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: Mm-hmm. Jai guru dev, jai masters.
It was in the talking about mind — which, of course, you’re lost in your mind, so we talk about mind. Let’s talk about emotions. These are things that a yogi understands at levels that very few people do. What are emotions? First, do you have emotions? That’s your question. Do you have emotions? How do you know? Okay, I’ll send you home.
Finish your homework. How do you know you have emotions? And you’d answer me with some wisecrack, “Because I feel them.” Who feels them? You who feels the emotion is not the emotion. You who sees a ball is not the ball. You who sees a woman is not the woman. You who sees your hand is not your hand. You’re the one who experiences an emotion.
That’s your first step in understanding things. There’s a subject-object relationship. You are the subject, and the ball is an object. A person’s an object. Your nose is an object. Your hand is an object, and an emotion is an object. It’s something you are aware of. To jump to the end from the beginning, Yogananda called his organization Self-Realization Fellowship.
In other words, do you know who’s in there? Let’s figure it out. ‘Cause one thing you know is you’re in there. Don’t you know that? You know you’re in there. Okay? So you can’t understand emotions until you understand that you’re the one experiencing the emotion. Then we can start talking about, well, what makes them be the way they are, and which ones are nice and which are not nice, which ones do I like, which do I not like, what do I do about it?
You are in there experiencing emotions. Can there be nice emotions? If I sent you home with your homework, list the nice emotions. And by the way, you would all list something slightly different, right? List the not-nice emotions. Again, you know, generally you’d be close, but you would have different priorities as to what you call nice emotions and not-nice emotions.
Based on what? Your past experiences. Is love a nice emotion? Not when my heart is broken, he or she left me, and, “I lost that loving feeling.” So is love a nice emotion? I could do without it. Okay? There are these emotions, and you’re in there experiencing them, and there are ones that are comfortable to you, and there are ones that are not comfortable to you, and you spend your life trying to have the ones that are comfortable to you going on and have the ones that are not comfortable to you not going on.
When you suppress — if we’re talking about suppression — you’re not really suppressing your mental thoughts, but you’re really suppressing your emotions. If you had a mental thought that was negative or, one way or another, not exactly optimal, but you feel good about it, your heart was open, and you laughed at it.
“Oh, look at you.” And your emotion can handle it. It’s okay. It’s just emotions. They’re just emotions, right? But you’re not that way. If you have emotions that are not comfortable to you, you suppress them. What does that mean? That’s very important to understand in terms of suppression.
Who’s in there, and what power do they have? If you have an emotion you don’t like, you push it away, don’t you? You have will. You’re in there. You have power.
Who’s doing that? It’s one thing to say, what is the emotion? It’s more important to say, who’s experiencing it, and who’s deciding to push it away, and what power do they have in there? Because you can push it away, and you do it all the time. Boom, “I don’t wanna feel it.” Well, you don’t wanna feel it? You just did feel it, obviously, or you wouldn’t not want to feel it.
You obviously had the feeling, and then you push it away. I wanna know what power you used to push it away, and who’s in there pushing it away? And you’re gonna find out, when it’s all said and done, that is a very spiritual discussion. In fact, it’s the only truly spiritual discussion. Who’s in there?
What is the nature of self? What is the nature of the indwelling being that’s having these experiences and has the power to control things in there? Okay? So it’s not just your thoughts that you struggle with, it’s your emotions. So what is an emotion? And you’re probably not gonna like it, because all emotions have a common background, a common root, all of them.
There’s energy flowing inside of you. You obviously have energy. You use it all the time. You have energy to push away the thoughts, or grab the emotions, or a whole lot of things. You have power in there. You have energy in there. An emotion is the energy, the internal energy that’s inside of you, the deep energy within you, coming up and trying to release.
Let’s take anger. You know what anger feels like. It feels like a tumultuous… I use the example of a river that’s flowing perfectly smoothly, and the riverbed is smooth, and the water’s just flowing by there. You’re gonna sit by and meditate on it and have a good old time. Now take a rock, one rock, and put it in that flow, and what happens?
Eddies, currents, rapids. That very flow of water that was totally calm and beautiful and flowing all of a sudden becomes turmoil. You can’t put a rock in there without causing commotion. Okay. If the energy inside of you — and we’ll talk about where it comes from and what it is — but there’s energy inside of you, if it’s coming up trying to flow, and there’s a rock in there, it is going to create turmoil.
It’s going to create that weird feeling that you all experience when you have emotions that are not comfortable. Now, anger, it really flies around. I love it to pieces. It’s hilarious. All of a sudden, something hits your blockage, and rage is going on, and all kinds of noises are going on, and yelling and screaming and throwing of pots and pans.
What is that? That’s energy, the same energy that’s love, the same energy that’s inspiration. That’s all the same energy hitting a blockage. And when it hits that blockage, it shoots out, and you have trouble holding it in there, don’t you? Next thing you know, like I said, people go into anger and rage and yelling and screaming and throwing things and…
Why? Because that’s the energy that comes out of having hit the block, the rock. Once it hits the rock in there, it’s not calm energy. It’s noisy energy. It’s tumultuous energy, and it spills out. What if it doesn’t spill out? Then you do this thing called suppression, repression, denial. What does that mean? “I don’t wanna feel this, and I’m not gonna feel it.”
Well, what is going on in there? You would not want to feel it. So what I do is use my will to push down this tumultuous energy. What’s gonna happen? It just builds, it builds in there, and it shows up in many different ways and different places — like a virus — that you shoved bad energy, tumultuous, disturbed energy down inside, and now it’s really gonna hit everything, and everything’s gonna hit it, and you gotta go there constantly, hold it together, keep yourself together, and tell people, “Don’t say that.
