striving for something below that, wake up because what you’re striving below it is not going to give it to you.
All it’s going to do is make you strive and try to get it and then try for something else. It’s going to find something wrong and so on. So you wake up and you realize, “Good, I have this tremendous opportunity to live this awesome life.” Now the question becomes: how? It’s fun. I could just sit here for an hour and encourage you, inspire you to how beautiful the life can be—and it can. And that life has no problems. Why would it have any problems? It has no fears and it has no desires. Now, let’s look at that because some people think, “Well, if I had no fears, I had no desire, it’d be blah.” They do say that. I swear. They say, “Unless you experience the opposites, how would you know what love is unless you felt pain? How would you know what joy was unless you felt sorrow?”
This is the ignorance speaking. I don’t care even if they’re great poets that speak that way; they don’t know what they’re talking about. There is spontaneous ecstasy that wells up inside of you and no matter how many times you experience it, it feels like the first time you’ve ever experienced it. You know what that first kiss feels like? You’re like, “Ooh, it’s electric.” You love somebody and the first time you kiss it’s got all that power and so on. How would you like it if every single time you kiss for the rest of your life, that’s what it felt like? You know what it tastes like—the first time you have some food that you’ve never tasted before—and it’s just perfect, it’s awesome, and you say you like it so much that you ordered every night and you get sick of it? How would you like it if every single time you ate it was like the first time you ever ate it?
That is what master calls it—ever-new joy. It’s what Yogananda calls it. That is what the Shakti is. For some reason, every single time you experience it, it is like the first time you ever experienced it. It just feeds your soul. It feeds you to the depth of your being. It’s because the mind’s not in the way. The mind is what gets used to things. When the mind is not there, spirit experiences spirit and it’s just like merging. It’s like water falling into water. Every time water falls into water, it merges. Right? It does. It just does the same thing. It just becomes one. That is what goes on inside of you and it feeds you all the time. You’re not going to get tired of love, are you? You may get tired of someone you love. You may get tired of something you love. But you’re not going to get tired of love.
What does it mean to get tired of something you love—that it no longer makes you feel love, isn’t it? But love itself—you don’t get tired of.
So I could spend an hour talking and encouraging, inspiring you not to live the ho-hum life of avoiding your fears and finding your desires. I’m highly encouraging you. I’m saying in plain English, if you live the life of avoiding your fears and of trying to fulfill your desires, you have lived a very, very low life even if you are completely successful. In fact, if you are successful in avoiding your fears, you lived a zero life because all you did was hide. All you did was avoid things. You didn’t experience anything. You avoided things. If you lived a life of trying to fulfill your desires and you went out there and whatever you wanted, you got—look at me, honest. That’s very honest talk. What happens? It’s very important. Don’t forget this one. What if you got everything you wanted the minute you wanted it, what would your life be like?
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: Right, just in case your mind’s confused, I’ll give you an example. You like playing basketball. You really like playing basketball. You’re just one of these guys that likes playing basketball, or girls that likes playing basketball. You challenge people, you do things, you try to perfect yourself. You practice all the time. “OK. Since I’m God and I know you’re my child and you love playing basketball, I’m going to give you a mitzvah.” That’s Jewish for blessing. “I’m going to give you a blessing and I touch on the forehead and wait till you see what’s going to happen.” Next time you go out to that court, you pick up that ball, swish, you go to another place, swish, go to another place on the court, swish. You go, “Whoa.” You close your eyes, swish; you stand backwards, swish. Full court—swish, swish, swish.Nothing but net. Every single time, no matter what you do—pick the thing up with one finger and throw it, swish.
For a little while, it’s like, “Wow, that is really exciting, isn’t it? Wow. Wait, did the guys see this?”
