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 mind can be one of the greatest obstacles on the spiritual path — usually is — but it can be a great liberator. There’s two layers of mind: the personal and the impersonal. It’s not a philosophical discussion. It’s something you live with every day of your life, but we don’t pay attention enough.
What is the personal mind? It thinks about you. What do I want? What do I not want? What do I like? What bothered me? What happened in the past that I liked or didn’t like? What might happen in the future? It has the words I, me, and mine. That pretty much defines it. If it’s using I, me, and mine — even things that you think are not you, like my child, my husband, what I love, what makes me feel love — that’s all personal. Why? Because it’s about you.
Wow. What else is there? A whole universe. You’re really very small. If you look at yourself physiologically, you don’t take up much space on the planet, do you? There are, what, 8.3 billion of you running around, and they all use the word I, and they all are talking about themselves. That is the personal mind. Most people have never gotten away from it, have never gotten a distance from it, but it is not the only layer of mind. It’s a layer of mind. We’re going to talk about that.
Well, just to get it out there, what is there other than that? Well, you can think about the galaxies. You can think about atoms. You can think about everybody else. There are lots of things to think about other than you. But I’m telling you that 90 plus, 95% of every thought that passes through your mind is about you. “Well, no, I study, so I can get good grades and go to a good college.” Oh, I heard the word I every single time. Not, “I study so that I can learn about the rest of the universe and what is going on in the black holes in space and science.” There are lots of other things to think about besides you. But even the people that are doing science think about winning a Nobel Prize, getting paid more. So this impersonal mind stuff can be brought down to the personal. It’s very difficult to bring the personalized stuff up to the impersonal, and that’s why very few people do it. They think about themselves.
It’s sort of like Galileo got in trouble for saying that the Earth was not the center of the solar system. Well, they locked him up. He got in big trouble, right? It was a nice prison they put him in. It was like a little villa, but he wasn’t allowed out. He got locked up for saying that. Well, it turns out he was right.
I am telling you, that is what you are doing about yourself. You are the center of the universe. You are the meaning of your life. You’re the meaning of your existence. You’re the meaning of everything. You’re it, man. What you like matters, doesn’t it? It matters more than what anybody else likes. And what you don’t like really matters. You know what happens if something in the universe takes place that you don’t like? You say it’s wrong. “That should not have happened. It shouldn’t have rained on my birthday. I was going to have my party outside. Why’d it have to rain on my birthday?” It doesn’t know it’s your birthday, but to you it’s personal. You take everything personal.
Somebody says something to you that you don’t like. Why don’t you stop for a minute? I told you it’s hard, but you can move up to the intellectual mind and say, “How many words were said, coming out of the mouths of the 8.3 billion people existing on the planet Earth at that moment, and I got freaked out at what one mouth said?” That’s what it means to not take it personal. Why? Because it’s not personal.
How about if I challenge you by saying nothing is personal? Nothing, nothing, nothing is personal. You take it personal. You take it personal. It is not personal.
You’re intelligent people. Let’s talk about it for a minute. You get in a car accident. Somebody’s driving too fast. They ran a red light. “Why did that have to happen to me? What did I do wrong? Is it my karma?” I will never, ever talk to you that way about karma. I don’t like how they use it, and so I never talk about it.
Why? How did that car accident happen? How much of it was you? If you were not in that exact space where the other car was running a light at that exact moment, you would not hit each other. Well, how much of how you ended up at that exact space and how much they ended up at that exact space was due to you? Well, now we’re down to very little.
The example I always use is if your coffee took 15 seconds longer to brew, you would not have been there. So it really didn’t have anything to do with you. It had to do with why the coffee maker took 15 seconds longer to brew. Well, it turns out — because I know this, I checked — that the coils, the electric coils in your coffee maker were put together many years ago, and the person that was soldering them together had a fight with his wife the day before and was not paying attention. If he didn’t have the fight, if he didn’t screw up the solder, if the coffee maker wasn’t bought at exactly the right time — do you understand? You wouldn’t be there. So how personal was it?
Nothing is personal. There’s this thing called cause and effect. How many causes did it take for that event to take place? Take another event. Why did it have to rain on my birthday? Do you really want to know? Go to school and study meteorology, and you’ll find out that the mountains over in Spain and the El Niño and La Niña, if they weren’t doing what they were doing, it would not have rained on your birthday. That’s why it rained on your birthday. It’s not personal, is it?
