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. Some people are very, very, very sincere about their spiritual growth. They’ve either had some experience that lets them know there’s a higher part of their being than what they hang out with all day, and they want sincerely to find out how to tap into that, how to feel that, how to live with that.
There are many, many paths. There are so many paths about how to grow spiritually, about how to achieve higher states of consciousness, of awareness. Some of them are very willfully oriented. That’s the path of traditional Zen. Very, very disciplined, very strongly control of the mind, control of focus, control of your awareness.
That is the essence of those deep teachings of Zen, and they’re very beautiful. They involve struggling. They involve a very, very deep level of surrender, of letting go of yourself. And there are paths that are… I, I can’t teach them, but they’re devoid of will. They’re just, “God will take care of it. All I have to do is recognize the omnipresence and power of the divine light, the divine being, and I don’t really have to do anything.
And if I do anything wrong, I just apologize and go to confession or whatever, and basically it’s absolved.” Those are totally different extremes of the spiritual path between Zen and that type of attitude. Is either one right? They’re both right. They’re both right, and they depend on your nature. If your nature is one of strong motive, strong will, Zen is very, very powerful, and people have very deep experiences.
If it’s one of, “I really can’t do this. I’m not that strong, not that disciplined, and therefore I just, I give it, give it to God. You do it, and I will do my best to allow it to happen.” And then there’s everything in between. Ramakrishna told it this way. He said, “The spiritual path has two very different aspects.”
He said, “It’s like the different animals. A baby monkey, if the mother’s gonna swing through the trees and the baby wants to be taken care of, it has a job to do. It’s to grab the back of the fur,” you’ve seen it, “it’s to grab the back of the fur of the mother while the mother’s busy catching the vines and swinging.
That baby has a serious job that it better do. And then there’s the kitten, who just sits there
And mommy comes to pick it up by the scruff of its neck and puts it down where the mother wants it. Ramakrishna always said, “That’s me. I’m the kitten,” right? He’s a great yogi, great master. So these, these paths. The question is what works for you? But be careful because you can’t be lazy. You can’t sit there and say, “Well, I like the path of eating whatever I want, doing whatever I want, and apologizing afterwards,” and so on and so forth.
That’s not gonna work. This I assure you. Where is the balanced path? And what you’ll find, and it’s really beautiful because the Bhagavad Gita absolutely teaches it, but so does the Bible. They can do what they want with it. But Christ and the Bhagavad Gita teach the exact same core thing, which is, “Not my will, but thy will be done.”
That is the essence of the Bhagavad Gita. It’s told slightly different. It says, “Whatever actions you do, don’t do them for yourself. Don’t have self-motive.” And don’t tell me it doesn’t say that, because it does, and so does the Bible. It says, “Don’t have self-motive.” It’s not about getting for yourself. The Gita says, “Renounce the fruits of your actions.”
Those are just words, but they’re not just words. There’s a very powerful path, which is you’re going to act. You don’t sit in meditation all the time. You’re going to act. Every single time you act, what is the motive? And that’s deep spiritual teaching into itself. Witness consciousness. Take a look at the motive, the real motive, no messing around.
What is the motive behind your action? And what you’re going to see until you work on yourself, it’s about getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want. Do you understand that? Let’s be honest. It’s always about getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want. Anybody want to argue about that?
Okay. That’s what you do all day. That’s what your mind thinks about, that you’re afraid that you won’t get what you want. You’re afraid that you’ll get what you don’t want. And if you get what you want, you’re afraid you’ll lose it. Everybody listening? You’re gonna find that that is what’s going on back there until you do steep spiritual work with yourself.
So the question isn’t what are you doing outside, it’s what are you doing inside? Where are you coming from? And if you want to grow spiritually, you better be brutally honest with yourself, to be look and see, what is my motive? Not paint it white or justify it being what you want or avoiding what you don’t want or resisting and so on.
So ultimately, the work is inside. But still, outside, the teachings are the same, which is you’re going to act outside. You’re going to eat. You’re going to have relationships. You’re going to go to work. You’re going to deal with finances. You’re going to do those things. You don’t renounce those things.
That’s absurd. You’re alive. You have a body. It was a gift that was given to you. You have a mind. It can think. You have a heart. It can feel inspiration. It can feel. These are gifts that were given to you so that you can serve God. And that’s what it boils down to. And that is the essence of the Bible.
That is the essence of everything Christ taught. And that is the essence of what Krishna taught to Arjuna, is it’s all about serving God, not serving yourself. And in truth. And I don’t like to say this because people don’t want to hear it. It’s not even about serving others. That’s a really good thing to do, okay?
But what happens if you serve somebody and they don’t, they don’t respect it? They spit at you. They, they diss you. You get upset. That’s not fair. I’m not gonna do that again. But if you renounce the fruits of your actions, it means it makes no difference. You’re not doing it. That’s what I talk about.
You’re not doing it for somebody else. There’s nothing wrong with serving others. But the truth of the matter is, if you let go of yourself, and your whole attitude is, “I am now about to eat this,” I can pray to say thank you for it, right? That’s very beautiful. Or I could sit there and say, “I’m gonna get out of the way and let God eat his lunch.” That’s what it means to renounce the fruits of your action.