OK, next time you’re down there at the courts picking up games, people pick you, don’t pick you. You always went through that, right? And there they all are, five on five, three on three, one on one—whatever it is. There you go, swish. “Hey, nice shot.” Swish. “Nice shot.” Right? After four or five, “What steroids have you’ve been taking?” They start accusing you of things, right? After 10 or 15, all of a sudden it’s not so much fun anymore for anybody because the minute you touch the ball, why bother playing? And you start to understand why you were playing basketball. You were playing basketball to better yourself. You’re playing basketball to see how well you could do. If every single time someone on that court touched that ball, it went in, it’s not a game anymore.
There’s no fun in it. No one would pick you soon. They don’t even want you on the court. You ruined the game. That’s what would happen if every time you wanted something, it happened—you would be dead. It would ruin your entire life. There would be nothing, no excitement, no challenge, no anything.
I really want you to look at that. I’ve always found that sometimes great teachings and insights are seen at the extremes. Just take something to its extreme and then you’ll see its nature.
So if you spent your life avoiding your fears—all of them, and you did really well—again, really well—nothing you’re afraid of happens; you just avoid them; nothing you’re afraid of happens—you will have nothing. You’ve done nothing with your life. All you did was avoid and not experience or feel. If you got blessed and everything you wanted took place the minute you wanted it, your life would be dead.
There’d be nothing. That’s why the life we are living doesn’t work. It really does not work because we’re not even succeeding at what it is we’re trying to do because success is failure. Hear me: I was like, what kind of stupid situation do you set up that if you fail, you fail, and if you succeed you fail? That’s a lose-lose situation. At least set up something that you can win.
So this thing about avoiding fears—I’ve talked to you this before, but never got in this clear: so, you can’t challenge it. You can take your mind with you in these talks. It’s very logical. If you spend the life of avoiding your fears, you lose. You lose either because you can’t avoid your fears or you lose because if you avoid your fears, you still didn’t gain anything. If you spend a life of trying to fulfill your desires, the things you made up will make you OK, you lose.
You lose either because you didn’t fulfill them and you feel resentment and anger and jealousy or because you did fulfill them, and now what do you do? Because it didn’t do anything for you. It didn’t do anything for you to be able to throw that basketball in every single time. What you wanted was respect of other people. What you wanted was to feel good about yourself. You don’t feel good about yourself and you don’t have the respect of other people. If you could throw it in every time, they want nothing to do with you. It’s just an amazing, amazing realization. And so when yogi wakes up and says, “I am not going to live that life,” which life? The life of avoiding my fears and the life of filling my desires. Then the question comes up—a little voice goes, “Well, then what do I do? Since I’ve spent every minute of my life avoiding my fears and I still do, and trying to fulfill my desires and I still do, I don’t understand. What is my alternative?”
Therefore, instead of explaining to you a moment ago, how do you live this life where you find this joy and ecstasy, right? You do it first by seeing what life doesn’t give, and then you see what’s left. So the life of avoiding your fears, of fulfilling your desires, is not going to lead you to ecstasy. It’s going to lead you to depression. It’s going to lead you to your humanness. It’s going to lead you to jealousy, fear, anxiety—just all the stuff that’s going on inside. That is the gift—the booby prize of living that life. It is a mess in there, isn’t it?
And I’m telling you, if you look carefully, you’ll see it’s a mess in there because you’re trying to avoid your fears and you’re trying to fulfill your desires and you’re lost, and you have all these emotions come up—and hope and the disappointment and the opposites. The opposite just keeps happening.
What is the alternative? There is an alternative and the alternative works, and it’s the only thing that works. So we call it The Middle Path. It lies in between all of that. It says as follows, “Why am I not OK?” Not, “How do I be OK?” It asks a very different question. It does not ask, “How do I avoid my fears?” It says, “Why are there so many fears?” It doesn’t ask, “How do I fulfill my desires?” It says, “Why am I not OK within myself?”
So it’s an exploration inside. It has nothing to do with the outside. It is an exploration inside. You’ve now at least lined yourself up. If you can find out why you’re not OK and fix that, now you solve something. You hear me? What will happen if you fix not being OK? By definition, you’ll be OK. You got rid of not-OK-ness, you will feel all this joy and ecstasy.