Will you dare to look at reality instead of through the lens of your personal mind? But we don’t do that. “How could you say that to me? I never thought you would say something like that to me.” Yeah, that’s personal, isn’t it? Really? How come that person said that? Well, I don’t know. They got a phone call five minutes earlier. They found out somebody had died. They found out somebody had left them. They found out they failed a test. They found out that they have a doctor’s exam that didn’t come out good. So they weren’t exactly in the best mood. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have said it. Well, how did that happen? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And by the time you’re done, you’re all the way back to the dinosaurs. Why everything happened the way it happened. You’d have to trace it all the way back — every cause causing every effect, for that domino of science, of reality, to end up on your plate at that moment. It’s not personal, is it?
That’s what it means to grow spiritually — to move from the personal to the impersonal. You know what the impersonal is? Reality. What do you mean? Like Zen. We’ll get more Zen with you. You go to a Zen master, right? Pranam, and he gives you the teaching. “Water’s blue. Flowers are red. Grass is green.” That seems stupid. No, it doesn’t. It’s not stupid. It’s, come on, get with the program. It’s what is.
How to get that way really is none of your business, and you really don’t want to know. You would have to study so long to find out why that particular blade of grass is green and the other one’s brown. You don’t want to know. You just want to take it personal. “My neighbor doesn’t have the weeds that I have. Why do I have them?” You want to find out? Go study agriculture. What fertilizer was used and who used it and how long ago did they put it there and did they till this right or wrong? You don’t even want to know. You just take it personal.
Everything. If it’s pouring rain and I have to take these papers in, “God doesn’t like me. It’s God’s fault.” And worse — I like to wait till the end to talk about this, but worse is you think it is supposed to be the way you want. It’s not supposed to rain when you have to deliver these papers and walk out in the rain. “Well, that’s not reasonable. That’s not fair. That’s not just.” No, it just is. See the difference? It has nothing to do with right or wrong or good or bad or karma. It has to do with science. The outside world is the result of science. And part of science is psychology. That’s a science. Therefore, people are behaving the way they’re behaving, not because of you.
Do you understand that if you’re standing somewhere and somebody’s yelling at you, they’re not yelling at you? You’re just having to be standing on a spot on the planet Earth where somebody’s yelling. If they had had a better day, they wouldn’t be yelling. If you had been late, they wouldn’t be talking to you. It is just the result of everything causes everything. And a wise being lives there and says, “So be it.” It’s not about me saying I like it or don’t like it. What happens if you like it or don’t like it? You either cling to it because you want it to happen again. Now you’re screwed up. You’re busy manipulating, controlling everybody and everything. Or you resist it. You push it away. You struggle.
Buddha said it to you. What was Buddha’s second noble truth? The first was all of life is suffering. No, that doesn’t mean you break your arm every day. You do suffer. You understand that? You struggle. You have anxiety. You have fears. You have tension. That’s called suffering compared to where he was in Nirvana. What’s the cause of suffering? He was a man of very few words. I mean, Buddha literally came back from his enlightenment and said he now understands the cause of suffering.
Well, the rest of the priests said, “There’s old age, there’s sickness, there’s death, there’s people taking advantage of you, there’s getting poor and losing all your finances. There’s a lot of reasons for suffering.” You know what he said? No, there’s only one. The cause of suffering is preference. It’s generally translated to the word desire. I purposely picked the word preference. What is a desire? A preference. You better have a preference. You’re not going to have a desire, are you? A desire is something you have a preference about. How’s that? It’s an energy field. It’s an action thing about a preference. If you didn’t have that preference, you wouldn’t have a desire about it. And he said all suffering — what a wise being — all suffering is due to preference.
What do you mean? If you don’t mind getting sick, you’re just sick. You’re not suffering. You’re just experiencing being sick. If you don’t mind losing your money and living three steps down from where you used to live, you don’t suffer. You suffer because you have a preference. “I don’t want to do that.” If you’re married and someone you love dies, you don’t feel joy. You feel sorrow. You feel loss. But you don’t want to feel sorrow and you don’t want to feel loss. So you fight it. “I’m not supposed to feel this. Why does she have to die? It’s not fair. I told her I want to die before you do because I don’t want to suffer.” You hear me? You have a preference. There’s nothing wrong with feeling loss if you don’t prefer not to. That is where a master lives.