You’re not doing it for somebody else. You’re doing it to let go of yourself and be an instrument of the divine expression and the divine will. So not my will, but thy will be done. The ultimate of that is that you’re not even there. It’s talked about die to be reborn. Ram Dass talked about becoming nobody.
It’s not that you have control of yourself and you have a motive that’s nice, that’s wonderful, that’s very good, but that’s not the same thing as letting go of yourself. There is a state in which you’re not there. That’s very deep, and it’s very Zen, and it’s very Christian, and it’s very Jewish, and it’s very Hindu.
It’s all of them. It’s the essence of the deepest teachings, which is, can you not be there? Who’s the you? You know who the you is. The you who wants something or doesn’t want something, who’s afraid of something, and has scars from the past and wants to avoid what they don’t… You hear me? There’s somebody in there, in there, right?
Psychology calls it ego, self-concept. It’s something you built within yourself that is making you believe it’s you, and that’s all it talks about, is I, me, and mine. True spirituality is what Christ said, “Die to be reborn.” You have to be willing to let go of yourself. But what happens when you let go of yourself?
Meher Baba said, “Man minus mind equals God.” Man minus mind equals God. What does that mean? If you’re not there, it’s not that nothing’s there. Awareness is there. Consciousness is there. Being is there. You’re not that being. What you’ve done is built this whole model inside yourself of your past experiences that you liked and didn’t like, and now you’re trying to manipulate and control the world so that when it comes in, you’re happy, that you feel better.
No question you feel better when you’re getting what you want. How do you feel when you’re not getting what you want? How do you feel when you got what you want and then it betrays you? How do you feel when you thought you got what you want and you found out they were lying? It doesn’t work to get what you want.
What works is to give your entire being to something higher than you. I don’t care if you call it God. I don’t care if you call it the void in Buddhism. It doesn’t matter. The point is you’re not living for yourself, and that is the essence of the spiritual path. Like I said, I’m gonna talk very deep. Does that mean I’m living for others?
That’s really wonderful to live for others, unless you’re busy living for others as a spiritual ego. “That’s what I do with my life. I serve others.” Careful, there’s still an I there. That’s not the same thing as dying to be reborn. I hate to talk like this to you, all right? But I’ve always found it’s wonderful that you hear the higher states, right?
‘Cause as you’re growing, you’ll see, “Oh, that’s what was being talked about. Oh, I see that,” and you’ll grow into them. It’s a very beautiful path, right? To reach, to see the highest. Master called it, set it as the polestar of your life. You’re not there. It’s the polestar. But you have your eyes, your heart, your mind are aimed toward that, and that’s what we’re, we’re talking about today, is how do you do that?
How do you live that really high, truly selfless path? The funny part about it is, if you do that and you’re not living for yourself, you’re gonna find out everybody benefits. Because you’re not trying to take the energy and pull it into you. Whatever energy is flowing out goes to the other person. You know?
What did St. Francis say? “Make me an instrument of thy will.” It’s just basically, get me out of the way and let, let God, really ultimately, let God do it. I’ll tell you that story. Ramakrishna, I know it was Ramakrishna, he said, “There’s two times God laughs.” And when I say Ramakrishna, I’m talking about these highly enlightened beings, and he would tell stories to his disciples.
He said, “There are two g- times that God laughs. One is when the father dies, who’s wealthy, and the two brothers go out on the land, and they draw a line, say, “This half is yours, and that half’s mine.” None of it’s yours. It’s God’s. I mean, those stupid thing, you made all this up. Yes or no? All right? The other is when doctor comes in as the child is sick, and the doctor says, “Bring the child to me, Mother.
Don’t worry. I will heal your child.” And he said, “God laughs.” Right? This I is a problem. Even if what it’s doing seems reasonable, it will cause problems in the end because you’re not the doer. The universe, I, I’ll do it. I, I hope I don’t belabor it. You didn’t make the universe. There’s a person over there.
Did you make her? Did you make the 32 trillion cells that make up her body? Did you make all the experiences that happened to her so her mind is programmed with those experiences? How much did you do? Nothing. You did a little bit, ’cause I s- I smoked when I shouldn’t have. All right, well, who made the cigarettes, and who’s the doctors, and what is the hospital, and what is this?
You don’t do anything in comparison to what’s going on. The planet stays in orbit. You working hard? Start pedaling. All the stars stay as they’re gonna be. All of them affect every single thing in the universe. The atoms come together. Why do the atoms pull together the way they do to make water? You did that?
You take hydrogen and a couple of oxygens, put them together, make sure you have something to drink. Wake up. You’re not doing anything. You in there, you’re taking credit for everything or blame, and you’re deciding what happened to you in your past that made you feel better, and what happened to you in the past that made you feel worse, and now you’re out there trying to manipulate the outside world so that you can feel better.
You lose. Why? Because you’re not in control of the outside world. Anything can happen at any time. Somebody can run a red light. What did I do wrong? Nothing. I’m not into that kind of karma. It’s what happened. But why did they run the red light? They ran the red light because they were looking down to get a Kleenex because their nose is running, and they went and did the same thing you do every day, but they got in trouble.
