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 so many paths and techniques that one can follow to go through their evolutionary process. Yoga is all about the energy. It’s all about working with the energy, raising the energy, purifying the centers so the energy can rise, bringing your consciousness up to the highest centers — which is important and wonderful.
The question I was asked is: why isn’t it just there? What is your natural state? Is your natural state to have to do all these efforts, to push and struggle and stress? Where is your natural purity, ecstasy, total freedom, liberation? That is your natural state, but very few come to it. And all those who have say the same thing: you are God. Not even a God descendant — God is staring at you. That’s all.
It’s not like God really descended. If I want to look at that picture over there, I don’t have to get up and go over there. I just focus my consciousness — like a ray of light — onto that picture and focus it such that I’m not distracted by other things. You wouldn’t say the consciousness descended into the picture. I’m the consciousness that is focused on that picture. That’s what’s going on with us humans. It is divine consciousness — enlightenment, the pure, the infinite, the absolute, the unmanifest, the manifest. That which was in the beginning and will be in the end, and always was and always will be.
That awareness of being throughout the universe is the same awareness. There’s no difference between what’s staring at the galaxy and what’s staring at your mind. There’s just consciousness. Consciousness is the one. It is the truth, the absolute, the beginning and the end. If there were no consciousness, there would be no reason to have creation — because nothing would be aware of it. Consciousness is what gives meaning to everything.
But if divine consciousness, infinite consciousness, is focused on your thoughts, your emotions, your body, and what’s coming through your senses, it has focused so much that it has limited its experience of existence to those things. That is what’s going on — period. Someone who understands that understands everything, and it’s not complicated.
You’re obviously conscious. You’re in there, aware of your thoughts, your emotions, your body, and the world that comes through your senses. Where did that awareness of being come from? We’re so lost in our thoughts, our emotions, our body, our senses — everything. And then what comes into our senses, which is a very small part of your world. The senses don’t pick up very much at a given time. That little package of thought, emotion, physical body, and the small piece of world around you — that package has distracted consciousness. Whose consciousness? Consciousness itself.
I don’t usually talk to you this way, because I want you to get there yourself. There is only one consciousness. Just one. Awareness of itself, awareness of being — and it is aware of itself in the farthest galaxies, every star, throughout the entire universe. Just as you’re aware of your hands and your feet and your legs and your knees all at the same time, it is aware of itself — which is everything — all at the same time.
That’s enlightenment. That’s realization. That’s liberation. God realization. It’s what Christ meant by “my Father and I are one.” He ceased to stare at this tiny little thing and merged back into the universe, back into the Father, back into the creator of all creation.
Why, if that is what’s in here, don’t we experience it? For the same reason that if I only look at that picture, I don’t see the rest of the room. If I stare at that picture enough, I can’t see you, I can’t hear you, I can’t do anything — because my entire consciousness is focused on that one spot. Do you understand that? That is what has happened: the consciousness has become so distracted by your thoughts, your emotions, your body, and your outside world that it never stops staring at that. You stare at your thoughts all the time.
I try to teach you that you’re not your thoughts. How do I know you’re not your thoughts? Because you’re the one who notices them. If you don’t notice them, they aren’t there — and that’s still not a problem. But if you get distracted by them, your awareness of being is focused on those thoughts, going back and forth from one thought to another, each causing the next, and then they cause emotions. By the time you’re done, you’re totally lost in your thoughts and your emotions, which tend to sync up. If your emotions are messed up, your body’s going to be messed up. If your mind’s doing well, your emotions follow. And then the body can certainly pull your attention. Just drop something on your toe — that’s where you’re at. Your thoughts aren’t there, your emotions aren’t there.
And then the outside world can distract you too. It could be a sunset that pulls you out of your distraction from yourself. Art does it. Music certainly can. “I lost myself in the music.” Well, where’d you go? What you mean is: your awareness of being ceased to focus on your thoughts and focused on that music. It caught your attention — it moved your consciousness onto a different object. And if it moved you away from those bothersome thoughts you’d been having all day, because the music was so beautiful, or the aria was so beautiful, or the sunset was so amazing — when that happened, you weren’t experiencing your ego. You weren’t experiencing what you want or don’t want. You lost yourself in the object. That’s a very beautiful thing, isn’t it? Very nice to lose yourself.