Someone asked Ramakrishna, one of the highest beings that walked the face of the earth, “Does an enlightened master ever feel anger?” You know what he said? Yes. He said, but it’s like writing on water. What difference does it make to write on water? It’s not there in a moment. As your finger passes through, it’s gone. Therefore, anger is free to come up and pass right through if you don’t resist it, if you don’t have a preference that it not be there, if you’re not afraid of it. It just is an emotion in the universe, is it not? Anybody know anything about anger? Anybody ever feel anger? It’s a word. How do you know about it? It’s inside. Because everybody knows about it. It’s part of reality, isn’t it? Fear, loss. It’s not about not experiencing those things. It’s about being willing to experience those things, having no preference. If you don’t fight it, it passes right through.
In fact, because you’re advanced, I’ll jump ahead. It doesn’t just pass right through. As it comes up, it passes through different centers, the higher centers, and anger becomes love. Literally, it’s called transmutation of energy. It’s not something you do. Spiritual growth has nothing to do with you. It has to do with you not being there and allowing the natural forces of creation to express themselves. So you feel anger. So you lose your job. So you feel the natural feelings. Somebody dies who you love, you feel loss. Okay. But if you don’t fight it, if you don’t have a preference that you don’t want to feel loss, you don’t want to have failure, you don’t want it to be hot, you don’t want it to be cold, you don’t want to get old…
“I don’t want to get old.” Who wants to get old and end up all wrinkly and no hair? So you sit there. Are you listening to me? You don’t want to get old. You want to look good all the time and attract people and so on. What if you don’t have a preference?
All right. I used to tell the story this way. You’re standing with a bunch of friends, and somebody in the distance is coming up, crossing the street. You turn to your friend and say, “Oh my God, here she comes. It is so embarrassing. She treats me like I walk on water. She thinks so highly of me, it’s embarrassing. Wait, you’ll see.” So somebody comes and says, “Oh my God, it’s you. I get to see you again. Oh my God, you’re so beautiful. You look more beautiful than the last time I saw you.” And you’re standing there: “Hmm.” They pass by. All your friends are looking at you. Okay.
Then a few minutes later, somebody else is crossing the street, and you see them, and you have the exact same reaction. You say to your friends, “Oh my God, this person hates my guts. They’ve never said a nice thing about me since we were in kindergarten. Wait till you see how negative she is.” Person comes up, dumps all over everybody. And you are exactly the same with both people that passed through. That’s what it means to be clear. That’s what it means to be impersonal. It doesn’t mean you have made sure that nobody shows up who doesn’t like you when you’re with your friends. You just think it’s just God. It’s just energy. It’s just life passing through. And if you don’t have a preference, somebody hates you or somebody thinks you walk on water — they’re the same. They’re people spewing noises out of their mouths. That’s what it means to grow spiritually.
Meher Baba said, “Man minus mind equals God.” Man, woman, minus mind equals God. He’s talking about the personal mind, not the impersonal mind. If you are hanging out with the personal mind, you are suffering. And you’ll see that. You don’t want people not to like you. In fact, this is how much we suffer. Somebody tells you that yesterday they heard that Paul told Sally that you did something three years ago they didn’t like, and they never liked you ever since. What’s your reaction? “What do I do? Should I say something? How can I defend myself? Who can I talk to? Should I call?” You don’t just let that go by, do you?
Come on, because you have a preference that people think nicely of you. You have a preference that people like you. And you sit there. Well, if people like me, then they’ll accept me, and they’ll give me a job or take care of me or be my friend. You have a preference that people take care of you. You have a preference that you get the job. You have a preference. It’s all based on preference. Do you see that? All of human suffering is based on preference, but we’re not willing to look at it.
But a great being is willing to look at it, and someday you’re going to find out, as you grow in your life, that you better start looking at it because the more preferences you have, the more you suffer.
I’m going to throw words at you, and you show whether they’re about preference. Have you ever been disappointed? You can’t be disappointed until you appoint something. Therefore, you’re disappointed. Okay. You appointed it. “I wanted him to like me. I wanted her to speak nicely to me. I wanted to get the A.” I have a preference, okay? And I got disappointed.
