The Illusion of Control and the Power of Acceptance

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.

Tami Simon: Welcome to The Michael Singer Podcast, presented by Sounds True in partnership with Shanti Publications. For more information about Michael Singer’s work, access to all prior episodes, and information about upcoming releases, we invite you to join us at MichaelSingerPodcast.com

Michael Singer: Jai Guru Dev, Jai Masters. The more you grow, the clearer you get, the more you’ll realize that the secret to a beautiful life. The secret to spiritual growth is acceptance, but acceptance doesn’t mean what people think it does. Let’s look at it. If you haven’t noticed, the world unfolds in front of you. I know you like to think you’re in charge and you’re control and people try to tell you that you are, but obviously I could sit here all night and tell you that 99.99% of every single thing that passes in front of you, you have zero control over. You may have control over 0.1, but you don’t have control over the rest. Right now when you step on the floor, you don’t fall through, do you? You’re doing that right now. Your breath goes in and out. You’re doing that right now. Your heartbeats, you’re doing that right now.

35 trillion living cells, divide, communicate, secrete, do all kinds of things. You doing that? You’re pregnant, you have a baby. You doing that? I know you think you are. I like to walk up through a pregnant woman. This is my baby. I said, well, make me an eyeball. Here’s 5 billion. Take as long as you want. I don’t want much. I don’t need a liver or a kidney. Pancreas. Just make me an eyeball. You’re not making that baby. You can ruin it. Smoke, drink, but you’re not making that baby. That is something that is going on, has nothing to do with you. It goes from a single cell into a skeletal structure, a heart lung of pancreas, pineland, I don’t even know where it is, makes all that by itself 99.9% of every single thing that is happening around you and within you. You are not doing.

Let’s say it was your responsibility to teach this. What if you grew up in a society that didn’t know that they say your heart better or beat and it don’t work well, your heart doesn’t beat does it? And so they learned to do this all the time. Well, it’s not going to be by itself. Come on, get smart. Okay, so sitting there doing it and everyone does it, who’s not going to do it right? It’s like you take a risk, don’t you? That is exactly what acceptance means. It’s not weird. It’s not spiritual or mystical. It’s merely saying, will you pay attention and realize that all of these things are happening by themselves, but there’s this little bit here. I want to pick up the glass. I didn’t make the glass. I didn’t make gravity was holding it there. I didn’t make the atrial molecule.

I’m not doing anything. I don’t make it rain. I don’t make it get hot. I don’t make it get cold. I didn’t make you be the way you are. I didn’t make your body. I didn’t do anything in comparison to what must be going on for me to have this moment in front of me. Will you please contemplate that? They want to tell you you’re in charge. You can attract yourself whatever you want. You ain’t touched nothing. That really matters. You’re making a slight change of something that 99.9% is already there or is going to be there anyways. That is spiritual truth and I like talking about it. Even what you think is out there by itself is not what you think it is, and that’s why we have scientists. Your scientists are your preachers. They’re telling you it is not what this appears to be.

That really underneath they thought there were molecules and they thought there were atoms and they thought electron nuclear protons. Now they even talked about for a while, subatomic particles. Now guess what they say? There are no subatomic particles. There are wavelets in a quantum field that behave like a particle. They have qualities that when they interact together, a bunch of ’em make a proton, but they’re not things. They’re just force fields. It’s like it’s not even here. They tell you you create your universe. I, I’ll discuss that in a minute. I know that everyone teaches you that and I don’t. Okay, are you making the quantum field create all the flowers and all the trees and all the things that are happening? Which one of you’re doing that? Go on. No, you’re playing around with a surface level thing to do what? Make it be the way you want.

You’re not even starting by accepting the miracle that it even exists. I want to meet somebody. I want to nicer house. I want to attract a car. I want to do this, I want to do that. It’s like, oh my God. You can even start an I do to ask the question, okay, the world is making itself, is it not 1.3 million earths from inside the sun? You have to listen to that number. It’s a big number. How much of the earth do you take up? How many moments are you experiencing that are going on and you are in charge? You create your universe, holy mackerel and a chance in the world now just because you’re going to fight with me, you do create your universe. You create your experience of the universe. My brother wore his hair like that. He died young. Therefore, when I see you, I feel attraction or repulsion to you.

I just created my universe. Has nothing to do with you, has to do with me. I’m looking through the veil of my mind and seeing here. You go out and you see a sunset and you say, it’s the most beautiful thing. Oh my God, it blew me away. What of grace I have makes me believe in God, makes me believe that I tracked it to myself, this beauty. Somebody else walks out there and their girlfriend just dumped them and walked off into the sunset and didn’t even say goodbye. They hate sunset. They see the sunset and they’re being tortured, which is it? It’s neither. It’s just a sunset. It’s the earth turning on its axis and you happen to be standing in that spot at that moment to see what you see, but because you have this veil that you collected inside your mind, it’s like a veil.