Where are you when you’re not lost like that? Where are you when you’ve stopped being caught up in the music? “I wish I could meet that band. I wonder if they’re coming to town.” All of a sudden, boom — all the thoughts come back. They’re all about you. You’re caught right back in there.
So you get distracted for a short period of time. If you understand this, you understand everything. You understand all of yoga, all of true spirituality, all of Christ’s teachings, all of Buddhist teachings. You are in there. You’re staring at you. You’re addicted to you.
But the self is not addicted to you — the self is infinite and expansive. A light can be a floodlight shining on everything, or it can be a spotlight focused on one thing. What you have is a divine consciousness that is one — that’s what Christ meant: “I and my Father are one,” “we are one.” But every ray of that consciousness is focusing on these different pieces that are distracting it. So what you really are is God distracted. I hope that doesn’t offend you. First, it’s nice to know you’re God, because that’s what you are. “I don’t feel it.” Of course you don’t feel it. You’re staring at something other than that. You’re staring at what you’re looking at instead of paying attention to who’s looking.
See the difference? You’re having experiences — thought experiences, emotion experiences, physical body experiences, outside-world experiences — and you are the same you having every one of those experiences. They say, “Can you walk and chew gum at the same time?” You can have thoughts, emotions, body experiences, and interact with the world all at the same time. And you are lost in that. That’s what you do all the time.
So the key is not “can you” — it’s “can you not?” And that is what all of yoga and the entire spiritual path is about: can you not?
Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutras — around 500 BC, something like that. One of the great scriptures of yoga. He said there are four stages of growth. First, you’re lost in the outside world, so you need to be able to withdraw your senses from it — otherwise you’re constantly distracted and you can’t meditate, you can’t do anything. This is called pratyahara. The ability — and I’ll qualify, everyone can do it, but not in the way you think — to be in here and withdraw your senses from the distractions of the outside world. Obviously, if you’re going to meditate, you need to be able to do that.
But here’s the thing: you do it all the time. Every single one of you, even if you’ve never meditated a day in your life, does full pratyahara. You withdraw your consciousness from the senses when you go to sleep. Are the senses still there? Yes. You withdraw your awareness from them. When you lay down in that bed and people are talking, there’s noise in the house, whatever’s going on — you know nothing. Until it bothers you enough, then you come back. But otherwise, you withdrew your awareness. The sensors are still working, still picking up information — but you, the consciousness, are not focused on it enough for it to be your world.
I saw a video of Yogananda — a very great master. Since he came to America, whenever people would ask him questions, he’d sincerely answer. He was a great being who could go anywhere inside and out. Somebody once asked him — I saw the old video, 1920s or 1930s — “Can you fall asleep at will?” Generally you can’t, because the very fact that you’re trying keeps you awake. So he laid down on the couch, closed his eyes, rolled them up for less than one second — gone. Entered the state of pratyahara anytime he wanted.
He went way past that, but I want you to understand that you can relate to that state. Don’t sit there reading the Yoga Sutras and think pratyahara is some weird thing that only great masters can enter. You do it every single night. That is pratyahara — you’ve withdrawn your consciousness from the senses. They’re not pulling your consciousness back down into them.
Then there’s dharana. Now that you can withdraw your inner consciousness from being distracted by the outside world, can you focus your consciousness inside — to one-pointedness? When you sleep, all kinds of stuff is going on. Dreams, all kinds of things distracting you — your awareness is obviously going with them, or you wouldn’t know you had dreams. But you’re not in dharana. You’re not in this one-pointed focus of awareness.
Some people say meditate on a candle, meditate on a mantra. You’re bringing your mental and emotional energy down to one point. That’s dharana — beyond pratyahara. You have to go through pratyahara first. Now you’re inside and you have the ability — which most of us struggle with — to focus your awareness at will on one-pointedness.
