Michael Singer: Jai guru dev, jai masters. We always talk about to work with the mind and the heart and the daily process of life. You have to start with the small stuff. It’s the simple little things that you bother yourself about. Then people write me and say, yeah, but there’s big stuff. Yeah, there’s a lot more small stuff.
Things that irritate you, the driver in front of you. The weather, the rain. What somebody said, what? Somebody didn’t say what you thought. Somebody said what you remember somebody said 10 years ago and I don’t know what they meant. And what are they doing now? What are you doing? If you do that with your mind, it’s going to cause disturbance.
It’s going to cause you not to be comfortable. Why? ’cause it’s making you not comfortable. Here’s to say this. What if I took a headset? Nowadays, you’re gonna be earplugs. I take a headset, I put it over your head and I’m gonna take a microphone. Don’t let me do it. I’m gonna do that stuff inside your head all day.
Oh my God, you forgot. You forgot what you said the other day. I wonder if she’s still thinking about it. Should I call her? No, I guess she’s probably not thinking about it and I’m gonna remind of it and then. How would you like me talking to you loud? That’s what’s going on inside your head. Do you understand that?
All the time? Don’t you dare say it’s not. It’s just these thoughts are popping up and feelings and thoughts affect your feelings and all this stuff goes on. Witness consciousness is not stopping that. It’s not about stopping that. It’s about being aware that you are in there watching that. Eventually you’ll watch it and you’ll say, whoa.
No wonder I’m not okay. No wonder there’s so many problems inside of me ’cause I’m making them be well, that’s the small stuff. So tonight we take a moment. ’cause you write me all the time, what about the big stuff? It’s irrelevant. I’ll do it, but it’s irrelevant ’cause you can’t handle small stuff. You’re not gonna handle the big stuff.
A chance in the world if you can’t handle the fact that it’s raining. When you don’t want it to be raining, you’re in trouble. ’cause then if somebody leaves you or somebody dies or you sick or something happens, there’s no way you’re handling it. Chance in the world if you can’t handle this hot hour and complain all the time, why it be so hot Or, or the fact that you saw something you didn’t like, oh my God, I can’t believe how disgusting the color combination was.
That’s ridiculous. How at they own a car like that. What are you doing? It has nothing to do with you. It’s just something that’s happening inside your mind that you’re not paying attention to and it’s letting you get upset. It’s letting you bring you down. That’s what creates your moods. Right? Right. What about the big stuff?
What you’re gonna find is the big stuff is way, way harder to deal with, and the way you try to deal with the big stuff is to make it stop. Not to handle it. To make it stop. Okay? I can’t believe you said what you said. I can’t handle it. You need to stop it. You need to apologize. In other words, I can’t handle it.
There’s no way I’m handling it. If I can handle it driving in front of me. If I handle the weather, if I can’t handle it, I got a mosquito bite. These dumb things. That there’s nothing to do about other than handle it. Will you. Right now you have something going on, which, which your mind’s gonna go crazy and your heart’s gonna go crazy, and it’s gonna talk about.
Every single time. Everything it’s talking about is, what do I do about this? How do I stop this? You don’t realize that somebody said somebody, you do something and somebody you get jealous over what skin and other did and what are you trying to do? How do I stop this mess from going inside of me? How do I stop the feeling of jealousy?
How do I stop it? Not how do I deal with it? Not why is it happening, not is it real? It’s just what do I need to do to stop it? I need to drink, I need to smoke. I need to do drugs. I need to yell at somebody. I need to, I need to do something. I can’t handle this energy. What you’re gonna find, but you’re not, unless you’re ready.
Unless you can’t handle the small stuff, I don’t mind talking about it because that’s like graduate school. If you can’t handle undergrad or high school, you’re not gonna be able to handle the big stuff. I’m telling you, if I had my way, I would only talk about handling the small stuff. ’cause you can’t even handle that.
Alright. You don’t let yourself be okay with things that make no difference at all. Like what happened to you 10 years ago or somebody might have said or didn’t say, or what somebody might say in the future. It’s making it up in your head, causing trouble for yourself. So while it’s you causing trouble for yourself, I highly suggest learning not to do that.
Before you handle a breakup, before you handle somebody dying, before you handle getting fired, that’s not something you’re doing. It’s something you have to deal with. But if you’re gonna continue creating in your mind these disturbances that are only there, ’cause you put them there, it’s true. It happened 10 years ago.
Has it happened since? No, but I’m embarrassed of what I said. I was in high school and I, I didn’t know what I was doing and the whole cast laughed at me. That was 10 years ago. Why is that still in there? So that’s a situation. What I’m talking about that, believe it or not, is small stuff. Why there’s nothing to do about it.
You are not gonna go back and make it not happen. You are not gonna think of some way. So what you’re doing, all you do then is try to figure out how can I deal with the fact that this is going on in my head and I can’t deal with it. It’s not comfortable. Should I call somebody? Should I do this? Like I said, should I drink, should I smoke?
There’s drugs, should I, should I go run around? I partying so loud that I can’t even see myself straight. What do I need to do? To not have this stuff be bothering me. And the truth is, what you need to do is every minute of every day of your life is keep watch, not stress. Just notice are you causing yourself trouble?
The world doesn’t have to do anything. You’re perfectly capable of doing it for yourself all the time. Do you hear me? Are you aware of that? Do you know that’s going on in there? Like the vast majority of all the stuff that’s going on in your mind, other than your intellectual, purely intellectual thoughts, which you wish you could have more particularly distracted by your personal thoughts or vast majority of these.