You know I don’t like when you say that. Don’t do that. Don’t even make me think about it, because it freaks me out to think about it.” So you’ve got this stored energy inside. How did it get stored? Because it got blocked. Why did it get blocked? Because you couldn’t handle it. You understand? There’s nobody in there but you.
Anybody in there? Mommy, Daddy? No, no, no. No, you’re in there. This is so deep, all right? So now you’re in there, and if you push away these energies that are trying to come up, they create turmoil. They create all kinds of disturbances, and then sometimes have to shoot out, and that’s how you see a lot of energies expressing themselves.
A yogi, a being who’s grown enough, does not judge those energies. Doesn’t say it’s good, it’s bad, it’s right, it’s wrong, it’s better, it’s worse, right? It’s just what it is. If I put the rock in the water and there’s turmoil and rapids, are they bad? No, they’re the nature of things. If you put a disturbance in the flow of energy, it’s going to create turmoil.
So if you put a rock in there, it’s gonna make problems. So now we have to talk about, well, “I don’t have rocks in there.” Yeah, you don’t, but you make them. How is that? Anything that disturbs the flow — and it’s generally an upward flow — anything that disturbs the upward flow of your energy, we call Shakti.
Anything that disturbs the upward flow of your energy is going to cause disturbance. So what did you put in there? What got put in there that the energy’s hitting and causing turmoil? Because it does do that all the time. Then you try to control it. The deep teachings are so deep. It’s not that you’re supposed to be expressing it.
It’s not that you’re supposed to be suppressing it, because both of those cause a lot of trouble. Go around there expressing, yelling at everybody, and causing anger and all kinds of stuff, right? Or don’t. Feel it, but don’t. Stiff upper lip. Just hold yourself together. I like that. “Hold yourself together.”
Whoa. That is deep spiritually. Who is doing what to whom? “Get yourself together.”
What does that mean, get yourself together? Who are you talking to? About what? And what does it mean? Generally it means suppress. It generally means don’t act like that, don’t do that, don’t think like that. So what do I do? Push it away. Do not allow that to be going on inside, and for sure, don’t let it leak out.
Let what leak out? That which hit the rock, the block, and then is trying to shoot out. Do people feel better after expressing intense anger? I had a talk the other day with someone, a very beautiful soul, and he said he had a friend who said there was a thing called healthy anger, and he was trying to say, because he was a very deep being, that, “No, anger is not healthy.”
Right? But that’s not true. If you’ve got all this blocked energy inside of you and it’s causing all kinds of mental problems and disturbances and rapids, and you’re right on the edge, okay? There can be healthy ways to let them out. Do you need to do that? Of course not. If you don’t block it, then it’s not there anyway.
It’s just cleaner energy. But if you block it and are getting ulcers and getting ready to blow up on top of anybody, that’s why some psychologists say it’s healthy to have pillow fights. The thing they miss is — and we’ll be working our way into this across the conversation — there’s suppression. What are you suppressing?
Energy. That’s all that’s in there. Einstein told us all that’s out here. There’s just energy, and the energy’s trying to flow, and if you block it, then it’s trying to come up, you suppress it. So there’s suppression, then there’s expression. There are plenty of teachers in psychology, and even spiritual people, who say expression is a healthy thing and so on.
Yeah, at that level, it’s better than being suppressed. I’ve always taught suppression is the lowest thing you can do with your energy. Why? Because it’s coming back up. If you lock a child in a closet every time they misbehave, I don’t wanna be around when that kid grows up, right? That is not doing anything to help that child or to help society or to help anything.
It’s just basically saying, “Get in the closet and shut up.” Okay, well, what do I do with this stuff inside of me? “Shut up. Get your act together.” People talk to you that way, don’t they? “Behave. Get yourself together. Suppress. Control and suppress.” But the poor kid doesn’t know how to sit there and say, “Well, what do I do with this stuff?”
They don’t know how to ask that, so they’re just told to push it down, and so are grownups. Okay? So it’s push it down. Okay, suppression is not healthy. It is under no circumstances a good thing to do — unless you can’t hold it together and you’re gonna blow up and cause all kinds of trouble or hurt people and say things you wish you didn’t say. Okay, take a breath, hold it together, but remember you did that.
Remember at night that you did that during the day, and let it go. So it’s not true that you may not have to hold it together under certain circumstances. All right? But I’m telling you, suppression is the lowest thing that you can do with your energy. You do not want to push that down there and hold it down there.
Does it come back up? If something bothered you ten years ago, and it really bothered you, and you just pushed it away — I mean your mother said, your father said, an accident you were in, or a girlfriend who left you, or a boyfriend — does it come back up? Can you hear somebody’s name? Can you have a thought?
What do you mean it comes back up? You pushed it down there. Go into a lake or a bathtub and take a ball, a child’s ball, and push it down under the water. Will it come back up? It’s coming back up, isn’t it? Unless you keep pushing it down. That’s what suppression is. It’s an energy that should’ve made it through, but it didn’t, so you pushed it down.
Its nature is to continuously try to come back up, and it does. It comes back up in your mind. It comes back up in your actions. It comes back with your ulcer. It’s trying to express itself. It’s trying to release. It doesn’t wanna be down there. That ball doesn’t wanna be shoved under the water. How do you know?
‘Cause it’s trying to come back up, right? It’s constantly trying to come back up. That’s happening inside of you every time you suppress. Okay, so there’s suppression, and then there’s this thing called expression. So there can be righteous anger, there can be healthy anger, there can be this, there can be that, all kinds of expressions.