What’s so great about that? Nothing inherently great about meditating on a candle or a mantra. It’s the one-pointedness that matters — it doesn’t matter what you focus on. The point is that your consciousness is not distracted. It wasn’t distracted by the outside world, and now it’s not distracted by the mind and emotions either.
Do they have to stop? I once heard Baba say something beautiful: Baba found that the mind does not have to stop in order to enter Samadhi. What does that mean? The outside world doesn’t have to stop for you to withdraw your senses from it, does it? The world keeps going; you just withdraw your consciousness from it. What Baba was saying is: if the mind is going on, you have the ability to withdraw your consciousness from it. You don’t have to stop it. That’s a very liberating thing to hear.
In other words, the mind just doesn’t distract you enough — just like the outside world doesn’t distract you when you’re sleeping. You are in there. When you try to fall asleep and the mind is going blah, blah, blah, you’re not in one-pointed consciousness. But Yogananda had the ability — just like rolling up his eyes — to sit there while the mind is talking and just not pay attention to it. It might as well be gone if you’re not paying attention to it.
So now you’re inside — pratyahara done, dharana, and you have the ability to focus your consciousness at one point such that the mind is not floating, creating, distracting you. Here you are, completely focused on one-pointedness. Is that a high state? It’s rather peaceful. But it’s not enlightenment. It’s not some absolute state.
Then Patanjali says: once you can focus your awareness at will on one point, without struggling — because if you’re struggling, you’re still there — the next step is dhyana. When that sunset catches your attention, you don’t have to do anything. It just blows your way and pulls you out of your mind. Has anything ever touched you at the depth of your being? Literally, you just melted into it. Nothing distracted you from the depth of your being.
So now we have this one-pointed focus, and the next step is dhyana — beautiful. Patanjali says: take that one-pointed focus and focus on the consciousness itself. Instead of being the consciousness focusing on a point, release it. The consciousness isn’t focusing on anything — it doesn’t have to come down to be small. And all of a sudden you’re big. That’s what happens.
There’s a Buddhist teaching where in certain satori states — not permanent, some satori state — instantaneously you were little, and now you see the whole thing. You become the light, you become the universe, because you stopped focusing. The consciousness is the universe. The problem is it is addicted to focusing on you.
So as you work your way through these higher meditative states, you’ve learned to withdraw the consciousness so it’s not distracted by the outside world, not distracted by the thoughts and emotions. Now you can be in a nice state — not enlightenment, not anything final, just: wow, it’s nice here. Some of you have gone into deep meditation and come back saying, “I went so deep, there were no thoughts.” How do you know? Because you were there, and nothing was drawing your awareness toward an object like a thought or emotion. It’s very peaceful, very beautiful — but you’re still you. You’re still focusing on the individuality of your consciousness. It’s not focused on the senses, not focused on the emotions and mind, but it’s still there.
Deep sleep — you can go there. You can come back from deep sleep and say, “I went so deep I didn’t have any dreams.” How do you know if you weren’t there? You even say things like, “It was so peaceful.” But you weren’t in there saying “it’s so peaceful” — otherwise it wouldn’t have been peaceful. Yogananda called that state semi-superconsciousness — not superconsciousness, where the consciousness merges back into the one, but a state where it’s not being pulled down.
That is dhyana. The focus is one-pointed, and it’s not something you turn back — you can’t be there to turn it back. There’s no ego there. What happens is when you let go enough, when you let go of the thoughts and emotions and there’s peace and depth, it starts to pull you up into it. The ocean pulls the drop into itself. You actually feel an upward pull. But if you try to do anything about it — people say all the time, “I saw the light and then I started to focus on it and it went away” — of course it went away, because now you’re there, and you only saw it because you weren’t there.
As you work through these deeper states, you’ll feel that it is natural to be pulled up — but you are not doing it. You reach a point where your individuality was in the way. When Patanjali talks about dhyana, he’s talking about focusing consciousness on consciousness itself. Consciousness doesn’t leave in order to come back to consciousness — it just is what is.