Have you ever felt loss or failure? Have you ever experienced failure? Have you ever experienced fear of failure? It didn’t even fail yet. You have a preference. “I don’t want to fail.” Okay. It doesn’t mean you want to fail. It means for everything there’s a season and a time for every purpose under heaven. There’s a time for things to go up. There’s a time for things to go down. There’s a time for day. There’s a time for night. There’s a time for love and a time for… and so on. You’re not going to change that. Nobody’s ever changed that.
Hitler tried, didn’t he? And what did he do? For the exact level that he pushed his preferences out, he ended up killing himself and destroying an entire country and almost the whole world. That is the result of preferences.
Now, just in case you’re not feeling comfortable about not having preferences — which we’ll talk more about — the Third Zen Patriarch had a first line that said, “The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” There again, same thing as the Buddha. I’ve been given a dispensation to change the most important spiritual line ever written, that one. We’re going to change it to this: “The great way is not difficult for those who prefer everything.” See, I made it easy for you. You’re not trying to get rid of your preferences. You’re welcome to prefer everything. But if you have selective preferences, I’m telling you, you’re going to suffer.
So the spiritual path is not about renunciation. It’s not about sitting there saying, “But I prefer this. I have to renounce it.” That’s a total misnomer of spirituality. Well, it’s not a total misnomer. There are stages on your path. There is a stage where you work with that kind of thing. When you go deeper, you look and you say, not that I want to suppress my preference — why do I have a preference? Not that I don’t want to do it or push it away, which will just come back and bite you because suppression doesn’t work.
What’s my alternative? I have to honor and respect that there is a preference. I don’t need to do anything about it. It’s just one of the things that exists in the universe. “I have a preference. I’m pregnant. Do you want it to be a boy or a girl?” “I got to get a sonogram to find out.” What are you going to do about it? It’s a boy or a girl. You’re so silly. “Oh, I want it to be a boy.” Look what you’re doing with your preferences.
And you finally wake up and realize that the more you have, the more… What does it mean to have fewer preferences? You are open to reality. “I don’t need a preference about it. I can experience it.” And experiences are neat things. In the end, you’re going to find that experiences are your teachers. Every experience you have is teaching you something. If what you do with it is say, “I don’t like this experience,” then you go to school, you didn’t do well, and you say, “I’m not taking that course again. I don’t want to learn that. I’m not good at it. I don’t want to learn it.” As opposed to: Earth is a place that souls are sent to evolve. You’re one of those souls. But how do you evolve? By locking myself in the house and putting bars on the windows to make sure that nothing ever happens that bothers me, and then playing people and manipulating people and conjuring things up so I get what I want all the time? That’s how I evolve? No, that’s not what Darwin said. He said evolution is through experience. It’s through interaction. It’s through going through the changes you need to go through because you’re being challenged. And that is true of spiritual evolution.
And so you get to the point where you understand it is not about getting what you want. In fact, getting what you want — I feel sorry for people who want to get what they want because they suffer. And they try to find all kinds of methodologies. Have you ever changed how you act because you want someone to like you? Have you ever felt a little anxiety about what you’re going to wear today because they liked what you wore yesterday and they complimented it? But if you wear the same thing, it’ll smell. So what do I do? Don’t tell me you don’t have these experiences. You’re causing anxiety. You can’t be happy with anxiety. You can’t feel love when you have anxiety. Somebody tells you they love you, you’re trying to figure out, “Well, why? What did I do? Well, can I do it again? Was it this? Or maybe it was that. What should I say? What did I say?” You really want to live like that for the rest of your life? Because it’s going to get worse. It doesn’t get better.
“I don’t want to go to a nursing home.” “I took care of you, I don’t want to stay in a nursing home. Don’t put me in a nursing home.” What are you doing? Maybe the right thing is you go to a nursing home. We come visit you, you’re taken care of. Nobody says there’s anything wrong with anything except you said it.
And by the way, how do you decide what your preferences are? Have you ever looked at that? You know you have them. If you get what you want, you feel happy. If you don’t get what you want, you feel disappointed. If you get what you don’t want, you get upset. How did you decide what you want and what you don’t want? Have you ever questioned it? Because I’m telling you, 10 years ago you would not have made the same list. It would have something to do with your dolls, okay? Maybe a year ago you were into Teslas, and now maybe you’re not, or maybe you are. It changes, doesn’t it? How? Why?
