E180: From Ego to Freedom—The Path to Liberation

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’s one topic that, if you wanna grow spiritually personally, you better get down on. And that’s the topic of mind. Lots of people talk about mind — how to control your mind, how to use it to get what you want. There are so many different things you can do with your mind.

The trouble is, mind is not a solution. Mind is a problem. Not all of mind — there are two different distinct layers of mind. Really many, but those are the big categories. There is the personal mind, and there’s the impersonal mind. The personal mind is the one that uses the words “I,” “me,” and “mine” all the time. What do I like? What do I not like? What do I want? What are my dreams? What are my hopes? What do I believe in? What do I not believe in? What is my religion? Who are my children? Who is my spouse? What hurt me in the past? What do I never want to happen again? Wow. That is the personal mind.

Is it a personal mind? Because it is about you. Does the mind have to be about you? No. The mind doesn’t have to be about you. The mind can be — oh, the astronauts just went up into space. All of NASA, all these wonderful people did all this work. They were not “I”-ing. They were thinking pure thoughts, and pure thought means it’s not about you.

Any thought that’s about you is not pure. Any thought that is about you is a lie. It’s false. It’s an illusion. It’s a delusion. Every single one. Why? Because there’s a whole universe out there. I always tell you, there’s something else you can do with your mind. How far away is the sun? 93 million miles. Wow. You can think about that. Can you think about that? Can you imagine the distance between the moon and the sun? That’s because you have an intellectual mind. You have an impersonal mind. You have an abstract mind. Fine. So you have the star out there that’s so far away — 93 million miles. Where’s the next star? Ever think about it? That’s called the impersonal mind. You get to think about it.

So this star, which is our sun, is 93 million miles away. The next star — well, how many are there? There are 300 billion in your galaxy. So the next one’s kind of close. The next star is 4.3 light years away. Let’s look at what a light year means. It means if I catch a beam of light above the planet Earth — those of you who paid attention to the flight we just did, you saw the planet Earth, pretty — just floating out in the middle of nowhere.

Hold a beam of light above the planet Earth, right above the planet Earth. Listen to me with your intellectual mind, with your abstract mind, with your impersonal mind. I sit there and say, “What’s it got to do with me?” No, that’s the personal mind. The impersonal mind holds this beam of light above the planet Earth and lets it go for one second. It just circumnavigated the globe seven and a half times. It circled the entire globe seven and a half times in one second. Go that speed every second for 4.3 years and you’ll get to the next star. Take a breath. That is using your impersonal mind. It’s not about you.

If you come back and say, “Yeah, but how does it put bread on the table?” I’m sorry — what? You’re gonna find out, if you stop with this stupid personal mind making every single thing about you — why? Because it’s not about you. What’s not about you? Everything. It’s part of all that we just talked about. It’s about all the stars, 300 billion stars, about everything. You know what life is about? Every single thing that’s happening everywhere, at every second, every moment, everywhere. How much of that is you? I don’t have enough zeros percent. That’s called truth. So the personal mind’s a lie. Why? Because it says it’s about me. But it’s not about you. Yes, you get to be part of it — a pretty small part — but it doesn’t seem like that. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about.

So you understand the abstract, impersonal, intellectual mind — it’s just thinking about wonderful things you get to think about, but not you. And I’m telling you, the entire problem of your life is because all you think about is you. And when you learn not to think about you, life becomes totally different. Absolutely, unbelievably different.

What do you mean? I bought a new car, somebody in the parking lot opened their door and hit my door. Can you imagine that? I don’t know — 93 million miles away, 4.3 light years, 300 billion stars. Oh, I forgot to tell you, that’s 300 billion stars in one galaxy. The estimate is there are 2 trillion of those. Oh my God. What happened to my car there?

If you had that mindset, or frame of reference — we’ll call it a frame of reference — your frame of reference is “me.” That’s not reality, is it? The frame of reference, the universal set in math, the universal set, the frame of reference, is everything. Everything’s part of everything.

