Tami Simon: Welcome to the Michael Singer Podcast, presented by Sounds True in partnership with Shanti Publications. For more information about Michael Singer’s work, access to all prior episodes and information about upcoming releases, we invite you to join us at michaelsingerpodcast.com.
Michael Singer: Jai guru dev, jai masters. There are many different levels of waking up. One very, very major level of waking up is when you realize that the outside world and your inside world are completely separate. They’re tied together because you tie them together—they’re not tied together inherently. The outside world has been going on for 4.5 billion years on this planet.
They say something like 13.8 billion years everywhere, at least since the Big Bang. Let’s just stay with the planet—that’s close enough—4.5 billion years. How long have you been here? How long are you going to be here? 70, 80, 90 years? 4.5 billion has nothing to do with you. You drop down onto a place that was created by itself 4.5 billion years ago.
It’s evolved through everything—the whole evolution story—and then you’re here. It’s not even a blink of an eye, is it? Not only is that true, but it’s going on everywhere. I keep trying to talk to you about this. I don’t know whether you’re willing to listen. It’s not just going on where you are, is it?
Now you’re here. Is it going on nowhere else? How many other places is it going on? 700 billion zillion—and that’s just on the planet. Let’s not talk about the rest of it. It has nothing to do with you. It has to do with itself. It has to do with the force of creation. It has to do with evolution.
It has to do with planetary science. It has to do with where all the other planets are and the power of the sun, the whole gravitational system—it has to do with so many things that have nothing to do with you. Look at me: it has nothing to do with you. If you’re going to be here for 60, 70, 80 years, and it’s been here for 4.5 billion and it’s happening everywhere—and in any given moment you’re only in one spot—it’s not about you. It has nothing to do with you.
The part that does have something to do with you is inside of you—that’s what’s making it have something to do with you. This person looks at that person and says, “Oh, I really like him.” Somebody looks at somebody else and says, “I don’t like him.” What is that? That’s not something outside.
Everybody’s the same. I mentioned it last night. A friend of ours had a baby the other day and she sent me a picture, just hours after the birth. But I didn’t see what you all see. I looked at that thing and thought: where did it come from? And don’t tell me people made love—no, that is not where it came from.
The closest you can get is: a single fertilized cell. Is that where it came from? Listen to me. A single fertilized cell knew how to make itself into that baby—with eyes and ears and nose and crying and arms and legs. I know you don’t think that’s the truth. I had somebody tell me otherwise when I said that.
Oh, that’s not true. It is true. Nothing else was added. Well, the mother ate food. How did it know how to take that food and turn it into a baby? How did it know how to take water and sunshine and milk and Fritos and Cheetos and Coca-Cola and molecularly break that down into atoms and molecules that put themselves together to come out as a baby?
That’s what happened. It came out of nothing. It just—boom—manifested. What does science tell you? They tell you that, but they tell you in a way that makes it seem like they know what they’re talking about. “Oh, DNA molecules—the DNA has these genes.” What are genes? Molecules. Atoms. So the atoms know how to make a baby. What if you were sitting here—there are atoms all over the place, right?—and while you’re watching, they started going, and there’s a baby. That’s what happened.
Now, you mothers don’t like that. You say, “That’s my baby. I made the baby.” You did not. I was playing around a little. Nice mothers: you made your baby—okay, make me an eyeball. I’ll give you as much money as you want, for as long as you want. Make me an eye. Just an eyeball. Forget the kidney, the liver, the pancreas.
This is what it means to wake up. It’s not about knowledge or study. It’s about realization of the reality of the world in which you live. So I go back to it: it’s been doing that for 4.5 billion years. Darwin talks about evolution. Religious people have trouble with evolution. But it’s the miracle of how God created the universe.
We started off with plankton in the water, or something. Protozoa running around, and then over time—wow—you all showed up. How did that happen? Did you do it? How much of that did you do? I’m going to pick on your ego for a little bit. So it’s been here for 4.5 billion years. You’re going to be here for 80, 90.
It’s happening everywhere, all the time, and you’re only experiencing the exact moment where you are. Do you know anything? I’ve asked you this over and over. Do you know anything? You’d better say no—because you do not know anything. Why? Because you only know what you’ve experienced. You don’t know a single thing about anywhere you haven’t experienced. Reading books is experiencing too—I’ll give you that. So how much have you experienced of what there is to experience? Almost nothing. You’re only experiencing the moment you’re in; you’re missing all the other moments. Are things going on in France? Things going on in Italy—not just Italy in general, but a specific spot in Italy, just like you’re in a specific spot here. Is it not going on everywhere? Are you experiencing those things? No. Therefore, what you know is statistically insignificant.
