E205: The Pathless Path—Learning to Handle Reality

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Michael Singer: Hmm. Jai guru dev, jai masters. The true depth and beauty of the spiritual path is what some call the pathless path. There are practices, and you will do practices, and you can do practice. Practices are very good. But the pathless path, you will find out over time, is phenomenal, phenomenal to your growth.

Literally, if you walk the pathless path, a lot of times you will not be the same person who goes to bed at night as who woke up in the morning. That’s how fast your growth takes place, how fast the evolution is. What is the pathless path?

Life is reality. That which is happening is happening. That which has happened, has happened. That which will be, will be. It doesn’t mean everything’s predestined or something like that. Obviously, your input is part of what happens in the future, but your input is not part of what happens in the past.

That book’s already been written. You cannot change the past. The events that took place in the past, took place. Now, how you perceive them, and how you perceive them now — that’s all your mind, that you can play with all you want. We’ll talk about that. But in terms of the events, the grass grew, the leaves fell, the people talked.

That’s past, man. That’s happened. Anybody who’s telling you to go back and change it — not only can’t you, but you shouldn’t even try. What a waste of time. The present and the future are where existence takes place. What is the purpose of changing the past? There’s only one purpose: you didn’t do well with it.

How’s that? You, inside yourself, did not do well with the past, and so you don’t like it. Okay? To me, if you came to me, I would look you in the eye and say, “Man, that’s what happened. I don’t know you. You can’t rewrite that.” You can do it differently in your mind. You can say, “Well, it didn’t really happen like that.

She didn’t mean what she said,” or this, that, and the other thing. But the right thing to do with the past is to say, “Thank God it’s over.” If I didn’t like it, it’s not happening anymore. It’s a silly thing to sit there and say, “I don’t like it. I don’t like that Saturn has rings.” How am I doing? Terrible —

’cause Saturn has rings. I don’t like it if I get my telescope out and Saturn’s at an angle that I can’t see the rings. It is what it is. For you to fight reality is the silliest thing in the whole world. I don’t even know who came up with that concept. In Living Untethered, I define reality very simply: that which has already happened.

That’s a minimal line for reality. That which has already happened, you better be accepting as okay. That’s reality. And the question isn’t, did it happen? You know it happened. The question is, can you handle it? Can you handle that it happened? Maybe you couldn’t handle it when it happened. You had trouble with it.

We’ll talk about that. That’s part of the pathless path, right? It’s fine. Reality is reality. That’s part of reality. You weren’t able to handle it. Okay? But there’s nothing you’re gonna do about the fact that it happened. So the only thing you can do to be okay with the past is be okay with it. How’s that?

If you can’t change it, have fun not liking it, ’cause you won’t. All of Freud was about what you do when you don’t like your past. You do this thing called suppress, repress, denial. Anybody know anything about that? You push it away and try to make believe it didn’t happen, or at least try not to feel it again, okay?

And you may have noticed, that’s where Jung came in — that your dreams start expressing stuff symbolically and stuff like that, right? This stuff’s down there. It doesn’t do any good to shove it down there. It rots down there. It’s like a virus. It just spreads around everything. So if you don’t like something and you shove it down there, that’s what psychology studies.

That’s why there’s therapy. That’s why there’s everything. Because people shove stuff down there and now they can’t handle their life. “I can’t handle what my mother did to me 35 years ago.” Well, she’s dead, or she’s gone. You don’t live with her anymore. You still can’t handle it? “Don’t talk about it. I don’t like talking about my mother.”

That’s not a reality problem. Reality is Mommy is Mommy, and Daddy is Daddy, and first boyfriend is boyfriend, girlfriend. This is what happened in your past. How do you know? I think you know. If it didn’t happen, it wouldn’t be down there, but you couldn’t handle it. So the first step in the pathless path — it really is a first step — is understanding that shoving stuff down there does not make it not have happened.

It has happened. The fact that you can’t handle it, that’s where your work is. Hear me? Your work is to sit there and say, “I can and I will handle reality, and if I can’t handle it right now, what happened in the past” — and I know you can’t, that’s why you keep shoving it back down. You do shove it back down when it comes up, and I always teach this at the end, but I’ll do it at the beginning, right —

take some easy stuff. Easy stuff that’s happening every day in front of you — the weather, the driver in front of you, whatever, just simple little things. The only reason they’re bothering you is ’cause you said they do. Somebody else, they’re not bothered. They like the weather. Somebody else drives the way they drive.

You happen to be behind them. If they’re bothering you, it’s ’cause you decided to let them bother you. Can we go slow with that? Usually it’s the end where I talk about this. Is that not true? Can you decide that they don’t bother you? Just as easily as you can decide that they bother you. Okay? You can like the heat.

I discuss that with you all the time. I had this experience in my life when I lived out here alone, and it was hot out here, okay. You live in the woods, and basically, there was no air conditioning in the car, a VW van, and there was no air conditioning in the house. So it’s hot, and he used to complain about the heat, even though he meditated.