You’re not the doer, and I wish you didn’t even have that concept of good things happen because you were good and bad things happen because you were bad. God is the only doer of all the creation, and as every star, all the galaxies, the black hole. How many galaxies are there? They say two trillion at least.
How many stars are there in each galaxy? Hundreds of billions, and you’re the doer. Sitting here on this little planet, having these experiences, saying, “I’m in charge. I did wrong. I did right.” If you get rid of the I, all of a sudden consciousness feels this connection to everything. That’s what enlightenment means.
Enlightenment is not some weird state. The weird state is the I that, that you, you, you basically are sitting here, one little dot on a tiny little planet in the middle of nowheres saying, “I’m in charge.” You’re not doing anything. Compared to what is going on, all of which is a trillion times more important than anything you’ve ever done, is your heart beating?
What if it didn’t? Make a heartbeat. Am I done yet? Make your breath go in and out. Make your organs do what they’re doing. Go, go study biology. Go study medicine. Go study physics. Go study anything. No matter how far you go, there’s way more. That’s what’s going on, not you. You just, you made a big deal out of qui- nothing.
Nothing. None of it would be– you couldn’t do anything if everything else wasn’t doing everything. Can you hear that? Or our ego’s so big that not only can we hear it, we don’t even wanna hear it. How does it put bread on the table? Hello, what is bread? What is a table? And it’s like, at least put it in perspective.
You’re not doing anything. What proportion of everything I’ve talked about are you actually doing? Nothing. That’s what it means to die to be reborn. That’s what it means to let go of yourself. That’s what it means to become enlightened, is this sense of individuality, of personal self that’s busy being somebody and doing something fades away.
You don’t fight it. It actually falls away. Why? Because it’s not a truth. It’s, it’s a true non-truth. It’s literally ignorance. If you ignore the truth, you’re ignorant. The root of ig-ignorance is ignorance. You’re ignoring the truth. I tell it to you all the time. You’re sitting on a planet that 1.3 million Earths fit inside the sun. And how important are you?
If 1.3 million Earths fit inside the sun, and there’s 300 billion suns, stars, in your one galaxy, how important are you? Please, I dare you to not ignore the truth. Otherwise, you’ll be ignorant. I’m not insulting you to call you ignorant, but you are ignoring the truth when you sit there and say, “I’m important.”
You’re not, you’re not even here for very long. How long do you live? 70, 80, 90 years? How long has this planet been here? 1.5 billion years. Not million, billion. And you’re gonna live how long? 80 or 90? What are you doing? How dare you build a self-concept that ignores all of reality?
Fair enough? Okay, that’s what ego is. And if you build one of those, and of course you have, so does everybody else, now there’s war. Now there’s disharmony. Of course there is, because the one you built is the sum of your learned experiences. The one you built, the sum of your learned experiences. The one you built, the sum of your learned experiences.
And none of you had the same experiences. As you walk through your life, you’re having a unique experience every moment. Nobody else had it. So of course you don’t get along. You programmed your ego, your mind, that says, “I’m special. I know what’s right. I know what’s wrong. I know what’s good. I know what’s bad.
I know what you meant when you said that.” I, I, I, I, I. And you believe that. You listen to that. If you had different experiences, a different mother, a different father, a different first boyfriend, first girlfriend, a car accident when you were… There’d be a totally different story going on in there.
Psychology says man is the sum of his learned experiences. But you’re not the sum of your learned experiences. You’re the consciousness that is aware that you got that stuff going on in there. Aren’t you aware? Do you have an I in there? Does it have preferences? Hopes, dreams, constant views? Yes, you know that, because you’re conscious.
But psychology says man is the sum of learned experiences. Your psyche is the sum of your learned experiences. What you think you know, your heart, feelings, they’re programmed by the sum of your learned experiences. So what does that mean if you’re gonna be here for 80 or 90 years? It means absolutely nothing.
I know this is the part I say, and I get it very well, but I see nobody else gets it. Not at the level I’m talking. As you’re having an experience, right now you’re having an experience. Okay, you like it, don’t like it, you’re having an experience. How many are you missing? How many ex- potential experiences are going on right now all over the place that you’re not experiencing?
What’s the ratio between what you are experiencing and what you’re missing? 700 billion zillion trillion to one, and you’re the sum of your learned experiences. What does that mean? You missed the whole thing. How can you know anything? Anybody willing to listen? I know you’re not. I’m not trying to degrade you.
The truth is, you’re a very great being, but your psyche is not. The thing you collected, right? Listen to 10 songs and decide you understand what music’s all about. Ask somebody who they’re gonna vote for in the next election. Now I know who’s gonna win. Wait a minute. That’s not statistically significant.
You can’t do that. That’s a term I learned in college, statistically significant. I like it. Right? Do you know what your experiences are? Not statistically significant. How can they be? D- you got… Man, once again, do you get the point that while you’re passing through time and space, you’re having these tiny little experiences, how many are you not having?