But you say, “I’ve had many moments.” Yes, you’re like a laser beam shining in the night, going through one tiny little fragment, missing everything else—and then you tie together the little nothing that you’ve experienced and say, “I know what I’m doing.” But you do worse than that.
That’s where the inside comes in. The outside is just real. It’s real. Don’t worry about it. It’s there; it’s been happening forever. They say the sun will shine for another 4.5 billion years. You don’t have to worry—you’ll only be here for 80, 90, or a hundred years. Wake up. But you can’t. Why? Because that is the reality of the outside, is it not?
It always has been. It will always be. It will continue doing its thing. It doesn’t need you. The planets don’t need you to stay in orbit. Which one of you keeps the planets in orbit? Which one of you lights the 300 billion stars in your galaxy? Which one of you creates the 2 trillion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each one of them?
Are you busy? Are you worn out? Some people tell me, “I’m tired.” You are not doing anything. You’re not doing a hundred billion trillion of what’s going on, and yet you think you’re it. In order to feel the reality of your being, you’d better start feeling small. Because what you’ve done is made up something that is so small—it only lasts 90 years, it’s only in one place at a time, it’s missed every single thing in creation all the time—and yet inside you’ve done something very, very interesting that has nothing to do with the outside. You make up that it does.
“That’s my baby.” I’m sorry. It’s not your baby. It’s life’s baby. Life made it. Evolution made it. God made it. Whatever you want to call it—to me it’s all God. That’s just a word. I’m fine with science. I love science. We’ve talked about it before. Scientists have gone all the way down. They don’t even accept that there are solid atoms anymore. Scientists nowadays say: no atoms. There are electrons and protons. They act like atoms. There’s no separate atom with an electron and proton inside it—there are just electrons and protons. They act in a way that we call them atoms.
It’s like water, steam, and ice: same thing, just how fast they’re vibrating. So you have electrons and protons—we did our physics class. You were taught there are atoms. Then you were taught electrons and protons. They circle the nucleus—we used to paint it that way, as though electrons circle around the nucleus. They don’t. But in any event, you can look at it that way. And because they do that, and because there are different numbers of electrons and protons, they make the periodic table. And then the periodic table gives you the molecules, the atoms, that you have. You put them together and everything shows up—all the forms made of that, the furthest galaxies, every single thing.
But then scientists looked and said, “Well, where did the protons come from?” They had the right to ask that. Where did electrons and protons come from? They looked really, really closely. They built giant colliders—miles long, under Switzerland, 26 miles underground, something like that. They bombarded protons against each other at the speed of light, and they noticed: they’re not elementary particles.
They break apart for a trillionth of a second. Their nature pulls them together again, but they break apart—and that’s quantum physics. When they get down and start looking at those broken parts and give them names—quarks, electrons, bosons, and so on—what did they really discover? What did they realize?
They’re not there. You study particle physics? Well, there are no particles. That’s what science has found. There are no particles. There are wavelets in a field they call the quantum field. Just like if you drop a leaf into a totally still lake—will the lake stay still? No. It’ll make wavelets. Are those wavelets things? Well, they’re the field itself. The water itself is behaving in a certain way. That’s all. The quantum particles are a behavior pattern of wavelets interacting with each other and behaving a certain way. That’s what a baby is. Now you go from that to this, because that’s what’s going on.
Chinese scientists know it. American scientists know it. Russian scientists know it. This is known physics—that’s the quantum level that’s going on. How dare you not think of that when you look at a baby, when you look in the mirror? Because that’s what you’re looking at. There is no step in between that becomes something. It’s just that, putting itself together based upon the laws, and the next thing you know—that shows up. The outside world shows up. Einstein once said, “Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” And you laugh all you want. That’s why you get caught.
If you woke up in the morning and you weren’t where you were the night before, and there were no dressers, and there was somebody else there, and nothing looked the same—you’d go, “Oh, it’s just doing its thing,” and you wouldn’t get caught. But it looks the same in the morning as it did in the evening
One of the biggest misunderstandings in religion is that God created the heavens and earth. That is not true. God did not create the heavens and earth—God is creating the heavens and earth right now. The earth doesn’t exist if that quantum field stops vibrating. Goodbye, it all disappears, nothing here. How can you not be interested in this? It’s reality.
Now I’ll tell you how—because that is reality, and you are intelligent enough to understand it, and that’s unbelievable. You evolved from a protozoa, an amoeba, into something that can understand what I’m talking about. That’s far out.