All right? The problem is, if you have energy inside… Anger’s the easy one to talk about. If you have anger inside of you that’s eating you up, who’s it eating up? How do you know? “Well, I’m in here, and it’s hard to live in here when that stuff’s going on in here.” Okay? So basically, I need to release it. I need to express it, right?
Hopefully, psychology, therapy, different things are teaching you ways to be able to release some of the energy. Some therapists, very healthy, say, “If you’re feeling anger or jealousy, run.” What do you mean, run? What’s running got to do with it? A lot. Why? Running uses up your energy.
Get a hobby that interests you. Why? It distracts you from pushing that energy away. So over time, these are therapies. They’re controlling the expression of the energy that’s trying to come up, and it can make you feel better. It will tend to still come back up. Why? Because you didn’t get rid of that rock.
You learn to live with it. You learn to release the energy, so it’s not causing all kinds of trouble all the time. But in general, something will come back up. Let’s say somebody did something that really hurt you in a relationship, and you say, “I don’t wanna handle this anymore. I can’t handle this anymore.”
And they beg you, “Please give me another chance, and I’ll never do it again, I promise.” Right? And you actually are so high that you say, “Okay, I forgive you. I’ll just make believe it didn’t happen.” Do you understand how unreasonable that statement is? There’s no way in the world, unless you’re very evolved, that that’s the truth.
The moment that person acts even slightly the way they hurt you, even slightly — “You said you wouldn’t do that anymore.” That’s it. Do we get strikes? First strike, second strike, three strikes, you’re out. What does that mean? “I didn’t forgive you. I didn’t let it go. I stored it in there. I just didn’t dump it all over you right now,” but it’s coming back up.
Anything you push down there is coming back up. Have you noticed? I’m asking you to notice. That’s what these teachings aren’t about — learning anything. They’re just about realizing, “Yeah, that’s what’s going on in there.” Anything you shove down there — of course you’re… Yes, traumatic things, of course, but even mild things.
Somebody didn’t say hello, somebody didn’t treat you well, and one day, not your friend anymore. “You don’t understand what she said to me. How could she say something like that? I thought we were friends.” She had a bad pizza last night. I don’t know. She had a bad phone call before you saw her. You don’t think like that?
You say, “No way am I gonna be treated like this,” and you just shut it down, and that’s the blockage. When you push it down, then everything hits it, and it tries to come back up. So that’s one level of understanding emotions. Emotions, what you call emotions, are the result of the blockages you shove down there and the energy trying to come through it.
Energy can’t be created or destroyed. The way I described it, way, way back in ’72, ’73 — I once gave a lecture on this, all right? If there is a block there, the energy’s going to come up, and it’s going to hit it, and it’s going to try to express itself. What is the block? What you shoved down there is the block.
If it made it through you to start with, then there’s nothing down there. You can still remember it if you wanna bring it back, but it doesn’t come back by itself. People ask me, “What’s the difference between memory and samskara?” What I call samskara is a blockage. Let’s do it very easily. You can have memories.
Of course, you remember what happened. It happened there. You went on vacation. It rained. You can remember things. You have a memory bank just like a computer does. It comes up, and you deal with it. It’s fine. But if you blocked it when the event took place — if you said, “No, I don’t want to experience this,” then you pushed it away.
It didn’t make it cleanly into your memory bank. It now is charged with all that emotion and all that liking and disliking, and all the memory. You see what I’m saying? You held them in there, made a little ball out of them, and that’s what the energy hits when it tries to come up. It hits that blockage, then it can’t make it through, so it tries to find ways around.
Expression is one of the ways. Suppression is you’re trying to stop it. Isn’t there a nicer way? Yes, there is. It’s called transmutation, which is yoga, which is deep spirituality. What do you mean? The energy comes up. If it makes it through, it’s beautiful. Energy that is not blocked is beautiful.
Who says so? You do. If you meet somebody and your heart opens and your mind just goes, “Woo…” Ooh, how’s that? How you feel? You doing okay? Of course you are. ‘Cause the energy’s flowing and it’s not blocked. It’s not hitting anything that’s making it disturbed. It flows just like that river that I talked to you about.
It just flows without hitting anything, then it feeds you way up high. Who talked about that? Jesus. What did he say? “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that leaveth the mouth of God.” It means you’re not just getting high and feeling good because you got what you wanted. Bread alone.
What’s coming in from the outside. There’s an inner flow of energy, but by every word that leaveth the mouth of God, that’s your inner flow of energy. You get fed inside ’cause you’re not blocked anymore, and eventually — Yogananda said it. He said, “What hast thou done to me?” He’s talking to God. “What hast thou done to me?
Wave upon wave of divine energy saturates me day or night, throng after throng. What hast thou done to me?” He just felt ecstasy pouring through his being all the time. Can you? Of course you can. If you stop blocking the flow, it’s not gonna be blocked, and if it’s not blocked, it doesn’t create this turmoil that you have to struggle with and fight with and express or suppress, right?
So what is transmutation? The energy comes up. It’s not that it doesn’t hit a blockage. It hits, but you’re conscious. You don’t react. You don’t get lost, because the disturbance that it created in there — you’re a conscious being. You see that something got hit, and you breathe, you relax, you welcome it, and you relax through it.
You relax through that, and the energy all of a sudden turns into love, turns into inspiration, turns into joy. It’s all energy. It’s all the same energy. The most terrible thing anybody ever did, they did ’cause the energy was blocked. The most beautiful thing anybody ever did, the energy was flowing freely.