He would meditate, meditate, and then he’d come out here and complain about the heat. And so one day — I’ll never forget the day, that’s why I talk about it — I walked outside to get into my van, and it was hot, okay. And so I talked to him because I was meditating, I’m in witness consciousness, and I talked to him.

“All right, Mick, hey, cool it. Cool it. Stop complaining. Shh. Why is it hot?” Nice — you can talk to yourself productively. Why is it hot? He said, “Because of the sun.” He’s smart. I said, “The sun. Okay, what is the sun?” And that was it, changed my life. He said, “A star.” Who doesn’t like stars? They’re romantic, they’re beautiful.

Who doesn’t like stars? That is a star, and you’re close enough to one of those twinkle-twinkles that are out there that you feel its heat. That’s pretty awesome, isn’t it? There are 300 billion of them in your galaxy, and this one’s close enough that you feel the heat, and it’s 93 million miles away.

All of a sudden it’s neat. It’s fun. I get to feel what it’s like to be near one of those stars. You just change your attitude, and suddenly it’s fun. Suddenly, every time now I step out of a car and it’s hot out, it just happens naturally. Ever since then — that’s fifty-some years ago — if I step out and I feel that heat, it’s like I just feel God.

I just feel like, “Whoa, I’m standing next to a star.” That’s a star, guys. You just change your attitude about it. You made an attitude that says, “I don’t like it.” Well, make an attitude, “I do like it.” That’s a lot easier than trying to move, a lot easier than trying to change the weather. There was a thing once I read about Moscow — there was too much snow, this was way long ago —

I read an article. They were gonna make a cloud-blowing thing that blew the clouds away from Moscow, so that the snow all fell on the outskirts, right? And then they started thinking, “Well, then there’s gonna be all this snow on the outskirts, that’s not exactly fair.” And they decided to leave it alone.

But the net result is, this is the beginning of the pathless path. What do you mean? Well, we know about meditation, we know about mantra. Do we know about honoring and respecting what’s in front of you? That’s not you doing something. That’s you not doing something. That’s you not complaining about it.

That’s you not being unable to handle it. Do you see the difference? And you finally get to the point — that’s the beginning of understanding the pathless path: can I handle the moment in front of me? Can I handle yesterday? If you can’t handle yesterday, you’re in big trouble. Why? It’s over, and you’re not going to change it.

Are you? And if it’s bothering you, then you have a problem. Otherwise, you look at it, give it a kiss on the head as it’s passing by: “I love you. I’m sorry if I didn’t get everything just right. I’ll do better.” And you just keep on trucking. You just keep on moving, and then you don’t store this stuff inside.

And if you don’t store the stuff inside, you don’t have a problem with your past. Why? ‘Cause you didn’t have a problem when it happened. Now, there’s stuff down there that’s way deeper than that, that’s not that easy to let go of. But I’m telling you, if you don’t practice letting go of the easy stuff, you will never be able to let go of the big stuff.

If you practice a sport, if you practice an instrument, you get better at it. If you practice handling reality, you get better at it. That’s the foundation of the pathless path. It’s all about you in there and reality out here. What’s your technique? Handle it. See? That is a pretty good technique. Not how many hours did you meditate, not how many mantras did you do, not how many malas did you…

Which, those are wonderful things, I don’t talk against them, right. But I’m telling you, if you don’t do this, you’re really not going anywhere. Just sit down and meditate, go to retreat, and come back. Wait and see how screwed up you are in a week. It comes back. Why? You left it down there. As opposed to saying, “I don’t want to put more stuff down there.

I know that the stuff down there is a problem, so I won’t try to mess with it, it’s too hard and it’s too much.” I’m not telling you to make yourself neurotic trying to work with yourself, but at least start with the simple stuff. And if you start with the simple stuff, you’re gonna be shocked to find out how it changes your life. Just to not complain about the weather ever again for the rest of your life — rest of the day, let’s say, right?

Will change your life. That’s an entire negativity, complaining world that you create for yourself that you can’t change anyway. Learn to not do that, okay. So that’s the start of how one learns not to do that. ‘Cause this is gonna be the entire pathless path as we go from past, present, and future, okay.

And this is good, I like starting with the past. There are things in the past, little things, that come up that still bother you. They bother you. If you think about them, they bother you. If somebody doesn’t say something, it bothers you. If somebody says something, it bothers you. There’s just little things that come up all day that he or she complains about, and that don’t feel so good, right?

Here’s how you work with that if you want to tread this path. What you’re experiencing inside is energy. They are energy shifts. The world doesn’t come in. I’ve discussed this with you over and over again. The world stays out there. It emanates vibrations. It emanates energy that gets picked up by your senses.

All right? I said that last time. I know it’s hard for you. You do not look out through your eyes. Light bounces off the atoms, and it comes back, and it gets, quote, “codified.” It gets turned into vibrations that pass up through the nervous system, and then you experience them. You’re not experiencing the actual event.

You’re experiencing a vibration that came in, and then it passed through up to you. I wanna know, do you understand that? And now what happens? You experience it inside because it emanated a vibration. Its action, its words, its touch, taste, smell, who cares — came in through your senses, but the event itself did not come in.