That’s not the outside. The fact is: you are conscious. There are two things in the universe—creation, and that which is aware of it. You are aware. So you’re inside. Are you inside? You can’t prove it, can you? But you know you’re in there. You are in there. How do you know? You know you’re in there. You are. That you are. You can’t prove you’re in there, but you’re a conscious being. You’re aware. Fine.
So now we have awareness—being aware of the moment that’s in front of it. That’s great. And you have this little period of time to experience that. The big questions—and I don’t like answering them—are: where were you before you were in here? Where will you be after it’s no longer here? You’ll find out.
So what’s going on is there is this creation that has nothing to do with you. I don’t know how to talk to you if you haven’t been here for 99.9999999999% of its existence. And you’ll be here for 0.0. How does that have something to do with you? You admit that all the places you’re not, have never been, have nothing to do with you. That’s everything, everywhere, all the time. This is how you liberate yourself.
You know what it means to be free. You can meditate. Yes. You can do mantra. Yes. You can believe in this and believe in that and read this. Fine. The question is, do you realize what I’m telling you? You’re in there experiencing a moment in creation which is enormous. It goes on forever. And you’re experiencing it. That’s wonderful. That’s what’s supposed to happen. The purpose of creation is that God wanted to experience himself—therefore he vibrated, and then looked down. You are that consciousness looking down into what that consciousness created through its vibrations. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” What’s a word? A vibration.
So: you are in there. Let’s get the facts. It’s all out there—big, everywhere. And you’re in here. And you are experiencing what your senses send into you. You have senses because without them you can’t experience the outside world. It doesn’t exist to you without them. Your senses are receivers—sensors. Just like a computer has sensors to pick up light and sound and vibration, these are sensors. They pick up the outside world and send it back to you. Who’s in there? If they didn’t do that, you wouldn’t even know there was an outside world—literally. But it gets sent back into you. And what happens when it comes back? You experience it. Who experiences it? You—who’s in there—experiences it.
Are you in there? This is the most spiritual discussion you’ll ever have. Are you in there? Are you sure? Do you experience what comes in through your senses? Of course you do. What’s the problem with that? There’s this creation that’s everywhere and it’s amazing—there are elephants and dogs and monkeys and everything—and wherever you are, you in there are experiencing what you’re experiencing. You’re experiencing the sky and the clouds and the dirt, wherever you are. So it comes out of the many, and comes back into the one place where you exist in there. What’s the problem with that? Nothing. That is what it’s meant to be.
Is consciousness experiencing? Let me show you this. Your consciousness is an emissary experiencing the moment of creation that you’re experiencing. And no one else is experiencing that moment. No one ever has, and no one ever will. And you want to be special? I think you’re pretty special. One moment in creation—no one else ever saw it. No one else ever will, not from your angle, not through your linear path through time and space. What you’re experiencing no one has ever experienced. So you’re pretty special, aren’t you? You are literally consciousness experiencing the moment that consciousness created.
So you’re in there and you experience creation. It’s going on. What’s wrong with it? Nothing. It exists and you experience it. But that’s not what it’s like in there, is it? Can we have an honest discussion? That’s not quite what it’s like in there. I’m here experiencing reality. I’m here experiencing the moments that are being given just for me, specially made just for me. Wow. Those quantum vibrations made all the way up—and there’s a flower right in front of me. Thank you. That’s all your life is. Thank you. Oh my God, thank you. Look at it. Look what’s being given to you. It’s not taking anything from you. It’s all free.
You didn’t give yourself a body. You don’t give yourself air. You don’t give yourself anything. The essentials for you to be here—almost every one of them—have nothing to do with you. It’s just happening by itself. Your heart’s beating. Your breath is going in and out. Your cells are dividing. “But I eat food.” Yeah, you eat food. And what happens when you swallow it? You don’t have any idea. You don’t do any of it. And something better happen, or you won’t be eating anymore. It has to break down and digest and send itself to the bloodstream and go there and excrete. You’re not doing anything.
How many cells do you have? Around 32 trillion living cells make up your body. It’s not your body—it’s theirs. If they don’t do their thing, you aren’t here. They take the food and digest it and pass it along and feed the rest of the system. The whole thing takes care of itself.
So now—what’s wrong? Because it’s pretty awesome. There are all kinds of things to see and experience. It’s just beautiful. It’s fine. Do they all feel the same? No. Snakes are scary and butterflies are fun. But that’s fun too—you go to horror movies, there are all kinds of things going on. And it’s free. Life is free. You don’t need billions of dollars. Life is free. Your lungs go in and out, don’t they? Your heart beats, doesn’t it? Your cells divide, don’t they? 99.9999999% of it is just happening by itself. It’s a gift, and you’re just in here experiencing it. You’re the experiencer. It’s the experience. You’re the experiencer. It’s the experience.