And I’m a nice Jewish yogi, but I really like Christ’s teachings, and I love to read the Bible. I read it once a long time ago, fifty-five years ago, right? But as you grow, you realize that’s what he was talking about. When somebody hits you, turn the other cheek. It doesn’t mean outside — somebody hits you, protect yourself.
That means inside. So if something happens, and inside you react, turn the other cheek. What does that mean? Let go. That’s what turn the other cheek means. Don’t face it and react to the fact that what happened inside, you didn’t like. Just relax. Turn away. Let go. So if somebody ate the pizza, had a bad stomachache the day you met them, don’t dislike them.
“Oh, but they said something really disturbing to me.” Turn the energy. Don’t try to stop it from having happened. Let it pass through. And that’s what forgiving is. That’s the whole thing about forgiveness. You’ve heard about forgiveness, right? Very Christian and Jewish and Muslim, right? And Hindu. Every single thing’s about forgiveness.
What does that mean? If you don’t forgive, then it hit a block. It had to hit a block, because you didn’t like it. If it does not hit a block, you like everything. It’s just pouring through you. But if it hits something and it gets disturbed, can you forgive? Can you forgive? What is it? It’s beautiful. What does forgiveness mean?
Turn the energy. Why should I forgive you? Because you’re gonna be screwed up if you don’t. How’s that? It doesn’t mean you don’t leave, doesn’t mean you don’t change the situation. But if you start with saying, “I can’t handle this, and I don’t forgive you, and I will never forgive you, and I can’t believe you did this,” that will be inside of you for the rest of your life.
You block that energy instead of sitting there saying, “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.” That’s some deep meaning, isn’t it? It means in all of your life, you look at somebody, they’re having trouble, they said something mean, they did something not so nice — forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.
What does that mean, they don’t know what they do? There was just reaction. They had blockages inside of themselves. The energy came up, and next thing you know, they did something that disturbed you, that was disturbing. So there are so many examples of having to live like that. And if you don’t live like that, you have to pay the price.
You’re at the light, and you’re looking at your phone, and the light turns green, and the person behind you, not even nicely, goes, “Brrr.” Do you get upset? You wanna go stare him down? You wanna have road rage? Come on. “Don’t forgive them. Don’t forgive them. Make them pay for that.” Then you pay for it.
They pay for it. Everybody pays for it. As opposed to, “Forgive them, Lord. They know not what they do.” Into every life, some rain must fall. Some beeping must happen. Into every life, some stuff must get hit, and you start catching on that these are all the spiritual teachings. They’re part of the path. But I’m still not talking about transmutation yet.
I talked about being able to handle what’s happening to you, ’cause if you can’t handle it, you’re gonna suppress it. You’re either gonna suppress it or express it, and you don’t wanna be expressing that weird energy. Well, is it just weird energy? “I’m married, I have a family, it’s been wonderful, and I start taking golf lessons, and he’s really cute, the golf instructor, okay?
And he’s a lot younger than I am, and he’s just got some really nice energy, okay? And it’s been a long time since I felt that kind of energy. Why? I got family problems. I got this, I got money, just everything that we all deal with, okay? And all of a sudden, this energy comes up inside that’s really beautiful, really sweet, really nice.”
Mm-hmm. Okay? Let’s express it. I don’t… I think you better think twice about that. Hear me? But you don’t want to. It’s the same as the anger. What do I do? Do I suppress it? Suppress love? Suppress this beautiful feeling that I’m just having at this moment? No. There’s a higher way to deal with all of those energies, both the ones that are tumultuous and the ones that are beautiful, that open just because of a situation outside.
It’s called conditional opening. Something helped you open, and so the energy flowed. Can it do that? Yes, it can do that. Does that mean… There’s a line in Gibran — I love Gibran, The Prophet — but he has one line that I always get very interested in. He says, “When love beckons you, follow her.” He doesn’t mean that a golf pro put his arm around you for a minute.
Give me a break. His teachings are as deep as they come, all right? So that’s not what it means. If love beckons you, follow her. Okay? He’s basically saying, make sure that it’s real and it’s appropriate, and so on. It’s not just a momentary thing that caused you to open. All right, let’s talk about transmutation.
If you get high enough — what does that mean, to get high enough? It means you’re back there enough. We already admitted you’re in there, but you’re pulled down into your emotions. Don’t they pull you down into them? And it’s hard not to, isn’t it? And you get pulled down into your thoughts and your mind. So you don’t live back here.
You are back here. A light that’s shining on an object did not get up and get onto the object. It radiates its light onto the object. It didn’t have to move. Your consciousness can project its awareness. It does. It can get distracted by something. In other words, instead of light shining on something, it’s the light of consciousness expanding its awareness onto something.
Right now, if I’m sitting looking at that picture, I don’t have to get up to look at the picture, but I’m still aware of it. See, your awareness is like a beam of light that shines where you put it. Take a good look at it. What does it mean to be high? It means you stay in there, or… You’re always back there anyway.
The light is always back there. But if it identifies with what it’s shining on — oh my God, look, it’s broken. You’re not broken. You’re the light. You can’t get broken. All right? And so the Gita says, “Weapons cannot touch the self. Waters cannot overwhelm it. Fire cannot burn it.” Why? Because those are just experiences you’re having.
You’re back here having the experience. That’s what it means to be higher. You’re back more, and you can see that here’s anger coming up. I’m not the anger, and I don’t even need to do anything about the anger. I told you they once asked the great master Ramakrishna, “Does an enlightened being ever feel anger?”
I was shocked when I heard the answer, back in the ’70s. He said, “Yes, but it’s like riding on water.” What difference does it make? Go ride on water. See how much trouble it makes. And so he says it just passes through. That’s transmuting the energy. Instead of going down to the energy and getting all messed up in it and trying to fix it and trying to let it go, doing all that stuff, you’re able to stay behind it, not suppress it.