And that’s what you’re going to find someday—is that what’s happening; is underneath you is all of this joy. I promise you. I’ve never asked you to believe anything. I don’t want you to believe anything. Go find it. Underneath what you think is you—all this desire and need and fear and junk, your personal self—underneath that is the ecstasy, the joy of life, of being. And every once in a while when you get what you want, it comes up because it clears out. Every once in a while when you avoid what you don’t want, it comes up and you feel relief. But it’s there all the time. Just an ocean. An ocean of joy and ecstasy. So what you find is the fact that you’re not OK, you’ve shoved on top of that, and now you try to build a life of how to be OK.
Spirituality doesn’t do that. Spirituality says, “I understand that spirit lies underneath and the personal self is in between. I need to find a way to let go of the part of me that is not OK.” And that becomes the entire meaning of your life. Not to satisfy it, not to avoid. How do I let go of the part of me that’s not OK so that I can experience what’s underneath it, which is more than OK? It is ecstasy itself.
And so now the question becomes: how do you do it? What I like is I always spend this amount of time I talk—I have just a couple of minutes left. But it should be that it takes forever to explain, “How do I do it?” In this particular case, it doesn’t. The answer of, “How do you do it?” is so simple. It is so easy.
That’s why everybody misses it. If it is true—and it is—that your consciousness is aware of whatever it’s looking at—I have to argue that one, do I? Your consciousness is aware of whatever’s in front of it. Right now, what’s in front of it is the mess of the human psyche, which was made up of fears and desires and all the experiences that support that. That’s what your psyche is. It’s just full of it and it’s just causing all this trouble and reacting to everything. It’s just a mess. Underneath that is where you want to go. Underneath that is everything, underneath that is God. When Christ said the kingdom is within you, that’s way back inside of you, way back behind it all. So the answer becomes, “I’m going to live a life.” If I’m going to find that, I must remove my consciousness from my psyche.
Right now my consciousness is completely addicted to every single thing my mind and heart have to say. How about yours? All they have to do is move. The heart moves, you’re gone. The mind says something, you’re gone. I have to find out how I can get my consciousness off of that and onto the ecstasy. They both exist side by side. You’re just paying all your attention to one and avoiding the other. How do you do that? Well, that’s what yoga teaches you. That’s what all the practices are about—how to center back in your consciousness so that you can release the addiction your consciousness has on your humanness because you are not a human being. You are not a human being. You are an ocean of consciousness that is watching a human being, and you can if you want, watch something very different—the ocean of ecstasy, the universe itself, but you must be able to remove your consciousness from its addiction to yourself.
So how do you stop being addicted to yourself in the simplest sense? And you have to find your own way; I can only point. In the simplest sense, you learn to handle yourself. If you can’t handle your mind, then you freak every time it says something. If you can’t handle your heart, then you freak every time it emotes. If you can handle it, then you can stay conscious and centered when your mind says something.
You just notice, “There it is. There it is again. Talking about fear. There it is again. Talk about what it needs to be happy.” You can handle your heart. “There it is breaking. Been there, done that. There it is excited. Been there, done that”” You can handle the states that your mind and your heart go through. If you can’t handle them and you know exactly what I mean, then by definition you will get lost in them because you can’t handle them.
“She left me. I can’t handle this. I want to die. I’ll never be OK.” OK, you were fine. You’re meditating. “I don’t meditate anymore. I don’t do anything. You don’t understand. She left me.” Hello? “No hello. Don’t hello me. She left me. You don’t understand. She left me.” OK. I understand. I understand. So your heart went into a place that you couldn’t handle. What happens to you? I don’t think we want to talk about it. Do we? We were having a nice talk. That’s not nice. You get lost in that and now you are no longer anybody. You’re this broken heart. That’s who you are. But that’s not who you are. You’re the soul experiencing a broken heart, but you’re not willing to be the soul experiencing a broken heart because you couldn’t handle it. Right?
So first, I’m encouraging you to learn to handle anything your mind says and anything your heart feels. Not to control, not to get rid of, not to never feel.