The vibration came in and passed up to you. That’s where you get to grow. That’s the beginning of your spiritual growth, when you understand inside is inside, outside is outside, and never the twain shall meet. The outside does not come in. The inside does not go out. You can express it outside and throw vibrations out.

They can come in, and you feel them, all right. But those are two different worlds. Let’s draw right there — there are two different worlds, your inside world and your outside world. Inside, you have thoughts, emotions, and the senses come in. Outside, you have physical form, okay. All the physics go on outside, and they get transferred inside through vibrations of energy.

That’s all it is. It’s just vibrations. That’s what sight is — vibrations. That’s what light is. That’s what sound is. You know that? Sound is waves. Light is waves. Touch — it gets passed up as a vibration. It passes up your nervous system. Smell, taste, all of it — they are sensations that get picked up and passed back to you, but you live inside, and it lives outside.

So when things come in, you will feel a change in your inner vibration. It can be uplifting. It can be boring. It can be scary. It can do all kinds of things inside, can’t it? All right? When it starts doing that — right when it starts doing that — be conscious enough to look and say, “Can I handle this?” Not, “Do I like it?”

Never ask yourself whether you like it or not, or do I not like it? All right? All you’re doing is inviting yourself to get screwed up. “I like it, I don’t want it to leave, I want more.” You hear me? “I don’t like it, I never want it to happen again.” There you are — you’re already screwed up. You already made a mess in there.

And whatever it was didn’t manage to come in and make it through you. It came in, and you made a mess of it. So the first thing you do is — to me, it’s the highest — again, I’m a yogi, but I know about mantras and meditation and yoga and all the wonderful techniques, and they’re wonderful. But I’m telling you, the pathless path is very, very deep, okay.

I do it this way. People say, “Well, should we meditate?” People ask me, “Why don’t you teach meditation?” My guru did. In yoga, I was big on meditation, okay, and I meditate. But I don’t teach meditation. There are tons of meditation teachers. I wanna teach you what to do when you’re not meditating.

That’d be a fun thing to know. How can I grow spiritually when I’m not meditating, when I’m not focused on a mantra, when I’m going to work, when I’m dealing with a relationship, when I’m in the outer world, when I’m driving, when there’s traffic, when there’s beeping? When I’m in the world, in the whole thing, interacting with what’s actually going on out there.

That’s what I wanna teach you. And wait till you see what happens, ’cause it’s phenomenal, the transformation, how fast it is, if you take on the responsibility of saying, “This event took place. It’s coming in. I can feel it causing a problem.” Causing a problem ’cause I really like it, and I wanna cling to it —

I want it to happen again, to grab it. Or I don’t like it, I don’t wanna feel this, right? You just feel the energy. Do you feel energy? You know what I’m talking about. It comes up. What are emotions? You can’t touch them. Show them to me. They’re vibrations. What are thoughts? You can’t touch them. They’re vibrations.

They’re vibrations, vrittis, on the mental plane, and they’re vibrations on the energy plane. That’s what emotions are. You think I’m not talking about yoga? Annamaya kosha, physical plane. Pranamaya kosha, emotional energy plane. Manomaya kosha, mental plane. Vijnanamaya kosha is your inspiration, your wisdom kosha — it just comes down into your mind from the higher plane.

And then anandamaya kosha, the body of ecstasy. That’s the entire path. Very good. It’s all vibrations, they’re all vibrations at different rates. The only difference between the mental plane and the emotional plane and the vijnana plane is the rate of vibration that’s taking place.

So these are all vibes that come in and you experience them. The trouble is, you can’t handle them. How’s that? You can’t go through your day, you can’t go through an hour of your day without getting all weird. It gets weird in there, right? It just does weird things. I don’t know what to tell you. It doesn’t stay very stable, does it?

You try to fight it to make it do that. What you really do is try to manipulate the outer world so that when it comes in, it doesn’t get too weird. You’re literally trying to change what comes into you so that it feels good when it comes in, doesn’t feel bad, and you go to a lot of trouble to manipulate, control.

So that’s what we’re doing all the time — we can’t handle what’s coming in. Can you handle what’s going on outside? If you want to, you can handle anything. You’re in here. It can’t get in there to you. Sticks and stones can break my bones, words will never hurt me — that’s a little kid’s thing. Pay attention, all right.

You’re so sensitive. Anything, the way somebody acts, something. I told you, you’re in love, and you just can’t even handle how beautiful it is. You just say, “I love you, I just love you so much.” What if nothing comes back? Or what if it comes back as, “Oh yeah, I love you too” — just the way you said it, and all of a sudden you’re out of there, man.

It’s the end of that relationship. A little sensitive? You can’t handle what goes on inside of you. Look at it. It’s important to know that. And what does that mean? It means the energy comes in, and then it does stuff inside. Usually what it does is hit the stuff that you couldn’t handle before and bring it back up.

Somebody comes up and gives you roses, and it’s supposed to be a special thing, they give you roses, and you start getting really weird and upset and so on: “Those look just like the roses when my mother died, why’d you do that to me?” They’re not the roses from when your mother died. Your mother died five years ago, and somebody’s trying to give you something nice.