Let’s say you don’t know somebody. You never met them, walking down the streets of New York, they walk by you. Now let’s say you did know somebody and they walked by you and didn’t say hello. You freak out on the second person, not the first. The first person? No problem. They’re just like any other person. There are 8.3 billion of you on planet Earth. This one walks by — nothing happens. That one walks by and you go crazy.

I’m gonna paint the personal mind for you, and why it is the problem. It is a problem, isn’t it? How about — not “it is a problem” — it is the problem. It is the problem. You know why you have problems? Because you think you do. The person next to you doesn’t have the problem. You have it. “He said he would call in five minutes.” You’re talking to your girlfriend or boyfriend. “She said she would call in five minutes and I’m waiting and I’m getting so anxious.” The person next to you is looking, saying, “What’s wrong with you? It’s been five minutes. They’ll call.” No, not to you. You make your own problems. You manufacture them with your mind.

Are there things outside that unfold in a way that need to be dealt with? Yes. But how many of those are really happening all the time compared to what you do inside your mind? Take the word worry. Do you ever worry? Tell me the truth. Do you ever worry? You know what worry is — it obviously isn’t happening, or you’d be dealing with it. It’s that it might happen. Have fun. What might happen? Anything you wanna make up might happen, and you do it all the time. “What if he really doesn’t love me? He said he loves me.” It never stops in there, does it?

You are creating problems. Let’s just take that one. He or she said they love you. They sure act like they do, but “I’ve been hurt before.” Look at how many times the “I” came up in one sentence. “I got hurt before. I don’t wanna get hurt again. How do I know that they really love me? How do I know they’ll love me tomorrow? How do I know in five years? What if we have children and they stop loving me?” And you’re 12 years old — can you do it at 12? Answer me. Can you have those thoughts at 12? Who is creating hell here? Your mind. These things are not happening. They might — of course they might. Anything might happen.

If you try to figure it out with your mind — anything that might happen, and then figure out what to do about it — here, let’s do that. Can we do that? Just use your mind to think seriously about anything that might happen, and then think about what you would do about it if it did happen. That’s the personal mind in full glory. Do you do that? That’s the problem.

Events are not problems. They’re events. You deal with them. This mind — you can’t deal with it. It’s never ending, is it? It just goes on and on. You go to sleep feeling well. Everything’s wonderful, he loves you, or she loves you. You wake up — you can do it in a billionth of a second. “Yeah, I think it’s wonderful. Yeah, this could be my soulmate. Nah, he’s not a vegetarian. Well, maybe someday we can get married. God, that’s so exciting. No, he’s not Jewish or Catholic or whatever. My parents might not approve.” How long does it take to get screwed up? I’m asking you.

The problem is the mind — not the mind itself. The mind itself is brilliant, it’s unbelievable. Look what it did — it flew to the moon and came back, perfect, on a dime. Unbelievable. And your mind can do that. You have a mind that can do that. Your mind can write music. Your mind can learn all kinds of things. Your mind can do all kinds of things. But what you do with it is what I just told you, and you do that all the time, constantly.

So if you sit there and take the attitude that your mind is responsible for thinking about what could go wrong, and then responsible for thinking about what to do about it if it does go wrong, you will be neurotic. You will never be okay. Do you understand that? You’ve decided you can’t be okay because something might go wrong. I love that you laugh. I really do, because you’re laughing at yourself. Just think about that for a second. If you decide that something might go wrong — of course it might go wrong. Anything might happen. Your hair might fall out and nobody can figure out why. Oh my God, what would you do? You’re eight years old and it’s crazy.

Please listen to me. You do not have to live like that. You are not meant to live like that. It is not what’s supposed to be going on. You somehow ended up on some planet here, and you know how you got here. Don’t you dare think you do. You got here somehow, right? “Well, my mommy gave birth to me.” Gimme a break. There was a single cell and it knew how to make a baby. A single cell knows how to make a baby. The mother does not know how to make a baby. The father does not know how to make a baby. The doctors don’t know how to make a baby. AI doesn’t know how to make a baby. But a single cell knows how to start dividing and split the chromosomes. Who’s doing that? It’s programmed. It has this intelligence. Then it takes the food that the mother ate and the air and the sunshine, and it breaks it down to molecular structures and turns it into kidneys. The baby made itself.