Why does it not feel like that? How come we have these things called problems? I don’t see a problem. I live out here—it’s really beautiful out here, and there are a lot of deer. Way more than I’ve ever seen. There are always deer on the front lawn, sleeping. I don’t know—they’re big, they’re deer, and they have babies. Where do they live? Who feeds them? Where’s the pet store? They take care of themselves. Everything exists. Everything’s happening. You get to experience the part that you experience. Life is so easy.
Look at me. How can this be hard? Is there a moment unfolding in front of you? Do you have to pay for it? No. It’s there. The moment is there doing its thing. Are you aware of it? Yes. Did you have to put money in the till to be aware? No. It’s just an experience that you get to have. And there are lots of different ones—don’t worry. It’s constantly changing. Will anybody listen to what I’m talking about?
You do not have problems. If you have problems, you made them up. And I’ll prove that to you. They’re not out here. You made them up. What’s out here? It came in through your senses and you experienced it. Are you okay with that? No. Oh, now we come down to it. What do you mean you’re not okay with reality? “Yeah, I guess I’m not.” I see. So there’s something going on inside of you, aside from pure consciousness—awareness of being—which is who you are. And if you weren’t there, forget it. Your whole life is about being aware, and then what’s out there is happening. I told you—it’s phenomenal, and it comes in
I’m telling you, look at me for once in your life and listen to me. There’s nothing wrong with this. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that there’s a planet spinning in the middle of nowhere, holding itself up, floating through empty space with no strings attached—with blue water and continents and animals and people and a whole rest of the universe. This is called reality. There it is. And you are the consciousness that is experiencing the reality that exists. I wish I could just sit here and say that to you over and over again, because that’s what’s going on. You are the consciousness that’s experiencing the reality that exists.
But then I ask you: is that okay with you? And that’s almost a stupid question, because what is, is. What was, was. What will be, will be. It has nothing to do with you. Does it all unfold the way you want it to? Has it all unfolded the way you wanted it to, all the time? Why does it unfold the way it does? Go study science. Study physics. Study psychology. There’s a thing called cause and effect. One moment generates the next moment—but not just your moment. All the moments. They’re just passing through time and space. And they create each other. And you’re the witness. You’re the witness experiencing the reality that’s unfolding.
Okay—what went wrong? Something went wrong. Because it sure doesn’t sound like you’re saying that you don’t have a single problem in the world and never will. Let me repeat that to you. You in there are experiencing the reality that creation created. You didn’t create it. I hope I’ve convinced you of that by now. You didn’t create a drop of any of this. It’s all happening around you and you’re experiencing it, and that’s beautiful.
Now, if I talk a little too close, your mind is going to start: “Yeah, but there are wars, and there’s death, and my mother died when she was young…” I see. Now we’ve just brought something else into the equation that we’d better start talking about. And I can say it in one word: preference. Do you have preferences? Do they make you suffer?
That is the Buddha’s first noble truth: all of life is suffering. Maybe you know something about that. It doesn’t mean you break your arm every day, but it gets pretty heavy in there, can’t it? All of life is suffering. And the cause of suffering is preference—desire, preference. They’re the same thing. Desire comes after the preference. You have a preference, you want it to happen, and that’s where desire comes from. The root is preference. Not amazing?
The cause of suffering is preference. Not death, not old age, not wars, not terrible people. One word: preference. If you’re in there living, as we talked about a moment ago—just in there, experiencing the reality that’s unfolding and going with it—all kinds of stuff is going on. Do lions eat lambs? Are you okay with that? You have no basis for having a decision. There’s just experiencing reality. Are there nice people? Are there not-nice people? Are there friendly animals? Are there mean animals? Is there nice weather? Is there scary weather? It’s called reality. Just put aside your thoughts about whether you like it or not. That’s called preference.
So in between the reality you’re experiencing—that God is creating through the quantum field, that comes in through the senses you were given, that you get to experience—you put something in between. You put: I like, I don’t like. I want, I don’t want. I prefer, I don’t prefer. It’s right, it’s wrong. It’s good, it’s bad. If you understand anything I’ve talked about so far—you understand yin and yang, you understand the Tao, you understand every single deep teaching there is.
What is this thing you put in between reality and that which experiences reality? In between consciousness and reality stands: mind. That’s what you built. Let’s talk about it seriously. You built something in between the purity of divine consciousness experiencing creation—that’s you, that’s what’s in there, the self—and the creation of reality. You built something. How did that happen? Why did I do that? Because it’s a problem.