But it doesn’t come in that way, does it? Not if it hits stuff you stored down there. That’s what it’s like to live inside. It’s not easy, is it? ‘Cause everything hits stuff, and it shifts, and — let’s not talk about it, right? First, let’s start this way. It does not have to be like that. Let’s get that straight.

Period. It does not ever have to be like that, but that’s graduate school, okay. So you start off by saying, “Why is there all this stuff in here, and why am I so reactionary?” There are people who can’t go home to see their parents without getting weird. They can’t. They come to me and tell me, “I have to go down and spend some time with my parents.

I don’t do really good with that. They really upset me.” And then, like, when they come back, they say, “You know, I’ve been practicing the teachings. I did fine with them this time. I’ve never, ever done fine before, look at that.” That’s because you learned to handle the vibrations inside of you. In fact, someone said to me a while ago, this was a short time ago, “They didn’t change.

They were exactly as weird as they normally are,” right. “Exactly the same, but I guess I changed, ’cause it didn’t bother me.” It was just like, “Oh, okay, here’s some people.” So you can work with yourself, and again, the important part is the outside is the outside. It’s gonna do its thing. That’s a whole talk that I love giving, that I can’t give fully this time.

Where’d the outside come from? Right now, there are moments unfolding in front of you. How’d you end up sitting there? How’d you end up wearing that? If you look back at it, that would take a lifetime to explain — because I don’t know, that was given to you by somebody, and then, and then the thing, it was a little cold today, and every single thing caused everything.

To try to explain why anything is the way it is, don’t even try. How’s this? You know why everything is the way it is? It is the result of everything it ever was. It’s called cause and effect. That which happened caused other things to happen, and that means everything everywhere is interacting. They even say the pattern of the stars in astronomy, how they were patterned when you were born, affected this.

I don’t wanna talk about it, it gets too big. But the net result is, every single thing going on in front of you has a lot of history, doesn’t it? And if anything was different, it wouldn’t be the same. Okay? So the outside is the outside. The inside is what you did when it came in. What should happen — let’s get that straight.

A great being — it comes in, they experience it, and it passes through. It does not get stored in there. That’s what the Buddhists mean by empty mind, the void, clarity. It comes in, maybe it doesn’t feel good, okay, fine. Then it doesn’t feel good, right? Is that okay, that it didn’t feel good? Is it okay that it felt scary?

Is it okay that you felt some anger? Is it okay that somebody said something and you didn’t like it? Sure — why? Because that’s what happened. Reality wins. It came in. Did it make it through you, or did you put your hands on it and manipulate it and control it and push it away and grab it and rationalize it, et cetera?

And the answer is yeah. Yeah, that’s what I did. If it didn’t feel good, I tried to either suppress it or tell it to shut up, or change it outside, okay, or rationalize it. Oh my God, what could you do with it? We’re laying the foundation for the pathless path. It’s about life. So what’s the answer?

Learn to handle reality. Like I was saying, that’s a path. Learn to handle reality. What does that mean? It means I’m here, reality’s — how do I know it’s reality? It’s happening in front of you. Start with that. Start with the simple stuff. Wake up in the morning — it’s part of this pathless path. You wake up in the morning and you say, “Hi.

Hello, world, I’m back.” You listen to my lecture about the quantum field — it’s pretty amazing that thing’s still there, vibrating from nowhere, it’s coming up, and your bedroom is still there, your bed’s still there, your body’s still there. Wow, pretty neat. Now you wake up, “I’m back.” Now what? The first thing you do is say, “A day is going to unfold in front of me.”

What’s gonna happen? How do I know? What’s gonna happen is what’s gonna happen. I don’t run the world. I interact with it, do my best, but — what did John Lennon write? “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” Have you noticed that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans?

Or does everything go exactly the way you want? Okay, so you wake up, and you sit there and say, “A day is gonna unfold in front of me, and I am going to handle it. I can handle whatever happens. That’s what I’m gonna do today.” That’s my practice, my meditation practice, my whole practice: I am going to handle the moments unfolding.

Now, you may have to meditate a little more than just saying that, so that you’re clear enough to be able to do it. See? Meditation has its place, but it’s all part of the pathless path, ’cause you’re gonna deal with reality when it’s all said and done. So here it comes, and now you step out there, and you turn on your electric toothbrush, and it doesn’t buzz.

Whoa, what a tragedy — because probably there’s a regular toothbrush in the drawer right there. You don’t have to get upset about it, do you? But you do, don’t you? So you catch yourself right then and there. It’s okay. Not, do I want it, not, do I not want it — can I handle it? That’s the pathless path. Can I handle the moment that’s unfolding in front of me?

If you can handle the moment unfolding in front of you, you can be present for the next moment. If you can’t handle the moment unfolding in front of you, then the next moment you’re gonna pay attention to, ’cause you’re busy caught in the last moment. And you start watching and saying, “That’s my practice.