Count them. It’s pretty funny. No, I’m gonna count the experiences I had and make them be the most important thing in my life, and I’ll ignore all the ones I didn’t have, and therefore you’re kind of ignorant. I mean, ignorant of the reality. So spirituality is really very honest and truthful and, and logical.
It’s not logical to say I’m important. It’s logical to say, “I don’t know how I got here, but here I am, and look at all that’s going on, and it could have not happened. I could look to the left, see something else, look to the right.” Right? Or don’t even look anywhere. Be thinking something while something else is happening, and you miss it.
Now your life’s about what you were thinking about. Can anybody understand? I’m not trying to degrade you. I’m trying to wake you up, right? That’s what it means. In any event, the net result is. If you are thinking you matter, you missed the boat, baby. It’s when you die to be reborn, when you’re willing to sit there and say, “I’m here.
Yes, I am, and I have experiences. Yes, I do, but so does everybody else. They just have different ones.” 8.3 billion people right now are having totally different experiences than you. They are not less important than you. Why would it be the experiences he had were less important than the ones she had?
That’s crazy. They’re just the experiences you happen to have. What is an experience? Something that came in while you were standing in a given place on the planet Earth. If you go to another place, you have a different experience. Okay? I hope this is helping. This is how you die to be reborn. This is how you let go of yourself.
This is what the S… I don’t care if it’s Zen, I don’t care if it’s Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism or anything, it all, at its core, is about letting go of yourself, about letting go of this thing that I just, I know you don’t like it, that I just painted for you of the truth, right? But what about if I want something?
Look, notice there’s an I in there, but give it the credit or discredit it deserves. It’s just something that you built in there because of your past experiences. You… Listen to me. Look at me. You don’t want what you think you want. You do not want what you think you want. You want whatever your mind is making up in the moment to tell you, “This is how I see things.”
It will change. Have one experience, and the whole thing changes. I’m madly in love with you. Oh my God, you seem like the most perfect person. You what? You killed how many people? Oh my God, I don’t want anything to do with you. How long did that take? Four words. The sum of your learned experiences. You see the difference?
Then you may say, “Well, that’s logical.” It’s not logical. It’s just the sum of your learned experiences. Ready? Okay. I’ll never see you again. April Fools. Now what? Oh, that was so funny. Anybody listening? That’s how tenuous a stupid thing is. It has no foundation. It’s just basically life is passing by, and you’re standing in a given place, therefore you have those experiences.
They’re not meaningless, but they’re about equally as meaning as the ones you missed. Can anybody hear that? You just happened to be standing there when something happened. If you weren’t or it didn’t happen, you’re a totally different person. And so eventually, that’s real spirituality. You wake up and say, “I don’t know anything.
I don’t know anything.” That’s your first step. How could you? I just told you the sum of your learned experiences is statistically insignificant. So where do I start? What do I do? You start with honesty. That which is going on in my mind, my opinions, my hopes, my dreams, my constant views, are the sum of my learned experiences, which is nothing.
If I had different experiences, I would have a whole different thing going on in there, wouldn’t I? And so you start with that, but that’s hard for you. But it shouldn’t be hard. Spiritually, who wants to carry the burden of yourself? How much fun do you have every time you meet somebody to make sure you impress them?
How much fun do you have every talk, talk to somebody that you walk away thinking, “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that. I forgot to say this, if I’d said that, it would’ve been so…” Come on, nobody? Nobody does that? Every one of you do that. Why? That’s the nature of the personal self. It identifies with itself falsely as the sum of learned experiences.
It’s not that. It’s the consciousness that is aware of the sum of learned experiences. But no, that’s a very high state. So instead, you identify with the sum of learned experiences. Now you better go out there and be a good salesperson. It’s every person you meet, you’re afraid of being rejected. You’re afraid of not getting what you want.
You’re afraid of saying something wrong. You’re afraid of burping in the elevator. Isn’t that fun? Isn’t it fun to carry the burden of the personal self? No. It’s a tremendous burden, but it goes away when you get older, right? No, it does not. It gets worse. Why? You’ve had more experiences, all right? And, and what’s nice, and I don’t wanna get into it ’cause it’s a lot of fun, who said that the experiences you had matched each other?
You met someone named George, you fell in love with him in fifth grade, and you’ve always been attracted to George. You just love George, okay? You got George on your keyring, and George on this, and George on that, right? And now you meet a George who is the biggest bunco that could possibly walk the face of the earth, so now he’s in there.
Well, which one is it? Have fun. You have to manipulate, and rationalize, and push this aside, and divide a part of your mind, the part that likes George, and the part that doesn’t even wanna hear the word ever again. Nobody does that in there. That’s all you do in there is fight with yourself, and fight with reality, and try to figure out some way to be okay.
How would I say that? Is it true or not? You try to figure a way to be okay. Figure a way not to get hurt, figure a way to get what you want, figure a way to feel better, all that. Why do you need to feel better? ‘Cause you don’t feel good. ‘Cause you’re not doing good in there. And so you finally wake up, and this is deeper than I usually talk to you, and you realize you don’t matter.
