E191: Living Inside—The Spiritual Science of Learning to Let Go

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. It’s amazing that whether you realize it or not, you live inside. How do I know? Because if you were outside, you wouldn’t need sensors to pick up the outside and send it back to you. But you do. You call them senses, but they are sensors. Your eyes, ears, tactile touch, olfactory smell.

Why do you need those things? Because if they’re not working, you’re not receiving the outside world. That’s your first clue that you live inside. You — the experiencer, the Atman, the self, the soul — call it whatever you want. The essence of your being is the end user of the experiences that it is receiving. It’s so obvious. Why do we discuss it? That’s not a spiritual discussion. That’s medicine. That’s physiology. That’s understanding why you have senses.

And it’s funny — you can’t hear through your fingers. You can’t see through your ears. They’re literally just like a computer. They have position, and you put them out there, and then they have this connectivity. Interestingly, nowadays everything’s wireless. Your senses are not wireless. They need wires. Isn’t that amazing? If you just had the senses sitting out there remote, you ain’t getting nothing. You have to have this thing called your nervous system that wires the senses back ultimately to your brain, to the central processing unit that is receiving. Your brain receives from the ears, from the nose, from the tactile, from taste — I left taste out — from taste. It’s all coming back to the same place. You can hear, smell, and taste at the same time, can’t you? They all come back to the same place.

I’m not trying to teach you medicine or physiology. It’s obvious. What does it tell you? That you’re in here. You’re not out there. You’re never out there. You experience an “out there” because the universe, the world, is created in such a way that those very special atoms that make up your eyes, your ears, your nose, your throat — that kind of stuff — they pick up these vibrations.

In the sense of sight, they pick up photons that come back and hit the senses, and then they send back these messages. The result is they are sensors, and they pick up those vibrations. Your eyes don’t pick up the vibration of sound. Your ears don’t pick up the vibration of sight. They have their dedicated atoms that are constructed in such a way — the molecule’s constructed in such a way — that when the stimuli of light comes in, or the stimuli of sound vibrations, or the stimuli of taste, chemical interactions, or tactile touch, when those senses feel that, they send these messages back to you. So when I start teaching you that you’re in there, I hope that’s not hard.

You’re going to say, “I don’t know if I believe in that.” I don’t want you to believe in anything. You are obviously experiencing that all the time. How do I know? I’ll prove it to you. Ready? Close your eyes, and I bet you don’t see. Why? Did the world go away? No. The photons that are bouncing off of the molecules of the world come in and stimulate the senses, right? The optical senses. Do all the molecules that are out there come back and hit your optical nerves? No — you wouldn’t see shape if they did. It would just all be one blob of light. But I’m looking at her. Exactly where her ear stops, the molecules of the air don’t send back the photons. Where do they go? They go right through. So all of a sudden I see shape — not because shape is there, but because the particular molecules that are making up the body, or the wall, or anything like that…

If I look at the wall, there are cracks in the wall. There are knots in the boards. Depending on how the light is hitting them, they’re reflecting back different colors, different densities of light. If I remove a board and it goes to the outside, I say, “Oh, a board is missing.” How do you know? Because it’s not sending back the photons. That’s true of all your senses.

Why are we talking about that? Because I don’t want to have to convince you that you’re in there. You’re obviously in there. You’re the end user. You’re the receiver of all this stuff.

Okay, now let’s get a little more interesting. Is that the only thing you experience in there? I know you never think about being in there, but obviously you’re in there. Is that the only experience you have — you in there receiving what’s coming in through your senses? You wish. There are some other culprits in there. What do you mean? Who could get in there? Thoughts and emotions. Are they out here? Can you touch them? Can you see them? I can’t see hers. She can’t see mine. So you are in there, and you are receiving what’s coming from the senses, and you’re receiving the thoughts that are created in there and the emotions that are created in there.

You don’t do well with those things, and that’s what we’re going to talk about. Right now, you can learn to be okay with the world. The color’s slightly different — what she’s wearing versus what he’s wearing — you can handle it, right? There’s a bug. It’s out there. Don’t worry about it. The mosquito cannot bite you when it’s out there. It’s like you hear it, you can see it, and if it bites you, you can feel the spot where it bit. It came back to you, but the mosquito stays out there. Your thoughts don’t. Your thoughts and emotions are created inside, and you experience them inside.

In case you haven’t followed so far: there are times in your life where you experience thoughts and emotions inside so much that there is no outside to you. There’s only the thoughts and emotions going on inside of you. When? When you go to sleep and when you dream. That world is created by your mind. It’s created by your emotions. It paints pictures. You have a city you can walk around. You can get married and get divorced three times while you’re asleep. That’s not happening outside, but it’s the exact same experience that you would have if you were having it outside. If you have a mosquito buzzing around you when you’re dreaming, it’s bothering you, but it’s not even there.