I mean, it’s God. Fine. Yes, fine — same thing, by the way. There is a force in the universe that took a single cell and made a baby. Call it God — that’s a nice thing to call it. Or just say it’s science. I don’t care. The point is it’s phenomenal, but you pay no attention to that. “Oh, he’s so cute.” What are you kidding me? Where did that thing come from? “Oh, out of my womb.” That’s not where it came from. It just lived there for a while while it was busy building itself.

And eventually you wake up and you realize: I’m not paying attention. I’m only paying attention to me. Literally — is it gonna come out perfect? Now I haven’t touched the biggest topic. All that’s fine — worry about what’s gonna happen in the future, have fun, because you won’t. What about the past? Take a breath. What about the past?

Let me tell the truth about the past. It doesn’t exist anymore. The atoms that made up the present are making up the next moment and the next moment. They’re not staying behind and making a photo image. Right now there are atoms making up the entire universe. Those atoms will make up the next moment. They don’t stay behind. The past doesn’t exist. It’s over. It had its moment. I don’t understand — how can you have a problem with something that’s not happening? How can you have a problem with something that doesn’t exist? How can you have a problem with something that will never happen again?

Does your past ever bother you? Are there things in your past that bother you so much that you’d better go visit Freud and understand what suppression, repression, and denial are? What are those? Those are Freud’s terms — suppression, repression, and denial. What do they mean? They mean something happened in the past and it’s not okay with you. What do you mean it’s not okay with you? How can it not be okay? You just told me it happened. Did it happen? Yes. Can you make it not have happened? No.

I’d like to talk to your intellectual mind about your personal life. Did it happen? Yes. Can you ever make it not have happened? What are you gonna do about it? You can accept it — it happened — and deal with it. Or you can not want it to have happened so much that you deny that it happened. How do you do that? You push it away.

I teach you this all the time. Reality comes in through your senses. It comes in, you in there experience it. “But I don’t want to experience it.” I just love those words. I’ve been doing this for 55 years. Do you know what that sounds like to me? “I don’t want to experience what I just experienced.” Well, then you’re in big trouble. Why? Because you’ll never not have experienced that. Why don’t you just make a complete mess of yourself? Does that make sense to you?

So it comes in, I experienced it — but when I experience it, I have will. I’m in here and I don’t want that to have happened. But what can I do about the fact that I’m experiencing it and I can’t make it not have happened? So what do you do? You use your will to push the experience away. It can’t push the event away — it actually happened. But you don’t have to let it all the way in.

That’s why I always — let’s talk about this. Have you ever had a moment in your life, you turned the corner, the sunset was so beautiful that it blew you away? You say things like, “It touched me to the depth of my being.” Has anything ever touched you to the depth of your being? How many times — five times in your life? But things can touch you to the depth of your being. What does that mean? They came all the way in. Where’s that? All the way back to where you’re in here, past your mind. They made it past the judgmental mind. Music can do it — can it? Can you get blown away by a piece of music? You’re not even home anymore. It just melts. You say it touches the depth of your being, or “I felt like I was in the presence of God.” It’s a spiritual experience, isn’t it? It is a spiritual experience, because it touched you to the depth of your being, and the depth of your being is God. It’s the indwelling divine being, and it can touch you that deep.

Now very often does it? What happens if it comes in and it is not the kind of vibration that you want touching you like that? You push it away. You push away the vibration. You push away the inner experience, not the outer. The outer still happened. The outer will never not have happened. I don’t care how much it apologizes — it still happened. The apology just makes you feel better. “If you apologize so deeply, and I really believe your apology, okay, I can accept that it happened.” It doesn’t matter — it happened anyway. It just made you feel better about the fact that it happened. An apology cannot undo what happened. It just makes you feel better. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I really, I didn’t realize that would hurt you like that. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.” That’s all wonderful. All it’s telling you to do is let go. Don’t keep pushing it away.