Are you just popping into your mind to cause trouble for yourself? So I wanna talk about the bigger stuff, but it’s irrelevant. It’s truly irrelevant. If you can’t play tennis with a ball thrower or with a coach. You ain’t playing with McEnroe or the will sisters, I guarantee you. But if you wanna, you can practice, you can learn, you can do things that will make you better and better.
But we don’t do it. We just let ourselves create all this mess that is meaningless. I don’t call it meaningless because it’s not still happening. Either it didn’t happen and you made it up and it’s bothering you. You like that one? Alright. How many things have you worried about in your life that didn’t happen, but I wish you could take inventory.
You’d freak out. I’m telling you, it’s 95% of every single thing you ever worried about did not happen. You’re not even sure what to worry about. You might think. Sure. Wherever it is. No, this is more important. No, no. That was important. You worry about what you should worry about. It gets really weird in there.
Have you noticed? Okay, alright, fine. I did my job. That’s where your work is. There. Learn. I don’t care how you do it. Just learn to look at that and say, that is a waste of my happiness. That’s a waste of my love. That’s a waste of my joy. I am creating trouble for myself and then try to figure out how to make it go away.
How about don’t create it? You do that by letting go. It’s always letting go. Just relax in the face of it, yes, it’s hot out, but I can handle it. Yes. Somebody says something or maybe somebody will say something I don’t like. That’s a better one. You’re free. Nothing in there, can’t you? Right. Relax. Okay, now let’s say you’re ready for graduate school and whether you’re ready or not, you’re gonna hit it.
Say, well as we’ll talk about it. How do you handle when the mind is is disturbed? The mind is having trouble with something. And that’s generally down to something, not a whole bunch of little things every few minutes. Like it goes hot. Oh my god, what did he say? No, it just stays there, doesn’t it? And it stays there at night.
It stays there. When you wake up in the morning, it’s there for the rest of the day. Anybody listening, anybody got that? This thing bothered you? It was not low hanging fruit. It caused disturbance inside. It could still be something that happened that’s suppression. It could be something that happened 20, 30 years ago that you can’t let go of and it just keeps coming back up and you can’t get it outta your head.
You know that, right? So the first thing I will teach you, and it’s very deep. It takes very deep years of meditation to see this. The root of the mind is in the heart. It is because it is disturbing your heart that it is creating all this mess inside your mind. If something happened and two people are standing there and one person doesn’t have a relationship with the person that caused you trouble, they’re not having trouble.
It’s not the event. It’s what it hit inside of you. And generally it’s fear. It’s fear. It’s fear of being rejected. It’s fear of being hurt. It’s a fear of whatever. It’s, it’s just fear, right? And that fear manifests as logic in the mind. The mind figures out, why do I feel this fear? Well, because I could get fired because this could happen, or because that happened, how nobody could handle what happened to me.
It’s just, it has a problem in the heart and it manifests in the mind. Do you understand that? That’s a very important step? ’cause people try to work on their mind. You can’t work on your mind when it’s really disturbed, when it’s just bothering you every minute about the same thing over and over again.
You can do what you want. I used to, but mantra used to mean to me when I started this journey was a sledgehammer. He’s in there doing this bothered, damn grown, grown, grown, grown, shut up Gro that is not doing mantra, that’s basically trying to find a hammer that can beat this thing down so he knows to deal with it.
If you succeed, it will come back. That is just suppression. Call it mantra and give it a fancy name. It’s suppression. You’re taking the energy you can’t deal with, you’re trying to beat it out of there. Yell it out. Where’s it go? The energy didn’t go anywhere. You didn’t let it. What you did is try to shove it away so you don’t have to experience it.
Not a good thing to do ’cause it’s just gonna come back up. And by the way, it doesn’t always come back looking the same. It’s like a virus in a computer. You don’t know what’s going next. Next thing you know, you’re taking outta the dog or the kids or your husband or your wife or a job, you don’t like your job anymore.
It’s that same stuff that you push down there and the heart did not work it through in any way, shape, or form. And so now you all kinds of trouble goes on. But that disturbed mind, the real disturbed mind, it’s root is in the heart. And so the great ones, they don’t try to work with ’em with the mind. It’s not a matter of quieting the mind.
If the mind is noisy, there’s a reason. If a child’s misbehaving, there’s a reason. It’s not to send ’em to their room and tell ’em to shut up without dinner. You didn’t deal with what happened today. What can we work with? Okay? And so instead you’re sitting here saying, I’m not gonna deal with the cause. I’m just gonna deal with the effect.
Okay? Yes, you’ll go through so many stages, but I guarantee you that will never work, ever. It does not work with the effect. It works with the cause. We say work at the root. So the root of the mind is in the heart. The heart is having trouble and expresses itself to try to relieve the heart. Nothing’s against you.
It’s all for you. It’s just like when your, your body temperature goes up because you have a bacteria or a virus and the body temperature a few degrees, it goes up, you know, a hundred, 102, it’s not trying to make you sick, it’s trying to make you well, right? That raisin tempera is because those viruses and, and, and bacteria can’t always handle a higher temperature, and so a body naturally tries to take care of itself, but that’s the root.
So basically it is the same thing inside of your heart. If the heart is having trouble and you feel fear or insecurity or jealousy, which all those are fear, by the way. What is insecurity? Fear. You get funny if you go down to the root. It’s always fear. Okay, wanna do that? What is jealousy? Fear of loss. If you don’t care about the person you don’t have you jealous about ’em.