Your mind can create thoughts and emotions that have nothing to do with the outside. Normally — and that’s why you interpret dreams and stuff like that — the outside leaves impressions on your mind and emotions. Then before you go to sleep, it recreates those impressions, but they really got stimulated from outside. You can dream about aliens. You’ve never seen any. You can dream of all kinds of things. Your mind can create things, and you experience them inside. The purpose is not to analyze a dream in this talk. It’s not to study the physiology of the nervous system and the brain and all that stuff. It’s: are you in there, and do you experience dreams? Yes or no? How do you know you experience dreams? You wake up in the morning and say, “I had this amazing dream.” I’ll stop you right there. How do you know? “What do you mean, how do I know? I had it.” Who did? “Me in here.” Thank you. So you are in there. You’re not out here. You’re not your body. When you go to sleep, you ain’t got one. You can sleep so deep that they can tap you and you don’t wake up, and then when you finally wake up you say, “Oh, I was having this beautiful dream. Why’d you wake me?” What do you mean, wake you? What does that mean? It means that your consciousness is now receiving messages from the outside, not just from the inside.

So we’ve established that you’re in there, and you receive these messages from the outside world because you have senses, otherwise you don’t. And you receive the inside thoughts and inside emotions. Trouble is, you’re not doing so well lots of times. In fact, I’ll tell you a secret — you’re very rarely doing well. You’re doing relatively well. Your mind’s kind of behaving a little bit. Your emotions are kind of tolerable, but there are lots of times that mind is not creating thoughts that are fun to live with, which is very interesting to talk about. You create the thoughts. There’s nobody else in there. Who’s in there? Mommy, daddy, sister, brother, teacher? Nobody. You’re in there. So if you have thoughts that are bothering you — oh, you don’t want to hear this — you’re doing it. No one’s reaching in there and making your thoughts be the way they are. They’re your thoughts. You always say, “my thoughts.” You don’t say, “your thoughts.” You own them. They’re yours. You say, “my emotions.” They’re yours. They can get stimulated from the outside and therefore create things that are associated with the outside, but they don’t have to. There are things that stimulate you that don’t stimulate her from the outside. She just walks right by and you get all caught up in it. It’s something you’re doing in there. Let’s get that spiritually straight right away.

There’s no one in there but you. That’s your house, and how it is in there — I know you don’t like to hear this — you built the thing. Something happened to you in high school, or kindergarten, or something like that. How do you know? Because I experienced it. Okay, you ready for the next experience? No. I’m not ready for the next experience. Why? I didn’t like that one. So now that you don’t like it, why don’t you keep it? That sounds like fun. Let’s keep all the ones we don’t like inside our mind so they can bother us for the rest of our lives. Good idea? You didn’t say yes or no. Who came up with that idea? I’ve got to throw out that playbook.

You don’t know how not to do that. That’s what I want to talk about. Why are they in there? Most of them aren’t in there. The white lines you pass by, the sunsets and the clouds, and people you don’t know — there are all kinds of things that go on that don’t get stuck in there. But some of them get stuck. Why? Because you hold onto them. Nobody else is doing that. What he holds onto inside, he doesn’t. What you didn’t hold onto inside yesterday, you hold onto inside today because something happened in between that made you do that. Made who do it? You did.

That’s a talk that I know no one wants to hear. You don’t want to hear it — that you’re the one causing all this. You shouldn’t feel guilty about it. Just — who else is in there? If I go into your house and there’s pizza crust all over the place and roaches running around, it’s your house and nobody else lives there. So the question is, how’d it get that way? Because you let it. You had an experience — how do you know? Because it came in. Otherwise, I guarantee it’s not in there if it didn’t come in. It came in, and instead of experiencing it — just, “Okay, there’s an experience. This person doesn’t like me. They’re dissing me.” You do whatever you want with it. It came in, you’re experiencing it, but what you intuitively do by default is resist. “You’re not going to talk to me like that. I don’t have to put up with this.” What does that mean? I wasn’t able to handle the experience, therefore I pushed it away, kept it at bay, or I ran away. “Talk to me like that, I’ll never talk to you again. I’m going.” The point is, you couldn’t handle the experience.

Do you understand what the words mean? You ever say, “I can’t handle this, I can’t handle this”? And I guarantee you, if you say “I can’t handle it,” you can’t. But if you said, “Okay, does it feel good? But I can handle it. It’s temporary, it’s momentary, I can handle it” — well, you feel a lot better. You have a much better chance of handling it if you say you can handle it than if you say, “Oh no, I can’t handle this.”

So if you can’t handle it… First of all, who’s this “you”? Who is this you that can’t handle it? And what’s the “it”? The “it” is the vibrational sensation that came in from the outside. Let’s say somebody’s saying something to you. The person didn’t get in there. They can’t get in there. You’re still the only one in there. But vibes get in there, don’t they? Just exactly like physics. The vibrations come through, they get picked up by the senses, and then the whole nervous system carries those vibes — emotional or vibrational, call them whatever you want — and they come in and come back to the central processing unit of the brain. I’ll talk to you later about how they go much further than that, which is not what science at this point understands, though more and more they’re starting to. It doesn’t stop at the brain. It comes in and you experience it. You in there.