My practice is I can handle it.” And anytime the mind says, “I can’t handle that, I just bought that toothbrush, I paid the best…” Okay, go on, make a big deal out of it, because it’s not gonna change a single thing. It’s just gonna make you upset. So you wonder why you’re neurotic. You wonder why you have anxiety.

People have anxieties. They wake up in the morning saying, “What if my electric toothbrush doesn’t work?” They’re gonna wait for it not to work. Right or wrong? But “will you love me tomorrow?” There you go. Don’t tell me you don’t do that. That’s where your work is — to catch that, and sit there and say, “I can handle it.

I can handle the toothbrush. I can handle this. I can handle the car in front of me. I can handle the weather. I can handle the rain. I can handle hot. I can handle cold.” Doesn’t mean you can’t go into the house because it’s hot or cold, but when you’re taking a terribly long twenty-foot trek from the car to the house, stop complaining, just for at least twenty seconds.

Catch yourself, and you will be happier when you leave the car and make it to the house than you would’ve been if you complained the entire way. This is your work. This is spiritual work. This is meditation. This is walking meditation, that’s what they call it, all right. So basically, now I’m there —

okay, I understand, I’ve taken the challenge, okay. I wake up, and I go — toothbrush, whatever it is, right — and the vibration immediately changes. What do I do? Push it away? No, no. Do not suppress. Suppression doesn’t work. That’s just a matter of storing it inside. It will come back later. You’re just trying not to deal with it now.

No, no, no. Just say, “I can handle it. I can handle this. I can handle it.” What if your mind said that instead of “I can’t handle it”? All right? And you’re gonna find out there’s a whole bunch of what I call low-hanging fruit that you can handle if you bother. You’re just not bothering, and that is your spiritual growth.

And the pathless path means you’re interacting with what’s actually happening, instead of what you want to happen or don’t want to happen, and making a mess inside because of that. If you don’t want something to happen, you can’t be happy — even if it’s not happening, the possibility that it might happen.

And if it happened in the past, you don’t like that it did happen. You see what I’m saying? It’s so clear when you’re making a mess of yourself for absolutely no reason. No reason. But no one talked to you like this. Instead, they tell you, “Go out there and fight to make it be the way you want.” It’s not gonna be the way you want.

So basically, you come down to, “I can handle it.” All right, so I’m not gonna belabor it. What you do with the present, when you wake up in the morning, is say, “I’m gonna handle today. Forget the past and forget the future. I’m gonna handle today, the events that happen today.” And I promise you, it’s unbelievable how that will change you.

Why? What does it mean to be able to handle the event that you wouldn’t have been able to handle, that you would’ve complained about? It means you’re starting to deal with the energy at a much deeper level. It comes up. It used to come up and get you upset, and you expressed being upset, talked about it, whatever, suppressed it, did whatever.

Now it comes up, and you notice it. You gotta be witness-conscious, and you notice. Witness consciousness isn’t just noticing your mind — you notice a shift in the energy, because you didn’t like something, because you did like something, because somebody said something. It shifts, doesn’t it? Things are different in there.

So instead of freaking out, you say, “I can handle it.” How do you actually go about handling it? And that’s the deepest thing I’ve learned on my entire path for all these years. The tendency is to protect yourself from the energy, which is very funny, ’cause energy can’t hurt you. But you wanna protect yourself, don’t you?

“I don’t wanna feel this. I don’t wanna think this.” You try to push it away. The moment you notice yourself coming down, the consciousness focusing on it to push it away — relax instead. And people misunderstand that. They don’t do it so much now, with all the books that are written, but they say, “How can I get anger to relax?

How can I get jealousy to relax? How can I get fear to relax?” The answer is, you don’t. You relax. That’s the difference. You — in there, who would have resisted — relax. All right? You didn’t change the energy. You let it go. That’s a big difference. You’re not struggling with the energy. At first, you will. I hope you listen and you grow.

You don’t struggle with the energy. You honor and respect — okay, this is the energy, you’re not ignoring it. It’s just, basically, I am aware, and I don’t have to push it away. I would rather relax, but if I relax, it comes closer to me. Yes, it does, doesn’t it? That’s why I pushed it away, so it didn’t come close to me, the consciousness, the experiencer.

I didn’t want the experience, so I pushed it away, but that’s where your work is. Are you willing, instead of pushing it away — you have hands in there, don’t you? They push things around, cling and resist. It’s not your willpower, you can do that. It’s the focus of consciousness — like hands. Instead, you catch yourself right there, and you relax.

Relax. Just literally, physically relax, and then inwardly don’t resist. But you say, “Well, what happens when I don’t resist?” It will come closer. “But that doesn’t feel good.” But it will make it through. The only reason it stays is because you keep it. Why do you want to keep what doesn’t feel good?

Doesn’t make any sense at all. What you have to be willing to do is say, “I can handle the moment of it passing through.” Some stuff you can’t — you know that, they’re big, right? Your ex-husband shows up with his new wife. Yes, it does all kinds of stuff, all right. All kinds of things go on in the world, and you’re not ready.