Now I’ve helped you neutralize it some. Right or wrong, it still happened, didn’t it? And I’m telling you a secret — no matter how much they apologize, and no matter how much you believe it, if something happens a year from then that reminds you of what they did, you’ll say, “You said you would never do that again. You promised.” It doesn’t go away.

Every single thing that ever bothered you in your entire life, you kept inside and kept carrying it with you, didn’t you? Does it come back up? Does it still bother you to think about it? You don’t even have to think about it — it comes back up and you think about nothing but that. Isn’t that fun? Why are you doing that? How is that rational?

I’m gonna use my intellectual mind to look at the personal mind. Intellectually, something happened — it’s over. It can never happen again. Your stepfather can never say something to you that way. You divorced five years ago. Fine. It’s over. But it will never be over, because you decided to keep every single thing that ever disturbed you inside of you, didn’t you? Is it still there? What kind of decision is that? If you keep everything that ever disturbed you inside of you, you will be disturbed. Yes or no, are you? Yes. Not always. Well, good — I’m glad you’re on a nice vacation. You wanna have fun coming back?

It can’t work — to look at your past and not be able to handle the reality that took place, and store it inside as a disturbed experience that freaks you out to think about. It doesn’t make sense to do that. Then why do it? Because no one ever told you you didn’t have to. There is no reason in the entire universe that anything that bothered you in the past, that is not happening now, is still bothering you. Look me in the eyes. There is no logical reason that anything that happened in your past that is not happening now is still bothering you.

It doesn’t make sense to store inside of you everything that ever bothered you. But one — nobody ever told you you didn’t have to. And two — nobody taught you how not to. No one ever taught you how not to. They said, “Of course you got bothered. Oh my God, I would be more bothered. I can’t even believe you handled that.” That happened 10 years ago. What is that? That’s saying, of course you’re bothered — you have to be bothered. It was a bothering thing 20 years ago. It’s not a bothering thing now. They’re all dead. Your stepfather’s gone. Can I talk like that? That’s the personal mind versus the impersonal mind.

You have an impersonal mind. Why don’t you use it to raise the personal mind so that you’re not destroying your life with yourself? Because not only does it bother you that the past happened, but you let that bothering determine how you act today. You sit there and say, “No, I’m not going to Texas. I ain’t living in Texas. All my exes live in Texas. I’m gonna move to Arizona. No, no — I saw a movie once, there are rattlesnakes in Arizona. I don’t need rattlesnakes.” What are you doing? You saw a movie and it’s determining your life.

Let’s get a real one. “I’m in love and yes, we get along really well, but I just need to understand — do you have children? Oh, you do. No, no, no, no. Then we can’t get married. We can’t get along.” “Why don’t you wanna have children?” “Well, when I was growing up, it was a really very tough time for me. My father was an alcoholic and my mother didn’t help us. It was just really, really hard. I don’t wanna bring anybody into a world that has to live like that.” Don’t think that’s far out — do people think like that? You got real quiet, didn’t you? You had an experience. Everyone has experiences. You don’t let it determine your life. What kind of thing is that? It doesn’t mean you have to have children, but it’s not a reason not to have children.

And it’s the same thing. “No, no, I don’t wanna live in Gainesville. Gainesville used to be called the Tree City — do you know that? At one point it was the most tree-filled city in the United States. Well, I’m not moving there.” “Why?” “I fell out of a tree once. I don’t have any use for those things. I broke my arm. They’re evil.”

I’m trying to touch both realities and extremes. They’re all real, aren’t they? You literally think, “What do I wanna do?” and what you’re checking out is your database — what made me happy in the past, what made me unhappy in the past. But that past? You were 10 years old. You’re 23 now. How dare you look back there and say, “Because I had an experience when I was 10 that felt good…” If you hadn’t eaten the day before when you were 10, what you ate the day of that experience might not have turned you on or might not have turned you off. And now you’re gonna sit there and say, “Let me check my data bank — what made me happy before. I wanna go search those things and seek those things and be disappointed if they can’t happen again,” instead of being here now. Instead of: here’s reality, let’s have some fun. Not bring all this garbage from your past.