First I said, “I can’t handle this.” What’s the “this”? I can’t handle this. It means what came in. And what do you mean you can’t handle it? I would have a whole hour talk on that sentence. “I” — the subject, the final receiver, the you in there. So if you say, “I can’t handle it,” and the “it” is what came in from the outside, what are you doing in there? How do you know you can’t handle it? You know, don’t you? Because it’s not comfortable. Because you’re experiencing what somebody said or didn’t say or did or might do, and it comes in and has a vibration that when you experience it, you say, “No way. I do not want to experience this.” Or to be fair, “I want to experience this. In your presence, I just — I love what I feel. Don’t go away, and don’t talk to anybody else because I want to experience this.” You have that going on in there, right? Much more of the “I don’t want” — believe me.

So you’re in there, it comes in, and you are the one experiencing it. You can sit there and say, “I can’t handle it. My mother talked to me that way, and I didn’t like my mother.” You can do that. But still — you in there are saying, “I can’t handle this.” And then what you do — your natural tendency — is just like the deer run away, and the possums run away, and the raccoons run away, and the birds fly away. Everybody’s running away, aren’t they? Why? Because they can’t handle it. Go walk up to a wild deer, see how that works. Man will stay there. Why? Am I going to hurt them? I love them. That’s not what they feel. That’s not what they experience. They experience fear. Can they handle the fear? Obviously not. They’re running away so they don’t have to experience it.

Do you run away? You do. So you’re in there doing things, and one of the things you do is when something comes in, you either resist it or cling to it. It’s very Zen. What does resistance mean? I don’t want to feel this. Well, too bad, buddy, because it happened. No, I don’t have to feel it. Oh wait — you can’t make it not have happened. How do you not feel it if it happened and you’re not liking what it feels like — which means you are feeling it? What do you do? I push the vibration away. I do not need it to come all the way up to me. I have will. I have the ability to focus this energy that I have inside. You don’t need to think twice about it. Do you suppress things? Do you push things away? Do you cling when you want something to happen?

When you do that act of pushing away, it doesn’t finish. It can’t. You stopped it. You dammed it up. You dammed what up? It’s a real thing. The energy that you’re experiencing — that came in from the outside, or at least got stimulated from the outside — is obviously a real thing, or you wouldn’t not be able to handle it. You’re saying it’s a real thing, it’s vibrating, and I don’t like the vibration, and I am not going to tolerate that vibration. I’m going to use my will inside — a power you have — to push it away. That’s the base of suppression, repression, denial, and just basically resistance. I’m talking to you. I don’t like what you’re saying. You can see — I don’t like what you’re saying. My vibration’s changing. How I’m sitting is changing. In other words, I’m resisting what you’re doing. This is the essence of spirituality. It’s your everyday life. It’s every second of your life. You do this all the time.

You’re in there and you try to protect yourself. From what? From these vibrations that you’re not comfortable with. And that’s the essence of what we’re talking about. There are things that come in that you’re not comfortable with. There are things that come in that you’re comfortable with. That’s like the foundation of life and the foundation of spirituality. The fact that you have differentiated those two things — that which you want to come in and that which you don’t want to come in — runs your whole life. Not only when you’re experiencing them, but you don’t want to experience the ones that happened before that you didn’t like. That’s the whole psychological basis.

You’ve had past experiences, and you know you didn’t like them, and you don’t want it to happen again. So now I’m out here manipulating the world — yes, that can come in, but I don’t want that to come in. You want to go to the party with so-and-so? No, I don’t want to. Why? Last time I didn’t have a good time. Oh, there you go. Maybe he was in a bad mood. Maybe he’s a wonderful person. You don’t care. I didn’t feel good afterwards. I don’t want it to happen again. You’re very quick with that, aren’t you? And you build this model inside of yourself.

Inside. We talk about outside and inside. You build a model of what I like and what I don’t like, and then you go way further. It’s not enough to have the model of what I like and what I don’t like. I need to figure out how to make the outside world be in a way that I like it and not in a way that I don’t like it, and that has just defined your life. That’s how you make decisions. That’s why you have fear.

I hope you’re following me, yes or no? Do you do that? Have you ever not done that? And that becomes what it’s like to live in there. That’s not fun. I guarantee you it’s not fun to live in there that way. Even desires are not fun. That’s what I want to talk about: desires and fears.

We’ve got the groundwork, right? There you are. You feel fear when it comes in. You feel desire. When you feel desire, it means it’s good — you like it. Then you cling to it. I don’t want it to go away, and you do everything you can to make sure that you don’t blow it. They’re a person, or whatever — person, place, thing, job, it doesn’t matter. Finance, it doesn’t matter. And otherwise, it’s not comfortable and you want it not to be that way. Do you relate to what I just said?