It’s like a filter that you look through isn’t up. You look through it. You see what you like. You see what you don’t like. You see what you want, what you don’t want, what you believe in, what you don’t believe. You are seeing that that’s what’s going out there. Let’s say you have a husband and he’s mean. He’s not a nice guy. He don’t treat you well. Don’t treat the kids well, but you’re Catholic. Can’t get rid of the dude. You come home one day and there’s this note sitting on the dresser and what says is from your husband, I’ve had enough of you. You keep the kids. I’m leaving. How do you feel?

God’s grace. What if you didn’t want the husband to leave with your best friend? Now the note says the exact same thing is sitting in the exact same place, which is it a beautiful experience or a terrible experience, which did you attract to yourself? So you are creating your universe. You are creating your experience of the universe because you are looking at it through your personal veil and therefore you see what you see. It’s just as simple as that. But as far as are you causing the quantum field to vibrate the way it’s vibrating and then put together and leptons to make protons, to put together atoms which happen to bond together based on the traumatic laws. Are you doing all that? What makes us be here, isn’t it? Wake up, right? And then the question becomes, I always ask people that want to create their universe, how did you decide what you want?

I don’t want to know how you attracted yourself. I want you to answer me honestly. How did you decide why you want to attract yourself? You did decide right, and you’re going to find out that what’s there now, physicists, scientists are the priests today. Well, so are psychologists. Physicists study outside rule psychologists study in your mind. What they come up with man is the sum of his learned experiences. Go look it up. Talk to any psychologist, psychiatrist, okay, you the sum of your learned experiences. You’ve had experiences. Some of them went right through. Some were nice, you held onto ’em, some were not nice. You suppressed them and you built this thing in your mind called your ego, your self-concept. What’s it made out of? The sum of your learned experiences. It’s so easy. You held on to certain experiences that you had either held onto them by pushing them away, which made them stay inside Freud, suppression, repression, denial or resistance, whatever.

If you push it away, it stays in there. Or you did what the Buddhist called clinging. I liked it. I held onto it. So these things stayed where outside? No, they didn’t stay outside. They kept going. The outside keeps moving. It’s a motion picture, but it stayed inside, didn’t it? So you built this house inside your mind that’s made out of your learned experiences and that’s how you decide what you want to attract. Did you want to attract the things that hurt you the most? I don’t think so. You want to attract the good experiences that you had. Somebody else doesn’t want to because they had a bad experience with blondes. You had a good experience. They bought a new house and the contractor was terrible and it became a money pit. They’re never going to build a new house again. I’m buying a used one man, check it out.

See how it holds up. You would never buy an old used house. It’s just your learned experiences. There’s no rights, there’s no wrong, there’s no better, no worse. Everybody’s had different experiences. No one that ever lived had the same experiences as you. No one and no one that ever will have the same experiences as you. You’re completely unique and therefore you experience your universe, which is the sum of your learning experiences. That’s what you’re experiencing. So when you go out there and decide what to attract yourself or pray to have it not happen, where did that come from When you’re praying to not happen, she’s praying to happen. She’s got a party set up for tomorrow and she’s not ready. She blew it. None of the food came in. Please rain, especially an outside party, please. God rains so hard that nobody shows up. Alright, you got a party and you got everything ready, please don’t rain.

People ask me, does God listen? I hope not. I hope we just leave the weather to be what it is. My favorite is this. Why did it have to rain on my birthday? It didn’t rain for two weeks before my birthday. Why did it have to rain on my birthday? It always rains on my birthday. Guess what? It doesn’t know it’s your birthday. People literally say, I don’t believe in God. Why would he make it rain on my birthday? Didn’t rain before it didn’t rain after is ridiculous or God’s mad at me. What are you doing? You’re building something in that’s mind of yours. The personal mind. That is a sum experiences. You’re projecting it onto this innocent world that’s out there. Why did it rain on your birthday? Go to the University of Florida. It’s a very nice place and they have a field called meteorology and they have lots and lots of books.

Read them all and show me one spot that has your birthday in it and yet you sang it. Why’d it have to rain on my birthday? Alright. That’s why you create your universe because you’re not willing to objectively look at the universe. It would blow your mind that all of this exists. You should train your mind. That’s the difference in what we call the personal mind and the impersonal mind. Once you’re not talk against mind. Yoga, spirituality is not against mind. Mind is a beautiful thing. Mind is a phenomenal thing. Look what you can create. Before humans showed up, and I know you wish you would go back there, the world was jungles and it was deserts and there was water and there was fishes and animals running around. Monkeys lived in trees and then beavers built dams with their tails and now there’s skyscrapers, there’s rockets that go to the moon.

There’s air conditioning. Who did that? Your mind. That’s the impersonal one. Creative music, art, technology. It’s a phenomenal thing that’s mind of yours. What do you do with it? Instead of leaving it whole and pure and able to think clearly, you have experiences that you in there who live in there can’t handle. I can’t handle what you said to me. I can’t handle what you did. I can’t handle what you didn’t say to me. Things happen and I can’t handle them so I keep them, which I always tell you is that’s really interesting. The things you didn’t like the most you kept go ask Freud. Isn’t that funny? Alright, I hated what you said to me. I’ll never forget it for the rest of my life. Okay, very good. Congratulations. So you held on stuff in your mind. You can’t hold it out here because it’s gone.