You don’t touch it. You allow it to run its course, and it will run its course. It’s because it’s hitting this blockage. If you relax through the blockage… Somebody once told me — Ma Yoga Shakti, who gave us the Durga statue, and that’s her picture over there, a very high being — she once leaned over and she said, “Mickey.”
I said, “Yes, Mother?” She says, “Don’t you just love when they yell at you? There’s so much energy.” She was talking about one of her disciples. They ended up sat on her and yelled at her, and she transmutes it. She loved it. Like, oh, boy. Is there a lot of energy when people are yelling and screaming? Every yell and scream, a lot of Shakti in it, a lot of energy.
Very disturbed energy, all right? What if you don’t block it? If it’s just wind, beautiful wind flowing through your hair, and it’s just, wow, it’s a rush. You can do that. That is transmuting the energy. In other words, you don’t go down to meet the energy. You stay seated where you are, the source of your being, and you allow the energy to wash over you, and it can just be beautiful.
It’d just be high. I don’t wanna get lost in transmutation, but there’s a choice between suppression and expression, and most people do not know that at all. They’ve never done it. They can’t imagine why, because they can’t stay back there. You hear me? “But what do I do? What do I do? Somebody left me, and I had so much pain that it hurts so much.”
That was energy that was flowing before, and it made its way out to express to another person, and your thoughts worked, and the whole world was together. It all was flowing in a way that fit. Now, all of a sudden, somebody leaves you or dies. The worst part is if they leave you, especially for your best friend.
That’s very hard to handle. But it does happen. Okay? What does that mean? It means it came in, and it used to flow out in the form of love. It used to flow out in the form of balance, some level of balance. Now it can’t. Why? The person left. The person’s not there anymore. The turmoil that goes on inside of you…
Listen to me. You’ve been there, have you not? What is that turmoil? What does it mean, “It’s ripping my heart apart”? That is that energy that used to find a way to flow out and hook up with somebody else and feel the connection and all that kind of stuff. Now it can’t, so it doesn’t know where to go. And so it’s broken, and the energy hits the heart and smashes all over the place.
“My heart’s got ripped out.” That’s what you’re saying. You’re just describing what it feels like to have that energy not knowing where to go. “I feel lost. I don’t know who I am anymore,” because the energy used to flow a given way. Come on, you’ve all been there. The energy used to flow a given way, and now it can’t.
It can’t. And maybe you beg the person to come back. “Oh, please, anything. I’ll change. I’ll change any way you want me to. Just tell me how you want me to be, and I’ll be that way.” What are you saying? You’re saying, “I can’t handle the energy that is disturbed inside of me, and now I’m willing to sell myself out and make believe.
I don’t know what to say. Okay, I’ll do anything.” That energy has a way to flow. And so basically, we have trouble with our hearts. We have trouble with our emotions because the energy can’t flow properly. Transmutation, which under those conditions is hard, but masters can do it, and I’ll talk about that in a second.
Transmutation is to look at that energy and say, “You do fit in me. I honor that energy just as much, but it needs to find a way to flow.” And you say, “You are welcome inside of me. Here’s the flow. Come on up. Come on up.” And whoa, wait till you see what happens. The reason it’s so big is you try to push it away.
“I don’t wanna feel this. I don’t wanna feel that situation.” Okay? And so you push it away. Well, that’s how it got all blocked to start with. But you found a way around it, in a relationship or something, right? As you relax through it, you just learn to stay back here and relax. Not suppress, relax.
That’s the difference. You’re in there relaxing. It then has a place to go. Down? No. Out? No. Up, yes. I just described yoga. Okay? As it goes up, the energy goes up, and it’s a divine energy. The energy itself is God. That’s why you feel holiness when you feel it, when you feel that. “I was in the spirit of the Lord today.”
What in the world does that mean? A yogi knows exactly what that means. It means, “When I was clean and open, I was filled with Shakti. I was filled with spirit. I was filled with all this beautiful energy, and I don’t wanna push it back down.” So you evolve inside to be able to handle the energy that got disturbed because you shoved stuff down there.
The energy is clean. The energy’s completely open. The path is always there, but you can’t handle it. You can’t handle the situation that happened to you in your life, and so you built all this stuff inside of you, and now you need people to be a certain way and things to be a certain way for you to be okay.
You do not. You’re always okay. You’re the highest being to walk the face of the earth. Again, I am a Jewish yogi. What did Christ say? “That which I am, so also are you. As I sit by the throne of my Father, so shall you sit by my throne, and these things which I do, you shall do these and even greater things.”
That’s like, oh, great being. You know, the throne is not a throne, it’s a seat of consciousness, okay? That I can sit that high, and you can, right? The problem is you can’t handle the energies that are disturbed inside of you, and so you push them away, which causes more blockages. So what’s the answer? Well, the problem is you push the energy away.
Stop it. Not so easy, but yeah, stop it. That’s the whole thing. So — cleansing. You ever heard of the ascent? You do this in meditation. The ascent happens as you clean out — the energy goes up. You don’t have to do anything. You’ll be sitting there watching TV and can’t even see straight, ’cause you just got open, ’cause the show was interesting, and next thing you know, all this beautiful energy’s flowing inside of you.
It can happen anytime with anything, and it does. The more open you get, the more this just… A bird sings, and you melt. Why? Because there are birds singing? No, because you’re open, and every single thing hits you, and if the energy stimulates, it flows up. So transmutation is when the energy seems like it has to be pushed down — you know better than that.