That’s why this whole thing about distraction and focus is so important. It’s everything. It’s all one, but you focus a ray of it down to a tiny thing. As you let go of what you’re focused on, the ray is not being pulled down as much, and it starts to expand — not outward, but inward.
But that final step is very, very difficult. A truly great guru once said that even the soul that reaches that state and is ready to go is like a bird that’s been caged its entire life. The gate opens, the door is open — and it jumps in and sits there and looks around. It’s scary. It has never experienced who it truly is. That liberation, that freedom. And then finally it flies.
These are stages you go through in the deep states. What is it all based on? Your consciousness, your awareness of being — not some mystical thing. You in there, not being so distracted by your thoughts, your emotions, your body, and what’s going on in the outside world, that you think that’s who you are. You are so distracted that you think you are your thoughts. You think you are your emotions. You think you are your body. You literally think you are the experiences you’ve had.
“Who are you?” “I played Dorothy in the fifth grade, and then I had this boyfriend who really hurt me terribly.” You’re describing experiences you had. You’re not describing who’s in there — you’re describing who had the experiences. You’ve built a world in there made out of your experiences and called it “who I am.” This person got married, then divorced, then had this child — what are you doing? Those are experiences you had.
Because the consciousness got so lost, it didn’t know itself. It got lost — that’s the fall from the garden. It got lost and started grabbing onto mommy and daddy and crib and toy. It built a self-concept — a mental frame of reference that says “I’m okay as long as this is accepted as who I am.” And then what does it do? It goes out and offers it to everybody. It tries to sell itself. “I am not stupid. Don’t say that.” You get defensive. You define everything, then fight to be who you are — but it’s not who you are.
You are the consciousness looking at this house you built in there. That’s called the ego, or the self-concept. When Christ says “you must die to be reborn,” someday you’ll understand exactly what he meant. That needs to go. When the personal self is gone, it naturally merges back — because it always was. It was just being distracted. It’s not like you have to do anything. Just stop being distracted. That’s the whole path.
And it comes back to what I always teach you. You’ve had experiences in your life. Good for you — you’ll have them every single second of your life, and you’ll continue to have them. Different ones all the time, because everything keeps changing. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what it means to be alive — to have senses and be conscious, to experience life. You came here to experience life. You didn’t come here to renounce it. Earth is a place souls are sent to evolve.
I’ve just described to you the entire path of evolution to the highest state, but we haven’t gotten past the first step. We don’t even want to do pratyahara. We want to stay up all night enjoying ourselves or protecting ourselves from what might happen while we’re asleep. Some people can’t sleep — they’re too excited about getting what they want, or too scared something might go wrong. That’s a far cry from pratyahara. You can’t even withdraw from your senses. You’re supposed to be sleeping, but somebody’s in the next room and you’re thinking, “What are they talking about? I’m talking about me.”
So the path — it’s easy to talk about pratyahara, dharana, one-pointedness. We can talk about it all you want. How do you actually walk this path? Because your intellectual knowledge about it is just more noise. You come to the question: here I am. Yes, I’m lost in my thoughts. Have you noticed they rumble around in there all the time, change direction all the time, cause all kinds of trouble? And then you try to solve the problems they caused. And you’re lost in your emotions. You can’t handle them, so you try to control everything. The consciousness is being pulled down because you’re distracted — like a drug addict. They know heroin isn’t good for them, but they’re addicted. The only time they feel okay is when they’re getting what they’re addicted to. The only time you feel okay is when you’re getting what you want and not getting what you don’t want. It’s an addiction. You’ve had past experiences that made you happy and you want them to happen again. You’ve had past experiences that hurt you and you don’t want them to happen again. That is an addiction.
So you come to the point where you ask: is there a way out? Of course there is — and you’re already out. You are out looking in. It’s not like you have to get out. You are already enlightened.
Christ’s teachings were phenomenal. He literally says: “As I sit by the throne of my Father, so shall you sit by my throne, and these things which I do, you shall do — and even greater things.” What is he telling you? That you’re a sinner? He’s telling you you’re the same as him. When he says “as I sit by the throne of my Father,” he’s talking about a state of consciousness. The “I” — the awareness of being — sits in merger with God, in oneness with God. And he says you shall sit on his side and do even greater things. Never heard that? It’s in the Bible.