Your past is gone. It’s not happening anymore, but it’s still in there, isn’t it? Why? Because you held it in there. That’s memory. That is not memory. That’s what yoga called some scar a pattern that happened. It came in and it passed through. You can bring it back if you want. You drive by building, you see people, you see white lines, you can bring it back. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the stuff you didn’t let go. It came in and you held onto it because you didn’t like it. You did like it got stuck in your mind. Do you have stuff stuck in your mind? The stuff come back by itself, yes or no? That’s not memory. Your computer has memory and it doesn’t come back by itself. When you want to bring it back, you bring it back. You want it to do something you tell it to do.

You want to sitting on your computer all sudden yelling at you. He’s going to get there with AI someday, right? Be careful, but then right now you have to want to bring it back out of memory so you have memory in there. Even hypnosis can bring back all kinds of stuff. It does store stuff. That’s not what this personal mind is made out of. It’s made what? Yogis got some scars. Patterns that happened. They were passing through and you didn’t let ’em. You stopped them inside your will. You in there. Who lives in there? You consciousness will. You held them inside and they started to build up inside and you built this whole structure inside called your ego. So now instead of being creative and engineering and all kinds of things that you can do with your mind, you’re in there saying, why did she say that to me?

Maybe she heard what John said. I shouldn’t have said that to him. He probably told her, I don’t. Should I call him this ISN to you with your mind? Tell me the truth. I’m so embarrassed by what I did five years ago. I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t even want to go home. There are people who knew what I did and they probably think about it all the time. There’s nobody thinking about it. Only you thinking about it. Anybody got one of those minds? Answer me. Does anybody have one of those minds that talks like that? Okay, and guess what? Every one of ’em says something different because it is a sum of your learned experiences. You’re not talking about a thing that happened to me, are you? It’s the stuff you held in there got stuck in there and lemme tell you a secret people, so I say to me, why is that voice in your mind talk all the time?

Because it’s trying to get out. It’s trying to continue seriously. It’s trying to continue its journey through the universe and you didn’t let it, you held it in there. So it’s always trying to release the energy. Energy can’t stand still. There’s not single place energy stands still. Energy can’t stand still. The stuff that came in is energy. The event didn’t come in, the impression came in, the energy came in and then what’d you do with it? If you hold it, it gets stuck in there how? It’s just energy because if it circles around itself, energy can stand still. It’s not standing still but it It’s standing at one place, isn’t it? Right? That’s why circle is such an important thing as a structure in the universe, all kinds of things circle around. Let’s energy move when it’s standing still. That is what your some scars are the patterns that we’re trying to pass through that you used your will to block or clinging and now they’re just circling around.

That’s literal what karras. The ancient yogic teachings all. It’s just a seed that’s caught in there and it’s always trying to let go. That’s why it comes up in your dreams. That’s why it comes up when you see something, it reminds you of it because it’s trying to release. That’s why the personal mind is so noisy and that’s the personal mind. That’s what you did with this beautiful thing that has created so much beauty in every single thing. You sat there and made a mess by storing stuff inside of you because you store that you have desires. Desires are not natural. Psychological desires are not natural. I don’t care what they tell you. There are no psychological needs. You’re whole and complete within yourself. You have such beauty going on inside of you. You’re filled with love, you’re filled with joy, you’re filled with Shakti.

You’re the highest thing. I walked the face of the earth because you blocked that energy by storing this stuff in there. The energy that you are is all caught up in there. So it has the effect of trying to push the blocks out the way and that’s why you’re so neurotic. That’s why the mind has so much trouble and that’s why you have need because you blocked it. Okay? If you don’t ever drink water, you get thirsty. If you don’t ever eat, you get hungry. If you don’t ever let energy flow inside of you, you get needy. You feel empty, you feel lonely, you feel scared, you feel insecure. You feel self-conscious because you blocked your power, you blocked your energy. A great beam doesn’t feel any of that ever. They could be in the middle of New York or they could be alone in a mountain cave.

They’d be fine. Well, I guess they’re fine inside. They’re being fed from inside. Who taught you that? You think it’s just yoga taughts you that the Bible tells you that Christ said what? Man does not live bread alone, but by every word that leaves the mouth of God, it means anything from outside that comes in that feeds you because you’re needy. Somebody loves you, somebody something nice to you. You win. You get a raise, you then get fired. Different things happen. It comes in, it makes you feel better or makes you feel worse. That’s not where it all comes from. There’s energy inside natural energy, spirit, shockty, you call whatever you want, your natural energy flow, that’s whatever leaves the mouth of God. Okay, so he’s teaching the same exact thing that Yogi taught and learned a long time ago. You’re a great being. You have no needs.