The difference between us and a purely, highly enlightened being: they don’t have that. They can bring it back if they want, but it’s not part of their being. They’re what’s called liberated—free, jnana mukta, enlightened. They woke up.
Why did I create this mess inside myself? Meher Baba said it really beautifully once. He said, “I don’t know how you can have so much trouble. Nothing that you’re dealing with can ever last more than one lifetime. It’ll be gone.”
It’s called reality, again—I keep stressing it. You are in there experiencing creation. What’s wrong with that? Who are you to sit there and say, “That shouldn’t have happened”? Guess what—it should have. Why? Because it did. Were there causes behind everything that happened, even things you don’t like? Were there causes that caused it to happen? Then you don’t get to say it shouldn’t have happened. It did. If it happened, it happened. The problem is not that it happened. The problem is your judgment of it. “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” That’s the Bible. And the patriarch of Zen, the Third Patriarch—it all comes down to: what did you build in between the experience of consciousness experiencing reality?
And don’t you dare tell me it’s not reality. Has anything ever happened in your life that you don’t like? How did you decide? Ready? You made it up. You made what up? You didn’t make up the event—you made up whether you liked it or not. That which he loved, he can’t stand. That which he loved yesterday, he doesn’t want to think about ever again for the rest of his life. You are making this up in that area in between awareness of being—the witness, consciousness—and the reality of life, which we already said is happening by itself.
This is happening. You built this thing. Now, how did you do that? Not everything feels the same—we know that. A rattlesnake rattling versus a butterfly flying around—they don’t have the same vibration. In the Buddhist tradition, they say beautifully: everything has its nature. Everything. Clouds, different shapes, colors—rain, wind, hurricanes, storms, tornadoes, calm. Everything has a vibration. It gives off a vibe. It all gives off energy.
So when it comes in, it’s not just a physical aspect that you perceive. You also feel its nature. Can you walk into a house where people have been arguing and know they’ve been arguing even though they’re smiling at you? Can somebody be telling you something and you just feel it? “That ain’t true.” It has a vibe. The vibes come in. Are you okay with that? Not just the physical—it comes in through the senses, but the whole nature of the thing comes in. Are you okay with that?
I know you want to say no—but I want to tell you, you have no right not to be okay with it. Because it’s part of reality. The rattlesnake is rattling, it’s giving off this heavy, heavy vibe: “Get away from me.” And the butterfly is like, “I like you.” And yes, that’s what it is. Is that okay with you?
And at some point—this is the forefront of all of it—it’s just consciousness. God experiencing creation. That’s what’s going on. And then the vibe comes in, and what happens is—I’m not going to explain the whole thing because it can’t be fully explained—but if you get very close, if you meditate deeply enough, if you watch carefully: the vibration distracts your consciousness.
Distraction. That’s a word I’ve come to understand as very spiritual. Does a rattlesnake distract you, or is it the same as the grass it’s sitting next to? No—it pulls your consciousness down into it. Your consciousness is back here. It’s like a light, but it focuses. It focuses on strong vibrations—strong positive, strong negative—or if they last a long time, it tends to distract. What is focus? Focus is distraction. “I want to do math in my head”—you have to focus, which means not getting distracted by what was distracting you.
It pulls your consciousness down into it. When it does that, it creates a force, a power. It’s called the power of will. That’s where it comes from. Consciousness is God’s power. Wherever you focus your consciousness, power follows. I give the example of a magnifying glass that you take out into a field. Don’t look through the magnifying glass—then you’ll just see magnification. Look on the ground under the magnifying glass, and you’ll see that the light that was everywhere is now focused on one spot. Where did that intense bright spot come from? It’ll burn you. It can set leaves on fire. It wasn’t that way a minute ago—it was just light everywhere. Focus. It focused the light, and the light became power, tremendous power at that point of focus.
So when you get distracted by something that comes in—consciousness gets pulled down. It gets caught on it. It creates a power. The rattlesnake came in—it was just a vibration. But it didn’t pass right through. Why? Because you focused on it and created that power. That power of focused consciousness held onto it, and held onto it after it was gone.
Is it not true that the rattlesnake is there, you’re experiencing it, and then it crawls away? Did it leave an impression? Might you not like rattlesnakes very much anymore? Might you be afraid of where you walk from now on? If I say, “Do you want to go walk in the woods?” might you say no? It stayed, didn’t it? It didn’t pass through like everything else—like the white lines on the road, like people you don’t know who walk by. 99.9999% of it didn’t stay. It came in and went by. But that—that distracted your consciousness enough that you focused on it. That act of focusing stops it and makes an impression in the area between your consciousness and what comes in from the outside world. That area we now call mind.