No one understands these teachings. They twist them. And because they don’t understand. I didn’t tell you that when the person you love more than anything in your whole life leaves you that you should feel joy. I never said that. I didn’t say you shouldn’t feel pain. I never said that. I didn’t say you shouldn’t miss them, feel a heart that’s just aching. I didn’t say that. You let it be what it is. When you’re trying to make it be other than it is. Why are you trying to make your broken heart not be broken? “Because I can’t handle it.” Why are you trying to make the mind not be weird when it gets weird? “Because I can’t handle it.” That’s what you’re saying. You’re saying, “I can’t handle these different states that the mind and the heart get into. Therefore, I’m going to try and control them.”
I’m going to try and make sure they don’t happen. That will happen. If you can’t handle it, you will either try to manipulate the world, people, places, and things so they don’t do things that make that happen. Or you will try to suppress it so you don’t have to experience it. Both of which are nowheres; they ruin your life. The alternative is to actually learn just like you learn to go swish with the basketball, just like you learn to play the piano—you learn to handle the different states that your mind and your heart go through.
How do you learn? Practice makes perfect. How do I get my heart to feel the different things? Don’t worry, it will. That’s life’s job. Life is the piano player, the heart player that plucks the strings of your heart. Doesn’t it? Have you had various experiences in your heart and mind as you went through your life?
How about as you go through your day? Can you handle it? This is a life of a yogi. This is a life of a spiritual being. It’s very different than what people teach or think. No renunciation. I keep telling you that. It’s not about that. Only thing you’re renouncing is your inability to handle yourself. That’s the last and only thing you renounce. The part that says I can’t do it. OK, good. You sit in there and you say, “I want to be free of this cloud of my personal self so that I can see beyond directly into the sun,” because I’m telling you, you are capable. Every one of you capable of directly experiencing God, directly experiencing the highest state that could possibly exist. You are capable of the direct experience of the divine experience, which is the highest experience there is, but not while your consciousness is addicted to yourself because then you’re just going to experience yourself.
So how do you do it? I told you, handle yourself. Don’t renounce yourself. Don’t fight with yourself. Don’t change yourself. If you change your personal self into something else, then you have to let go of that. I’m trying to get you to skip all the in-between steps.
So how do you do this? You wake up in the morning regardless of what you’re feeling—doesn’t matter. You wake up in the morning and you say, “The day is going to unfold.” That’s a guarantee. “The day is going to unfold. What I am going to use this day for is handling what happens.” That’s my only job today. Can I handle going to work? Can I handle what my mind says about going to work? Can I handle the relationship with this person? Can I handle what my heart does about the relationship with this person?
Can I handle the experiences that are going to take place today? What if I told you that that is the highest sadhana? That right there is the highest seat of spiritual growth—is you wake up in the morning and say, “Can I? I can. I can and I will. That’s what I’m going to do today.” Well, what if I don’t? Pick yourself up. That’s like saying, “But daddy, what if I shoot and it doesn’t go in?” You try again. Don’t say, “I’m not good at it. I’m not going to play.” That’s crazy. What if I play the piano and make a mistake? Learn. That’s what you’re doing—you’re learning. It’s all about learning, period. Your life is learning, and if you’re learning this, you’re learning the highest thing there is to learn. Now you’re in school. Now you’re in a school that’s worth going to. Life is your school.
So you take a seat in the self—you take a seat in the consciousness itself—and you say, “I’m in here and it’s out there and it’s going to do its thing and I don’t know what its thing is going to be, but it’s going to do it. It does it every single day for billions of years, doesn’t it? And I’m going to see it and hear it and taste it and touch it. Oh my God, what an interesting thing is going to happen. And I don’t have any control over it. I don’t know what it’s going to be. It’s just going to do its thing and I’m going to experience this thing and I’m going to sit in here and honor the experience I’m having.” OK?