You’re whole incomplete within yourself. Here’s the beam of light. Doesn’t mean you can’t interact with the world. Well, I get that down right away. If I’m so filled with light and self ult, why would I interact? Lemme tell you something. Beethoven heard music inside his head. You all know that. I hope you love Beethoven. He literally was just pouring beaming inside of his head. He had to express it. When you feel passion, just sit there. Oh, I feel passionate. No, you want to express it. You want to express the music. You want to express the love. You want to express the artwork. Okay? How many great artists sit there and Monet and paint this painting and don’t look at it? Nobody. How many sit there and paint the painting and don’t care if it sells real artists. They painted that because they had to, because they saw it inside and they had the passion to express it outside.

It’s where great musicians are, where great artists are. So basically if you’re filled with love and joy and light, you express it. Now you’re coming out here not to get something. You’re not even trying to give anything. You are. You made this beautiful thing, but you didn’t do it for any critical reason. You did it to express so great being stays in the world. Okay? In fact, again, I read the Bible once in my life in 1971 and I’m Jewish, okay? Yet if I’m talking like this, it comes back and there’s something in the Bible that says you don’t light a lantern and hide it under the bed. You put it in the window sill to light for others. You become great. You light the lantern. It’s not natural to stay alone. You’re emanating, you’re inspired, you fill in love, you want to express it so you’re giving it out, but I’m telling you, don’t feel like you’re giving a person who truly gives, they don’t know giving.

They’re expressing the wholeness and fullness that they have inside themselves and other people are drinking of that and saying thank you and they don’t know why A great being. You get fucking too advanced. A great being doesn’t do God’s work. A great being allows God to do his work. There’s nobody else in there. It’s not like God stops along the way, makes a phone call. Hey, by the way, I want you to do this for me. You get out of the way. Die to be reborn. Did Christ say that you must die to be reborn? What does that mean? You in there that’s busy doing things is not there and what’s there is this pure energy flow. It’s just pouring through you. It’s healing, it’s doing anything. It’s doing everything, but there’s nobody in there taking pride. If you get out of the way, the ego, the personal self with its likes and its dislikes and its wants and its fears and his anxieties and its hopes and its dreams, those things are not spiritual.

Those are ego. They’re your personal self that is not whole. A great being has no dreams, not like that. Has no hopes why. A hope means you don’t have something. A dream means you don’t have something yet. What if you were holding a plea within yourself, just filled with waves of joy and ecstasy all the time? What are your hopes? What’s that word mean? What are your dreams? It’s already happened. It’s over. And so all that’s left is this beauty pouring off of you. That’s where a great being is. So it’s not about attracting to yourself. Oh my God, 99.99% of the world makes itself. It’s not about attracting what you want, it’s about appreciating the reality that’s unfolding in front of you. How could you even think of you while something else? Do your eyes work? Does your breath go in and out? Does your food digest when you swallow it and you just want to say thank you for how good it tastes?

Give me a break. It’s not about how good it tastes, it’s about what happens after you swallow it, isn’t it? Who breaks it down? Who breaks it? Literally chemistry breaks everything down, sends it to the right place, passes through the bloodstream and excretes it. Who’s doing that? You. What if that didn’t happen? Don’t enjoy something too much because you ain’t going nowhere. So it’s not about attracting to yourself what you want, it’s about appreciating what you have. It’s about daring to not use your personal mind to limit you to your blockages. That’s literally what your personal mind is. It is what you didn’t let pass through is now determining what you wanted, what you don’t want, what you like, what you don’t like, and your hopes and your dreams and your beliefs and all that stuff. The sum of your learned experiences. Your mind is not the sum of you learned experiences.

Your mind is unbelievable, it’s infinite. Can you go to Mars in your mind? Can you imagine what it would be like to having 2 trillion galaxies out there? Even try and you expand. There’s no limitation to your mind what Microsoft used to say, where do you want to go today? I don’t need a computer, do I? Right? Where do you want to go today and where you go is to hell because you go to the personal mind, isn’t it? Hell answer me. Okay, that’s a tough book to live with and so you take this tiny part of mind, the one you held on based on the tiny experience that you had. I was trying to get across to you and I know I never do because I would know I got across if you pass out, alright,

At any given moment, I’m looking at her because she’s in there. I’m not picking on you at any given moment, you’re experiencing something correct. What are you missing now? What do you think you’re missing? What are you missing? Everything else you’re experiencing one out of 700 billion, trillion things that are going on on earth, not to mention the rest of the place. Is it not true? You’re missing everything else. If he was, I don’t want to miss anything thing. You’re missing everything. And the only part you’re not missing is the part that’s happening. How small is what’s happening in front of you? It’s nothing. And you take that in as the sum of your learned experiences. Zero plus, zero plus zero plus zero, zero. I told you once I studied statistics when I was in college, alright? It’s called statistically insignificant. That is what you’ve experienced across your life.

