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.
When we get lost inside, it’s because the psyche is so distracting. And it captures all of our attention, and then it does whatever it needs to do, causes emotional disturbance, and we pay attention to it because it’s disturbing. When something’s disturbing, it attracts your consciousness, your awareness. It causes mental disturbance.
People have all kinds of mental problems. We know that we all have all kinds of mental problems. So between the emotions and the mind—very, very distracting. And so this stuff called consciousness, or awareness of being: that’s what it’s aware of. That is the essence of all psychology, all spirituality, everything.
But we don’t get it. We’re busy trying to fix the fact that the mind is disturbing, trying to fix the fact that the heart can get disturbing, instead of paying attention to the one who notices this. And that is the essence of spirituality. It is a solution to every single problem you will ever have.
Do you know that your mind is negative? Yes. Do you know that your heart is closed and feeling anguish or depression? Yes. How do you know? Who in there knows this? I know it’s that way—but how do you know that? Because you’re conscious. And that becomes the essence of the whole spiritual journey, from beginning to end. You are, obviously, aware. You’re conscious, instead of being so interested in, attached to, and addicted to what you’re conscious of.
Spirituality is about liberating the consciousness so it can know itself as itself. Consciousness has qualities. It has its nature, just like everything has its nature. The nature of consciousness, obviously, is awareness. It is that which is in there that’s aware.
Okay. It gets distracted. How? Because it becomes aware of something noisy, or something disturbing, or something nice—and it means nice things. It gets drawn down to them, and it doesn’t know itself. The self does not know itself as a self. Why? Yes—it’s busy knowing itself as that which it’s looking at.
The way out—there’s lots of steps along the way, but the way out—is to reach the point where you understand, “I’m in here. I’m the one who’s in here. There’s a lot of other stuff going on in here, a lot of emotions, a lot of thoughts, but I am the one who’s aware of every one of them.” If you weren’t aware of them, not a problem.
If your mind is making all kinds of noise, but you don’t know it, you’re not aware of it at any level, it doesn’t matter. It just does its thing, and you remain what’s called seated in the seat of self, established in the seat of self. That’s funny words. We never use ’em. We don’t understand.
The consciousness has its nature. Its nature is awareness. But that’s not its only nature. Its nature is what we call Sat-Chit-Ananda: eternal conscious ecstasy. That is the nature of your being right now, every one of you, this very second—your awareness of being. If you look behind instead of in front—and that’s something I’ve discussed before, and people say, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
You’re in there looking down. The consciousness is looking down. Down at what? Down at the thoughts, down at the emotions, down at the body, down at the senses. It has to look down, ’cause it’s way up above. If it doesn’t do that, it will experience its nature, and its nature is eternal conscious ecstasy. That is literally—I hate to tell you that, because you say, “Well, what happened? How come I don’t feel that?” ‘Cause you’re looking down.
If I have two things for you to look at, one of them is filthy, roach-ridden, and dirty; the other one is light and beautiful. If you stare at the dirty one, you feel dirty. Yes or no? That’s what you experience, ’cause that’s what you’re experiencing. That’s what you’re staring at. If you stare at the light, the beauty, the beautiful colors, then you feel light, you feel open. You feel whatever you’re staring at.
And I know you don’t know it, but you’re staring at junk. Why? So you have two questions. Why am I staring at the junk? And two, why is there so much junk in there?
Why am I so sensitive? How can I worry about anybody who thinks about me, and what happens, and what’s gonna go wrong, and how to fix it? And how come those are my thoughts? Why are my thoughts not, “Oh, it’s so beautiful. I love the flowers. And the clouds are so beautiful, and the rain is beautiful, and people are beautiful. They’re like flowers. They come in all different colors and shapes and sizes and moods, right?” Why? Why don’t I just be like that?
‘Cause you can. There’s nothing stopping you. And then you get down to the real work of saying, “Why is it the way it is in there?” And I usually give a long lecture on it. I’m not going to, ’cause I wanna do a lot this evening.