They’re run around with somebody else who cares. But if it’s your dude or UTIs and they’re running around with somebody else, you are afraid of losing something you think you need. And so jealousy is fear. It’s not evil, it’s not bad. It’s the heart attempting to release the fear that is generated inside.
What is insecurity? Fear of being rejected. You see how it comes down to fear? It all comes down to fear. I. It all comes down to fear. The root of all this stuff that’s going on in the mind is the heart. There are people who are afraid of failure. What’s that? Has anybody driven by fear of failure? Has anybody realized you wanna get published, published, repaired, or I wanna make enough money?
Your people, right? You’re just expressing the fear that you’re feeling in your heart. That something’s wrong or something will go wrong and you, you won’t be okay. The real fear is I won’t be okay. That’s what will happen. If I knew I didn’t need the relationship so bad as they ran off of somebody else, eh, not so bad.
I might not feel jealously, but it’s the fear. Let’s have that. The fear that I might not be okay, how’s that? And it doesn’t say, might not. When it hits, the mind says you won’t be. Mm-hmm. It already knows. And so then it, what does it try to do? The heart, which is just emotion. It’s just energy. It tries to get rid of that energy.
It doesn’t want it just like when it tries to get rid of bacteria or different things or any other natural healing process, the body has. It’s trying to fix you. It’s not trying to hurt you or punish you. The heart does not want that stuff in there. It wants to feel love, it wants to feel Shakti. It wants to feel God.
It does as its natural state. So when all this messed up energy gets shoved down there, it tries to push it up, tries to get rid of it, and that expresses in the mind. I could talk all night on it. I’ve watched it for 55 years, right? It tries to release the energy. Through the mind, even if the mind’s saying terribly negative thing, people say to me, but you don’t understand.
Sometimes I have terrible, terrible thoughts. I don’t even like to talk about them, about hurting people or about doing something that I would never do. But it just comes into my mind and starts thinking about it. That is the problems of the heart, not knowing how to deal or release the energy and it’s just shoving it up there and expressing itself as crazy, this, that, and the other thing, and then you get afraid that you’re doing something wrong.
So now there’s guilt. It just spreads. The key, if you really wanna work with it and you have to be ready, and I still go, keep going back. If you can’t handle the small stuff, the low hanging fruit, that which, if you weren’t being bothered by it, there’s nothing to do about it. That’s what heat is. That’s what driving in front of you is.
That’s what, oh my God, I dropped some catch up on my pants. I have to go back to work. If you’re not bothered by it, there’s nothing to do about it. Doesn’t matter. So. I beg you to think that it matters, to deal with that those are the place where you work. But okay, what happens at some point trouble, then it hits you and it’s the mind’s gonna get disturbed.
Very disturbed. Can it get disturbed and get very disturbed? Can it be disturbed for more than a minute? How about an hour? How about a day it can get, I’m being honest, it can get disturbed. So the only hope you have in truly working with it, yes, you can quiet it down, but you didn’t get rid of the root, is to take a look at the heart, which is hard to do when the mind, the mind distracts you with all of its talk and all the solutions and all its problems and complaints and you know, why did I have to do that?
Why did he have to, hadn’t done that. Be okay. Can’t believe he did that. And it’s just, it’s just chewing at you. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? Right. I’m telling you, you get to a point where you don’t look at the my say, okay. Okay. Go on. Express yourself. Go on. I’m going down here. And you follow the energy down to the heart and you realize that is coming up.
Just like if you have a spring, you know we have all these springs around here. If you go there, you’ll see that water comes up and it ripples all over, makes currents right as it comes, it hits the top. That’s not where it comes from. If you dive down there, you’re gonna see it gets narrow and narrow and narrow and narrow, but it’s hard.
It’s pushing up really hard. The closer you get, and there’s this hole down there in the rocks, right, and that’s where the spring is coming up. That is the relationship between your heart and your mind. It’s coming up out of the heart. When it comes up as disturbed energy, it hits the mind. And then you know what disturbance looks like.
And I’m telling you that when you get ready. You’re welcome to work with it, you realize. Messing with the mind is not dealing with what’s wrong. What’s wrong is the fear in the heart is the problems in the heart. But like I said, the current is stronger and stronger. As you go down there, it’s, it’s hard to push past the noise that’s coming up so you can go down to the root, but you guys are great yogis and yoginis.
All right. It’s fine that you at least hear that if you’re in there saying, my mind should be quiet. You’re wrong. How’s that? It is not natural for the mind to be quiet until you’ve gotten rid of that junk that’s inside your heart. It’s gonna come back. Leave a good meditation and tell me how long before you have problems.
Do you hear me? And then you’re, you’re told well pay attention, but no. Yes, fine. Do whatever they tell you. I don’t want you to listen to me. The question is, why does that happen? Why? If you go deep in meditation, you feel peace, you feel God, you feel love, you know, within an hour you’re worrying about the phone call is and what somebody said yesterday and what am I supposed to be doing?
Okay. It’s not what I do about that. It’s why is it happening? It’s always why is it happening? Go the next layer down. Not try to solve it at the level it’s happening. There’s not a real solution level. It’s happening. Well, there’s a cause. Come on. You’re scientists. Okay? You have to deal with the cause, not the effect.
The disturbed mind is in effect. If you’re sitting there trying to make a disturb mind, be quiet. Good luck. I told you once, I don’t like to say it, but it’s true. Mayor Baba, a great avatar, one of the highest being all face of the earth, used to tell his disciples. When your mind’s in that state and it’s totally disturbed, don’t meditate.