The Buddhist concept of “empty mind” doesn’t mean you’re stupid. It means your mind is not full of rattlesnakes—not full of stuff that’s not there anymore. It’s supposed to go right through. All of creation is supposed to pass right through the consciousness that is experiencing it. It just comes and passes through. You can bring it back if you want, but it doesn’t leave a lasting impression that keeps coming back to haunt you.
In other words, it not only comes back to haunt you—you created a world in there. A world of rattlesnakes, and people who were nice, and people that were mean. Somebody said something yesterday you didn’t like. You stopped what came in—what was supposed to pass through—held onto it, kept it in this area. That’s called clinging. And that’s where it lives. It’s the area between pure consciousness, the experiencer, and what it’s experiencing.
That’s yoga: when the experiencer and the experience become one. You’ve heard words like that. So you are the experiencer. It’s the experience. They merge. They’re one, they’re the same. There are times in every one of your lives—not often—when you’ve had an experience so deep, so powerful that you couldn’t come down and focus on it. It blew you away. Maybe you turned a corner and a sunset was setting. It was so—oh my God—all the colors, and for a moment you weren’t there. You say things like, “It touched me to the core of my being.” Have you ever been touched to the core of your being? That’s not you coming down to it and holding it. “I’m going to hold it so it touches me to the core of my being.” No—that’s not how it works. You can’t make that happen. It’s when it comes all the way up by itself and merges into the ocean of consciousness that you say things like, “It felt like I was in the presence of God.”
A hug can do that, can’t it? But even that—to be honest—not that often. Because you can’t let it in because it hits your stuff. You say things like, “Well, you never close your eyes when I kiss your lips.” In other words, “I want it to be the way it was last time, when it really touched the core of my being. But now I’m waiting for it to be like that—and therefore, it can’t be like that, because I’ve put something in between.” Does anybody understand? What did you put in between? You held on to an experience that touched the core of your being, and you created something called desire and preference. “I want it to happen again.” And that’s what’s happening. You do that throughout your life.
Different things distract your consciousness. Can you see how it multiplies? Start with just a snake—it distracts your consciousness, and nothing else does. Everything else—white lines, clouds—just passes right through. Then all of a sudden you go into a house where your friend just had a baby, and the baby has a rattle. Oh, I see. So that snake is still in there. Or you see a coiled rope—does that do something? Yes or no? Because you held it in there, it starts determining what you like and don’t like. You don’t want to be around when the baby’s making rattles. You go into your friend’s house and the baby has a rattle, and you’re uneasy. You don’t like coiled ropes. You don’t find the Halloween snakes funny. You held it in there, and now it became your life. Literally, you can’t walk in the woods. One thing you held in there did that. But then it multiplies, because that holding leads to more—you don’t like babies, you don’t like rattles.
“I don’t want to get married.” Why don’t you want to get married? “I’ve never really thought about it much.” Well, why? “Because when you get married, you tend to have babies.” What’s wrong with having babies? “I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it.” Why don’t you have babies? “They have rattles. Babies can have rattles.” What’s wrong with rattles? “I don’t like rattles.” That determined your whole life. I only slightly exaggerated.
“I’d like to get married to George.” Right? “Why aren’t you?” “Well, he’s got a really good job in Arizona.” A lot of rattlesnakes in Arizona. And I’m not kidding—do you hear me? You have made a mess in there. And don’t you dare tell me life did it. Life did its thing, everywhere, all the time, and you just happened to be standing there when that encounter took place.
I try to tell you how tenuous this is. When you went out to that field, at the exact moment you were about to encounter a rattlesnake, a friend called out, “Oh, look over here!”—and you never saw the snake. That’s how tenuous your life is. All of a sudden, now you’re not getting married and not having babies. Please extrapolate that out a little bit. It’s ridiculous what we’ve done, isn’t it? It’s unbelievable what a mess we’ve made inside ourselves. And we made that mess. Don’t you dare tell me Mommy did it, Daddy did it, the boyfriend did it. They did what they did, and you’re the one who couldn’t handle it. Because if you could handle it, it would go right through. But you got distracted by it enough to hold onto it.
And that’s the point where I always say to you—because you’re all very intelligent people—isn’t it really intelligent to hold onto that which bothered you the most, for the rest of your life, and then let it multiply? Have you done that? Yes. You have done that.