It’s that way in there. Listen to me: it is not naturally that way in there. It is not your natural state. If I take a bucket of paint, it’s white, and I start dropping dark colors in it, what’s gonna happen? It’s gonna get dark. If you take what the Buddhists call empty mind, pure being, pure awareness of being, but you start sticking in front of it things that are disturbing, things that are low, things that are dark, then that’s what you’re looking at.
Well, who did that? Who stored things in there that are dark and troublesome? Who did that? “Well, I don’t know.” You’re the only one in there. Ain’t nobody else in there. If you hear your mother talking in there, that’s not your mother. That’s something you stored in there about your mother, and now you’re staring at it. Or if I just say that, can you get that? Yeah.
How many things have you stored in there? Because I’m telling you that at least 95% of them are negative. That’s why you stored them. Well, why would you choose to store all the dirt? Your house, if it was dirty, you’d say, “Oh, it is dirty. Let’s stare at it.” No, you—you’re cleaning the thing up. Why inside did you decide that if something comes in that’s dark and troublesome and disturbing, that you would keep it, that you would store it?
And that is the essence of Freudian psychology, and he was called the father of psychology—that you do that. You do this thing called suppression, repression, denial. Psychological terms. I use the word resistance. It’s the same.
How do you store something? You resist it. You don’t let it pass through. You don’t let it be the experience that you had. “He said something to me and I didn’t like it.” So what did you do? “I stored it. Next time I see him, that’s all I’m gonna think about. I may never wanna see him again.” I mean, literally, if he’s walking down the road, I may walk the other road just so I don’t have to see him.
Okay. Why? Because you stored it in there. Why’d you do that? Why don’t you just let things go? When they happen, they’re gone.
And you get to this very, very deep thing, which I rarely talk about, called the evolution of the soul. But people write me—they do that—and they say, “I thought the soul was God. I thought the soul was of God. How does God need to evolve?” I said, deep question.
That’s what happens is the divine consciousness. It’s like God’s lila. They call it God’s lila, God’s dance, God’s sport. So God is pure and open and one. There’s not even—there’s no duality. It’s just one force throughout the entire universe, conscious of its own being.
Like, I do this sometimes with you guys. Your body has lots of positions. It’s feet and knees and legs and arms and hands, right? Just for one moment, can you feel both hands at the same time without touching them? Answer me. Can you also feel your feet? Why? ‘Cause your consciousness is omnipresent in your body. You don’t have to send it from your hands to your feet. It’s always there. Doesn’t take time to go from one end to the other, because your awareness of being is aware of every bit of your body at the same time.
If you pay attention—you’re sitting down. Do you feel your butt? Feel your hands. Feel your feet. Did you have to tell ’em, like a phone call? Your awareness of being is omnipresent. That’s a very big word, “omnipresent,” throughout your entire body. It’s able to feel simultaneously. That’s a key word. It’s not like point A, point B. There is no points. It’s just a field of energy that’s everywhere.
Okay, so basically, that is what’s going on with this God stuff. The divine force is everywhere. It’s omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. It’s an omnipresent conscious force. What does that mean? It’s aware of everything everywhere at the same time. It doesn’t have to make phone calls and have to check to see what the other side’s doing—just like you didn’t have to with your body.
So the universe is the body of God, of which everything emanated, and it is conscious. Everywhere is exactly the same. It’s one force that is aware of itself, just like you’re aware of your body. So now that force is in ecstasy. That force is—wow. That’s called, in the garden, there’s just the divine being that expressed itself.
I just talk about it: the divine being. “Well, where’d it come from?” Nope. Nope. It’s eternal and infinite, omnipresent and omniscient. It always was, it will always be. There’s no before, there’s no after. There’s no left, there’s no right. There’s no front, there’s no back. It’s just there, and has always been there, period. Even to say “for all of eternity”—no, no, that’s still got an end. It’s just that which is. That’s what it is. And it’s aware of its being everywhere. It’s aware of the farthest galaxy far, far away, and aware of your nose.
“Why does he care about all he knows?” Because it’s everywhere. It experiences everything. The Bible says not a hair on your head moves but that God knows; not a sparrow falls from the tree, from a branch on the tree, but that God is aware. It’s not like God checking his stuff out. He is the sparrow. He is the hair, just like you are your hand and you are your foot.