’cause all you’re doing is struggling and fighting. With all that disturbance, you know, cook or play golf or do a hobby. Express yourself different ways, but don’t suppress that stuff. Okay. Nobody touched that, do they? Right. That’s a great master teaching you. It’s not an excuse not to meditate. Meditates a wonderful thing.
But if you’re just gonna go in there, ruminate over the problems that it’s, and try to stop them and argue why the, oh, it’s not necessary. All that stuff. You’re just creating more commotion. How do you solve this stuff? It’s not easy. You remember, it’s in the heart. It’s not in the mind. It’s in the heart, and you try to look, your consciousness tries to look past the noise of the mind.
Not easy, but it’s doable. You just relax past it. You understand that noise in the mind is not the problem. It’s the result of the problem. And so what am I doing struggling with that? Why don’t I struggle? Get down there and deal with the problem. And so you start watching your heart, and what you’re going to see is that the closer you get, the more you bring your consciousness as you’re doing, you’re bringing the awareness of your consciousness, your consciousness out of this higher center, the mind mental plane down to the Shakti, the energy level.
Plane. Alright? And you’re gonna see the energy very, very strong. In fact, most of you have never gone down there and don’t want to go down there. In other words, your mind is trying to tell you how not to have to go down there, apologize, say you’re sorry, but you have to mean it. Say it at least 15 times, right?
In other words, what can I do so I don’t have to face myself? Better yet, what do you have to do? I have to face myself. You just blame everything out there. That’s why you blame, because you need to push it out there and find a way to make it be quiet inside. So if you said something that bothered me even years ago, I.
And I don’t, I don’t mind it. AA teaches and I really respect AA a lot. Okay. A lot of people get help with these really beautiful teachings. They teach that. When you see that something in the past happened and you hurt somebody or did something, go down and find them and apologize. Okay, that’s fine. And I’m not gonna say no.
Okay. Yeah. We does not teach that. It teaches if you see that something stuck inside of you that’s over. It’s just not over inside of you. It’s over, right? Go deeper. Go down to see why this is still in there. I’m telling you, you check it out. There are times that you go try to straighten this stuff out from years ago.
They don’t know what you’re talking about. They didn’t have a problem with what you did. They forgot about it. Instantaneously, you got all guilty about it, and now you feel like a fool haven’t brought anything back up. So basically you sit there and say, the solutions inside, not outside, but I’m not telling you not to do that stuff.
You do whatever works for you. I’m tell you what’s said and done. You look at those problems in the mind telling you they’re coming from the heart, whether you see it or not, whether you can trace them back or not to exact moments, it doesn’t matter. The noise that is ending up in the mind is like the spring coming from the heart, hitting the surface of the mind, causing all those ripples.
So what do you try to do? You try to dive down. It’s like diving down into the heart, right? You have to go past this current that’s pushing up. How always it’s the same answer. Relax. I dunno why we’re talking so deep. I hope you can use it. Relaxation is always the answer. So when you start with all that noise in your mind and you see yourself trying to go out to solve it, to stop it, you, you try to play billiards with your thoughts.
If I have this thought, it will offset that one. She didn’t really mean what she said. Uh, by the way, it’s not bothering me anymore because I don’t think she even heard me. No, she didn’t hear me. What are you doing? It’s about rationalization. You’re trying to throw one thought at another one so you can neutralize the thoughts.
Yes, it can help. Yes, do it. Do whatever you need to do. Said and done. There’s this dive down into the heart and you have to be able to relax through the noise that exists now. ’cause it’s not the problem, it’s the result of the problem. So are you willing to just say, okay, I hear it, I know it, I feel everything.
I’m gonna relax so I can go deeper, so I can go down, not just in meditation. You get to a point where you’re doing this during the day. Anything here’s learn to let go. That’s what letting go means. People tell me, letting go means not dealing with the world. It does not mean letting go of the world. It means letting go of the noise inside of you so you can go deeper inside.
Accepting even acceptance doesn’t mean accept everything that’s going on. It means accept that this noise is going inside of your mind. You know where it’s coming from. It’s coming from your heart. So there’s no reason to fight with the mind. So I accept that the mind is doing this. It’s not its fault.
It’s not against you. It’s not evil. The mind is not evil. Do you understand that? Period? I don’t care. Hitler or anybody, that mind was really screwed up, wasn’t it? That’s ’cause of where the heart was, okay. Had serious problems, and then it came up and he got the ultimate solution. That’s a such an amazing, I’m Jewish.
That’s an amazing example of watching how disturbed that can get, and so all of a sudden the mind’s saying this is a solution. Kill everybody. There’s a solution. Wipe out a whole race. There’s a solution. Holy mackerel. Blow up the world and take it over. That’s the solution to the fact that I don’t feel secure and I need to own everything and power everything.
Do you understand that? It’s very good to look at these extremes. They help you see what’s going on. Don’t ever be afraid to look at the extremes. They’re very good teachers for you, but they’re hard to handle, aren’t they? You wanna just say, oh my God, no. So the answer is relax through the disturbance. Yes.
Okay. Mantra can help. Yes. But it means relaxation. Things will help you. But relax. Don’t think that’s the end. Relax doesn’t mean it stops. Relax means you don’t get caught in it and you’re able to go deeper. And when you relax past the noise in the mine I just told you doesn’t mean it stopped. Okay? When I go dive down to those springs and I get past the ripples on the surface and I start feeling the force coming up, those ripples did not stop.