You’re a great being. Christ said you must die to be reborn. What does that mean? You have to let go of this fake, personal self you built inside your mind that is trying to sell itself and protect itself. You spend your whole life dealing with that thing. When it goes, you’re reborn of spirit — you go straight up and you merge.
So the question is: nice to talk about, very inspiring, but how do you do it?
There are all these different paths, and they’re all beautiful. I don’t judge any of them. Take renunciation, for example — that is a path people work with. But my question is: how do you know what to renounce? If a child has a little bunny rabbit they’re very attached to, maybe they should renounce that. Somebody else has a husband, somebody has a child, somebody has a food they’re attached to — how do you know what to renounce? That which you’re caught in. You don’t renounce something you don’t want. If you’re caught in something and you can’t practice pratyahara with it, some people teach you to stay away from it, push it away, don’t touch it. That’s called suppression. Freud had a very good name for that.
I joke with the Catholics — on Ash Wednesday, you’re supposed to give up something. “I hate Brussels sprouts, I’ll give up Brussels sprouts.” No, it doesn’t count. You’re supposed to recognize what you’re caught in. But everyone is caught somewhere different. One person wouldn’t even think about a particular thing; another person is dying for it. So you’re picking your biggest problem — the thing you’re not okay with, the thing you’re addicted to — and saying no.
Well, why were you addicted to it? What’s going on? And what happens if you just push it away? The energy has nowhere to go. It’s not free. Having a list of things you never do doesn’t mean you’ve achieved pratyahara. If you don’t do them, it means you want to — because there are 800 billion things you never do and you don’t think twice about them. Please listen to me: I’m not teaching you not to have discipline, not to work with things. There are times your addiction is so strong that if you’re anywhere near it, it just takes over — in which case you need to practice some control, some renunciation. But that’s not liberation. That’s not learning to let it go, not learning to free yourself from it.
The real high state is: “Been there, done that.” If you really mean it. “Been there, done that. Got my heart broken. This happened. I hurt somebody else. I’ve been around the circle. I see too much. I don’t need to renounce it — I would never do it again. I’ve evolved.” Earth is a place souls are sent to evolve. If you’re only renouncing, you’re not evolving about that subject.
So how do you work with it when you’re getting caught and having trouble stopping? By all means, practice some discipline. But don’t think that’s the answer. If you spend your entire life pushing something away, you can’t let go. You can’t be free. And if you look in there — and that’s the real path — you realize: I’ve got some work to do. I’ve got some stuff in there that I really don’t want to face. Anybody have problems with certain people, places, and things that remind them of bad things stored inside?
That’s the foundation of your spiritual growth. If you deal with that, the rest happens by itself. If you have trouble visiting your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, your old hometown where you had all kinds of trouble — and you still have that in there — you’re not going anywhere. It does no good to suppress. Suppression means it’s still in there. You cannot suppress your way to heaven. Suppression creates hell. You just keep pushing it back down every time it comes up, and you start worrying about what might happen again. “Why did he say that? I told you not to talk to me like that. I don’t like when you talk to me like that.” And now you have to manipulate the world to make sure nothing touches what you’ve stored in there. You’re not going anywhere. There’s no way you’re getting liberated by keeping that stuff inside.
So you look and you realize: I need to figure out a way to get rid of this stuff. I don’t want it in there. Do you have experiences so terrible that you never want to see them again — and every time they come back up, and they do come back up, you push them right back down?
The answer is: you can do whatever you want, but that stuff has to go. How much of it? All of it. Any part that’s left is a part you can’t deal with. Otherwise it wouldn’t still be there.
You got married, you like Pepsi Cola, and your new husband likes Coca-Cola. Can you handle it? “No, I like Pepsi better. He should too.” Then eventually: “What do I care what he drinks? They’re really the same anyway.” You see — you work your way out of yourself, as opposed to committing yourself to the garbage going on in there.