Well, okay, I said it is everything. It is from alpha to omega. It’s the beginning, the end. It is the energy that is behind every thought. It is a consciousness that’s aware that there are thoughts, that there’s form, and it’s aware of them all at the same time.
Alright, so what is this about the evolution of the soul? If that consciousness, which is one—it’s one; use the word non-dual, that’s better than “one.” Non-dual. Not two. It’s just one. Therefore, everything’s the same. It experiences all, all the same. If it gets distracted, what does that mean? It’s consciousness. Can consciousness get distracted?
Do you ever get distracted thinking about something, and then something distracts you? Can you try to do some math in your head and get distracted? So you know all about it. Why? Because you are made in God’s image, man. He can get distracted. Consciousness can get distracted. That’s all there’s to it. Awareness can be aware of itself as the whole, as one. Christ said, “My Father and I are one.” It’s all just one.
Alright? But it can get distracted. Is that a bad thing? No. Is it a good thing? No. It’s just the nature of consciousness is it can get distracted. What does that mean? It means it focuses more on one thing than another. I said a moment ago it was all one. There’s no reason that you’d be focusing on one thing versus another. But if something pulls a ray of consciousness down into a distraction, that is what’s meant by the fall from the garden. That is when you fall out of that state.
But you didn’t fall out of that state. You’re in that state all the time. I mean, that’s nice, that you know that you’re in a state of divine ecstasy at all times, merged with the entire universe. You are enlightened completely. Not like “he’s enlightened, he’s enlightened, he’s a great master, he’s enlightened.” You are absolutely in that state. You’ve always been in that state, except you get distracted by what? Your thoughts, your emotions, your body, and what’s coming through your senses. They’ve kind of distracted you, right or wrong.
Did I get those? Your thoughts—are they the same as her thoughts? No. They’re your thoughts. You are not distracted by her thoughts. You don’t even know what they are. You don’t even care. But you’re very distracted by your thoughts, and you’re very distracted by your emotions. Right or wrong? Go to somebody: “Oh my God, she left me. My heart’s killing me.” Oh no, mine doesn’t.
Your awareness of being is being pulled down to the noisiest stuff around you. And therefore it doesn’t remain in oneness. It doesn’t remain in the state of divine consciousness, of enlightenment—call it whatever you want. Liberation, freedom. Right? It gets pulled down, like I said.
Is that a bad thing? It just is. Consciousness is aware of what it focuses on, and not all things are the same. I teach all the time: if a rattlesnake’s passing in front of you or a butterfly’s passing in front of you, they don’t have the same effect when they come in. One of them is scary. One of them is beautiful. Although you can screw up butterfly, too. Just sit there and take all your friends up to the place to show the butterfly so they can see it, and it won’t be there. Now you’re getting depressed and upset and embarrassed. See? There’s no such thing as one state.
But basically what happens is you get pulled down into your thoughts, into your emotions, into your body. Well, alright, my body—of course you’re not your body. When you go to sleep, do you take it with you? Hmm. Now, but you do have dreams, don’t you? So your mind and your emotions are liberated when you go to sleep. They’re liberated to be freer, to express themselves. You don’t have a physical body.
What’s gonna happen when you die? I love that question. Right? You’ll find out. You will. Why are you thinking about it? Thoughts are just stupid things that you make up. “I think this’ll happen.” I don’t care what you think. You’re gonna find out, and it’s pretty neat. I told you: what is death? A once-in-a-lifetime experience. In fact, it’s the ultimate once-in-a-lifetime experience.
So why is that not exciting? You don’t have to make it happen. Right here, you’re living fine. But don’t worry about death. It’s very binary. Either you’re not gonna be there—the consciousness, like a light bulb, gets turned off. “But I won’t like that.” You won’t be there. You won’t be there to like it or not like it. It’s like, either you’re not there, or you are. What would that be like? “Wow, I’m still here.” Okay. You see, it’s an exciting journey. Life and death is a major part of it.