You think you know something? How can you know anything when you’ve experienced nothing? If your personal minds are somebody you learned experiences and just told you at any given moment you’re having one experience, you’re missing everything else. Oh, but I read some books. How many? 600. How many are there on a given subject by the way? It’s like hello? And so basically you wake up and you realize this personal mind is a problem. It’s not a solution. Getting what you want is ridiculous. Why don’t you appreciate what you have? So I don’t talk against the law of attraction or any kind of stuff is wonderful. Yes, you can attract things to yourself. I want to know what you decided to attract because I’m telling you what you decided that was you feel you’re lacking and I know you’re not lacking anything, but I want to have a relationship.

What kind? Well, somebody who respects me, somebody who takes care of me. Start making the list. Okay? What if you were filled with love and Shakti and spirit flowing through you feeding every cell of your body every moment you couldn’t even see straight. Now what do you want? Nothing. Leave me alone. Why are you even talking to me? You’re distracting me. So what you think you want is because you’re blocked and so you have a choice in life. I devote my life to getting what I want, which is the last time you got what you wanted. Didn’t want anything else, never. Okay. Or you devote your life to get rid of the blockages that are making it so you don’t feel whole and complete within yourself so that you’re always okay no matter what happens, no matter what. It’s alright. That’s that. So acceptance does not mean what you think it means.

It doesn’t mean somebody spit at you didn’t do anything. Somebody fired you and you shouldn’t have been fired. You don’t fight it. You don’t do anything that does not. Acceptance means acceptance means something happened out there. How do you know? Because you came in. It came in. Okay, you better start by accepting that that happened. I teach you this all the time and I hope you get it. If you don’t accept that it happened, you’re going to resist it and you’re going to get unclear. It’s going to become a personal thing and you won’t be able to see what to do. I always tell you, if you can’t stand the side of blood, I hope you’re not the first person in my car accident because you can’t help. Well, if any event happens in your life or ever did happen that you couldn’t handle, you were the worst person to deal with it.

Have you ever said I can’t handle this, and what did you do? Because you can’t handle it. You pushed it away. Therefore it got stuck inside of you and therefore you’re not clear. So you can’t make a good decision about how to deal with it there. Acceptance means don’t do that. Surrender means don’t do. That has nothing to do with the outside. It has to primarily with how you handle when it comes in. Can you accept that it rained? When you have parties set up for tomorrow, can you accept that it rained on your birthday? Can you accept that it’s 98 degrees and you’re sweating? Can you accept the driver in front of you who’s driving 10 miles below the speed limit and not using their blinker? Can you accept that? Because if you can’t, it’s going to bother you. Did the driver bother you or the fact that you couldn’t accept it bothered you?

Answer me. If you sit there and say, fine, this person’s driving 10 miles below the speed limit. I can’t pass ’em. Fine, I’ll breathe. I’ll be comfortable. But instead you resist it. Therefore you get upset, therefore bothers you. There’s a line in the new book, living untethered. The moment in front of you is not bothering you. You’re bothering yourself about the moment in front of you. Think about it. If you didn’t bother yourself about it, it wouldn’t bother you. Okay? So you have a choice. You either go out there and fight the world which you’re not making. You already admitted you have very little control over it. Go fight it to be the way you want, which you just made up in your head anyways or let go inside. Start by saying it came in. Has anybody ever undone what already happened? Anybody ever? Has anybody ever made something that happened not have happened?

The answer is no. You need a time machine to do that. Therefore you have a choice. You either accept that it happened. I mean you like it and it has nothing to do with that. It happened. How do you know it’s in here? It came in through my senses. It happened. You either accept it or you resist it. If you resist it, you suffer. If you accept it, you have the ability to stay open to digest it and then sure you can deal with it. Nobody say you don’t deal with it. Don’t get that wrong. I surrender means just let everybody walk all over you and don’t do anything. It doesn’t mean that. It means don’t do anything while you’re resisting. You’re not clear. Don’t do anything when you can’t handle it. If you can’t handle what happened, you’re the worst person to deal with it.

So you learn inside to do this thing. I quote letting go. You let go, you let it go, you let it come in, you let it come in and when to talk about how to do that, that’s the only meaningful discussion. Other people will teach you how to get what you want. I don’t want to teach you how to get what you want. You know why? If a child is throwing a tantrum in a department store because they’re spoiled, they’re in the terrible twos and just crying and carrying on. I don’t want to be the person that walks up to that child and the mother and says, which toy do you want? Which one? That one over there. I’ll get it for you. I just made a spoiled brat. I just made a person that I want to meet when they grow up. How about you?

So I’m not into figuring out how you attract yourself what you want or get yourself good looking and this and that and the other things. You can have what you want. I would like you to let go of the part of you that’s blocking the wholeness that I know is inside of you so that you can be emanating light no matter where you go and handle every single thing that happens and therefore be the solution. Alright? So you have a choice. Either let your messed up mind that’s messed up because you stored stuff in there and didn’t let it go. Determine what you want and what you don’t want and then go out there and fight with the world. Try and make it happen or let go of this messed up mind. Let go of what you stored in there that’s messing up your mind so that you’re able to handle reality when it comes in and be able to deal with it from a very clear and center perspective.