I’m gonna say something to you that you’re not gonna like. Your past is meaningless. Anything that happened might not have happened. I try to teach you — all the events that led up to that moment that you liked or didn’t like: if any one of them did not happen, you would not have had that experience. If you get in a car accident, it messes you up and you never wanna get in a car ever again, because you’re 10 years old and now you’re a neurotic mess. If the person that ran the light — their coffee machine didn’t work properly that morning and it took three seconds longer to make the coffee — you would not have been in the same spot at the same time. And the reason the coffee machine took three seconds longer is because of how it was made somewhere. And the guy who made it — who was coiling the coils — had a fight with his wife the day before, therefore didn’t pay much attention, therefore six years later the coffee machine didn’t work as well. If he didn’t have a fight with his wife, and you’re letting that destroy your life — does that make sense? No.

What makes sense is: I’m here, I’m a conscious being, and I fell down onto this planet. There’s life, there are things going on, and you’re interacting with them, and that’s the reality. And you can deal with them. Every one of you can deal with everything — if you didn’t bring the garbage from your past into your present and decide, “I don’t want it to happen again. I’m afraid.”

Are you afraid? Is there fear in there? And mostly what you’re afraid of is that what you didn’t like might happen again. I guarantee you, you’re not afraid of what you don’t know about. None of you are afraid of something you never even heard of. And you haven’t heard of 99.999% of it. But you stored this stuff, and I just showed you how tenuous it is — it might not have happened, with the slightest change.

So the question becomes: can I learn to handle reality? But you’re not busy trying to learn to handle reality. You’re busy trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again, or that it does happen again — those moments that you liked. And the moments you didn’t like — you spend your entire life trying to make sure they don’t happen again or that they do happen again. There’s the mind. That’s the personal mind.

The intellectual mind showed you it flew to the moon. You can do anything. You can do anything. Doesn’t mean you can fly to the moon, but you’re a great being. Let’s say something straight. In there — you who experiences what’s happening — the consciousness inside of everybody is the same consciousness. Not the same intellect, not the same personal, but in the end, the experiencer, the end user in there, is the same consciousness. It is universal. And it’s just looking down at you, and looking down at you, and staring so much that it got lost in your stuff and it doesn’t know how to get out.

Enlightenment is when that consciousness is no longer staring at your garbage. It’s not someplace to go — it’s someplace not to go. Right now, your awareness of being is fixated on your personal mind and what to do about it. But I hope I’ve painted the picture. When you are no longer staring at you, you’re gonna find out you are very big and you are very great. What all the great masters — what Christ tried to teach you — “My Father and I are one.” It means that the whole universe is inside of you. Not in your body, but the consciousness that is looking at you. You in there are a very great being, beyond your comprehension. And Christ taught you that, and Buddha taught you that, and Muhammad taught you that. You are a great being. You are the Self. You are the consciousness. The problem is you’re fixated, staring at yourself.

How do I not? Can I not? Let’s start there. “I’m a mess.” People write me all the time. “I’m a mess. I’m 63 years old and I finally caught on. I read your books,” this and that. “But I can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” One bet — just stop staring at what the old dog’s staring at. You’re a totally new being. Every moment you’re totally new, but you carried with you this garbage in your mind.

Meher Baba said the following: “Man minus mind equals God.” If you were not staring at that garbage you’re staring at, you’ll have no problems. You’ll start to realize you are filled with joy. How can you be filled with joy when you’re staring at what you collected — which isn’t really you? You’re staring at everything that ever bothered you, and you’ve built a whole ego inside your mind, which is the mind. There’s no ego. It’s just that you took pieces of things that bothered you from the past, shoved this over here, shut that over there, moved this over here. “I want this to happen, I don’t want that to happen, I like this, I don’t like that.” And you built this thing called a personality, called a self-concept. Even psychology says it’s not you — it’s a concept of you. A concept’s not a real thing.