Now, if that was all that was happening—was that out there was going to do its thing? Probably we’d all be very good at it. “Eh, the cars are stacked again. Shit.” It’s way worse than that. While the outside does its thing and I’m sitting in here, this computer is going to keep talking about the thing that’s going on out there and what it likes about it and what it doesn’t like about it and what it’s going to mean in the future because it did that now, and how it reminds you of the path. It’s going to do that. It’s going to say, “Oh, I’m scared. This is no good.” It’s going to—unbelievable what it’s going to say.
I’m going to handle that. Now you can handle the world doing it same, but you can’t handle that. Mine’s saying, [INAUDIBLE]. How? I’m just going to watch it. What if it says, “This isn’t good. Maybe she’s talking about you. What if she tells somebody?”
What if it says that kind of thing? What if it says, “They don’t like you. Don’t go talk to them; you’ll get rejected.” But this stuff like that. I’m going to be fine with it saying stuff like that. It’s just something it’s saying—that’s how I’m going to deal with my mind. It’s just a computer gone berserk. OK? It is just a psyche in its full glory, isn’t it?
And I’m going to watch it and I’m going to see it and it’s not going to bother me. I’m not going to stop it. See, when you say it’s not going to bother me, then I’m going to change it from saying no. Now in the highest state, I ain’t changing enough. The world’s unfolding. I’m experiencing it through my senses. It’s hitting the mind and the mind’s doing its mind thing. It’s little personal, little melodrama. As the World Turns, Edge of Night, General Hospital—has always been one going on inside of you.
This is your life—“Days of Your Life.” I like going to “days of your life”. There’s a good one.
That’s what it’s going to be doing in there. Can you sit in there and handle it doing that? I’ll tell you, if you can handle the world doing what it’s doing and handle what your mind’s got to say about it—because it’s got something to say about everything, doesn’t it? “Why are you driving like that? Go faster. Don’t put your blinker on so soon,” to either the person who’s driving in your car or to the person who’s in front of you. It has something to say about everything, doesn’t it? Can you handle that? Can you handle your mind? Let’s say you were really, really great being and you could handle the world, which is none of your business. You could handle experience in the world and you could handle what your mind has to say about it. Now you’d be there, right?
Not exactly. We left that one little thing out of the triumvirate:, your heart. I have a heart. “Oh yeah, you have a heart.” And what happens is when the world unfolds, doing its thing, and you experience it and it comes in and it drops into the mind, and the mind starts blabbing about it, watch your heart. Your heart reacts to every single blab your mind has to say. If your mind says, “But what if this happens?” the heart goes, “Woo.” If the mind says, “Maybe she’ll do this,” the heart goes, “Woo.” I can see the heart, the orchestra. It’s the soundtrack of your life. It gives this richness, this depth to what’s happening, and it plays to the tune of the mind. The mind is the conductor of the heart. The world doesn’t make the heart move. The world’s just moving. The mind decides.
If she starts to walk toward me and my mind says, “Oh boy, she’s coming to talk to me. I’m so excited,” then the heart goes, “Woo.” If she starts walking to me, my mind goes, “Oh my God, I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to talk to her now. I’m not ready. I don’t look good,” and my heart goes, “Woo.” The mind conducts the orchestra of the heart. Now, can you handle that? Handle what? All the things the heart does. Can you handle the jealousy? Can you handle the fear? Can you handle the hope? Can you handle the excitement? Can you handle the love? Can you handle the hate? Can you handle whatever it is that the heart feels? “No, not hate. I’m not supposed to feel hate. Oh my God. No, I’m supposed to like people. I didn’t feel it. No, this is not right. It’s the devil.”
In other words, I can’t handle it. Can you handle your heart? The day that the answer to these questions I have asked you is yes, you got somewhere. You hear me? You have used your life for something very great. Why? Because the day can unfold and you can experience it and it can do what it does to the mind, and it doesn’t distract you from your seat of awareness.