I usually show you at the beginning what liberation looks like: to walk around in ecstasy at all times, to have no personal problems, and to help everybody you meet — because you let go of yourself. But now we’re down to how you actually let go of yourself. You start with the root. Buddha said work the root. The root is that you’ve stored stuff in there.
You do it every day. That’s what’s so funny. The driver in front of you isn’t driving the speed you want, didn’t use their blinker, and you tell everybody at work about it. What are you doing? You’re on a tiny little planet. 1.3 million Earths fit inside the sun. The sun is one of 300 billion stars in your one galaxy, and there are 2 trillion galaxies. What are you doing worrying about whether somebody used their blinker, or whether it’s hot out, or whether somebody’s drinking Coke versus Pepsi? No wonder you’re caught. You’re not paying attention to the frame of reference of reality. Your frame of reference is your thoughts, your emotions, your body, and what’s happening to you in the outside world. That’s a pretty small frame of reference compared to what’s actually going on. It is the tiniest cage that ever existed — one person’s thoughts, one person’s emotions, one person’s body.
If the entire earth blew to smithereens tomorrow, a couple of planets would change orbit and nothing else in the universe would ever know it. It is so much bigger than you and bigger than the planet Earth — bigger than your star, and there are 300 billion of those stars in one galaxy. You’re only going to be here for a blink. The earth has been here 4.5 billion years. You’ll be here 80 or 90. You are nothing in that frame of reference — and you have to honor and respect that. But you want to be something. Why? Because you don’t know who you are, which is everything. That’s the funniest thing in the whole world. You are everything — the entire universe — caught looking at this tiny little thing, saying “what matters is this.” And you’re driving yourself crazy with drugs and alcohol trying to cope. An enlightened being does not do alcohol. Why would they? They’re already in bliss. So are you, in there — but you’re using substances to stare at this tiny self.
So you get to the point where you realize: I would like to devote my life to getting rid of this garbage I’ve managed to store inside myself. People come to me and ask, “What about past lives?” I don’t care. Don’t worry about whether something came from a past life — let it go. It doesn’t matter where it came from. It doesn’t matter if it was mommy, daddy, a boyfriend, or something that happened in the womb. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t care.
You start waking up and realizing: I don’t need to think about all this stuff. I don’t need to be bothered by all this stuff. I need to let go of what’s stuck down there. And don’t doubt that you’re holding it down there. There’s no superglue or flypaper in there — there’s nothing in there but you. You’re in there pushing this stuff down and building this mess.
It’s funny — we started with pratyahara: letting go of being distracted by the outside world. But how can you let go of being distracted by the outside world when you’re afraid your car will break down, when you’re afraid you can’t pay the bills, when you’re afraid somebody won’t like you? If they don’t like you, you can’t be quiet, you can’t sit down and meditate — you have to go out there and get them to like you. In other words, you’re distracted by the entire outside world because you’re not okay, because you stored all this garbage inside. Get it out.
How? That’s your business — that’s the work. The new book, Wisdom Untethered, addresses this in depth, because it asks 200 questions that all of you have asked along the way: “I don’t get along with my spouse and this is happening — should I leave?” All the real stuff people don’t want to talk about. How do you work your way free in this situation, in that situation, in business, in everything? How do you use life to free yourself from yourself?
Right now you’re using life to protect yourself from yourself. You need people to be the way you want, things to go the way you want, everyone to act the way you want — you’re using life to protect yourself from yourself. Eventually that turns around completely and you say to life: come and get it. I don’t want it. Come and get it. That means: I am open. I am willing to go through whatever it takes to let go of this garbage I’m holding inside, to stop protecting myself from myself.
I like this analogy. Picture a giant block of marble, rough, just cut from the quarry — six feet by two or three feet, rough all around. There you are. The world is flying around and hitting you and doing different things. All of a sudden you feel a sudden, painful, sharp hit — on this upper left area of the marble. What’s going on? And it just keeps happening, hit after hit. “You’re killing me. Stop it.” And eventually you look and there’s David’s arm starting to emerge from the marble — and you realize: life is making something very beautiful out of you. But you have to be willing to let go of the pieces. You have to be willing to say: bring it on.