And so you wake up and you realize that what the evolution of the soul means is the consciousness, which is of God—it is that same consciousness, divine consciousness—staring at your ego, staring at your guilts and fears and emotions and all kinds of junk. It’s staring at those. Alright? To the extent that it can stop staring at those, it starts to experience itself as itself. It starts to feel a higher energy, and eventually you go higher and higher and higher and higher. And that’s the spiritual path: is letting go of staring at what you’re not.
But you do stare at what you’re not. And most of you may even know what I’m talking about. “That’s me. I’m the one who grew up in this place, and this is what happened to me. And I played Dorothy in the fifth grade and everybody clapped and it was wonderful”—or they booed and it really bothered me a lot. You’re describing yourself by the experiences you had.
You are not the experiences you had. You are the one that had the experiences. You would still be there if a different thing happened. You are the consciousness that’s always there. But you get caught in what you stored in your mind and stored in your heart.
What do you mean, stored? If it comes in and you don’t like it, or you really, really do like it and you don’t want it to go away—both—you hold onto it, you cling to it, you push down on it so it stays inside. And that’s how it got stored in there. You stored it in there.
A great being, a self-aware, realized being, does not do that. “What do you mean? Everything goes right and they don’t?” No. Everything goes the way it is, and okay, that’s the way it is. Let it be. Let it be, let it be, singing words of wisdom. They’re willing to allow life, the senses, what comes into the senses, to come in. Experience—you know, not experience it; you experience it. Some things feel good, some things feel bad, some things are scary, some things are very attractive. Are you okay with that? Altogether now.
“No, I’m not okay with that. I am not. I want only things that come in that make me feel good. I don’t want anything coming in that makes me feel bad. And in fact, I—not just I want—I’m gonna manipulate everything out there and try to figure out how to make everybody be the way I want them to be, talk the way I want them to talk, treat me the way I wanna be treated. I’m gonna go out there and fight with the world so that when it comes in, it only makes me feel better and not worse, or it makes me feel less worse.”
That’s a fall from the garden. Now you’re so caught in your mind and so caught in your emotions that you can’t handle it, and so you think, “I have to go out there and manipulate the world.”
Which I’ve had that discussion before: you are not running the world. I’m sorry to tell you. I don’t care what they tell you, you don’t run anything. You have 35 trillion living cells inside your body—not inside your body; they are your body. That’s what makes up your body. Liver cells, skin cells, eyeball cells, everything. They’re cells. How much control do you have of those? You feed ’em, you make sure they eat right and do everything right and talk to each other and coordinate. Their liver cells talk to—you don’t do a single thing. So here is the closest thing to you, and you’re not doing it. You’re not the doer. You’re the experiencer. You experience what it’s like to have a body.
And the world is unfolding. Every day the sun comes up. You make it happen? I would like you—you know, people journal. I want you, from now on, as you go through the day, to journal what happened that you didn’t do. Did you do the rain? Do the snow, cold, hot, the driver in front of you, all the cars on the road, all the people you met, their bodies, all their trillions of cells, the leaves on the trees—you make those happen? The cornstalk that grows up out of the dirt and turns itself into corn?
I’m listening. A few of them—you better get busy writing. How many things are happening throughout the day that you are not doing, but they’re happening anyway? How about 99.999999999999%? And I have to include Jupiter and Pluto. You’re not doing anything. You’re doing the point—oh, right, better make sure. Make sure gravity’s working, you don’t float off the planet. You are making sure Saturn has rings.
You don’t do anything, except for the fact that you’re caught within your mind, and you made this tiny subset of things and said, “That’s who I am. That’s what matters.” Is that what matters? “I matter.” Right? And that “I” is 0.0% of what’s going on. But that’s what matters. You know that, don’t you? Right? “I matter.” Well, I’m sorry to tell you, you don’t. The reality says reality matters.
But what you did is, the world came in and you weren’t able to handle it, right? Usually because it was disturbing. And so what you did is you stored it, because “I didn’t wanna feel it. I didn’t wanna feel it, so I pushed it away.” What happened when you pushed it away? Stayed in there. So what’s it like in there? Terrible. It’s very disturbing, and “I’m scared that something’s gonna go wrong, the thing I don’t like.”