When the energy feeling has to come out, fine, okay. All right? But you’re gonna find out that instead of out, it can go up. That’s what transmutation is. The energy can go up. What energy? All energy, and that’s where an enlightened master is. They’ve cleaned out enough and let go of enough. What does that mean?
Dying to be reborn. Did Christ not say you have to die to be reborn? That’s what he’s talking about. You have to die of the personal self, of these blockages you put in there, and next thing you know, spirit is who you are — you identify yourself as this beautiful flow of energy instead of identifying yourself with the garbage that’s coming out of your blockages.
So I’ve done nothing this entire evening but talk about emotions. That’s what an emotion is. You can fall in love and cause a lot of disturbance for everybody else and yourself, right? So it’s not which emotion it is, but there also can be a love very different than personal love, very different than needy love, that when the energy is free to flow, it makes it up to the heart, and you feel a love that’s just beautiful.
It’s devotion. It doesn’t need anything. You don’t need somebody. “I need your love.” Okay? That can be very uncomfortable. Isn’t need uncomfortable? It causes all kinds of problems. Love doesn’t have need. Love is whole within itself. It’s just the feeling of the Shakti, of the energy, having made it up to the heart unconditionally.
It wasn’t based on somebody behaving a certain way or doing a certain thing. You get a certain job. It’s just — you cleansed out enough to where the energy goes through the heart. For how long? It never stops. In fact, I talked… Last night, we had a whole talk about the chakras. That’s only the fourth center of energy.
There’s seven of them in the body, and some say there’s twelve. You know, outside the body, there’s more. So what does that mean? It means the energy isn’t blocked even at the heart. I’ve always taught that, and Living Untethered talks about it: there are two levels of the heart. There’s the mid-heart, and everything below it is human love.
It’s beautiful. Human love is beautiful until you get heartbroken. Somebody doesn’t behave the way you want them to, somebody doesn’t say the right thing, or you think maybe they won’t — it still can get knocked back down to the third, personal center. But is it beautiful? Human love is beautiful. Then you will go through a point.
It will happen in your growth. It will happen. To where it burns through that. You have to go through it. It burns through this heartache, and this energy pops through into the higher part of the heart. Now it’s called devotion. It’s not called human love. Now you just feel it all the time.
You just feel filled with God. What’s God? That feeling. Now we got it. That energy is the spirit. That energy is that divine energy, and if it comes up into your heart and pierces to the higher part of your heart, it doesn’t ever stop. It just becomes devotion. You just wanna express it as a giving of love, and boy, it doesn’t need anything, and nothing can stop it from flowing.
Anybody can treat you any way they do, leave you, die, right? Well, there we go. There’s an emotion. What if somebody dies? Are we supposed to be happy? No, no. If you love somebody and you care about them and they die, your heart is going to feel heavy. Your heart’s going to feel a loss. There’s nothing wrong with that.
That’s a very normal human situation. The question is, can you handle it? You have to be able to handle the emotions you’re feeling. It doesn’t mean that they’re not there. Obviously the energy was connected. It was flowing. It’s gotta go through some changes. Are you willing to let it? Are you willing to be open?
Are you willing to sit there and say, “Okay, here, the energy doesn’t know where to flow. I’ll…” And that’s what spirituality is. If you get in a state where energy doesn’t know where to flow, that’s wonderful. Why? Now it’s free to be brought up. It was attached. You know what I’m saying? “I’m very attached to her.”
What does that mean? My energy’s tied to hers, and they flow back and forth. That’s beautiful, but not as beautiful as it going straight up. When you sit there and say, “Okay, I have this pain to go through and this loss to go through,” I want to help the energy go up, not out and not down. And you can do that during different times of your life, and it’s what a great being does.
Every single moment is an opportunity for growth, an opportunity to let go and let the energy change and go up higher. You lose your job. Okay, well, now you have a problem. You don’t feel good about yourself, and people are thinking about judging you, and this and that. Or it’s people who lose their job.
It happens in life. Can you use it to let go of the part of you that had defined yourself as somebody good in a job, in a position? Your ego doesn’t know where to go now. It’s just like any relationship. You understand that? You had a work relationship. Now it doesn’t work, because you lost your job.
I don’t wanna tell you it’s wonderful, but it’s wonderful. Everything is wonderful. Everything is an opportunity to say, “Boy, was I caught there. I was caught thinking, ‘Oh, I’m vice president of this, of that, and everybody respects me, and I know exactly what I’m supposed to do in the morning,’ and now a loss.”
Good. Now, I don’t mean it’s good because I know it’s difficult. But you wanna grow? This is how you use emotions for growth. You look at that and say, “Wow, was I caught. I defined myself as vice president. I’m not. I’m the person experiencing life.” And so you just experience life. But what if you’re gonna have to go and get a job at a 7-Eleven flipping hamburgers, and you’re a vegetarian?
I’ve talked to people like that. Go there and take that job and be happy about it and let go of yourself. You don’t have to eat it, all right? But let go of yourself, but be humble. Be surrendered. Let go instead of fighting with life and fighting with the energy, and the energy will learn to find a way to go up.
And when it goes up, my God, imagine — you learn, “Now I’m happy flipping hamburgers. I used to have to be vice president earning six-, seven-figure money. Now I’m totally satisfied with a simpler life.” Well, you win. What’s life about? Being happy, being satisfied. Now you get it for free. You don’t have to eat lobster Newburg.
You can flip hamburgers. You just get to the point where you stop defining yourself by what you’re experiencing. You stop defining yourself as a particular energy flow. And at one point, you realize you are the energy flow that’s liberated, the energy that’s free. You literally feel… Christ said, “My Father and I are one.”