People have preferences. How did they get them? I should just send you home. That’s your homework. Psychology says man is a sum of his learned experiences. That’s where you got your preferences. Something happened in the past that you liked, and that past could be when you were five years old. “You’ve always liked princesses, and somehow somebody treats you like a princess and, ooh.” You never liked princesses, then someone says, “You’re my princess,” — that’s it for him. They are impressions that get left on you based upon past experiences you had. And those examples I used about the coffee maker — if five minutes earlier that experience had taken place, you might not have had the same experience. If you’re not in a good mood, if somebody’s accent was of a nationality that you don’t like… Do you understand that?
People teach you that first impressions are very important. Don’t they? Have you ever heard that? That’s ridiculous. Somebody’s first impression is that they had a bad pizza last night? Or because they got a phone call that bothered them two minutes earlier, and now they’re categorized as, “This is not a nice person, this is a person who’s rude.” Or they seem like a really, really nice person because they won the lottery yesterday. First impressions are absurd. They’re nothing. I’m telling you, this whole thing about first impressions is the most ridiculous thing in the world, because anything can happen before you meet that person that changes how they behaved and what they said to you.
“I know that Americans are ugly. I met one.” You understand? “I’m a waitress in France, and these Americans came in. They were loud, playing crazy music. They were just talking all the time. Americans are ugly.” It’s called the ugly American. “Oh, you really met one.” Do you understand if I’m out talking to you, you stay like that? Does it make sense that your first impression with somebody matters? Isn’t it rather random how they are at that moment? So how can the first impression matter?
You get to the point that you understand things are what they are. I’m not here to judge them. I’m not here to like them or not like them. I’m here to experience them. If I’m open enough to experience it, everything has something to teach me. I become much broader, as opposed to, “Now I know what you’re like.” Okay.
Therefore, the deep teachings are as follows: You’re in there. The world’s out there. Check that truth or not. You’re in here, aren’t you? Things come in from outside, and you experience them, right or wrong. How? Because you have these things called senses. There are five of them, and they pick up the outside world. What if they didn’t? You wouldn’t know it was there. You’d still be in there. You have nothing to do with the outside world. How do you know? Because you need to have sensors out there that pick it up and send it back to you. You are the end user from a computer’s point of view. You’re not the chip. You’re not the wiring. You’re not the input. You are what receives the final experience that came in. You are the self. You’re a conscious being. Are you not? Are you in there? Do you experience things? How do you know? Because I’m in here.
What if you didn’t have senses? Then I wouldn’t be experiencing that. Some people don’t hear. Some people don’t see. Some people don’t smell. They don’t experience that. If you didn’t have any of the five senses, you wouldn’t know it’s there. There’s nothing there. But they’re still in there. Your consciousness…
I told you, nothing’s personal. Now I’m going to tell you that the outside world has nothing to do with you. There’s a moment unfolding in front of you all the time, is there not? How many other moments are there going on that you’re not experiencing? Give me a number. 700 billion zillion? Why is the one that you happen to be experiencing different than all the ones you’re not experiencing? Because you’re not experiencing it? Now there’s ego for you. That moment is no different. Look to the left, you get a different one. Look to the right, you get a different one. Up, down, anywhere you want. Take five steps forward. There are moments everywhere. And on Einstein’s time-space continuum, not just on Earth, everywhere, every spot in all galaxies, there’s something going on. You’re experiencing one of those moments and you’re freaking yourself out over it. You can’t be okay because you’ve decided how that moment is supposed to be.
Well, where did you get that idea? Because of the past moments I experienced. Sum of your learned experiences. “Do you like snakes?” I met somebody once who used to carry rattlesnakes around in a cage and thought it was neat. And some people hear the word snake and they run forever. “I’ll never go outside again. There are snakes here.” They’re just impressions that got left. You go watch a movie, you’ll leave an impression. Read a book, you’ll leave an impression. It’s so powerful, but they won’t even pay attention to what they’re saying.
A human being’s psyche — not the human being, but the human being’s psyche — is the sum of their learned experiences. You’re being programmed every moment of your life and you think you’re in charge. You’re no more in charge than somebody programmed you. Life programmed you by the tiny experience that you had.