Not that you. It does not matter. It’s absurd. It can change in one second. That’s why relationships are so difficult. Somebody do one thing, you don’t like them anymore. Somebody else does something, aah, you go running after them. Okay? And eventually you catch on, “I don’t want to live with that craziness, and I don’t wanna have to struggle for the rest of my life.”
Do you? Do you wanna have to wake up in the morning worried about what happened yesterday, or worried about what might happen today, and what you did wrong, and what, what’s gonna come back from five years ago, and you feel guilt and insecure? Really, isn’t that a lot of fun? No. No. I would like to live at least one day, one hour, of my life free.
Free to do what I want? No. Free of myself. Free to be– wake up and look at life instead of look at me or look at life through the filter of me, and just see what is, and let it be, and enjoy it, and love it. That’s what it boils down to. That’s the only real happiness, is the natural, spontaneous joy of experiencing reality without judgment.
Again, the Third Zen Patriarch, “The great way, enlightenment, total enlightenment, is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” What does that mean? You have nothing going on in there that is a summary of learned experiences. It’s empty mind. It’s clarity. So now it can come in and it can touch me, and it goes on.
“When love and hate are both absent,” meaning like and dislike, “everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the slightest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. To set aside what you like and what you dislike is a disease of the mind. Avoid such pursuits carefully.” So we noticed we don’t avoid them, and that is what we do, and we’re diseased.
Okay? And the mind has made up what it likes based on? What’s it based- You’re smart now. Based on your past experiences. It’s not based on what you didn’t experience. It’s based on your past experiences. Well, what if I didn’t have the experience that I wanted to? You wouldn’t even know it existed except it was part of your past experience, that somebody else said they liked it.
It is the sum of your learned experiences, your desires, your fears, your hopes, your dreams, your concepts, your views, your beliefs, sum of your learned experiences. That’s all the psyche knows, is what it experienced and how it put it together. There is a state in which you do not have to suffer with that.
You do not have to fight with yourself and with everybody else to make it so that you’re okay. You’re just okay. Why? Why are you not okay? Like I said, I can’t do it again. Will you look at all the things that are happening automatically? Your breath’s going in and out, your cells are dividing, babies are being made out of single cells inside your body.
It’s pretty miraculous. Trees are growing out of acorns and, and, oh my, grass and there’s stars, and what are you doing? You’re not paying attention to everything. You’re paying attention to you and then saying, “I am the center of the universe.” You are not. How could you be the center of the universe? So at that level, you’re nothing.
You’re nothing, and guess what? When Ram Dass taught becoming nobody, I’ll take it. That’s what you want. You don’t want the burden of the personal self. Well, then what do I do? You serve what’s happening. Well, why would I? ‘Cause there’s nothing else guiding you or asking you to do anything else. So where I started this thing is to sit there and say, at some point, you see you’re serving yourself, and the only way to get rid of that is to serve something other than yourself, and the ultimate of that is to sit there and say, and what I mean by God, doesn’t mean you have to mean by God, is the entire universe.
Is all the galaxies and all the stars and every atom and all of creation, right? That’s God. God created heavens and Earth, and look, look where it is. There it is. Okay? Why don’t I eat my food as an offering to that? Why don’t I just sit there and say, “Here. Here. I’m doing this for you”? Why don’t I pick up the phone call, even at work?
And before I pick it up- I’m on a little planet spinning around nowheres with wires or wireless connecting the people together. It’s meaningless. It’s the stupidest thing in the world. If the whole thing blew up to smithereens tomorrow, a couple of planets would change orbit and nothing else would change throughout the entire universe.
So I’m gonna pick up a phone. I’ll take a phone call for you. I offer it to you. I, I have no motive, no objective, no right, no wrong, no good, no bad, no success, no failure. How could there be? And you’re dead tomorrow anyways. Now, seriously, wake up, right? 80, 90 years is not a very long time. They’ve come and gone.
How many have come and gone? Well, if there’s 8.3 billion here now, I don’t wanna count how many have been here before. They add them all up. I just hear a secret though, they’re all gone. And you could be gone, too. That’s another way to look at it. Do you know that? You’re gonna die. But all this stuff you’re worrying about and thinking about and wanting, bye-bye.
Goodbye. And that’s wonderful. You should be totally happy with that. That’s the part I don’t understand about humans. All they do is complain, yet they don’t wanna die. They just complain about what happened, they complain what might happen, but no, no, I wanna stay here. I don’t wanna die. It’s fun, isn’t it?
Okay. So look at yourself from an objective point of view and you will see that dying to be reborn is a very, very encouraging and enticing thing to do. Becoming nobody is an extremely enticing thing to be. But that doesn’t mean you don’t do anything. You just don’t have a personal motive behind what you’re doing.
I meet you. I’ve never met you before, okay? I feel love. Why not? Why would I be afraid of you? I don’t even know you. And even if you did bad last time, so what? Who cares? What did Christ say? “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.” Why don’t you try doing that? It doesn’t matter that last time I saw you, you dissed me.
You were in a bad mood. Who knows what happened to you before you met me? So fine, forgive them, Lord, for they know not what to do. I told you, the Bible, the Gita, the Quran, the, the Torah, they all teach the same thing. Let go of yourself, and the way to do that is to permit your brilliant mind to include the rest of the universe, to let it expand out and understand you’re part of everything.