And that’s just your story, and that’s why you’re distracted. And that is the fall from the garden: that your consciousness, which is divine and beautiful and filled with ecstasy all the time, all the time, is pulled down and distracted by the stuff you stored in there. If you had not stored that in there, it wouldn’t be there.
If you are able to allow life to unfold as it naturally does—which you have almost no control over. “Yes, I do. I do. This is my spouse, is a person I love, and they love me so much. Okay? They’ll never fall in love with somebody else. They’ll never die. They’ll never get in a bad mood. Nothing ever happens.” Right? It’s just exactly the way you want it to be, all the time. It’s never anything like that. It just keeps changing, doesn’t it?
You try to stop it, and you just catch on: I’m the observer. I’m the experiencer of this universe unfolding. I’m not the doer. And so you stop separating these single little events as separate and then building an ego out of them inside your mind that says, “I matter. I’m important. I’m the reason for life. I’m the purpose of life.”
Just like Galileo taught everybody that the earth orbits the sun, the sun doesn’t orbit the earth. They put him in jail. They locked him up for saying that. The church said, “No, no. Earth is the center of the universe. God made it. Everything orbits around it.” Well, that’s what you said about your ego: “I’m the entire purpose of life. What I think, what I feel, what I want, what I don’t want.”
It’s all because you stored that in there. Every single thing that you want or don’t want, that you had not experienced before—you don’t want it ’cause you didn’t like it when it happened before; you want it ’cause you liked what happened before. And you try to manipulate the world to match all that.
So that is a fall from the garden. That is a consciousness now focusing on the stuff it’s stored inside, that is distracting. How distracted are you by your “I”? “I like this. I don’t like that. I believe in this. I don’t believe in that. I want this to happen. I don’t want that to happen.” It’s all you’re about. I mean, mine. So you’re distracted by that tiny little subset of thoughts that you stored inside of you.
Evolution of the soul. That word, spiritual evolution, means you have learned to let go of storing new stuff, because it creates quite a mess. And then eventually the old stuff starts to come up, and you welcome it. You allow it to pass. You are now evolving.
What does that mean? It means that if you work with yourself to be able to let go of this stuff you stored in there and not put more in there, you’re going to start to feel who you are. Every single thing you let go of instead of suppress, you get higher, because you start to feel lighter. You start to feel higher.
Yes, I used to worry about that. Here, some of you played with dolls when you were young. Okay. If someone took your doll away—oh my God, what a drama that would create. It was traumatic, right? And then you grew up, and what happened to the doll? I don’t know. You grew past the dolls.
Well, you be that with everything. “I grew past the fact that I have this new car and I parked it in a closed parking spot and somebody opened their door, and there is now a scratch. You need a magnifying glass to see it, but there’s a scratch on my door.” Is that okay with you? “No. There’s not supposed to be a scratch on my door.” But there is a scratch on your door. “No, I don’t see it.”
So let’s just go make a big deal out of a scratch on the door, ’cause you can’t handle it. What if I sit there and say, “Oh, well, in every life some scratches must fall”? Alright? And you just say, “Fine. Scratched. Okay, I’m fine. It’s gonna happen. Eventually, give it a couple years, it’ll be very scratched.”
And you start learning to accept, respect, and honor the reality of life, instead of honoring and respecting so strongly this addiction you have to what you stored in there, and building an ego and a self-concept out of that, and then trying to make the world match that.
That is the fall from the garden. And the evolution of the soul is, as you let go of that part of your being, let go of the one that’s doing that, you actually start to feel this energy from behind you. Because that’s what I tell you: you are always looking down. You don’t know that, because it’s like the fish doesn’t know they’re in water, do they? Because they’ve never been out. You don’t know you’re lost in your mind and your emotions and your ego and your self-concept, because it’s permanent. It’s constant.
Okay. But when you start to grow spiritually, what does that mean? Let’s get that. It means to not store the stuff that happened today in there. Be able to accept it, to honor it, to respect it, to work with yourself so that it can pass through.