So spirituality is about not doing that. But that’s quite a path along the winding road, because we’ve been doing this every moment of our lives. “My sister got the bicycle that I wanted. I don’t like bicycles. I don’t like my sister. I don’t like my parents.” Laugh all you want—but that is why you need therapy. Because you held that stuff in there and you can’t get it out.
What happens when it tries to come back out? What happens when, three years later, you haven’t seen a snake, and somebody starts talking about a rattlesnake? You get scared. Your whole life is now made up of preferences. “I don’t want this. I like that.””
“But why are the things I like a problem?” Well, they’re not—I mean, if you can handle the stuff you didn’t like and let it go, that’s wonderful. We’ll work on the other part later. But the things you’re clinging to because you liked them—look at me—they cause just as much trouble. Just as much. I’ll show you in a moment.
Go to a restaurant. Have the most amazing meal you’ve ever had. Unbelievable. It was so perfect—the music was exactly the songs you like, nobody was smoking, nobody was talking too loud, the waiter was phenomenal. Okay. Don’t go back. I’m giving you advice: do not go back. Because it’s not going to be the same, is it? And you’re going to say things like, “Well, last time the music was…” And by the way, if you do go back, don’t bring your friends. You tell them, “You can’t believe what this restaurant is like.” And the menu is going to be different. Different specials. Different chef. Different waiter. Right or wrong? Come on. Have you been there? It is never the same. It can’t be the same. No two moments in the same place ever. But you set up an expectation: “I like this.”
And by the way, I’ve been very polite talking about food and restaurants. Let’s talk about our relationships. Do they always turn out the way you want? Does everybody end up treating you the way you want to be treated, saying what you want them to say, when you want them to say it? No. But you want them to. “It doesn’t feel like you love me like you used to. When you used to say it, it really touched me deep, and now it just doesn’t. I’m not sure you love me anymore.” Well of course you can’t feel it the same—because you’re waiting to feel it the same. You’re comparing it. You have this preference.
So positive experiences trip you up too. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have them. You should have them, enjoy them, and let them go. You make albums—photo albums of your wedding, pictures of things you want to happen again, things that you liked. Why don’t you like everything? Make a real album. You can’t hold it as it is everywhere. Every moment of your entire life is an experience. It’s a gift. It’s special—it is. But you’ve made it not special by either clinging to it because you liked it, or clinging to it because you didn’t like it.
Don’t worry about the “liking it” part for now—that’s post-graduate work. But I want to talk about the fact that you store what you didn’t like. Don’t you? You store what you didn’t like. What do you think it’s going to be like inside if, in the space between your consciousness and reality, you’ve stored every single thing that ever bothered you?
You say hello to somebody you like today. “Hey, Sally, how are you?” And she keeps walking. You’re bothered. “What? Why? What did I do?” It’s not just the big things. The big things are phenomenal, yes. But every little thing bothers you. That is the fall from the garden—preference. The fact that you can’t handle and appreciate and respect and love reality. It’s a gift. It’s a phenomenal thing.
A little tiny planet in the middle of nowhere—1.3 million Earths fit inside the sun, this tiny little thing floating out there. Wow. And we’d rather be on Mars. I wonder how long that’ll last. This is an exciting place. It’s a heaven of a place, is it not? But it’s not the way you want it to be. Where did you come up with what you wanted it to be? Do you know where you got your preferences? You didn’t make them up. They’re past experiences that you had. You had an experience and you stored it as good, bad, right, wrong, better or worse, believe, don’t believe—all kinds of labels. You labeled everything that went in there and you stored it. You made a storehouse of your mind.
Your mind is supposed to be thinking about the universe and quantum vibrations and medicine and air conditioning. Your mind is a phenomenon. Rocket ships that fly to the moon—we’re about to go back to the moon. Where did that rocket ship come from? Your mind made it. Not Einstein’s alone—the human mind made all this, didn’t it? The possum didn’t make it. You have a phenomenal mind.
What are you doing with that mind that can do anything at any time? What you have done with that mind—I don’t think I want to keep talking. You made a flaming mess, didn’t you? By storing over and over again every single experience you had that you didn’t like, storing it in there, putting them all together. You built an ego. “Here I am. I’m the person who likes this, who doesn’t like that. I had this experience and that experience.” That’s who you are? No, it’s not. Those are experiences you had. But you stored them and you built a fake you inside. It’s called a self-concept—a concept, something that’s not real. You built a concept of yourself made out of the things you didn’t like and the things you did. “This is who I am. I’m the person who got divorced when I was this age and then married this person.” No, you’re not. Those are experiences you had. You’ve had tons of them. Join them, let them go, learn from them, grow. Experience, experience, experience, experience, experience.