Very small part. And then what happens, the personal self falls away. And because the personal self falls away, when you interact with life, you feel respect. You feel honor. It blows you away that it even exists. What if somebody t- talks mean to you and you see them again? Isn’t that exciting? There’s a person who talks mean to me.
There’s frogs and snakes and clouds and rain and cold and heat and a person that talks mean. Everything, you get to the point of understanding you are not in charge of life. And if you try to be in charge of life, you will be neurotic, and you will not be happy, and you will feel tension, and anxiety, and fear, and insecurity in everything you do.
So don’t ask me why am I that way. That’s why. Because you said, “I am me, and that’s what matters.” It’s all the self-concept. That’s who I am, me, and people should like me, and if they don’t like me, I don’t like them, and they should respect me and talk nicely to me. Why? Why? You’re nothing. You’re nothing. It’s so good to be nothing.
Wouldn’t it be fun? Wouldn’t it be fun to wake up in the morning and say, “Hi, I’m back,” and that’s the end of it. And then whatever’s unfolding, you go to work. Why would I go to work? Because there’s work to do. Same reason there’s gravity, same reason that the… There’s magnetism. There’s, there’s forces in creation, and you serve them.
You just basically unfold. And you’re gonna find if you do that, you start off as a janitor and you end up as a CEO. It’s ridiculous, right? Again, isn’t it funny? I’m a nice Jewish yogi. I read the Bible once in 1972 or something, right? But Christ said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all things shall be added unto you.”
If you are not serving yourself, you have let go, not suppressing, you’ve let go of yourself, all right? And your whole being is about letting go of yourself and coming in harmony with the divine force. That’s what it means. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” It’s about merging back into the divine force, who you are, who your consciousness is, that created everything.
What did Christ said? He said, “My Father and I are one.” There’s this merger of your, your consciousness that was staring at you, has stopped staring at you. What happens then? Then it’s one with God. It’s, it’s back to its source. What is back there that’s not staring at you? The source of consciousness, which is the divine force that created everything, right?
That’s what it means, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and righteousness, and all things shall be added unto you.” What’s the all things shall be added unto you? For one thing, you’ll be in ecstasy, because that’s what’s back there. This I assure you. Sat-Chit-Ananda, eternal conscious joy. That’s the nature of creation, and you’ll come in tune with that, right?
And wait till you see what happens to the world. Yogananda came over here in 1920. He hardly spoke English. He didn’t have anything, and he gave a talk at the religious conference in Boston, and then founded this entire worldwide organization. He didn’t try. He did the work, but he didn’t think, “I’m gonna do this.”
You just put your mind on something higher than yourself. I gotta tell you something. I don’t ever say it like this. Wherever you have your consciousness, what is below that takes care of itself. Okay? So if your consciousness is at, “I want to take care of my family. I don’t care about myself, I wanna take care of my family,” and you really serve like that, you’re gonna find out that you’re able to, to not spend the money on yourself, not want things and so on, but take care of the family, right?
If you sit there and say, “I would like to serve humanity,” then you’re not thinking of your family, right? They’re part of humanity, but that’s what you’re thinking about. Then all of a sudden you’re serving a bigger bubble, and I’m telling you, the rest takes care of itself. Does it do what you want? No, but in the end it takes care of itself.
All right? I, I have honor and, and respect for the great renunciants. I don’t do it, but there are men and women in India that are complete renunciants, sannyas. They don’t beg for food. They don’t go around with the beggar bowls. That’s considered my will, not thy will. All right? And when they walk under a tree that has beautiful mangoes or beautiful fruit on it, I, I…
It’s so hard for me to talk like this, ’cause I, I would love to live like that. They don’t pick it. It has to fall down on its own in front of them. It has to be the divine force giving them, them not taking anything. There are people who live like that. Do you understand that? I’m not telling you to. But my surrender experiment at least showed at some level what could happen if you let go.
‘Cause that’s what it’s about. It’s not about how do I get what I want. It was about, can I let go while all this stuff’s happening? And then amazing what happens. So it’s the same truth. Seek ye first the kingdom of God his righteousness and all things shall be added unto you. What a beautiful way to live.
But you can’t force it, right? ‘Cause then you’re not seeking it first. Now, I can’t want something else, but say, “No, I wanna tear it away from me and give it to God.” You have to reach the state that that’s who you are, all right? So we’ve now laid the groundwork for everything I started talking about. What does it mean to die and be reborn?
What does it mean to be nobody, and why would you want to be a nobody? I hope now you wish you were. I’ll bet you anything you wake up in the morning, you wish you were nobody. I don’t wanna carry this burden. That’s Buddhist teaching. All life is suffering. Why? ‘Cause you want stupid things, and you’re gonna suffer.
If you don’t, you’re fine. But the net result is, how does one really follow these different paths that we talked about in order to really achieve liberation? And that’s what liberation means. Freedom doesn’t mean the freedom to do what you want. It’s not freedom for yourself, it’s freedom from yourself.