One is worldliness the other. Spirituality a worldly person. That’s not a dirty word. It means they think the solution to their problem is out there in the world. It’s not just money, relationships, money, children, cars, jobs, careers, whatever it is, it’s out there. You have to get it out there to make it work. Spirituality is, it’s in here. My answer’s in here. It’s not renunciation. The reason thing, you would renounce something cause you couldn’t handle it. I can’t handle this. I’m not have nothing to do with it. That’s not spiritual. Learn to handle. It doesn’t need to do it, but you’re comfortable with it. You can handle anything. Now Teresa went in and worked with the lepers and loved it. So you just learn that you have a choice. Either go out there and fight with that, which has very little to do with you.

It’s just hilarious. And try to make it be what your mind has decided you want. That’s what decides what you want is where you’re lacking or you take care of why you feel lacking. Because I’m telling you, you ain’t lacking at anything. They’re whole incomplete within yourself. So you do. It’s called the inner work. There’s a quote from Rumi that I love. He said yesterday I was clever, so I was trying to change the world today. I’m wise, so I’m changing myself. Took me an hour, took him two sentences. You’re not giving anything up. It’s found a more productive way to solve the problem. There’s a problem, isn’t there? You all got problems, don’t you? Okay, every moment there’s problems. What’s the problem? Things aren’t the way you want. Isn’t that the problem? Things aren’t the way you want. Not one of you have a problem.

That’s the way you want. Things are the way you want. You don’t have a problem. Do you have problems about how things might be? You have problems about how things were, do you not have problems about the way things were in the past? It’s never going to change. It’s not even happening. I’m sorry there’s something wrong. But you live in a society where everybody’s doing it. Everybody has problems on their past, so it’s considered normal to be screwed up, isn’t it? Spirituality, didn’t you say, I don’t want to be normal if that’s what normal is, I don’t want my past bothering me why? It’s over. If it’s not over, I’ll deal with it with acceptance. I’ll deal with it the best I can. But if it’s over, there’s nothing to deal with. All this childhood stuff 30, 40, 50 years ago. There are families that siblings don’t talk to each other anymore for 30, 40 years.

What happens? Some, I don’t know. I don’t want to hear about it because it’s not happening anymore. Why should it be bothering you? Because I held it. I kept it didn’t. I kept it inside and it keeps bothering me. Why goes you kept it. That’s all. Eat some food that makes you sick and then just take some home and eat it every day. Yes, that’s going to happen. You go get sick, take an experience that bothered you, really bothered you and keep it inside so you keep thinking about it. If things keep reminding you about it and it’ll keep bothering you, congratulations.

Maybe that wasn’t such a smart thing to do. Maybe you should learn not to do that. That’s spirituality. It’s not a mystical go somewhere. No, it’s like your personal mind is a problem. There’s no such thing as a good personality, no such thing, but you call it good personalities When the other people, we don’t care what other people like because then I feel accepted and I get what I want. See, it’s all based on the fact that you’re not okay If you’re okay, people think whatever they want, who cares? They can’t affect you. If you’re filled with love, you’re filled with joy. It’s funny. If you’re filled with love and filled with joy, they want to be around you. They love you no matter what you look like and what you ever did because you’re emanating all this beauty and light. But if you’re busy trying to get them to like you, that’s hard.

So spirituality is the only sane thing to do. The other thing is ridiculous. Why would you want to run around? Not okay and then trying and have other people make you be okay. You know why? That’s silly. They’re the sum of their learned experiences. I said that yesterday and I don’t know if anybody gets it. If somebody likes you, has nothing to do with you, has nothing to do with you. It has to do with them. They’ve had experiences that they are the sum of that you fit pretty good. Go out and have one more experience. Either you or them. It doesn’t fit so good anymore. Does it ever had somebody change when they come home? It’s like, have you ever had somebody like you and then not like you as a high school is made for? Right? Because you’re building this personality. You’re building your self concept.

And so one more thing happened yesterday and then you behaving different today and not better when you grow up. You just grabbed it and hell yeah, I better be stable. Nothing’s called stable. I’ll keep the mess the same. So I’m telling you, you can’t do it. You can’t win out there and you know that. That’s why there’s so much anxiety. What is worry? What is worry? I always play psychic. I don’t mean psychic. I’m not psychic, but I’ll be psychic for you. Just for you. I know what you worry about. I don’t even know you. I know what you worry about. Here it is putting on a show, magic show. I don’t know you do I? Okay. I know what you worry about. You worry that what you don’t want to happen will happen. You worry that what you want to happen won’t happen. Did I get it?

That’s what you worry about, right or wrong. And so you can’t win. You can’t win. The reason you have these problems is because you’re not feeling whole. You’re not feeling full, you’re not feeling that. And no one ever told you that you can, that you are. You’re a beautiful being. You’re the most beautiful being. I’ve walked the face of the earth, Buddha and Christ blush. When they look at you, there’s a truth. Why don’t I feel it? Because you blocked yourself. Who blocked me? You blocked you. There are experiences that happened in your life. I dunno what they are. But you do that. You did not handle well and you kept it inside of you, didn’t you? And now it’s bothering you. So therefore it’s blocking all your energy and the energy is not blocking you. Use it to try and make everybody else be the way you want them to be. So when they come in, you feel better. Did you get that one? I said it really fast.