Earth is a place that souls come to in order to evolve. What does it mean to evolve? To grow, to learn, to open, to be free, to grow toward God, to be liberated, to evolve inside. This stuff you’re doing in there is not very evolved, is it? And it causes tremendous suffering. Tremendous suffering.
So wake up. You do not have any problems. You have never had any problems. Who decides what your problems are? You. “When I went to get my hair done, they cut it at least a quarter inch too short.” “The color of the cabinets isn’t exactly what I wanted—it’s a bit more gold. Should I redo them? I don’t know. It’s a problem.” Who said it was a problem? You did. The husband or wife came home after a bad day, marched into the house, closed the door, went into the bedroom, and slammed it. And you wanted to have a nice dinner together. Is that a problem? No, it’s an experience. But no—”You will not treat me like that. You are not going to ignore me like that. I worked all day. What’s the matter with you?” The guy had a hard day. When he comes out, love him. Be understanding. Be open.
That’s what Christ meant by turning the other cheek. He didn’t mean literally: if somebody slaps you in the face, let them do it again. He meant: let it go. I teach letting go, don’t I? That’s what “turn the other cheek” is. Let it go.
And so, again, you think you have problems. And that’s exactly where they come from—thinking. There was a Sufi teacher in the sixties, Sufi Sam, who used to hang out with Ram Dass. He had a saying: “He gets more stung from thinking than he ever got from drinking.” You can get yourself pretty worked up, can’t you?
And now to close, or are you ready? Let go. Now you understand what letting go means. Did it happen? Yes. Is that okay with you? Yeah. What the heck, right? The driver in front of you—somebody was turning out of a subdivision onto a 55-mile-per-hour road. They turned when they probably shouldn’t have. They’re going 25 miles an hour. Are you okay with that? Things happen. They happen. So you have to start with acceptance. I’ve just taught you everything I teach: acceptance, surrender, letting go. That’s what it means. It doesn’t mean you don’t do anything. It means when it comes in, it came in—honor it, respect it, learn from it, grow from it, evolve from it. Do something great inside yourself instead of making more of a mess.
Now the final statement: does that mean I just sit here and do nothing? Of course not. You’re part of life. It’s an interaction. You’re part of God’s creation. You have what’s called your dharma—things that are meant for you to be interacting with. But if you’re busy stopping everything, busy storing everything you didn’t like from before, how can you see what you’re supposed to be doing? You can’t. It’s just a storehouse of “I don’t want” and “I’m afraid.” “I don’t want to get a job because I got fired last time, but I have to have money.” What are you doing? That’s not your dharma, I’ll tell you that right now.
Do you know what your dharma is? It’s a very great word. I don’t know if we have a full translation of it in English. But what dharma means is this: if there weren’t something in there reacting to everything, what would you be doing? You know what you’d find out? You’d be getting up in the morning. Why? Because you woke up. You’d be brushing your teeth. Why? Because your mouth tastes weird. You’d be eating breakfast, going to work, and looking forward to every single moment. Looking forward to brushing your teeth. Looking forward to waking up. Looking forward to driving the kid to soccer. Looking forward to every single thing that takes place. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing—not dividing everything into what you want and what you don’t want. Those are your past experiences, having left impressions in your mind.
Otherwise, it’s just being. And so yes, you go to work, and yes, you have children, and yes, you get married and yes, you get divorced. Yes, yes, yes. Wow. Bring it on. Bring it on. I love it. Bring it on. And put your whole heart and soul into it. If you’re getting married, put your whole heart and soul into it. Don’t go in saying, “Gee, I don’t know if I should be getting married. I’m too young.” Well, that’s a stupid way to get married. When you get married, just put your whole being into it, with no doubt at all. When you’re getting divorced—have a great divorce. Put your whole heart and soul into doing the best you can to say: “We loved each other, and now we don’t. So let’s have a beautiful split. Let’s at least have it end with a beautiful vibe.” That’s your dharma. It’s not about right or wrong, good or bad. It’s about where you’re coming from when you do it.
And if you’re coming from your ego—and I just defined the ego as the sum of your learned preferences—it’s going to be a problem. So spirituality is about letting go inside and serving outside. You get to a point where you no longer ever think about what you like and what you don’t like, what you want and what you don’t want. It becomes: how can I serve? How can I help raise what’s in front of me? Can I bring some good energy into it? It doesn’t matter whether I like it or not, whether I believe in it or not. It’s way past that. It’s: I’m in here—how can I help?
Alright. Will you work on these things?
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.