After a talk like this, you understand? Who wants to carry this idiot along with them? With all his problems, his or her problems, and desires, and fears, and concepts, and views, hopes, and dreams, and beliefs. They’re all just the sum of your own experience. That’s what it is. And they’re pretty heavy to carry around, aren’t they?
Right? A wise being wouldn’t touch it. But then how do they live their life? First, you let go. How? Part of it is by listening to what I’ve been teaching you. You’re very smart people, so if I teach you that you only had this… You’re like, your life is like little pearls that as you go through your life, it makes a necklace.
Isn’t that pretty? Yes, but you missed everything else. Does it mean anything to you? You understand how much you missed everything, right? Fine, you have a pearl necklace at the end of your life, but you missed all of life because you made that be who you are, but it’s not who you are, all right? So how do you let go of yourself?
One way is to use your abstract mind, not your personal mind, to think about the types of thing I hope you do. I, I know I don’t get the reaction from you when I sit there and say, “The sum of your learned experience is nothing” because you missed everything. I don’t see the, oh, but someday you’ll look at it, right?
You know, that’s true. If I looked to the left, I had a different experience. If I looked up, if my mother was different, like anything could be different all over the universe, and I… this wouldn’t be the same as it is now. And you look at that, you say, “Okay, I guess I can let go of it. I guess it’s not that important.”
How could it be? Or the fact that 1.3 million Earths fit inside the sun. Will you please contemplate that for a minute? Don’t sit there and say, “So what?” You’re nothing on the planet Earth, you little dot, and the whole planet, 1.3 million fit inside one star, and there’s 300 billion stars.
And sometimes, I don’t like pushing it on you because I, I want to see your abstract impersonal mind wake up. Okay, so you must admit that your point on this planet, of which there are 8.3 billion people at the most, is one 8.3 billionth. It’s pretty small, right? And that’s not including all the animals and everything else, okay?
So there, that’s who you are on this planet, and you stay for 70, 80, or 90 years. You must admit it’s pretty small. Okay, now the whole planet, 1.3 million, fit inside one star. Okay, well, that makes you even smaller, doesn’t it? How far away is the next star? Who knows that, right? I said there are 300 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
That’s a big number. Where’s the next star? Alpha Proxima, whatever it is. Where is the next star closest to our sun? Okay? It is 4.3 light-years away. How long is a light-year? If you held a beam of light above the planet Earth and let it go for one second, it would circumnavigate the globe for s- 7.5 times.
It would go around the Earth 7.5 times in one second. That’s one second of a light-year. How far would that beam go if every second it traveled that fast? That’s how far it’s going away from the sun. Takes 4.3 years for it to get to the next star, and you’re circling a star. Anybody look at proportions and ratios a little bit?
Maybe some. All right? How meaningful are you? And that’s one galaxy. That’s the closest star in your galaxy. Where’s the next galaxy? Next major galaxy is Andromeda. Okay, well, if there’s two trillion galaxies, how far away is Andromeda? 2.5 billion light-years away. Okay? That’s the next galaxy. How important are you?
Who’s willing to look at me? Once, I don’t care, do whatever you want when you walk away from this talk, but just once, I beg you, will you stop being ignorant of the truth and thinking you’re it? Babe, you ain’t it, nor is anybody else around here, okay? And they never will be. You understand that? They all went.
Nobody’s anything. It’s just a stupid thing that we make ourselves up to be important. All right. How do you… First, what would happen if you grew into that? If you let go of yourself, what’s left is ecstasy. You don’t have to seek joy. You are joy. You are joy. Listen to me. Right now, no spiritual work, right now, you in there who hears me, are joy staring at the junk you collected over the course of your life, of which the vast majority is negative.
It never hurts you. You still got it in there. Is that true now? The consciousness is one hundred percent addicted to staring at you, at your self-concept, what you put together. Do you have to? Of course not. Right? Well, what would happen if you didn’t? You’d feel ecstasy all the time. Then what would you do?
You’d serve. You know, there’s nothing else to do. If you love somebody, what do you do when you’re not with them? You better work hard. You better act like you love them. I don’t have to act like I love them. I do love them. But what happens if you don’t have any junk in your way that’s interfering with this flow of the love, the flow of the Shakti?
It doesn’t interfere. It comes out. Forgive them, Lord, they know not what to do. You who is without sin, throw the first stone. Judge not that you should not be judged. It’s constant in all the scriptures. And so you finally one day wake up and realize, okay, I would love being like that. I would love to be liberated.
That’s called liberation. That is jivanmukta, a liberated being. Okay? So how do you go about it? It is very easy to understand the path, not so easy to do. What you do is you wake up and you realize you’re fully you. Okay? Okay, I woke up. Today, I’m going to go through this one little orbit, not orbit, forget it, a little rotation on the planet is done so, right, 365 times a year for 1.5 billion years.
Get another one of those chunks. And I’m going to look at what’s happening in front of me and honor it. I’m going to say thank you. Okay? It’s like, what is there like? Try to respect it. Try to respect what is unfolding in front of you. Why? It’s a magic moment. It’s the only moment you’ll have in that moment.