Did they? I just went past them. ’cause I focused on going deeper. Right? So you relax through the disturbance of the mind. My advice is, it’s funny, when I did the interview with Oprah on the Other Soul, she said that one of her favorite chapters was, let go Now or Fall. Let Go Now or fall. What does that mean?
The moment you see that this is getting disturbed, go deeper. I. Let go. Otherwise it can get good and disturbed and the more disturbed it gets, the harder it’s to stop. Do you know that? So your path is, you notice what’s going on, you understand this whole thing, that the root of the mind is in the heart and you’re gonna deal with it.
So that you just, I would love you. Just notice right away, this is the heart. Emanating the disturbances and fears and they’re coming into the mine to try to solve them up here. Try to intellectually come up with an answer, but you get wise and there’s no answer up there. That’s not where the problem is.
You’re not gonna stop the ripples on the top of the water by smoothing them off or capturing them or carrying an iron in there, right? There’s a cause you have to go down to the cause. I would love that you at least reach the point that you understand all the time. That the root of the mind is in the heart, and you’re wasting your time to try and stop all that noise by dealing with the mind.
But I’m not telling you not to do it. There’s techniques you can do. Yoga helps and meditation helps, and stretching helps and all kinds of things. Help is wonderful, but understand that that’s, you’re dealing with the result, not the cause. And so you try to start going down. MDOs used to do something beautiful you to make believe that your heart, that center right there has a nostril just like your nose does.
And you can breathe in and out through that nostril, breathe in. And then blow out the disturbance, breathe in. That’s a wonderful technique. You’re working directly with the heart. You understand that you’re working with the energies of the heart rather than the noise of the mind. So that type of technique or anything, anything that works for you.
There’s so many techniques. I don’t teach techniques. Why? If you’re sincere, you will know what to do. If you catch on and you know that noise gone on in your mind, that worry that that’s coming from the heart. You’ll wisely go down there and you figure it out. You figure out how to keep your relationships, figure out how to make money, figure out how to not lose your job.
You figure out lots of stuff, don’t you? Okay. And basically, can you figure out what to do with the fact that your heart’s full of the garbage you shoved down there? I said that’s full of fear. And you will. I give you some techniques. Breathe through the heart is a very powerful thing. But the main thing is, is your consciousness, your awareness of being willing to not get stuck in the distraction of the mind so that it can go down and you’ll feel it.
You’ll start to go down. I’ll push it back up. You’ll start to go down. I thought will come in. Next thing you know. Oh I God, I’ve been thinking about that again. I try not to. That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. That’s like practicing tennis or playing scales on a piano so you can be, be a better pianist.
You’re practicing going down. You’re practicing dealing at a deeper level. Of course it’s gonna pull you back up. Don’t get judgment. Don’t judge yourself. Don’t say it’s wrong, don’t feel guilty. Don’t give up. Right? Just say, okay, I’m learning tennis and I play before, and the ball’s going on the net.
That’s what they do when you don’t know how to play, but every time you hit that ball, it’s, you can do better. And so that’s what you’re doing here. You’re practicing diving down, diving down deeper. At some point, the deeper you go, it’s not that the mind isn’t, I don’t know. They, they say if, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did it make a noise?
I nice coin, who the heck knows? There was nobody to hear it. Same thing here. If you start diving down into the heart. Does the mind stop or do you stop listening to it? Guess the answer is what does it make? It doesn’t, doesn’t make any difference at all. The point is your conscience is not being distracted by it, and therefore it’s fine.
Don’t go back and check it out. I wonder if we’re still talking. No, don’t, don’t do that. Just keep concentrating your awareness. Down toward the heart. Down toward the heart. Breathe through the heart, right? You can go through so many. Some people use discipline concentrate Zen. I, I started with Zen. I, that’s just the first thing that somebody gave me a book on Zen when I was trying to stop my mind, be quiet and they didn’t talk about the mind at all or the heart.
They talked about what yoga called the horror, which is just below the belly button. There’s a center, a powerful center and energy there, and they taught concentrating on that. There’s concentrating on that. There’s full concentrating on that. It’s very powerful. Okay, so the key is. Pick your focus. The heart is a wonderful focus.
Now, how you end up dealing with it. ’cause zen tends to be strictly power. You’re using the power of concentration to focus, total focus. The heart is much more gentle than that. And so when you’re working on your heart. You get to like say you breathe right? You get to treat your heart as a little child that’s been abused ’cause it has you shoved every single thing that ever bothered you down into your heart.
Those are some scars. You patterned them all in the heart. So now of course there’s fear. Somebody rejected you in fifth grade, somebody did that. Your boyfriend left you, this happened, you got hurt. So you just shove it all down there. It ends up in the heart. And that’s why it keeps coming back up. You say, but there’s in the mind.
No, it comes back in the mind. It’s the roots and the heart. And so you learn to relax through the mind, relax through that, that doesn’t distract you. Relax. The opposite of relaxation is resistance. You’re fighting something as opposed to it’s very hard to relax when you’re resisting, isn’t it? Okay, how long?
You said to me, just relax, shut up. I’m gonna relax. I dunno what you said. Okay? But if you can relax, all of a sudden it’s not the center of your attention. So as you work your way down toward the heart, you’re gonna feel it, pull you back up. You’d come on. Just come on down. No guilt. No shame. There’s no better.