I have so much fun with this. It’s so simple. I can’t believe people don’t pay attention. For example, I know who will win the next election. Why? I asked her. “What? That’s not a very big data point.” It’s about as big as what you do — you have an experience happening right here and you miss every single thing else that’s going on, and you say, “Now I know what’s going on.” You literally say, “No, no, I know what I’m talking about. I had that experience once.” That’s really funny. Do you know what that data point means? Nothing. It’s what we call statistically insignificant.
That one data point that you’re going to base everything on. “No, I met this type of person.” That’s when people get prejudiced. They have a data point — one data point — and they sit there and say, “I’m not making this up. I actually had that experience. I went to France. They were rude.” Who’s they? Every one of them? “Well, the waitress in the restaurant.” So you take a data point that is statistically insignificant, you put them all together, and you make a you of what you like and what you don’t like, and what you believe and what you don’t believe. And that… what are we talking about? The personal mind. Wow, that thing’s something else, isn’t it?
It’s pretty unbelievable. How can you do that? That’s crazy. And you suffer. If it doesn’t match what that data point created in you, called your self-concept, your ego — isn’t that what they define the ego as, a self-concept? Your ego is your self-concept. Well, it’s a concept. It’s not something real. It’s a concept. It’s something you made up based upon the sum of your learned experiences. They’re totally right, but they won’t live it. They give all this importance to it. “It’s very important. Your ego is very important.”
Your ego is meaningless. Have you ever been in a relationship that’s not working out so good, and the person tells you, “All right, I’ve had it. I can’t deal with you anymore.” And you say, “No, no, no, no, no, please, I’m sorry. I can change.” What do you want changed? What does that mean? “I made it up. You want me to change it? I’ll change it.” You can’t change it, can you? Because you have a preference. “I care more about being with this person than all the sum of my learned experiences. I can change. I’ll be different.” Which basically means, “I’ll suppress that part of me and I’ll force myself to be different,” and then you’ll be more neurotic. So I don’t know.
Why don’t they teach you that your experiences are meaningless? They are your experiences. They’re not everybody else’s. They’ve all had them, and they don’t match yours. And what you’re trying to do is find somebody who matches you. “They’re my soulmate.” What does that mean? “I’ve had these experiences. They left these impressions on me. I want to meet somebody who’s the same as me.” What’s the probability? Zero. Because nobody has had the same experiences as you. Never close.
And that’s why there are wars. The personal mind is a problem. You do not want to devote your life to yourself. “Then what else do I devote it to?” We’ll be there in a moment. It only takes a moment. But it’s hard to get your consciousness from being addicted to staring at you. How much of the planet Earth do you take up? And your consciousness is addicted to staring at your body, your thoughts, your emotions, and then going out and trying to make everything else match. What’s the probability you’re going to succeed? Because they all had different experiences. Plus, it’s not just that they had different experiences. People are the sum of their learned experiences. The outside world is the sum of its learned experiences. Physics, chemistry, the exact sciences determine the weather and everything else. From the beginning of time, the sum of its learned experiences are creating reality. And you’re experiencing that moment in reality. And it doesn’t match. It has nothing to do with the moments that happened to you before. There’s no way it’s going to match you. Why? It’s not supposed to. There’s science. There’s cause and effect. There are reasons things happen. And they have nothing to do with you. But you take everything personal.
“I can’t believe you said that to me. I never would have said that to you.” Well, of course not. You didn’t have the experiences I had. Why would you say it to me? And why would I not say it to you? My parents were this way, my brother was that way, my sister was that way. It’s a package. “But it’s not like me.” Of course it’s not like you. No wonder you have trouble with your relationships. You literally think they’re supposed to be your way.
You want a good relationship? Here. I always talk about the problem. Is there such a thing as a beautiful spiritual relationship? Yes, there is. Here it is. I understand everything that was talked about here. And I see that I am completely lost in my ego. And I think that everything is supposed to be the way I want it to be because of the past experiences I had. But you know what? I woke up enough to understand that you’re exactly the same. Not as me, but as you. And it is not my job in the relationship to make you be like me. And it is not your job in the relationship to make me be like you. Because that ain’t going to happen. There are these formative years. There’s such history.