Let’s say you’re a money person. You’re watching the stock market. You’re watching all these things. If it goes up, “Oh, boy.” It goes down, “Oh.” So now you have to figure out what to do with your money so when it goes up you get it, and when it goes down you don’t lose it. There you go — go be a financier. But the result is… Do you see what I’m saying? This is where tension comes from. It’s where anxiety comes from. It’s where all of it comes from: the fact that you can’t handle… What do you mean you can’t handle? You just said, “If I like it, I can handle it.” Yeah, but you can’t handle it not being there.

You can’t handle somebody who comes up to you and says, “I’ve never told you, but I’m so attracted to you. I’ve been, since we were in kindergarten — I’ve been embarrassed to tell you. You walk on water. You’re just the most beautiful thing.” How you doing in there? Pretty nice, right? Until they walk to the next person and say the exact same thing. How you doing now? You see what I’m saying? It’s like you have a way that makes you feel okay, and it’s very sensitive.

Can I ask you that? Are you sensitive? Can your heart open and close very, very easily based on what’s going on outside? Can you feel fear really easily? Can your mind think of situations that make you feel fear — it doesn’t even have to be happening? Are you catching on while we’re talking about this? You live in there. What kind of place is that to live? And the answer is obviously not very nice, because you’re trying to manipulate the world so that when it comes in, it’s the way you want it to be and it’s not the way you don’t want it to be. And that is a heck of a struggle, isn’t it? You’re in there struggling. That’s why Buddha said all life is suffering.

He didn’t mean you break your arm or you get sick. You suffer. Nobody has to do anything, and you suffer. You think about dying, and you suffer. “I can’t handle the thought of death.” Well, then there’s something wrong with you, because you’re going to die. If you can’t handle the thought of death, you’re going to suffer. If you sit there and say, “I wonder what that’s going to be like. I guess I’ll find out” — that is literally the totality of where you should be with death. Not when will I die, how do I stay longer, I have a bucket list I have to take care of before I… What are you doing? You’re living your life. You open up. You experience your experiences. And then if you have a thought that someday I’m going to die, say, “I wonder what that’ll be like. Will I be there after the death happens? Well, we’re going to find out.” That’s how you should handle death. But that’s not how we handle it, do we? Why? Because you’re not okay in there, and the thought of death means I don’t have time to make it be okay. That’s your bucket list — all the stuff you haven’t done yet that you want to experience.

It can’t happen. It’s all based on fears and desires. So — do you have fears? Of course you do. Do you have desires? Of course you do. And I guarantee you have more fears than desires, not even close. You’re not wanting a mosquito to buzz around your head. You want them not to. You don’t care about the car that’s driving in front of you at the speed limit and using its blinkers — like 98% of them — but you sure don’t like it when they don’t use their blinker or when they’re driving 15 miles below the speed limit. If the temperature outside is between 68 and 73, you don’t even think about it. It’s fine, it’s wonderful. If it’s 22 degrees or it’s 97 degrees, you’re complaining. So there’s way more negativity than positivity. That’s why it’s so hard to live in there — because you’ve set these parameters that say it has to be just this little box, and if it’s in that little box, sometimes the little box can send you into ecstasy. “Oh my God, you’ve been away, and I thought you weren’t going to come back, and you came back.” But how often would that happen compared to somebody who walks by that you don’t know and you’re scared of? It’s like you put bars on your windows to make sure the people you don’t know that you might not like don’t get in. You don’t take them off because somebody might show up that you like. So it’s a mess in there.

Because you’ve built up all these things that you don’t want to experience — those are your fears — and you’ve built up a very few things, but still they’re there, that you feel, “If this were to happen, I’d be okay.” Let me ask you honestly: has anything ever happened the way you wanted it to, and you got excited about it? Yes or no? How long did it last? I don’t need anything else for the rest of my life? You’re lucky if it lasts a very short period of time. So you see, I just wanted to paint the picture. I told you you’re in there. What’s it like in there?

All right. It’s true. I’m sorry. I’m not being negative. I mean, Buddha’s the one who said all life is suffering. And what is the cause of suffering? Preference. The cause of suffering is not the outside world, because that which causes her to suffer turns her on, and that which caused her to suffer yesterday turns her on today. And so you get down to the point you realize: it is not the outside world that’s causing me to suffer. It’s the fact that I have concepts and views and preferences and hopes and dreams and fears inside that are not being matched — or are being matched — by the outside, that causes suffering.

Let me get that right. The interaction between what’s actually happening outside and how you want it to be or don’t want it to be inside — if they don’t match, you suffer. Have you noticed? And to whatever degree they don’t match, you suffer, and that’s not fun. And what do you do about it? Try to manipulate people, places, and things outside so they’d be the way that makes you feel better.

How high can you get that way? Not very high, not spiritually. Why? Because you’re in there working, struggling, anxiety, tension, fears. There’s only one way to be okay, and that’s not it. “But what if I get what I want?” Okay, come back and talk to me about it later. You’re never going to get what you want. One, it doesn’t happen. Why would it happen? Why would what you want to happen, happen? You didn’t create the world. You didn’t create everybody in it. You didn’t create how they think and what they like and how they feel that day. Why would what you want in there — that you made up — be happening outside? If you haven’t noticed yet, it’s not. What’s the probability when you wake in the morning that everything you want to happen is going to happen? How about zero? Every once in a while something — oh, look, it matches. But they say a broken clock is right twice a day.