So you stored this stuff inside your mind. It’s like a suitcase — you store all the stuff in it. Emotionally, most of the stuff you stored were things that hurt you. And now when you experience the moment, you do not experience the moment anymore — not ever again. For the rest of your life you have a veil, a filter you built around your consciousness. That consciousness, that awareness of being, who you are — you, the aware being in there — has to look through that filter out into this world, and whatever comes in has to go through that filter.

Just watch what happens. When someone’s talking to you about something, everything they say — “Yeah, but I don’t need a new car” — if they said “I have a new car,” you say “I don’t need a new car.” You’re relating it all back to you. Whatever they’re saying, you only hear what your mind has to say about what the person said. It is a veil that you built, made out of those past experiences. You stored them inside this thing called the mind and you built a personal mind. That’s your ego — what I like and what I don’t like, who I like, what I want to happen. These are my dreams and my hopes. You’re looking through the veil of your own making, which is made out of the garbage that you couldn’t handle. That’s why you stored it.

You don’t store everything. The clouds go by, the trees go by, the people go by, the white lines in the road go by — you don’t store all those. 99.9% of every single thing that came in through your senses went right through. Just drive down the road. There are all kinds of cars, all kinds of trees, all kinds of clouds, all kinds of everything. You don’t store it, do you? It just goes through. You can bring it back — you can bring stuff back — but it doesn’t haunt you. It’s stored in a way that comes back with emotion. We call that a samskara in yoga — a pattern that you stored that will not sit quietly in there. It had more energy than you were able to handle, so you pushed it down and stored the energy, and it keeps coming back up.

So the question is, what do you do about it? Because wouldn’t it be nice not to have that stuff in there? It would be nice to be able to wake up in the morning and say, “I’m back. I’m back. I wonder what’s gonna happen. I don’t know. It’s gonna be fun, and I’m ready to deal with it. I have no problem and there’s nothing I can’t handle.” How would you like to feel, deep inside, at the bottom of your being, that nothing can ever happen again for the rest of your life that you can’t handle? Because that happens to be the truth. There’s nothing that can ever happen for the rest of your life that you can’t handle. It might not feel good for the moment, but it passes through. It all passes with time. No reason to store it in there.

So how do you do this? Can you do this? Yes, of course you can do this. Every one of you can do this. I don’t care if you’re 63 years old and never did it before. People write me and say, “Oh my God, my whole life changed. I was having problems, I was gonna get divorced. Now I get along with my family, I get along with my wife, and so on. I just let go. I stopped being like that. I stopped deciding that everything has to be the way I want.” How’s that? What if everything doesn’t have to be the way you want? Then it is the way it is. And if you’re okay with it, it’s okay. The moment you say you’re okay with it, it’s okay.

“You said something. I thought you said something. I’m not okay with that.” “I didn’t say anything. I burped.” “Oh, okay.” Then you’re okay. The moment you decide you’re okay, you’re okay. And the moment you decide you’re not okay, you’re not okay. Why don’t you decide you’re okay? You’re the one who decided you’re not okay with that.

“What if you really did say it and it wasn’t a burp?” “Yeah, I did say it.” Okay. I love it. Just like that. At least be okay with it. “I can handle this. I can handle this.” How about you? “I can handle this.” “Well, look what he said.” I can handle that. “But you don’t understand what might happen. It might rain tomorrow.” I can handle that. That’s how you deal with this. You start practicing the ability to be okay. You wanna be okay, don’t you? It takes practice. Playing piano takes practice. Playing a sport takes practice.

“Well, this is how I am. This is how I play the piano. That’s as good as I am.” You didn’t practice, you didn’t take lessons, you didn’t do anything. Same thing with a sport. “I kicked the ball once. I’m not good at soccer.” None of you do that with a sport. But why do you do it with this? Why don’t you sit there and say, “I have to practice being okay”? Why? Because “I don’t know how — I’m not very good at being okay with everything. I’ve got problems. I need to practice.” I’ve never talked about it this directly. Why don’t you practice being okay? “I’m gonna practice being okay. I’m gonna wake up in the morning and I’m gonna say today is a new day. It never happened before, and I’m gonna be okay with it.” You won’t be — but you practice.