And you start to realize, I can like it. I can like the heat. I can like the cold. I can like the driver in front of me. I can like things. I don’t have to not like them. If you don’t like something, is it fun? Answer me right now, very smart people. If you really, really don’t like something, are you having fun?
If you really, really like something, are you having fun? Well, like the damn thing. Who decides whether you like it or not? You. It’s so funny. You’re the one who’s deciding, aren’t you? You’re deciding whether you like it or not based on your past experiences. You can learn to raise yourself. You can learn to wake up in the morning and say, “Okay, events are gonna happen.
I’m not in charge. I can respect them, honor them,” and you do the best you can, and you’ll get higher. You’ll get higher if you do that throughout the day. And then that higher is energy that helps you do it the next day better, and the next day better. But what if there’s this thing called dharma? You’ve heard the word dharma, right action, right?
That… ‘Cause if I’m doing that, that’s the highest reaction, by the way, is letting go of yourself. But if I’m doing that and letting go and creating positive energy inside, what about the outside? You now are bringing good energy into the outside. Instead of bringing your complaints and your desires and your fears and anxieties and your manipulations, you now are feeling light.
You’re feeling higher. Every day you do this, you feel higher ’cause you let go of some of the stupid stuff that you were complaining about. You don’t have to do it, just don’t complain, and honor and respect the right for things to be what they are. Some things you won’t be able to. They’re too big right now.
But as you build your power inside, even those big things will seem like nothing. And what you do ultimately is let go first. You first let go. Don’t be afraid to let go. Why? Reality wins. And so you let go, then you come back with the clarity of vision, the clarity of heart to see, can I help? Make me cry.
Not how can I make it be what I want so I’m okay? Hear me? Is there anything I can do to help? Okay? So you’re, you’re protesting because you’re trying to help purify the earth, you know, be environmental. And the other people on the other side, “Hey, rah, rah oil.” Whatever. All right? And all of a sudden, somebody on the other side with heat stroke and they fall down and they faint, and you’re a doctor.
What do you do? If you’re where I said, you run right over there, you don’t even think about it twice. You do every single thing you can to help that person. So yes, you have views. Yes, there is an impression of the sum of your own experiences, but you’re not addicted to it. That’s not who you are. You don’t own it, but you’re aware.
We have sides. Uh, rah, rah this side, right? But you don’t… That’s not your whole being. That’s not your heart and soul. You don’t believe that, “Oh my God, this is so important.” You understand? Of course, it’s not important. I spent the whole evening telling you nothing is important. That’s ridiculous. The planet blow up, not even here.
Nothing cares. It doesn’t matter. Okay? So don’t bring these false self-concepts and make them real. They just happen to be the opinion that you developed over the course of your life. Wonderful. Mazel tov. Believe me, somebody else disagrees. And is that okay? Of course, it’s okay. It better be okay because it’s reality.
They had different experiences. They have different way of looks of things. But when you first let go, then you always keep a perspective that I’m back here, and yes, this is going on, and it’s going on in front of me, so I can help. I can deal with it. And just do your best to see, and it won’t be perfect.
You do your best to see, “Can I help the situation?” And that’s different than, “Can I help it be the way I want?” That make me want to cry. How you want is meaningless. It is meaningless. It could change in a moment. Just learn one new thing, and you want something different or don’t want something. And so instead, you bring clarity down from the higher level.
You’re feeling love and joy, but you see that there’s, there’s a dharma, there’s a path, there’s a right action for you to do what you can. To do what? To raise the energy outside of you. That’s what you’re doing. You’re raising the energy. You’re not fighting with it. You’re just raising it to the best of your ability.
And it’s… There’s a place in the Gita, right? That says, “You do action. You do act, but every action has an impurity.” There’s no such thing as a pure action on this plane. Just as fire gives off smoke, action gives off impurity. But you do your best to bring the clearest part of your being down, and that’s fine.
You just… All you can do is your best. But don’t do the best to make it be the way you want. Or make it not be the way you don’t want. You let go of that. You let go of yourself, and then when you come back with clarity, with love… Meditation helps. Asana helps. Mantra helps. All these things help. They’re all about creating clarity instead of hanging out with yourself.
Okay? But ultimately, it’s about not hanging with yourself. So if you can be in there and let go of yourself, then when you come back down, you brought good energy down and clarity. You will come up with solutions that nobody else would’ve seen. You’ll run a business better than anybody else. You’ll be a better doctor, you’ll be a better lawyer, you’ll be a better everything, ’cause you’re not doing it for yourself.
You’re selflessly acting to the best of what’s in front of you. All right. Well, that’s what I wanted to talk about. Do you get it? What is so logical, what we’re talking about, about how it’s absurd to make yourself be the center of the universe? You’re not. You’re not, and you don’t wanna be. I can tell you right now, you wanna be free.
Free to love, free to feel joy, free to be open, free not to judge others. Just be free to enjoy the totality of your life, and then come down just to see what you can do to help, and of course, it’s gonna be tinged with your personal experiences, ’cause that, that’s there. So you’ll look at it a particular way, but you’re not married to it.
You’re not caught in it. You can live like that. You understand that? It was clarity, and do your best to bring that down. Okay. I hope it helps. 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.