Do you understand that what you want to happen is not going to happen? Have you noticed over the course of your life that the vast majority of the time, unless you manipulate it, control it, try to do something about it — it’s not just going to happen to be that way? The weather’s not going to be what you want. People are not going to act the way you want. It’s going to be the way it is. It’s very Zen. Things are the way they are. But because they don’t match what you’re doing inside… What is suffering? The dichotomy between what is actually happening — that comes in — and what you want or don’t want to be happening. So depending how big that gap is, is how much you suffer.

“I want to go to dinner. I’m dying to eat Chinese. I just want to eat Chinese.” And your husband or wife comes home and says, “Oh boy, I’m all excited about Italian.” And you look in there and say, “Okay, fine. I won’t have Chinese. I can handle it.” You’re not suffering. Or you sit there and say, “Why do you always want Italian? I want Chinese, and I never get it my way. Let’s have an argument.” And then you’re suffering. It’s all the difference — the gap between what’s happening out there coming in and what you want to be happening out there, isn’t it?

And you can’t handle that, so what you do is try to control the world. The world better behave, better be the way I want it to be. And so of course that causes suffering. What you do — and I like it, it’s positive, it’s good — you sit there and say, “Well, it’s not the way I want it to be, but if I keep working at it, someday it will be.” You said that when you were 12. By the time you were 15, you wanted something different totally. You don’t even understand what’s going on in there. It is never going to be the way you want it to be, and if it is, it’s not going to last very long. Why? Because the world is changing all the time. People’s minds are changing, things are happening, you’re having experiences. You can’t glue the thing down and say, “This is what I want. Here it’s happening. I’ve got two kids and the husband does this and nobody does that.” You try, don’t you? You try to nail that sucker down. It’s a motion picture. It’s not a photograph. It’s not a snapshot. It keeps changing. You keep changing. He keeps changing. Everybody keeps changing.

So I love my job. I got fired today. Did you expect that? No. How are you doing? I’m suffering. What if you wanted to get fired because you hated the job? I’m ecstatic. It’s the combination between what’s actually happening out there and what your relationship to it is, and if your relationship is, “I don’t want that happening — it’s not what I ever wanted,” then you suffer. If it’s, “Oh, that looks promising — not only got what I want, it’s promising. He didn’t say no,” now you’re a positive person. There you go — positive thinking. He didn’t say no. The boss didn’t say no to the raise. The husband didn’t say no about Chinese tomorrow. So you still have hope.

But if you’re a negative-minded person, and you’re both by the way, no matter what happens — the boss says, “Okay, I’ll think about it” — you think, “He’ll never give it to me. I know he won’t. He never does.” And positive: “Oh boy, there’s hope.” Isn’t that beautiful? You’re doing it. Who’s in there making that noise that’s making you decide if you feel good or feel bad or feel hopeful or feel depressed? You are.

But what happens is it’s not really you with free will. You have will, and you’re doing it, but you have formed tendencies. Things have happened to you in the past. You got fired from a previous job. Boss says, “I want to talk to you about your position here.” Well, you have now a tendency toward being afraid of being fired. Last time the boss said to you, “I want to talk to you,” he gave you a raise. So you are the sum of your learned experiences. I teach you that all the time. Psychology says that. Because you held onto those experiences, now when the world comes in, it has to pass through them. You built a veil. You built an ego. You built a self-concept. You built a way you want it to be. So when the world comes in, it either matches that or it doesn’t, or it comes close and so on and so forth. And depending upon the sum of all your learned experiences, you have this veil that the world has to pass through before it gets to you, and that’s what you end up feeling. You’re not feeling the world.

The world comes and goes. There’s a snake. Okay, there’s a snake. Did he bite you? No. Is it okay that there’s a snake? Of course, he didn’t bite me. That’s not you. There’s a snake. “I don’t ever want to see a snake. A little garden snake.” You hear me? But you do this with your mind, and then you expect to be okay, and almost everything you do tends toward the negative.

I’m serious. But what about if I practice positive thinking? Listen to me. I’m not picking on you. I love positive thinking. Why do you need to practice positive thinking? Because it’s negative. Why else would you need to practice positive thinking except that it would be negative otherwise? I practice positive thinking when I need to. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? It’s better than letting it fall down, but it will fall down in there if you don’t lift it up.

So we’re just establishing the fact that you’re in there. The world is out there. The truth is they have nothing to do with each other. The world is just doing its thing. The world is a sum of its learned experiences. It is a cauldron of cause and effect from the beginning of time interacting with each other — effects causing causes, causes causing effects — and that’s all unfolding in front of you. And I’m telling you, it has nothing to do with you in there, because it didn’t have your experiences. That moment you’re experiencing now didn’t have all the experiences you had before. You grew up in Detroit. The moment you’re having now has very little influence from all the things that happened to you in Detroit. So what programmed you to how you want things to be has nothing to do with how the world’s unfolding in front of you. Reality is what’s going on. Do you understand that? And yours is not reality. Yours is just what you made up based on the things that you like and didn’t like.