You are out there trying to, I want to find the job. I feel passion. You know what I want? I want you to be passionate about everything. I want you to be passionate about everything. I want you to feel I get to do the dishes again today. Really? You don’t want to do ’em? I get to do ’em. I take the garbage out. I can’t wait to do everything, anything. How would you like to be like that? That’s how a master is. How would you like to know? You will always be okay. You will never not be okay, period. Why? Because you’re not making yourself be not okay, right? You’re just, wow, look what’s going on. Wow, it’s better than Mars. There’s nothing going on. You compare what’s going on out there to what you want. Don’t you Compare what’s unfolding in front of you to what you want to be unfolding in front of you and what you don’t want to be unfolding in front of you.

That’s ridiculous. You made up inside your head what you want and didn’t want. Yes or no? It is crazy. Why don’t you compare what’s going outside compared to what would be like a Mars where there’s nothing happening or any other place that we aimed the Hubble and the Jamesville telescope has saw nothing but burning fire and rocks and sand. I’d like to go there. You at least have all this stuff passing in front of you. Oh, I can’t talk about it. You’re comparing against the wrong thing. You hear me as I tell you a story. You’re comparing against yourself. You’re comparing what you made up in your mind, but what you made up in your mind was the junk that you either couldn’t handle it because you didn’t like it. You couldn’t handle it because you liked it. You do understand you can’t handle what you like. But if somebody come up, oh my God, that’s a soulmate. I was just love for sight. It was unbelievable. My heart burst open. It was a beautiful experience I ever had. How would you like to never happen again? How would you like if you never saw ’em again?

You can’t even handle what you like and you sure as heck can’t handle what you don’t like when somebody came up and dissed all over you in front of all your friends and you’re crying in both cases. So lest the world unfolding in front of you is exactly matching what you stored inside of you. What’s the probability? How does it know? Why would the world unfold in front of anything about what you stored in there where you didn’t even grow up here? Well, it is a probability that the moments unfolding in front of you are going to match what you want them to be. Zero. Come on. If it’s true, I be a scientist with you. If it’s true that what’s going on in your personal minds, just some of your learned experiences, you grew up over there, you did this, and mother, father, just all the things, every moment you had some of your learned experiences, the moment of folding in front of you, is it the sum of your learned experiences?

Don’t even know your learned experiences. You know what it is? It’s the sum of its learned experiences. It’s called cause and effect. You have a history. So does it. The weather has a history. Other people have a history. Every single thing unfolding in front of you has history behind it, but not your history. It has its history. The sum of all its learned experiences all came together in that moment. And that’s what it is. And you’re comparing that with the sum of your learned experiences and you’ve been doing that your whole life and you wonder why you’re suffering. It ain’t going to happen. It’s wonderful that you’re in a universe that creates itself, that does all these things that’s going on everywhere is this colors and sound and shapes and people. And it’s wonderful that no one in the entire world is the same as you.

No one. You want to meet your soulmate. Look in the mirror as close as you’re getting because anyone you meet is the sum of their learned experiences. And by definition, you weren’t there. It’s not the sum of your learned experiences. Okay? And you think, well, he was a lot like I wanted to be and then I don’t know, he seemed to change. I don’t like. No, it was not like that. But it was two ships in the night and at the moment they crossed the sum of his learned experiences happen to be stressed themselves the same as the sum of your learned experiences. Believe me, if you haven’t caught on yet, it ain’t staying that way. Is it

Good? Thank you. And you wonder, I have so much trouble with relationships. So what’s the answer? Acceptance. You stop this silly old game that you’re playing that’s destroying you and everybody else. And so basically you wake up and you realize, all right, it’s not about getting what you want, it’s about letting go of the reason you want things. It’s about letting go of why you don’t feel whole. But again, it doesn’t mean you don’t interact with the world. Of course you do, but you don’t interact for you. Just think about you. No one will come back and step back far enough to say, are you literally going out there trying to make the world outside of you be the way you want and you call somebody else, has an ego? What do you call that? What if somebody who does something that’s not the way you want?

You know what you say, it’s wrong. That was wrong. What you say was wrong. It wasn’t wrong. It was just some of my learned experiences went to some of your learned experiences. Some of my learned experiences, my family, there’s sailors. They used to swear a lot. Yours were priests and nuns. You can’t handle the fact that I’m me. Oh God. Can anybody hear? Alright, so spirituality transcends. Psychology transcends it, incorporates everything. But it does it from the point of view. Impersonal. You don’t have the right to take the sum of your learned experiences and expect the people and the world unfolding in front of you to match. And you do expect that, don’t you? And you get upset when it doesn’t and you, oh my God, you do all kinds of things. Alright, what is the alternative? There’s an alternative. It’s called spirituality. What do you mean?