That’s okay, that’s fine. What if it’s not allowing you through? What if it’s something really big that has always bothered me, and then somebody comes and says it? What do I do? I’ll tell you what you do. It pulls you down, you get upset, and you dump. That’s what you do. Well, but that’s not nice. Yeah, but it’s the best you could do.

If that’s all that happens, you understand that? If that’s what’s gonna happen — you get lost, and it pulls you down into the energy, and you don’t handle it well — do better next time. Give the pathless path a chance. Don’t feel guilty. If you do your best at dealing with your inner energy, that is, by definition, the best you can do.

Okay? Don’t judge yourself. Don’t get down on yourself. Don’t get depressed. Don’t feel guilty. Just, when you come back up — and you will come back up — you’ll come back up and look at it and give it a kiss on the head and say, “We’ll do better next time,” right? And then, over time, what I learned is, not “we’ll do better next time” —

it’s that it’s okay. Your days are numbered. It won’t keep hitting me. I can handle it. Let me go through what I need to go through. That is the pathless path. Life is your guru. Life is your teacher. Life is phenomenal. And eventually you’re gonna see that every single thing that happens to you is —

if I say it’s for your growth, it’s not gonna happen just for you, but if it hit you, then it’s for your growth, right? It’s such a big topic to talk about — why is life such a perfect teacher? Because you’re exactly the one that needs to be taught, because it hits your stuff. It didn’t hit his stuff, so he didn’t need it.

You were standing right next to him, and it hits your stuff, what somebody said. Therefore, the world is your perfect teacher, ’cause it hits your stuff. It’s not so much that it’s doing something different. It’s doing its thing. But you got stuff stored in there, and it’s gonna hit your stuff and not somebody else’s.

Therefore, you didn’t need the teaching, and you do. That’s why it’s perfect. Do you understand that? It’s more than — because you take it as something you need to learn, because you react to it, and somebody else doesn’t. It just drives right through. So basically, you come to the point, the energy starts to shift.

The best thing to do is, the moment it starts to shift, you remember this discussion. I can handle this. I want to handle this. I do not want yet another samskara — we call them samskaras, these patterns you store inside. I don’t want another one of those inside of me. Have you noticed how quick one can get made, and how hard it is to let it go?

Somebody say one thing to you that you don’t like — every time you see them, it bothers you. Every time someone calls your name out somewhere in public, it’s not even them. Now get rid of that. It only took a second to put it in. You could spend a lifetime trying to get rid of it.

Well then, maybe we shouldn’t put it in. Maybe it’s worth the momentary disturbance of letting it pass through, as opposed to having to own it and work with it for the rest of your life, okay. That’s the pathless path. You’re honoring the effect that life can have for you, not on you, and you do it by saying, “I can handle this.”

And so the stuff comes in, and you relax your way through it. The first few times you do that, it’s like, “Ah, I can’t do it, oh my God, it hurts, it’s so bad, I’m scared, oh my God.” And then you do it a couple of times. Do small stuff first. Do it a couple of times, and all of a sudden it’s easier. You’ve opened up more.

You can handle more. And eventually, you wake up in the morning, and you realize nothing can bother you. That’s why I want you — nothing that will happen that day can bother you. Are there things that can be intense, which you have to deal with? Yeah, but you let them go as they pass through. You do your best, you let them go.

This whole thing of no guilt and no shame is very, very important. If you’re doing the best you can, there is no guilt and no shame. That’s the best you can do. You have the right to learn, don’t you? When you play tennis, you don’t know how to get the ball over the net at first. You have the right to learn.

Practice. I say again, I don’t understand — you practice instruments, you practice how to walk and how to talk, we practice a million things, but you don’t practice your inner work. You don’t practice, “Can I learn to let go?” You say, “No, I’ve never been able to do that.” That’s not an answer, right? “I can’t play the piano, therefore I’m not gonna try.

I’ve never played tennis, well, I’m not gonna touch a racket, I don’t even know how to do it.” You don’t take that attitude, or you’ll never learn anything. You’ll never go anywhere with it. Inside, you don’t take the attitude, “I can’t handle it.” You say, “I do the best I can every moment, and I get better every single day.”

And that’s why I said to you that you will get to a point, you’ll notice it, you will be amazed that when you go to bed at night, you’re not the same person who woke up in the morning, because you let go of stuff. You made it through stuff. Somebody did something you wouldn’t have liked, and you look at it —

it’s okay. I don’t even want the negativity for one second inside of me. I’d rather be neutral and open next time I see them. I don’t want what they did that bothered me to come back up because I see them again. Not even that — I handle it when it comes back up. It doesn’t come back up. Why? Because you let it go.

You start new, okay? This whole teaching, that some of the teachers teach — this thing that everything is new. It’s a first-time experience. So when you meet a person, it doesn’t matter what they did before. So much to talk about, like this whole thing about first impressions — I’ve been discussing that lately. They make a big deal out of first impressions. That’s ridiculous. Somebody’s in a bad mood and you meet them — don’t you dare let your first impression of them be who they are. That’s not who they are. It’s who they were at that moment, and it’s who you were at that moment.