There’s no worse. There’s not supposed to. There’s just, this is what I’m doing. I’m learning to not get distracted by the noise in the mind so that I can begin to dive. Take that dive and we cry. That’s a serious dive into the heart. We’ll talk a little bit about what it’s like as you go down in there, so as you let go, it gets hotter.
Of course, it gets hotter. Just like the spring gets stronger when you go down into it. Let’s say there’s your bon fire. We have that New Year’s Eve, there’s smoke that comes off. Some people can’t handle the smoke, let’s say, right? So they, they give up, they walk away. Unless you make it through the smoke, you’re not getting to the fire saint.
It’s always the same thing. They have a root. So if you’re not willing to go down into the heat of the heart and you go running back up to find the solution in the mind. The mind will always tell the solutions outside because it can deal with the outside, right? It doesn’t have trouble dealing with self, so, but you just keep going down.
You just keep going down then, and it’s noisy and it’s problematic and it’s strong. Like the mind makes mental and visual noises. The heart is just pure Shakti. It’s just giving energy. It’s vibrations of energy, so you have to learn how to deal with that. And so basically you keep letting go and letting go.
And relax and let go and relax and let go and relax. Just dive deeper and deeper and deeper. Okay? And as you do, I’m telling you, it’s not easy. It’s not meant to be easy. Andm. Finish a little bit of this. I’ll tell you some so that the Bible talks about this, right? It’s like you just relax through it.
That’s all. You just, here’s just your commitment is this is what your commitment is. If you’re a serious spiritual seeker, I’m going down there. I don’t care. That’s where the problem is and that’s where the solution is. And God’s on the other side, all that fear. And that’s where I’m going. So I just tell you the Bible, I was, was getting ready for Passover way back when dur and still lived out here, my daughter.
And we would kind look up some special stuff and I talk about the Passover talk when I give a talk. And we ended up in, in, uh, Genesis, in the Bible. And I’ll never forget what I read, it said. After man was thrown outta the garden, God took a cherub for the flaming sword and set that angel at the east gate of the garden.
Les Man. Figure how to get back into the garden and instead of tasting the tree of knowledge, taste the tree of eternal life. That fire that you’re going toward as you dive toward the heart, you wait. You’ll see that Is that Cher? That is that sword. And I remember thinking, God didn’t have to put something you’re afraid of a rattlesnake, a divorce.
He put fear itself there. That’ll get you outta there, wouldn’t it? Right. Let’s see who can make it through that. And so as you go down, it’s hotter and hotter, that’s all. And you have to want to go. You have to say, I don’t care. And it’s the media of my life is to pierce the heart chakra is to make it through this stuff that I store down there.
And there’s another line in Star Wars when Yoda was teaching Luke that he had to go into this cave. Anybody remember that version, right? To go to the cave and Luke turned around and said, ’cause all covered vines was dark. Luke turned around and said, but what’s in there? Heda said, nothing. You don’t bring in with you.
You’re bringing yourself into there. You’re bringing your stuff in there. Nothing you didn’t bring in with you. You gotta work it through. You gotta work through yourself, okay? When it’s all said and done, you’re not solving this stuff except to work through it. And let it go. And so as you dive down, there may be shadows that come up, you know, that are difficult to deal with and just push you back up that, oh my God, there was a divorce and so I broke my arm, and it’s like, it just starts coming up.
But it comes up as energy, not as words. It just comes up as a pattern of energy that got stored down there and somebody just spit you right back out. Do you hear me? You know what I’m talking about. You have to be committed and to be willing to, to say yes. But I’m going back. I’m going back. I don’t care every single time I can.
That’s all tire of so life. I’m going back. I don’t care what it does. I told you one semester I had this beautiful poem called The Hound to Heaven. He didn’t write it. My understanding is when Dees would go to live with him and the ashram. He would have them read his books, which of course they do. You don’t wanna get confused, but they would have them read this poem that that was a poem he was committed to.
And I’m not gonna go through the old poem, but it’s the Hound to heaven and God is the hound. And you are human. Human running away. Why? It’s scary. No, no. I don’t want that to happen. No, I don’t wanna get words. No, I don’t have this. I don’t wanna do that. Right. You’re just running through all the quarters of your life trying to be okay.
Trying to be okay. And at the very end of the poem is so beautiful. It says, I’m cornered now. The hound has got me no place for me to run what I do. And then the final lines are something like, oh my, is it possible that the darkness I was running away from my entire life was the shadow of your hand reaching down to pick me up?
Which talk too. We’re gonna talk deep tonight. That’s what it is. That heart is trying to cleanse itself and you’re running away from it with your mind and with your actions outside to try to be okay, which is why I teach, which I don’t care if they like it or not. Is there a law of attraction? Of course, there’s a law of attraction.
Of course, you can attract yourself if you meditate and focus on it what you want. I don’t highly advise it. Why? That’s basically saying, I got problems. J Mind came up with a solution. I need a new wife. I need a new husband. I need more money. I need a new house. I need to be accepted. I need to be famous.
Now I’m gonna attract it to myself so that I’ll never go to God. It’s not about getting what you want, it’s about finding a why you want it. You’re holy, complete within yourself. You’re great being on the other side of that fire. He’s the divine consciousness, but you are not willing to go there. So you run out and you try to fix the world and fix people so that the way you want them to be, so you don’t have to deal with yourself.
That’s the only reason you want anything other than your basic food, clothing, shelter is because you’re not okay. You build a self-concept of yourself. You’re not getting what you want. You don’t feel good about it. So how can I get what I want so I feel better? It’s not very deep. Pretty shallow. You’re basically saying, I don’t wanna go down there and deal with my stuff.