So what about a relationship in which I say, “How about this? We’ll get together. You be you. I’ll be me. And we’ll learn from each other how to grow, how to accept, how to honor, how to respect, how to love unconditionally. No matter what happens, I understand we’re going through our changes.” How would you like that kind of relationship? No fear, no anxiety, no tension, just openness. And openness means love. Love. And Buddha said the highest word was compassion. That’s where compassion comes from — from that deep understanding. “It is not supposed to be the way you want.” At that level, that’s ridiculous. You’re just this one tiny thing, not even an atom in the universe. And how long are you going to be here for? 80, 90 years? How long has the outside world been here? On this planet for 4.5 billion years. Why should it be the way you want?
What makes sense is acceptance and surrender. “Not my will, but thy will be done.” If you want to give it a spiritual twist, a God twist, you don’t have to. You can say to science, “Not my will, but go do your thing,” because it will. Take certain chemicals and put them together and wish they don’t blow up. You better watch it because they’re going to do their thing.
So “not my will, but thy will” isn’t necessarily a religious thing. It’s just basically saying to reality: “I in here am so small that the sum of my learned experiences is statistically insignificant. And that out there is called reality. What’s unfolding out there is reality. I am not going to pit my stupid little thing that I put together in here over the course of my tiny little vector in life against reality.” That’s what “not my will, but thy will” means. If you want to tie “thy will” to God, that’s wonderful. That’s fine. In fact, I don’t mind if you do, but my understanding of God is very different than other people’s. What do you mean? Well, to me, God is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. You’ve heard those words. Have you ever met anyone that was omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent? Okay. Well, you actually have.
Let’s start this way. Right now, you see this room full of objects. Is there a commonality about all these objects? Well, there’s a thing called a periodic table. You’ve heard of it? It’s got a certain number of elements — ninety-eight, whatever it is, natural elements, a hundred and eight, I don’t know, whatever. Doesn’t matter. Is it not true that every single physical thing in this room is made out of that periodic table? So there’s a bit of a commonality there. But that’s still a lot of elements. Well, what are they made of? Those are atoms, right? Well, I went to school, and they told me they’re made of electrons, neutrons, and protons. All of them? Every single one of them. That’s what those atomic numbers are — how many protons and neutrons and electrons they have. Electron, neutron, proton. Is that not true? That’s what an atom is. Well, now there’s just three things in the universe.
I want you to tell me — by the way, I didn’t have to go down to electrons or protons — which of them do you like and don’t like? You told me that every single thing you’re looking at and everything you interact with in this world every single day is made out of atoms. Which one’s female? Which one’s male? Which one’s right and wrong? And now I’m going to take it past the atom, down to electrons and protons. Now you’re going to have a lot of trouble figuring it out.
But wait a minute, you just told me it’s made out of that. Well, this is my favorite part. Are there really electrons, neutrons, and protons? They lied to you. They didn’t tell you that electrons, yes, but neutrons and protons are made of other things. Get down to quantum physics — quarks, leptons, bosons. There are different subatomic elements. And then they found out — because I’ll do it very quickly because we’re out of time, but we’ve come pretty far today, right? — that they’re not even there. What do you mean? They have properties that behave a certain way, like magnetic and color and whatever, but they’re really just wavelets in a quantum field. Just like if you drop a leaf into a still lake, it makes waves. If you agitate a quantum field — and the quantum fields are omnipresent.
That was one of my favorite things. I was reading something from NASA — you can believe NASA, science, right? — years and years ago, and they literally said, “The quantum field is omnipresent.” They used that word. What does that mean? Every galaxy, all two trillion of the galaxies and everything in them are in the quantum field. They all come out of the quantum field. And the quantum field is nothing but wavelets — wavelets that behave a certain way and have properties, and when they interact together, they seem to behave like neutrons and protons. Okay? It’s not even here. You understand that? Einstein once said, “Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
You wake up in the morning — is your bed still there? Is the dresser still there? Is the pillow still there? It literally, the field had to emanate those wavelets on a consistent basis, moving you through time. Because time changed. We moved through time, didn’t we? But the dresser came with you. That means that they are acting down there in the way that manifests everything you interact with every moment of your life.