Maybe you had a bad experience when you met them, so it didn’t work well. Maybe they had a bad experience when they met you. So how can this first impression mean anything? “I know that person, I met them over two years ago for five minutes, man, no, no, I don’t like them.” So you learn to let go. You learn to relax and release, to let go —

not let go of life, let go of your resistance to life. It’s a totally different thing. I realize that sometimes I talk and people don’t get the other half. Once you let go, it’s not over. If it’s little things, like the weather or the car in front of you, something somebody says, yeah. But what if it’s something you need to deal with?

Somebody screwed up at work, or there’s a relationship problem, or something like that that needs — you can’t just let it go. You can let it go if you want, but that’s a form of suppression, denial. You’re not dealing with it. No — first you let go. First, that’s what I want from you. First, you let the energy pass through.

No matter what it is, you let it pass through, so you have clarity. Then you look outside and see, “Is there something I’m supposed to be doing about this?” Not “I want to,” or “I don’t want to,” or “I have to.” It’s not a reaction. See the difference? It’s clarity. I handled it. It passed through. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be doing something outside.

And what you’re gonna find out, every time, over time, is that what you end up doing is not for you or about you. It’s about the situation. It’s about the other person. It’s actually an act of service. Why? ‘Cause you’re not serving yourself. It’s not something you do because you couldn’t handle it, or because you want something different.

It’s not about you. And once it’s not about you, what’s it about? It’s about, “for the sickness, let me bring health, for the sadness, let me bring joy” — that’s St. Francis’s prayer, right? It’s a very natural state. If you don’t need anything, you don’t feel like you’re serving. It doesn’t feel like that — “I’m gonna help people, I’m gonna be good.”

There’s just nothing making you otherwise, ’cause it’s clean enough. And now, when you come outside, and you will come outside, you go to work. But you don’t go to work to get paid. You go to work to do the work with your full heart and soul. And people say, “I wish I could find a job I’m passionate about.”

No, I wish you’d be passionate about every job. Why not? You’re sent to a little planet spinning in the middle of nowhere, and the universe gave you something to do. It could just be moving rocks around, if you want, right? It’s all the same thing. The planet’s meaningless. I can’t give you all my talks at once.

I would like to. I’d like to compress them down, right. I mean, you’re sitting on a little planet spinning in the middle of nowhere — 1.3 million Earths fit inside the sun, and there are three hundred billion stars in the galaxy, and there are two trillion galaxies, and you think you’re doing something. And you’ll be here for what?

Eighty, ninety years. The planet’s been here for 4.5 billion. It’s the most meaningless thing in the whole world. What, you? But I want to be important. If the whole planet blew to smithereens tomorrow, a few other planets would change their orbit, and nothing else in the entire universe would change. And you’re — that’s the whole planet, and you’re talking about you?

That’d be funny. You got an ego problem, right? What happens if you don’t have an ego problem? Then I’m honoring and respecting life as it comes in. It’s passing through me. But I can help. I can serve the moments in front of me. I can smile. I can laugh. I can lend a hand. I can help somebody. Why? Because I don’t need to help me. Once you’re gone — Meher Baba said, “Man minus mind equals God.”

Christ said you must die to be reborn. That’s what he’s talking about. You die to the personal self to be born into the spiritual self. And once that happens, even partially — it doesn’t happen all at once — you’re gonna find yourself serving. That’s what it boils down to. If you look at it — huh, interesting.

It didn’t used to be like that. It used to be for me. Now there is no “for me.” I don’t care, okay? Getting the pathless path now? It’s very interesting, isn’t it? It’s every moment of your life. It’s every event of your life. So as it comes in, it passes through. And I told you, if it doesn’t, fine. You’re not perfect.

You’re not going to be perfect, right? The Gita has a line in it that says, “Fire will give off smoke.” There’s no such thing as fire without smoke. The world is not pure. That’s it. It’s gonna happen. There’s going to be impurity. Don’t let that decide your actions. Just do your absolute best, and honor and respect that this is not a perfect plane —

not a very high plane at all. So basically, things are gonna happen. Literally, the Gita says, “No action” — if you do an action, it brings with it impurity, some impurity. Let it pass, just like you would let smoke pass because of a fire. All right? So basically, you start honoring, respecting yourself, honoring and respecting that your path is to let go to the best of your ability, and you will learn from everything that takes place.

And if anything went wrong, learn from what comes back. That’s why you never even talk about karma the way people do. It’s not a punishment. It’s a teacher. If you do something and it causes harm to somebody else, it’s going to come back. Because of cosmic reasons? No — because they’re going to throw it back at you.

Pretty straightforward, right? They’ll tell somebody, and it just comes back, okay? Is that bad? No. The fact that you were not conscious enough, that you did something to hurt somebody, you just weren’t paying attention, or whatever it was, or you did it purposely even, okay — it’s going to come back.