It means I’m in here. It’s witness consciousness. I forgot to add. Are you in there? You in there? You sure? Okay. I don’t need to define who you are. I don’t know. Hi. Hi. You in there. Hi. Okay. You in there have the ability to notice how screwed up your ego is. You have the ability, and maybe this truck will help to wake up and realize he’s right of watching a maniac down there who gets very upset over anything. If I’m going to the prom for high school and I have this mirror, one of those double-sided mirrors, it blows up to 65,000 times. Oh my God, there’s something over there. I can’t go tonight.

You didn’t do that, do you? Okay. You literally look for it. Why would you want to magnify your face where it looks like the piss of the moon, right? And they get upset. Oh my God, look at it. Why are you worried about that? Are you catching on? Just spread that out to what you’ve done with your whole life. You made yourself suffer. You have the right to stop how you go in there. You’re in there and instead of buying into what your ego’s doing, you take a step back and take a breath and say, wow, I used to listen to you. You used to determine whether I had a good day or not used to determine who I like and what I can handle and what I don’t like. There go be some changes in here. And now you get subtle. So I wrote living untethered.

Let’s get subtle about how to make those changes. Living untethered goes very deep into understanding the situation and how to work with it. So how do you work with it? You don’t beat it up. Do not ever fight with your mind. I’ll do it in a crash course. Do not ever fight with your mind. Don’t you dare think this is about killing your ego or stopping your thoughts. All you’re doing is suppressing. All you’re doing is fighting. There’s a reason that what’s going on inside of you is going on inside of you. You deal with the reason. You don’t deal with the surface. You don’t deal with the effect. You deal with the cause and the talk talked about the cause. The cause that you s shoved all this stuff down there. It’s trying to release itself. And so it built this self concept that defends itself.

Ever get defensive, alright? You just defend yourself and try to hold it together. Try to everybody like it do. Hold it out there. Okay? So you little by little look at it and the first thing you do is apologize to what you’re looking at. What you’re looking at. You’re going to see people write me say, oh my God, since I started witness consciously, I got much more neurotic. No, you didn’t. You just noticed how neurotic you are. You did not get worse. You look at it and you see how messed up it is. It is. It’s sensitive as can be, or I can’t handle anything and you apologize. You just look at it. Say, I am so sorry that I suppressed all this stuff and shoved all that down there into the darkness, did nothing would get worse. And you apologize and you change your relationship with your lower self.

You change your relationship with your ego mind. You start by realizing you did this by not handling reality. And so what I teach is don’t try to deal with that right now. You can’t. You’re not ready. Start handling your daily experiences. The weather, what somebody said, the driver in front of you. These tiny little things. Practice handling those. It’s like practicing the piano. You start with the scales. Start with Mozart to Beethoven. Start practicing, letting go, practicing, accepting, practicing, handling. What’s happening? You wake up in the morning. I’m not going to store any more in here. There’s enough in here. I’m going to handle the moments that are unfolding. How? Breathe, relax, welcome it. Relax, relax. Let it pass through. But it hurt. Yeah, it didn’t hurt enough to keep it in there. Which pain do you want? The one that you feel and passes through or the one that stays in there for the rest of your life.

No one told you had that choice, did they? Of course you do. You’re the one who’s doing it. Don’t do it. Relax through it. You can find out how to do that. Then the other stuff will come up. Crash course will start coming up. You do it with that too. Then all of a sudden some big will come up. Oh, you struggle. You have trouble, right? But eventually you say, I don’t want that in me. Well, I don’t want that in me. What mommy did 20 years ago, she’s dead. There are people that can’t talk about their mother, can’t talk about their father or their uncle. You understand that? Because something happen that bothered them, right? Do you know people like that? Subjects are very sensitively. They’re sensitive on subjects. Ha, right? You learn to let go comes up. It’s painful. He struggle it with pain.

It’s coming back with pain. You relaxed through it. You relaxed through it. And next thing you know, behind it is all this Shakti, you realize you were blocking it and then all of a sudden the world doesn’t look the way it used to look. It looks much more acceptable. It’s more interesting because you’re not judging it through a dark veil. You just keep letting go. Welcoming. Welcoming, letting go, welcoming, letting go. And eventually you start feeling all this joy. And the joy says, I’m stronger now. I feel the joy. Then you let go of more. They let go of more. And sometimes it comes up and it’s very difficult. Let go. You go through it called difficult time period. Good, I’m glad. Hear me. You want to go through that. You start considering those the most beautiful periods. I don’t have to carry that inside of me.

I care how long it took. How long will it take to let go of this stuff? Guess what? It doesn’t matter. What matters is if it’s out, you’re better off. Look how long you take to find a relationship. Look how long you take to work on a relationship. You go to a therapist, all kinds of stuff. Look how long you take to find a career to get a raise. And here you’re going to worry about it. You have this junk inside you that’s messing up your whole life. You have the wrong attitude. Come on up. Come on up. You start doing that instead of this up, not down. And everything changes. So now we’ve had a discourse on one way of life that doesn’t work. And one way of life that I guarantee you works. Which one you want to work on? Jai Guru Dev.

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