And the heart can expunge what it needs to expunge and emote what it needs to emote and be human. What it needs to be human. It can do its thing. You do have a human heart, by the way, I hope you noticed. It does its thing and you’re fine. What happens if I’m fine? The day you can sit in there, deep inside in the seat of self and the world can unfold and the mind can do what it needs to do and the heart can do what it needs to do, and it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t distract you. It doesn’t draw you into it in some panic of stopping and changing everything, you hear me? They are just events that are occurring in the universe that happen to be in your face— that happen to be before the face of consciousness, heart, mind, world.
The day you are fine with that is the day that you no longer need to look at it. It no longer holds its power over you. The third Zen patriarch said, “When the thing can no longer offend you, it ceases to exist in the old way.” This whole talk I just gave—he puts in that one line. Because you can handle yourself, it no longer has power over you. But what if it no longer has power over me? You no longer are addicted to watching it. Well, what if I’m no longer addicted to watching it?
You get to watch everything else. There is a whole universe. How much of it do you watch? Your mind, your heart, what’s in front of your senses—that’s what you watch and nothing else, and that is why you’re stuck as a human being when you are not a human being. You are consciousness, you are spirit, you are divine. So because you are addicted and they have this maya—this power, this control—over you. And you see they do. Don’t they? All the mind has to say is, even to this whole talk—the mind will say, “Yeah, but what if I get sick? Yeah, But what if they foreclose on my house? Oh my God, I better take care of that first before I go to God. I have to be ready to go to God.” That’s what’s going to happen. That’s the power they have over you. Somehow what they say, it seems important.
So how does one reach the great state? By letting go of the power that the mind, the heart, and the world has over their consciousness. How does one do that? By permitting it all to be and you being fine with how it is, you just keep letting go. You let go. You don’t control the final clue. What are you letting go of? You’re letting go of the pull. You’re not even letting go of the mind. You’re not letting go of the world. There is a pull on the Shakti. That is how the world pulls your consciousness into. It has this magic, this maya. They call it maya. And when the mind says something, you’ll see there’s this pull. It’s like an energy pull—like a magnetic pull that draws the consciousness into the mind and the heart.
You really feel that. When the heart starts to feel, it pulls you into it. Yes or no? You have to get pulled into it. That is what you’re letting go of. You’re letting go of the pull. How do you let go of the pull? Those of you’re into physics—understand that for something to have power, it has to be attached at two ends. It has the pull on one end and somebody has to be holding on the other. Otherwise, it just pulls. Nobody goes. You understand that? To have a tug of war, both sides need to be pulling. One side lets go, there is no tug of war. You are the other side. I don’t want you even still on the side where your energy is attached to the world. I want you to deal on the side of the self. Somehow you are holding onto the rope.
Thought comes—so it comes, so it goes. Who cares? You’re holding onto the rope of that thought. Therefore, it’s pulling you. The heart emotes jealousy, fear, insecurity. You are holding on to the other end of that rope. Otherwise, the heart makes it and it just goes by itself. Let go at that level and wait til you see what happens. You will end up in a place that is so beautiful. You won’t have to do anything. There is no act of will after this. Your last act of will that you will ever, ever be involved in is the releasing of where you’re holding on, which is deep in the self. And from that point forward, you’ll get sucked up and all you’ll have to do is take the ride. There’s no will. There’s no decisions, there’s no discrimination, there’s no right, there’s no wrong, there’s no good, there’s no bad, no better, there’s nothing left and you just sucked up.
Where? That’s for you to explore. Where do you come from? What is the nature of self? Who is the indwelling being who’s seeing all this? Now you’re getting into mysticism. I told you, spirituality is it, and it leads to the ultimate. And this is the journey that a great being takes. And the teaching we just had, every minute of your life is for the purpose of this. You’re not leaving anything. You see that. It’s all teaching you to do this.
So that’s the oneness, the beauty of the true spiritual life. So if I have but one life to live, heck, if I’m wasting it on avoiding my fears and trying to fulfill my desires—we already went through that, didn’t we? Taking you back. You are a great being. You get to live a great life and there’s nothing stopping you but you. [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.