My stuff has emanated that stuff and my mind came up with solutions. Good luck, by the way, doesn’t even know what it wants, right? It came up with solutions. Then it changes mind every day, and it comes with a solution. Then it tries to make ’em happen. I don’t care. You try to make ’em happen. You work inside the answer’s inside, deep inside.
It doesn’t mean you work with the outside. You’re gonna work with the outside, and life is an interactive sport. The purpose of your life is that dive to the heart and you keep your eye on that. And when things flare up at night, start fla up during the day. You remember that’s coming from here. I can’t deal with it right now.
I’ll do what I can to be okay, no problem with that. You just destroy, you’re gonna, guru used to say, throw the dog a bone. When they were talking about total renunciation, fine. So have an ice cream. Alright? It’s better than all this stupid stuff you would do, but ultimately the pole star of your life, the entire meaning of your life is that dive down through the energy, the Shakti that’s coming up, causing all this noise in the mind.
You’re diving down into it how. I’ll tell you how. Relax. I have no other techniques. I don’t care. You put helmets on your head and throw lights and do all kinds of weird things. Do whatever you want. When it’s said and done, relaxation is the only thing that will let you go to the next level. You have to relax through where you’re caught.
You have to relax through. It’s pushing up and it seems so hot. Fine. So as you go down there, believe it or not, everything feels more and more beautiful because you become capable of handling what you were afraid of your entire life. Like that hound to heaven thing you understand? I don’t want to run for that shadow.
That shadow is the divine trying to lift me up. I wanna help that. I don’t wanna run from that, but you still will run from it. I told you it’s the stairway to heaven. It’s not a leap. And so you just keep relaxing through it. And whatever you have to go through, you go through. But what if I’m doing really well and all of a sudden this thing happens outside and the person that was leaning on it, they left me or they died and that happened and now I’m for years, I’m not.
Okay. Right. You needed to go through that. How do you know? Because you went through it, because you had sincerity in your heart and mind that the entire purpose of my life is working through this stuff. I stored in there and I was doing really well. I really felt some divine consciousness and presence, and then this thing happened and it threw me for a loop.
No, it didn’t. It’s that shadow reaching down to pick you up, but it was strong. He got knocked off the horse a little bit. That’s good. Not bad. The question is, are you willing to get back on. Are you willing to, as soon as possible, sit there and say, I have a journey I devoted my life to, and yes, this was difficult, but I’m okay.
I can handle it. I’m going back. Some people never go back, which I don’t wanna talk about that either, which is why you’re given many tries. Do you understand that it’s not a one shot and that’s it. Alright. Even during your life, you give many tries, aren’t you? You just use each one the best you can to go the next layer.
And what happens is once you can handle the heat and the pressure and the push of the Shakti of a given layer. You can get comfortable with it. Just like you get comfortable with things in your life or with your mind, your egos figures out how to be, okay. What did Froy say about the ego between the id, the body’s drives and the super ego societies?
The ego tries to find a place of compromise where it can be okay. In between all of that, you, you don’t want that compromise. You want out, but that’s what Freud talks about, the ego, it’s the eye that finds the balance between society and, and. In pressures, right? That’s my self concept. It’s okay if I do this, not okay to do this, and you just kind of try to make it be okay when you go deeper.
It does become okay. That fire the heat, you become comfortable with it and it turns into shati. It is shati, not turns into it is shati, but you’re pushing it away. You fight with it, then it bounces off. It causes all kinds of trouble, right? But when you can relax in that presence, you start feeling this energy coming up and it encourages you to keep diving.
That encourages to stay there. People say that, oh, he is doing so well, and then all I write them back, say, good, thank you. I’m glad it happened. Do you understand that? Do the best you can and then step for as long as you can and come back as soon as you can. Step as long as you can. Come back as soon as you can, long as you can, soon as you can, and pretty soon you become established to see yourself.
The distance, the gap between going down and coming back. You’re gone and you’re just there and you continue that dive and no matter what the heat is, and you will come to a point, you come to a point where you thought you knew what heat was like. You thought you knew what it felt like to have somebody die that you love.
You thought you knew what it was like to have lose everything in your life, or no, this heat is way past that. Those heat still had red and blues. This was white way down right in the center. Right in the center of your heart, like a, like a black hole, but bright burning star. And you have to say, I’m going there.
I don’t care. I don’t care what it is. I’m going past that. And that’s when you break past. And once you break past that point in the heart, it’s over. Life can do whatever it wants to do. Sure. Of course you have little ripples, right? But the mind doesn’t say anything. And she says, boy, this is not so much fun than as far as it goes.
’cause it knows, why would I play with that? And you get to stay at that point, the shati changes direction. I talked about it once before. Right now you don’t realize that you’re being pulled down. Your mind is distracting you, your heart is distracting you, and it’s just basically you’re being the Shakti’s pulling you down.
Down and out, down and out. You look for solutions outside. You’re being pulled outside. Outside. You being pulled into disturbs of the heart being pulled down into disturbance of the mind, down and out. That’s the true fall when you pass that pierce thing I’m talking about, you know, it’s rare, but it’s very hot and it’s very serious.
Shakti changes. Its direct. From then on, she goes up. You don’t have to do anything. People talk about master gon. It’s all about will. It’s not about will. Well, there’s many stages, right? There’s a point in. It’s not about will. ’cause Will is something you exercise and you will get to the point where there is not enough you there to be touching anything.