Well, you’re not there yet, but you’re getting there, and it gets closer and closer, till you start to experience yourself as the spirit flowing inside. Really? Can everybody? Yes. Everybody. If anybody can feel anger, they can feel the spirit flowing inside. It is anger being blocked. If anybody can feel attraction for somebody else that they really shouldn’t be playing around with — well, what can I do?
How can I feel God? You are feeling God, but it’s blocked. Every single thing is blocked energy, unless it’s not blocked, and then you don’t need a thing. You just feel all this uprising energy. You will reach a point — and I don’t like to talk about it — you wanna feel love? Just wave your hand past your heart.
The heart will go bursting out. You are a very great being. It doesn’t take a great being to feel that. That’s what makes you a great being — that you let go of why you don’t feel that. It’s not about getting something so you feel good. It’s about letting go of everything so that you can… It doesn’t mean renunciation.
You don’t have to renounce. It has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with, are you willing to notice that every single emotion you have inside, be it disturbing-negative or disturbing-positive, all right? What do you mean, disturbing-positive? If you want something, is it really that much fun if you can’t have it?
Here you’re in love with somebody, madly in love with somebody, and they go off to war. How are you doing? Be honest. “I’m waiting for him to come back.” Well, it’s gonna be three years. That’s really a tough time. “I thought love was a beautiful thing.” Well, not if it can’t flow, okay? And it’s not even about somebody going off to war.
Go to a restaurant, have the most beautiful meal you’ve ever had. I mean, it just blew you away. It was so perfect. The music was perfect. The people around were perfect. The waiter was perfect. The specials were perfect. Wow, one of the nicest meals you’ve ever had in your life, all right? Don’t go back. Have you caught on yet?
You don’t go back. Why? It’s not gonna happen again. It can’t happen again. Why? It was the newness, the surprise. Now you get a waiter — is it the same waiter? Oh, it wasn’t like that — did he come from the right? Was it the same special? It can’t be the same. All right? I have some visiting economists in here, right?
One of the things I learned in my studies of economics was a very great thing. They’ll be proud of me, all right? It’s called the law of diminishing returns. This is fifty years ago — I was doing my economics studies. That’s a real law. That’s really true. Go have a meal that’s perfect.
Do you want it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner? Ah, give me spinach. Give me Brussels sprouts. Is there a law of diminishing returns? And it’s like it goes in everything. Like, “When you kiss me now, it’s just not the same as it was before.” Of course it’s not. I had never kissed you before, and it blew you away.
Now I’ve kissed you six thousand times. There is a law of diminishing returns. Does that mean I have to go out there and make everything be new? It means you need to let go of the part of you that needs it, so that you’re getting fed from inside, and there’s no law of diminishing returns inside. When you’re feeling God’s spirit, Shakti flowing through you, it is just as new…
It’s called — Meister called it ever-new joy. Wow, I love that he called it that. Ever-new joy. Not just joy. Not the joy of getting what you want, the joy of not having to have what you don’t want. It’s ever-new joy. Every moment it’s flowing, you’re being fed. It’s the highest, most beautiful thing you’ve ever experienced.
Okay. Is that an emotion? It’s not. The Shakti flow is not an emotion. An emotion is what happens when the Shakti’s blocked, okay? That’s why I say there’s a difference between love — meaning, which is wonderful, I’m not saying not to, love meaning between two people or whatever, okay — and it’s flowing out, but then it’s conditional.
If they leave you, or if they get sick, or they die, then you got a problem, okay? The love — and they say God is love — the love is when it pierced that individual chakra and it’s flowing up inside. What you’re experiencing is free energy, just completely free energy pouring through your being. That is not an emotion.
It’s an experience. An emotion is you experiencing an emotion. This, you are that flow. You actually merge back into that flow, and that’s where the great masters went. That’s what Christ meant when he said, “My Father and I are one.” You become that flow. You are spirit. You are. Except now your spirit consciousness is looking at all the garbage that you stored inside.
So emotions are very beautiful things, but we don’t understand them. Have you ever had a deep talk about emotions? All human emotions are the energy having hit a blockage and either finding a way out or not finding a way out. And yes, it’s more beautiful to find a way out, okay, until something goes wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with conditional love and conditional well-being until the conditions change, and they do. Has anybody had their heart broken? Has anybody been disappointed by somebody you really trusted, or whatever, and they didn’t behave the way you expected them to? It’s because it was conditional.
So they said, “My life was filled with joy, and now it isn’t.” Well, that’s sad. “We were married fifty-five years, and then he died. Now I’m so lost.” Well, fifty-five years — didn’t the love change? Or didn’t anything happen that was permanent? Was it totally conditional upon a relationship with somebody else?
That’s sad. It doesn’t mean the relationship’s sad. It’s the fact you did not use it to liberate yourself. You used it to be attached, and then when something goes wrong, you’re lost completely. Do you have to do that? No. You can be in the relationship. In fact, if you want a real relationship, you’re in the relationship in order to go through what you need to go through to let go of yourself so you can feel love all the time.
And so is the other party in the relationship. That’s a real spiritual relationship. And you’re both there growing with each other, letting go of the… If you did something to hurt me, thank you, I’ll let it go. But I always draw the line at physical. Somebody hurts you physically, get out. But you can’t.
Why? Because you’re attached. People put up with terrible situations, right? Because either financially they’re attached, or emotionally they’re attached, or something attaches their energy flow to where it’s better… And I don’t like to talk about this, because I’m not advocating it. Better to put up with that terrible situation than to go through what you’d have to go through with those shifts in your life, or shifts in your energy.