Okay. So now the question becomes, what do I do about this? Because I hope — I’ve talked a lot — I hope you understand this is truth. You can make believe it’s not all you want, but you’re going to suffer. You’re going to have anxiety. You’re going to have fear. You’re going to have tension. You’ll have insecurity. What is insecurity? Do you have insecurity? Why do I have insecurity? Because I don’t like feeling rejected. Who decided whether you’re rejected or not? What if you’re playing football and you have this professional coach running up and down the sidelines screaming at you, “Run faster,” or, “Avoid that,” or, “You can do this better”? Are they rejecting you, or are they teaching you, working with you, encouraging you? You decide. Everything in life — it’s not what’s happening. It’s just happening. It’s what you do with it when it comes in here.

And I told you what you do with it. If it ends up feeling good, you try to keep it. If it ends up feeling bad, you try to not have to experience it again, and that becomes the entire base of your life. There is a higher life to live. There is actually a totally different life to live here on this earth, every minute of your life — completely different than trying to make things go the way you want. When things don’t go the way you want, you know what you say? They’re wrong. He shouldn’t have said that. That was so wrong. How did I know it was wrong? Because I didn’t like it. Somebody else liked it. Yeah, well, they’re wrong. Isn’t that beautiful? Wake up. There’s a whole other life to live.

The alternative is to say the problem is not what’s outside — it’s how I’m processing it inside. And if I take it as negative, it’s negative, and therefore I have trouble with it. So what can I do? I teach you this all the time, and it’s so beautiful because it works. You catch on. If I don’t like it, it’s not going to be comfortable — period. By definition, the fact that I don’t like it means when it comes in here, it’s not comfortable, and therefore I’m not a happy camper.

What if you learn to like it? Well, what do you mean? I don’t like it. What if you learn to like it? I can’t learn to like it. I don’t know — you learn the piano, you learn to play tennis, you learn to do all kinds of things. You didn’t know how to do them before. Can you learn how to like things instead of not like them? Imagine what your life would be like if you woke up in the morning and said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen today, but I’m going to love it. I don’t care what it is. It’s going to be fun. I’m going to put my heart into it. It’s like a video game — I’ll put my whole heart into it. I’ll work with it, and we’ll have fun together. If you don’t like me and you say mean things about me, that’s fun. What can I do about that? How can I handle that? How can I learn to not let it bother me?”

See this all the time — how can you let another person’s words bother you? You listen to me. How can you let another person’s words bother you? They are the sum of their learned experiences. Their words have nothing to do with you. You just interacted with them in the last ten minutes. They have this whole history of what made it bother them. But you think, “I made it bother them. I feel guilty. I feel ashamed. I did terrible.” You didn’t do anything. It’s them inside of themselves who had all these past experiences that when you put them together and you did your thing, they got bothered.

I always tell you — people are not yelling at you. You just happen to be standing in a place on planet Earth where somebody’s yelling. If an experience happened to them three minutes before they walked up to you and it was a nice experience, they’d be talking about how nice you are and how wonderful everything is. “I love your hair.” If they’re in a bad mood because their girlfriend or boyfriend left them two minutes before they talk to you, they don’t like you. “You remind me of her.” You hear me? They project themselves onto you, and so you take it personally.

Can you learn to not take it personally? Absolutely. But we’ve got to talk about it. This is called real work on yourself — to where you’re always okay. Always okay, not conditionally okay. That’s the difference. It’s not about the conditions happening to match. It’s about you in there — that you’ve worked with yourself enough to say, “Yes, my past experiences have programmed me.” Can you learn to work with that? Can you learn to look and say, “Not only do I not have to be like that, I don’t want to be like that. I would like to be a loving and kind person. I’m okay with people. I’m okay with things.”

I love — I’m a nice Jewish yogi, and when I talk like this, I love quoting Christ: “Let you who is without sin throw the first stone.” Is that how we live? Not a chance in the world. But you wake up and you realize, “I don’t want to be like that.” I do have that in me. Don’t be embarrassed by what you have in you. It’s the sum of your learned experiences. Unless you accept that you’ve been programmed, is there a part of your being that you would like to never tell anybody about? Okay. It’s not your fault. You’re in there, and these impressions got left, and you didn’t know how to deal with them, and so now you’ve stored them inside.

And so you look at it, and you say, “I’m in here. It doesn’t have to be like that in here. In fact, instead of trying to control the world to match the junk I have inside of me, why don’t I work with the junk that’s inside of me to get rid of it?” And then all of a sudden, everything’s fine. Because I’m telling you, it will be fine.