You practice. You sit down at the piano and say, “I’m gonna play Beethoven,” but you can’t even play the scales. You will not play Beethoven right now, but I like your attitude. Just keep working at it. “I am gonna wake up in the morning and say, I can handle what’s gonna happen today.” That’s what he said — “I can handle.” I’m going to be able to handle what happens today. At least set that as an effort, set that as a pole star.

So what does that mean? That means you get up in the morning and you say, “I don’t wanna get up. I can get up. I can handle it, but I’m tired.” I can handle it. Okay, very good. “Oh my God, I’m almost out of toothpaste. I should have—” I can handle it. Can I handle it? I’m almost out of toothpaste. I can handle it. Wow. What are you doing? You’re practicing being okay. You’re practicing being okay that you’re still tired but you have to get up. Okay, fine, I get up. Practice. Practice at toothpaste. Practice breakfast. Out of eggs. Okay. Pancakes burned a little bit — they’re nice and crispy. I can be okay. Can you imagine doing that? You’re laughing because everything I’m saying you can’t be okay with. Look at all the things you can be okay with. What’s the weather forecast? Don’t ask, because you’re just gonna decide you’re not okay with it.

You don’t need to do it that way. I love you. I don’t want you to suffer. The Buddha said the cause of suffering is what? Preference, desire — preference. Having decided how you want it to be, you will suffer. Accepting the reality of how it is, you will not suffer. That’s how you end suffering. That’s the fourth noble truth.

So these little things — I’m glad we’re talking at that level, that basic level. Sometimes — I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I’m getting old — I start to drive away and I say, “Oh my God, I forgot my glasses.” “Mickey, you have your glasses on.” And so I laugh. What if I didn’t laugh? “Oh my God, what if I did forget my glasses?” I don’t go back because I have them. But what if I had forgotten them? “Now I have to go to work without my glasses.” No you don’t — you have them. “Yeah, but what if they didn’t have them there?”

Don’t tell me you’re not like this, because I know how you are. I could go on forever and you’d laugh, but you don’t laugh inside. You get weird. But that’s a classic, right? You drive away. “Did I turn the stove off? I think I turned the stove off. The house could burn down. It could, but I think I turned it off. Should I turn around? No, I’m late.” What are you doing? I guarantee you 99.9% of the time you turned the stove off — the house never went on fire when you came back. And that’s just an example.

Practice being okay. Do it by saying, “I can handle it. I’m okay.” No — “I can handle it.” Handle what? What just happened? Then you’ll realize you can handle it. It’s amazing. “I can handle it.” Just laugh. Oh right, just laugh at yourself — will you please? Because it’s pretty stupid. How can you be okay if you’re doing that? You’re making yourself not okay.

Take a test in school. “I probably failed it. What am I gonna do if I failed it? When I tell my parents — what if I don’t get into the graduate school I want to get into?” You don’t even know the results of the test and you’re making yourself miserable. You do that, right? You are getting quiet here because you definitely do that stuff. Come on, man. You have to learn — this is stupid. You take the test, you study the best you can, you do the best you can, and the results are what they are. If you did the best that you can, you studied the best you can, you did the best you could — the results mean nothing. You know what the results are? They tell you what you still need to learn. And that’s a wonderful thing. By definition, you did the best you could. “Oh boy, I got that wrong.” Go ask some questions about it. From now on, you’ll be fine. Don’t get neurotic. Stop making yourself miserable.