And I’m telling you, it’s not better. It’s better to get out when the getting is good, and then let the change take place. The energy’s gonna have to find other ways to flow. Okay. Welcome that. Feel that. Appreciate what it will be like to be freer than you were. But then, otherwise, inside — if somebody’s behaving in a way… He just doesn’t… You know, “I have irreconcilable differences.”
What do you mean? “He doesn’t behave the way I want him to.” That’s not an irreconcilable difference. It’s you expecting somebody else to be like you. Well, they’re not like you. They had their experiences in life that molded them. You had your experiences in life that molded you, and marriage doesn’t change that.
You understand that? It’s not some contract, “Okay, now I’ll be like you.” No, you ain’t. If I suppress myself, I’ll try to be like you. All right? Now believe me, that ain’t gonna last very long. Okay? Better that I honor you, and you honor me, and we’re here to help each other grow. We’re here to create an environment in which we go through the change we need to go through, and I’ll stand by you.
You hear me? Not, “I need you.” Just, “That’s what I’m here for. I’m not here for me. I’m not here for you to be like me. I’m here to let go of me.” Then that’s a spiritual relationship. The entire relationship is about, “I am in this to let go of me, and you’re helping me a lot with your behavior.” All right? And so you get into a point where you just realize that I’m letting go of me.
That’s my commitment. I commit that I’m gonna let go of me. Now, can there be relationships that are so caustic and so unhealthy that you end up… It’s out. Okay, fine. It’s not guilt. You just do the best you can. You do the best you can, not — when I say “relationship,” you think I’m talking about a relationship between people.
You know the ultimate relationship? You and life. You have a relationship with life. What does that mean? You have a relationship with life. Every moment life is unfolding in front of you, and you have a relationship with it. You’re reacting, you’re opening, you’re closing, you’re liking, you’re disliking.
What are you doing? That’s what you do with a person. “I like my life. I don’t like my life. I don’t like what happened. I don’t like what happened ten years ago.” Well, then you’re in trouble, because it happened. Can you have a decent relationship with life? Whoa, that’s some deep teaching. What is a decent relationship with life?
The exact one I just described to you about a beautiful relationship with somebody else. You look at life and say, “You know, you rained when I didn’t want you to.” You start with, “I forgive you.” Have a relationship with life that’s healthy. You say to life, “You’ve been here for 4.5 billion years on this planet.”
I mean, wait, we’re eighty? All right? Fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety years. I honor and respect the fact that there are little quantum waves down there — I don’t wanna talk about it, but I am — little quantum waves down there that make the atoms and make everything, that they’re doing their thing, and they don’t know what happened to me yesterday or ten years ago, and that they’re supposed to behave according to that.
No, they’re not. They’re supposed to behave in accordance with the reality and expression of the universe. Can you handle it? And all of a sudden, life becomes your teacher, life becomes your guru, life becomes your best friend. How’s that? It’s teaching you. It’s teaching you how to get rid of yourself, isn’t it?
It’s teaching you how to die to be reborn. So if you don’t block the energy, then it doesn’t get so disturbed. So the whole idea is let it be. Let go. Keep letting go. Don’t push back down. If something old comes up, that’s not easy. It’s stored with pain, it’s coming back with pain. Are you okay with that? The answer has to be yes, ’cause the alternative is, “No, I’m gonna push it back down and keep it for the rest of my life.
I want it to stay here for the rest of my life.” No, I don’t. And so you learn to work with yourself, to relax through things. Start with small stuff — the weather, the driver in front of you. Just keep relaxing, and you’ll find that you can do the bigger stuff and bigger stuff, until eventually some big stuff can come up and you can relax through it.
And then, just relax through, “I can handle it.” And then we’re gonna stop. I have to stop. I don’t wanna stop, ’cause you’re listening. So your first step even there is, “Okay, I can handle it.” And then you realize it puts you through some serious changes. You hear me? What happened when you were able to handle life is you didn’t shove stuff back down there.
It didn’t make as much of a commotion. You didn’t have all that anger and problems down there, and you start to appreciate that that’s really much better. Okay? Then you just handle it, then you start to honor it and honor its right to be. That’s higher than handling it. Handling it still has a little bit of negative stuff there.
“Okay, I can handle what you said.” Right? The other is, “I need this growth. I need this growth.” Let’s say you get cancer and you’re going through chemotherapy. We all know people who do. It’s not fun, but if it gets rid of the cancer, come on, guys. You hear me? If you’re thirty, forty years old and you get cancer, and you have to go through drinking that stuff and doing that stuff, at some point, if you’re wise, you say thank you.
You say thank you to the doctor, and then you get to that point, and you realize that’s a much nicer way to go through it. It’s bad enough you have to go through the physical disturbance, right? Why go through mental disturbance? You start welcoming it, and you start doing it all through life, and eventually you not only say thank you, you look back, and I tell you, that’s a state that’s amazing to get to.
You look back and you look at your lower self, and you don’t dislike it. You don’t dislike anything that ever happened. You appreciate that you shoved it down there because you didn’t know what you were doing. Don’t judge — you didn’t know then — and you apologize to your lower self. You’ll probably say, “I’m so sorry I shoved you down there,” and you just look at it and you say, “You’re welcome.
Here’s my hand. You need to come up. Come on up.” It’s a whole other relationship that you have with yourself and with life. Why? Because life’s gonna hit you with stuff, and you start saying, “Wow. Thank you. Thank you. You put me through the change I need to go through.” All right, I’ll end with a quote from Rumi.
He said, “Yesterday, I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today, I’m wise, so I’m changing myself.” All right. Thank you. 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.