When it comes back, it’s saying to you, “Here’s another shot at it. Would you learn from it? Did you learn from this?” And I always ask people, when they say, “I feel guilt about what I did in the past,” I ask them, “If the same event took place, same situation, would you do the same thing?” They look at me for two seconds —

“No, of course I wouldn’t.” Then you learned, didn’t you? And that was the purpose of it coming back. You learn from it, and you grow, and there’s nothing wrong with that. So I don’t want you to look at karma as, “He got bad karma,” all right? Your God is basically pure love, but if you have lessons to learn and you come from a lower place, they’re going to come back, and they’re basically saying, “Here, take another shot at it.

Can you do better? Can you do better? Can you learn from what you went through?” And I know you guys do — you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. Again, the pathless path is this constant interaction with life as your guru, as the perfection of God manifesting before you, teaching you what you need to learn. Are you willing to learn, or do you really want it your way, or not be the way you don’t want?

If you get caught up in what I want and what I don’t want, then you’re trying to manipulate everything and make a complete mess out of everybody, including yourself. But if you do this, even with small things — relax. That’s what I’m asking. I want you to notice that it gets weird. I like the word “weird,” right,

I don’t want to give it any other word. It gets weird. You feel the vibration, the shift. That’s Shakti. It’s all Shakti. You feel that vibration shift. Immediately: I can handle this, and just relax. Put your hands to the side, lean back, relax. Just relax. Breathe. Anything you want to do, but don’t resist. Let it come in.

It will get intense, and learn to handle that intensity until it passes. If you don’t touch it, it will pass. The only way it’s not passing is you resisting. It takes your willpower to stop it from coming out. Do you understand that? They say, “But aren’t there these body things that can store all this stuff?”

Of course there are, of course. Why? Because you pushed it away, therefore the energy had to get stored somewhere, and it got stored in your heart, it got stored in your body. Yes, that’s acupuncture, that’s all the stuff. That energy gets blocked because you blocked it. But if you don’t block it, it doesn’t.

So if you keep your hands to yourself and just keep relaxing and releasing to the best of your ability, the changes will be phenomenal. Then what happens? Then the things that used to be low-hanging fruit — all of a sudden the next layer up becomes low-hanging fruit. And so you start taking that attitude of being willing to let go.

Isn’t it a beautiful path, the pathless path? It’s exciting, isn’t it? You get to live it every moment of your life. It’s not, “Oh, I don’t have enough time to meditate.” Well, you have enough time to do this. You better, because it’s happening, okay. Eventually, you just let go. Ram Dass called it becoming nobody —

no self-concept, no hopes, no dreams, no concepts, no views, no opinions, no preferences. Just, I am loving life and handling life and interacting with life from a very real point of view, expecting nothing back, just doing my best to give and interact, and whoa — wait till you see how fast you grow. All right? I hope we’ve communicated.

I stressed a lot that I talked about the past and the present, right? But what about the future? You are projecting your past into the future. There is no future — it hasn’t happened yet. What you’re seeing is what you want based on what you experienced before, and what you don’t want based on what you experienced before.

And so you’re either afraid of your future — “I don’t want it to happen again, I had a bad relationship” — what are you doing? You’re projecting that stuff you stored in the past into your thought forms of the future. Do you do that? Or, “I had this wonderful experience once when I was 12, I just gotta wait for it to happen again.

Maybe if I move there, it’ll happen.” You’re projecting your past. Take a breath. Do you see that? There is no future, okay? We can talk about psychics later, okay — people can see the future, but it doesn’t have to happen that way, okay. Things — all I can say is, what you’re doing normally is letting your samskaras, patterns you stored in your mind from the past, project and create the thoughts of your future.

Can you see that? And that’s a ridiculous way to live. Now you’re stuck altogether. You’re stuck ’cause you’re stored in the past, you’re stuck ’cause you can’t handle the present, and you’re stuck ’cause you’re projecting the whole thing into the future. And so you’re scared, and you’re depressed, and so on. What’s the alternative?

Let go. If you let go of the everyday moments that are taking place, they won’t be stuck in there, and all of a sudden you didn’t store more. And when you don’t store more, you can handle more. And all of a sudden — you know, closing where I usually close — I didn’t even talk about the fun part. I talked about not being neurotic and screwed up and weird, right.

What happens, as you let go and don’t put more in there, the stuff that was blocking your Shakti flow comes out. It comes up and it comes out, and then you have less blockage inside. What does that do? All of a sudden you start feeling this tremendous upward flow naturally. You don’t have to do anything. It just flows up from down and keeps rushing up inside of you.

That’s your Shakti. That’s your natural state of being. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that leaveth the mouth of God.” That’s what Christ is talking about. You don’t live off your outside experiences. It’s flowing inside of you, right? You felt it. What if it doesn’t stop? What is feeding you day and night, no matter what happens?

Well, now it’s easy to handle the world, because you’re filled with love and filled with joy. It’s called the ascent. That’s what it’s called, the ascent. It just keeps going up from there, and then it gets really up. That’s what I pictured on the wall — enlightened masters, beings who let go completely and ultimately merged back with God, instead of being stuck in themselves.

All right, it’s hard to stop, but I’m stopping. Put a hard stop there. 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.