Now we’ll get back to like and dislike. I asked you — that was the personal mind. Now you see the impersonal mind? There’s the impersonal mind. It’s pretty beautiful, isn’t it? Why is it that it sets you free? How did I start the discussion? Mind can be the biggest trap or the biggest liberator. The personal mind is the biggest trap that could ever exist, and you’re completely addicted to it, and you’ll probably walk out of here and continue. I don’t want you to.
Why? You know what liberation means? Freedom from the personal mind. Well, what happens when you talk about it all being wavelets in a quantum field? That’s quantum physics. Every single thing in creation — all the stars, galaxies, every single thing — emanates from those wavelets. When you’re close to God, the quantum field is omnipresent. It also means it’s omnipotent. All forces in creation — we talk about the bosons or forces, I think four of them, right? Strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravity. All right? That’s all there are. These forces create everything. So out of that field, and that field is omnipresent, the only step you need to tie it from physics to spirituality is what the yogis found out. They went deep enough in meditation and let go of the personal self enough — man minus mind — and something happened to their consciousness. It stopped staring at them. Well, what happened to it if it’s not staring at them? It merged with all consciousness in the universe. That experience is called enlightenment. That is merger. That is oneness. That’s what it’s all about.
The great beings — including Christ, “My father and I are one,” including Buddha — the great ones and great masters of all traditions have merged, have literally merged into the oneness because they weren’t busy staring at their individual self. And so consciousness, it turns out, is the source of the quantum field. That conscious energy vibrated. It vibrated and it came up. Isn’t it amazing to hear the physicists say, is it possible that God, and in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God? How would they know that 3,000 years ago? Because they went there. And there was, it’s called the unmanifest. They’re bikalpa samadhi, the void. It vibrated. That’s all it took. The original vibration. And could a scientist today build the entire universe off that fact? Is that amazing? Look at the age you live in.
They would question whether consciousness created that vibration. Fine. Not all of them, by the way. Do you know that Oppenheimer read the Gita? When the first atomic test went off, he stood up in his trench and he quoted the Bhagavad Gita. Oppenheimer himself. The scientists went deep. A lot of them went very, very deep. So basically, just that little gap that yoga understands because they’ve been there — the yogis have merged, the great masters have merged — is that consciousness is the source of creation. Well, that sounds good, but how can that happen? Can you believe that your intellectual, abstract mind, non-personal mind was capable of figuring it out? They took it down to that field of vibrations. Whoa.
That’s the difference between the personal mind and the impersonal mind. There’s a pure sense of, “I want to know truth.” Well, if you want to know truth, then you don’t lock Galileo up. And if you want to know truth, then you don’t prevent the study of stem cells. There was a time when you were told that they were not allowed to study stem cells. It’s the same as telling Galileo he can’t tell everybody that the Earth is not the center of the universe. Fortunately, that stopped, right? But when science is doing that, that’s not science.
When you’re free, free mind, and you’re studying to the best of your ability to find out truth, real truth — and if your truth is challenged, you love it. And if it turns out wrong, listen to me, if you’re a true scientist and you devote your life to a theory and somebody proves it wrong, like Einstein, you love it. You love them. You worship them for the rest of your life because you don’t care about the I. You care about the truth. And somebody helped you see truth. That’s the intellectual mind. That’s the abstract mind. That’s the pure mind. That’s the impersonal mind. Big difference, okay?
Okay. We went a long way today, didn’t we? Covered a lot of territory. I kind of backed my way into the impersonal mind. I didn’t have to specifically talk about it, but we did. When you’re down there talking about that quantum field, it’s just so beautiful. So the net result is the personal mind is a problem. I know it’s difficult to listen to because we devote ourselves to that thing. Why? Because if we get what we want, we feel good. If we don’t get what we want, we feel bad. And if we get what we don’t want, we really feel bad. It’s true. That is definitely your experience. Are you willing to look underneath that? Just like a scientist looks through the atoms and gets down to what’s really going on.
Those impressions were left on you by your past experiences, which are totally random. If you had a different experience, you’d be totally different. It’s so funny. And you’re married to these impressions that got made on you. Yoga calls them samskaras. And you eventually get to the point where you let it go. You just keep day by day letting go, letting go, letting go, becoming nobody, emptying, emptying, empty bell. And you will go to these great states. You’re a very great being. What’s inside of you is more beautiful than anything you can ever feel from the outside. All right. 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.