If you just sit there and say, “I can handle it. I can handle it. I can handle whatever’s happening” — doesn’t mean you don’t deal with it. People misunderstand my teaching about surrender or acceptance. If something’s happening and it’s out of tune… here’s an example. You’re in an airport, and some mother is shaking, shaking the kid — really abusively, right? And you used to get shaken when you grew up, and it’s really bothering you. When you react based on the fact that it’s bothering you, I guarantee you it will not help that situation. Why? Because you just brought your stuff and added it to the stuff that’s making that person be the way they are.

Is it possible that you’ve worked on yourself enough to say, “There’s a mother or father shaking their child” — and realize, “Who knows what’s going on? I wasn’t here for everything that caused this. So is there anything I can do now that doesn’t come from being bothered?” Doesn’t mean you have to feel good. I’m clear, I’m centered. Is there anything I can do to help this situation? Maybe you get the police. Maybe you walk up and say something. Maybe you wait a little bit to see what’s unfolding. I would never tell you what to do because it’s based on the situation. But I will tell you this: if you can’t handle what’s happening, you are not going to do well with it, because you can’t handle it. What you’re going to do is attempt to manipulate the situation so it stops bothering you.

“Say you’re sorry. Mean it.” What does that mean? What you said bothered me. You said you were sorry, but I don’t believe you. Say it in a way that I believe it. In other words, say something that makes me feel better about the fact that I couldn’t handle what happened. That’s about you. That’s not helping anybody — you’re not even trying to help anybody else. You’re not trying to find out why the person said it. You’re not trying to learn more. Nothing. You’re just trying to say, “This bothered me. You make sure it stops.” So everything you’re doing is for you. It’s just pure ego.

First, learn to handle things. They come in. They don’t have to feel good. It’s not easy, but you learn. And you get somewhere. It’s about — I don’t know — 60, 70% is good enough. You’re never going to get 100%. There’s always a little residual, but the residual stops bothering you. It’s so little that you don’t have to act on it. And so basically, you look at it and say, “Okay, it’s happening. It’s bothering me. I’m not going to act while it’s bothering me. I’m going to let go.” That’s where letting go comes from.

What does letting go mean? Somebody asked me the other day, “What does that mean, letting go?” I know what it means — I’ve been working on this for 55 years. It means the energy came in. My tendency is to resist it. You see a tendency, don’t you? A tendency to get angry, a tendency to get jealous, a tendency to… It’s a tendency. Instead of going with that tendency, you say, “I can handle this,” even if you don’t think you can. “I can handle this.” And instead of resisting, you relax. And that’s the key. It’s the hardest part for you all to do.

If it’s not feeling good, and it’s challenging you — you feel angry, jealous, fear, anxiety, desire, whatever it is — and you’re having trouble handling it, letting it go, letting it pass through… It’s like the white lines on a road. You do good with those, don’t you? But not what the husband said while you were driving by. So you tend to resist it. You literally have to get to the point where you’ve practiced not resisting it, saying, “Okay, it doesn’t feel good, but if I push it away, it’s going to stay. If I’m willing to handle it not feeling good, willing to accept that this doesn’t feel good — I’m not lying, this doesn’t feel good — so what? Lots of things don’t feel good.” And this comes in, and I’m telling you, it will pass through you. Not the first time or second time, but every time you’re willing to relax instead of resist, you let a little more of that energy go through you.

And not only is it that incident that makes it through — it’s how much it disturbs you that made it through, and there are lots of incidents that could have made that level of disturbance. Now you know how to let go of that level of disturbance. See the difference? It extrapolates out to anything that creates that level of disturbance. So when you let go, you’re learning to handle all those situations of an equal level, and it really works. People write me from all over the world all the time, basically saying, “I practice what you’re teaching and it works.” Of course it works. How can it not work?

Now that I’ve laid the groundwork — to tell you the reason you’re in trouble is because you held this stuff inside and now the world is bothering you — it’s not bothering you. It’s bothering the stuff you held inside. What do they call soft spots? You have stuff in there. So you literally catch on. It’s about letting go of yourself. It’s about saying, “I don’t need this stuff in here. I don’t care what happened in the past. I can handle it. I didn’t handle it, but I can.

I can let it go.” And the more you let go, the more you can handle. And the more you can handle, the more you can let go. And all of a sudden you’re in there letting go to the best of your ability. You will not be perfect. You will sometimes fall. It’s called falling. You get sucked down into that energy, but you come back up.

And I teach this all the time — if you’re sincere and you’re doing the best you can, no guilt, no shame, no fear. You did the best you could, and that’s always good enough. Then you have another shot. Don’t worry — it will come back around, but this time you do better. Why? Because you practiced. That’s all that’s asked of you. You just keep letting go. You keep letting go to the best of your ability. Your best ability is always good enough. If you’re learning to play tennis, it goes in the net. Every time you swing again, you get better. If you learn, that’s what you do with this. You just keep letting go, and then all of a sudden you’re not bothered by things as much, and you just relax.