There’s just awareness of being, being pulled up. That Shante’s pulling you up. So now there’s just a letting go. That’s the ultimate last act of will. Is the willingness to merge. The willingness to let go. This is a journey I’m talking to you about. This is the journey of your life. This is the entire purpose of your life.
Your life has a purpose. It’s not having, yes, you have children. Yes, you get married. Yes, yes, by all means. Go through what you need to go through, live your life, but the meaning of your life. It’s not something that comes and goes, doesn’t not that goes away ’cause you die. Where are your children? Where’s that?
They’re gone. What’s happening is you’re trying to build a life out here to make yourself be okay. Do you understand? It has, it has a termination time. That doesn’t mean you die, it means everything else goes away. The Shakti stays, sorry, I’m not trying to scare you, but your business, your relationship, the buildings, your name, I love that.
They want my name to last. It’s just the world. It’s not the meaning of your life. The meaning of your life is liberation. I. Your life is freedom. You are in there and you’re caught in there. You see this journey to talk to you about, and when you pierce the heart chakra, when you pierce that center, the Shakti changes direction.
Now she’s feeding you instead of pulling you down, expressing herself, all these disturbances you have, you start to feel love all the time. When All the time. What do you mean all the time? You wanna feel love? Wave your hand over the fourth chakra. Love comes pouring through your mind. It’s like any chakra.
You wave your hand across, the energy comes flying and feeds you bliss. I’d like to live there. It doesn’t mean I interact with the world. I told you the difference is you’re not interacting with the world because you’re not okay interacting with the world. ’cause you are okay and you’re taking that love and that inspiration and that beauty and that compassion and expressing it into the world.
Now what you’re expressing is the attempt to manipulate people’s lives and things to be the way you needed to be, so you have to deal with yourself. I’m not blaming you, but you understand that, right? That’s what your whole, the whole thing is. Why don’t we just let go, let go of ourselves completely. So there is no ego in there.
There is no personal self in there, and there’s just this shockty pouring up inside of you, feeding you and feeding everybody else. You go hang out with a great saint. That war is beyond your comprehension. To stand in that from way, way across the room. I told you I’ve been in a room with a grave. Great master, great being thousands of people in the room.
The room was, and there’s a daran line all the way back. I couldn’t walk into the room. It was like a magnetic force of two, two negative poles or positive poles of a magnet pushing against each other. Every step I tried to take forward, it was like, oh my God, who is this? That’s, that’s who you are. That’s not who they are.
That’s who you are. But you’ve taken all that Shakti, all that energy, all that consciousness. Which expands out throughout the universe, and you took it down and focused on your mind. You focused the whole thing on your mind and your heart, and your body and your little family, your little life. But you make it so small now you have an ingrown toenail.
You have an ingrown mind nail and you don’t know how to get out. Well, we just talked about how to get out. We talked about out too, didn’t we? It’s good that you know this. That’s why there are masters. It doesn’t matter if they’re in the body or not. That’s why there was a Beethoven. That’s why there was a Mozart.
That’s why there’s a Monet. That’s why the great ones. But they were only great at one thing. Art music said that A master great at life, great at love, greater God, right? And so yes, you take inspiration from them. You’re not worshiping. You shouldn’t get it wrong. And we don’t worship the masters. You pay respect for the state they reached to worship the masters is, is to not lose yourself.
You basically sit there and say, this state that they reached, Christ said it. He said, as I sit by the throne of my father, the throne is not a golden seat somewhere as a state of consciousness, as I sit with the throne of my father, so you shall sit by my throne, and these things that I do should do these and even greater things.
Check it out. So you shall sit by my side saying, this state that I have reached of merger of my father and I are one. You’re right next to me. And that’s what the yogis teach us. The great ones teach. That’s who you are. And you learn that’s the purpose and the meaning of your life. And so you take this dive, I don’t care how long it takes and I don’t care much.
Your hurts. At some point you stop going, look, childbirth hurts. Ever had a baby ever hurt a baby? I hear it hurts a little bit and they go back for seconds and thirds and it’s worth it. That’s what this is. This is soul birth. You’re birthing your soul and you just willingly relax through it because it takes you where you wanna go, and the Shakti will show you.
You’re turning the fear into love. It’s a alchemy. You literally, that was just down there with all fear and incur all that I told you. It’s just fear. You can call it jealousy, call it insecurity. It’s it’s fear as you go down there and you face it. But I’m face. It means I’m strong enough to face it. No, that’s not strength.
You just relax. It’s such I’m strong enough to do it that you will lose that. No one’s strong enough for that. Right? Just relax. Just relax through it. That’s the greatest strength, the willingness to relax through it, whatever you’re experiencing, and it will take you, it’ll take you home. You have to figure it out.
People say, what is my path? That’s your path, but you didn’t tell me what to do. It’s not for me to tell you what to do. If you don’t understand who you are and do what you need to do to get back there, ’cause you will find your way and everything in your life will unfold helping you pull that through that.
But if something goes wrong, you say, I went the wrong way. No, there’s no wrong. There’s no right. There’s just growth. There’s just situations that life presents you that help free you from yourself. If you look at that way, where do you see how deep you can go and how fast you can go? Alright, I told you I’d be afraid to have this talk today.
It’s very deep. It’s good that you here it once. It’s good that you know who you are. It’s good that you know how to go there. It’s not over there in Haal somewhere. It’s not out there in Strom. It’s in here deep in there, right?
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.