So you wake up in the morning and you sit there and say, “I’m gonna handle the day. It’s gonna be like a video game — things are gonna come at me and I’m gonna be fine and deal with them.” You get up, you do your thing, you do the best you can. You’re gonna feel better. Trust me — in the morning you can do that, okay. Then you go out and something happens. Paul says something, there’s no parking spot — something’s gonna happen and you’re not gonna be okay. You forget to say “I’m okay” and you get all weird. “I can’t find a parking spot. What am I gonna do? I’m gonna be late for my doctor’s appointment.” At some point you get the car parked. You are all weird. Yes or no? Does it get you weird to think like that? Do you like feeling weird? Isn’t it a wonderful feeling to be all out of balance and all screwed up inside? Don’t you like that? Then why do you do it to yourself? The parking spot didn’t do it. The other cars didn’t do it — they just were what they were. You could have said, “I can handle that. I can handle being late. I can handle that. I’ll miss the appointment.” Better than being neurotic. I’d rather miss the appointment than be miserable for the rest of the day because I couldn’t find a parking spot.

You make some good decisions, fine. At some point, after you fell, it’s gonna get a little quieter in there. It’ll raise back up. It does come back by itself a little bit. You sit there and say, “I fell. I’m back.” That’s it. And you start over again.

The main part I wanna teach you: do not get down on yourself. Don’t say you failed. No. It’s a video game. It’s fun. You did the best you could. You handled the toothpaste — I’m proud of you. Couldn’t handle the parking spot? Okay, fine. At some point you’ll come back a little bit. The minute you come back, as soon as possible, say, “Wow, that was fun. I’ll do better next time.” There — practicing piano. “I’ll do better next time.” You don’t quit because you made a mistake. You just get back up. No guilt, no shame, nothing like that. No judging — just a learning experience. “I will do better next time.” Pick yourself up and say, “I’m fine,” and go about your day. “I can handle this. I can handle this.” Don’t sit there and say, “Because I couldn’t handle that, I can’t handle anything.” This is how you change what’s going on in there, and you do it all the time, every time.

And then at night when you come home, you sit down a little bit — call it meditation, call it whatever you want, I don’t need words. You sit down and you say, “How did I do?” Probably shouldn’t ask that. And you sit there and say, “Alright, there’s stuff that I didn’t handle well,” which is fine. Don’t judge yourself — do not. You’re learning a sport, you’re learning an instrument. You don’t judge yourself because you didn’t do perfectly. You’re learning. That’s the whole purpose of learning — to do better.

And you sit down and you say, “Is there anything left in here I need to let go of? I didn’t handle the parking spot, if I can look at it now. Yeah — or no, I couldn’t handle what Sally said. I see — it’s still bothering me. Let it go.” “What do you mean, let it go? How?” It’s just that the person said some words out of their mouth. You don’t have to take it personally. You just have to do that, and you just gotta relax through it and say, “I can handle it.”

I want you to say, “I can handle it.” And then practice handling it, and you’ll get better and better at it. And pretty soon some really big stuff will happen and you’re gonna find out you can handle it — not because it’s not big, but because you’ve practiced handling it. Practice makes perfect, and eventually nothing will bother you. No — it will bother you, but you can handle that it bothered you.

The house is on fire. Who do you want? You want the person in charge — your husband, your wife, whatever — the house is on fire, they’re freaking out. “Oh my God, there are children in there! What are you gonna do? Oh my God!” Or the neighbor whose house is on fire and somebody says, “Okay, look, we can handle this. We can handle this fine. Go get the kids, you do this.” Which person do you wanna be with? I want you to be that person. Don’t you wanna be that person who can handle it? Then practice handling it.

That’s how all the stuff I talked about — how neurotic and crazy it is in there — it’ll stop. It’ll stop. I’m telling you, it’ll get better every day. Every day. If you practice handling it, the next day will be better, and the next day will be better. And something big happens and knocks you down — just get back up and say, “Thank God I got to experience that. Now I can practice even better with that.” And eventually you’ll realize the only reason it’s bothering you is because you said it did. Otherwise, just deal with it.

I could go on forever. You know I could. You’re a beautiful being. Believe me — I don’t care what you’ve ever done, I don’t care what ever happened to you. You’re a very great being back in here. You — the end user, the experiencer — are a great being filled with love, filled with joy, filled with God. That’s what it is in there. But you’re staring at what’s not, aren’t you? Fixated, staring at the garbage that you collected. Start letting it go. The more you let it go, the more beautiful your life will be. Alright.

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.