Of course it’s going to hurt — you stored it with pain, and it’s going to come back with pain. If you stored pain and you want to let it go, what are you going to feel? Eventually you’ll feel joy, because you don’t want the pain in there. So the pain is actually the release. At some point you start seeing David coming out of that block of marble, and you catch on that the chisel is a divine force making something beautiful out of you, and you start welcoming it.
At some point enough has happened, and you’ve let go of enough, that the trials and tribulations and tough times you go through — you realize those are your growth. They’re not tough to the whole of you; they’re tough to the part that stored the stuff and didn’t learn to let go. But you learned to be open, to welcome life, to honor it and respect it.
Eventually — and I’ve gotten to know a lot about this after 55 years — first you try to push it away, push up and above it. That’s what you’re doing in meditation: pushing down so you can stick your head above the water. You can be very busy doing that for a very long time. But then you catch on and you realize: the mind is talking because the heart is not okay. I’ve told you this before — the root of the mind is in the heart. If your heart is full of love and openness, the mind gets very quiet. But if your heart has a lot of garbage in it, the mind talks about it — about how to protect yourself, how to feel okay, how to get what you need so your heart isn’t bothered.
Eventually you don’t live that life anymore. You sit there and say: there’s no end to that. I am willing to go through what I must go through to let this stuff go. I don’t want it in there.
But even that’s not enough. Then you get to the point where you realize: this is not a tough time. This is a great time. It’s freeing me, it’s liberating me. Here’s a graduate-level example: you’re married and things are going really well, you love each other. Then something happens — one thing led to another and now it’s war, it’s not going well. But you’re a conscious being. You’re not trying to fight the war or deny it. You’re sitting here saying: can I use this divorce to free myself? Not from him or her — from myself. Can I go through this consciously, with all the turmoil and pain and disturbance, and use it so that whatever was down there that got me into this situation is gone? So that I’m a greater being — not scarred, a greater being, because I went through this. More capable of relationships. More capable of being free.
And you start looking at everything that way. You start truly welcoming the purification process.
Then at some point you look and you realize: I’m the consciousness. I did that. I shoved it down there, because I couldn’t handle it. And you actually apologize to it. “I’m so sorry. I shoved you in that dark closet.” Is that what we want — for a part of our being to be locked up in some dark closet that can’t open the door, where you only feel safe when nobody goes near it?
When you reach your hand down, that’s when you’re really getting there. The higher self reaches down. It doesn’t hate, it doesn’t judge — it just says: I did that to you. I took a part of my being, my energy, and I shoved it in a closet for years and years. You apologize. You literally reach your hand down and say: give me your hand. I want to help you up. And it won’t give you the hand at first. It takes time, you need to sit with it. But you’re always there. And eventually that lower part of your being realizes you’re always going to be there for it. You’re never going to betray it. You’re never going to do anything but try to help it up.
At some point — and this is really beautiful — it reaches up to you instead of you reaching down to it. You call it the inner child, the dark side, the shadow — you all have names for it. It feels comfortable enough to realize you’re there. Consciousness itself is always there. And that lower self reaches up. When that happens, everything starts flying upward. It changes direction. You’ll never go down again. And then you just continue through this beautiful process of liberation, of freeing yourself.
By that point, the pratyahara states come naturally. The world is not distracting you like that anymore. That doesn’t mean you don’t deal with it, dance with it — but it doesn’t have the ability to pull you into it ever again. And then the mind isn’t disturbed at all, because it’s very natural.
We had a deep talk today. I love that you’re willing to listen. Because if you’re not careful, you spend the rest of your life protecting yourself from yourself. Do you see that? You have soft spots in there that nobody should touch, and everything has to be the way you want, and you have a dream that someday it will be the way you want and you’ll be okay. That doesn’t work very well.
You have to be willing to say: I don’t need that protection. I’m a great being in here, but I’ve made a mess — and I’m willing to let go of that mess every day. Every single day. When I wake up tomorrow morning, I’m a greater being than who woke up yesterday. Every day, no matter what. Just keep letting it go.
Thank you for listening.
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.