The key — how do you let go? You relax through the experience of the energy. That’s the highest I can tell you. You relax through the experience of the energy which you used to resist. You don’t try to change the energy. Anger is anger. Fear is fear. Insecurity is insecurity. The question is, can you handle it? Because if you can handle insecurity, you feel it for a moment, but you’re still there. It passes through. You’re not frozen. You learn to handle the experience. That’s the essence of the difference. You’re not trying to not feel insecure. You’re trying to be okay if you feel insecure. There are times you feel insecure, but if you freak out and you change what you’re saying — then I’m sorry — you can’t handle things.

If you’re sitting there and you say something and the person says, “No, you’re wrong,” and you realize you are — instead of saying, “No, I’m not. Let’s go look it up” — you try to find some twisty thing that makes it seem you weren’t wrong because you couldn’t handle it. What if you don’t do that anymore, and instead say, “Oh, you’re right. I didn’t mean to say that”? You handled it. Isn’t that better than making sure it doesn’t happen, or making sure you’re not around — “Now I’ll never talk to the person again who noticed that I said it wrong. I’m not comfortable with them ever again.”

You just sit there and say, “I can handle what it feels like,” but you have to practice. You’re not going to do it immediately. If right now the biggest thing you can’t handle — it’s not going to all of a sudden just be handled. You have to first handle the weather, handle the driver in front of you, handle that somebody didn’t say what you wanted them to say. Well, so did 8.3 billion people on the planet not say what you wanted them to say. Learn to let go. That’s what letting go means.

It comes in, you tend to resist. It’s the same thing with desire, but I don’t want to talk about desire. You have much less trouble with desire, right? Because it happens much less, and people say to me, “What if something happened that I like?” Enjoy it. I don’t want to talk about it, but I guarantee you at some point it’s going to cause trouble, because you want it to happen again, and it will never happen exactly the way it did last time. You’ll say, “Well, I don’t understand. It doesn’t feel the same.” Of course it’s not the same. You’re a different person. They’re a different person. You will never, ever have the first kiss again. Not with that person. And that first one’s kind of magic, isn’t it? If you didn’t expect it and all of a sudden — vroom. You weren’t conditioned, and now you’re conditioned for it and waiting to see if it’ll happen again, so it can’t be the same.

All right. So you just get to the point where you say, “You know, this is silly. It’s silly being programmed by past experiences. I am better off learning to handle them and let them go.” But I always have a caveat with that, an understanding — put a condition on it. If you can let it go — at least reasonably; I say 60, 70% at least — so it’s not bothering you so much, there may be something you need to interact with. You understand that?

You know, the principal of the school calls you up. Your kid’s in 10th or 11th grade doing drugs, and they tell you, “We found drugs in your child’s locker.” And you’re pretty straight people who never thought your kids would ever do drugs. Can you handle it? No. What will my husband think? What are the neighbors… I can’t even think of… Then you have a problem, and your problem is not your kid — it’s you, and you are not going to work with your kid if you’re trying to fix you. Then you go pick the kid up. “How could you do that to me?” I’ve met parents like that. “How could you do that to me? You hurt me so much by doing that.” How is that helping the kid?

Instead, you feel it. It does not feel good. Of course it doesn’t feel good. Maybe there’s a sense of embarrassment or fear. Let it go. How? Relax through it. “I can handle this.” You relax through it. Now you’re clearer, and you go down and see what you can do to help. You’re quiet, you’re open, you’re receptive in order to deal with the situation. It’s wonderful if you get down there and find out that your kid’s locker was 182 and the principal is looking at 181. Then you don’t yell at the principal, “How could you put me through that?” Because he didn’t put you through anything. You handled it just fine. You say, “Oh, thank God. Thank you. Goodbye.” You can handle things, but it doesn’t mean you don’t deal with them. You deal with them from a place of clarity, so you’re making reasonable decisions that are best for the situation, not best for you.

Okay. There. I got to where I wanted to talk, which is: it’s about fear and desire running your life — trying to recreate what you desire, trying to stay away from what you fear. And there’s no way it works. Never. No chance in the world, because the world is always changing, and you’re changing, and everybody else is changing, and you can’t nail that sucker down. There’s not a chance in the world, and you know it. Instead, you learn to handle things. If I can handle them, they’re not a problem. If I can’t handle them, they are. So maybe I should learn to handle them. And I told you how.

It’s that easy. You will feel the tendency to resist or cling. Relax. I hope it bothers you to even say it. Instead of touching it that way, just fall back — very Zen, very judo — let it go through. At first it’s scary to do that, and then you learn to do it, and all of a sudden it’s not scary at all, because behind that energy, there’s the most beautiful energy you’ve ever experienced rushing up inside of you. You were blocking it, and when you’re willing to get rid of the blockages, you’re going to feel that Shakti pouring up inside.

All right. Jai guru dev.

Tami Simon: You’ve been listening to the Michael Singer Podcast, produced by Sounds True in partnership with Shanti Publications. For more information on Michael’s body of work and all back episodes, please join us at michaelsingerpodcast.com. Thanks so much for listening. Sounds True: waking up the world.