“Does that mean I don’t deal with anything?” That’s what people misunderstand about this subject forever: “I just let whatever’s happening happen.” No, no. You accept and honor and respect reality. How do you do it? It’s reality. Does it happen? Not difficult.
Then what? Once it can come in and pass through you, you look and see: is there something I’m supposed to do about it? There’s a scratch on the car. “I need to find out who was parked next to me. I want cameras. I wanna check the license plate number and call the police.” And go try that and see how they feel about you. “Alright, I got a scratch.” Yeah, well, another guy got killed. You just make a big deal out of everything.
And say, get to the point. Oh, you learn to stop doing that. Learn to stop having scratches? No. Learn to stop making a big deal out of a meaningless thing, that you’re sitting on a planet spinning in the middle of nowhere and there’s a scratch on your stupid car.
Or somebody came home and they were in a bad mood and they didn’t say something nice. Poor little thing. What? They’re allowed to be in a bad mood. Do you get in bad moods? Did you ever say something you wish you hadn’t said? Right? Well, how would you like it if you said it to somebody and it was okay? “It was okay. Okay, fine, you’re in a bad mood. I’m gonna hold it against you”—I’m not gonna make a thing out of it, you know. To say sorry, I was able to handle it. That’s evolution.
So as you evolve, as you learn, in here, you in there, the consciousness that doesn’t have to resist and fight and manipulate and control everything. Why? Because most of the stuff doesn’t need it, right? The fact that it’s hot out—okay, it’s hot out. You have to complain about it for hours and do all kinds of stuff? You understand that? And the same thing with the driver. He’s the driver in front of you. You talk to him: “Hey buddy, nice blinker.” Alright? Or, “Come on, you see the speed limit?” They don’t hear you. You’re not doing any good at all to do this.
And you start to practice not doing that. And I tell you, that’s your spiritual growth. Just like you learn that the dolls don’t really matter so much—you reach a certain age, okay, and so you learn that. They fall off. It falls off. You thought you needed it. You grew past it.
Well, grow past the scratch in your car. Grow past the driver in front of you. Grow past the weather. These are meaningless things that you’re complaining about. Can you learn not to do that? Of course you can learn not to do that. Of course you can. You can learn anything. You learned math. Some of you guys learned calculus. You learn things. You learn to play tennis, you learn to play golf, you learn to play the instrument. You learn things. How? By practicing.
Practice letting go. Practice honoring and respecting the fact that life has the right to unfold. “No. Why does it have to rain on my birthday?” Come on, guys. It doesn’t know it’s your birthday. It’s like, it rains. Wanna know why it rains? Go study meteorology. And you’re gonna find out that you’re wasting your life by trying to manipulate the outside world to match what you want. And the only reason you want it is the past experiences you had. And then next thing you know, you’re fighting with life.
Spiritual evolution is the opposite. It is to say, “I’m okay. I’m okay.” Is it what I want? Of course it’s not what I want. This thing in here is an idiot. Wants and not-wants, all kinds of stuff. Tomorrow it’ll want something different than what it wanted today. Five minutes from now, one minute from now, it’ll want something different than it wanted a minute ago.
“I’m gonna meet you, and I know you’re gonna love me, and you talk so sweetly to me. That’s so wonderful, and I love you so much.” Right? And the next thing you know, the guy didn’t show up. How you doing? Didn’t take much for you to change. “I never wanna see him again the rest of my life. Can’t believe he stood me up like that.”
Alright? That’s how fickle it is in there. It’s ridiculous. So you wake up and you realize, I got some work to do in here. And it starts with being able to honor and respect the reality that’s unfolding in front of me. I did not create that person. I did not create the gravity. I did not create anything. I didn’t create anything. But I can honor and respect its right to be. Let go. And then you’re evolving.
You evolve, less things bother you. Wouldn’t it be nice to have less things bother you? You know how you think you get less things that bother you? Make them be the way you want. You wanna know how to have less things that bother you? Evolve past them, so that whatever they are, you’re fine.
The difference in it: one, you have to struggle with the world and everybody in it to try and make it be what you decided it should be. Or you sit there and say, “Oh, maybe I can let go and be okay with the way it is.” You know, there’s other stuff you have to deal with, but not that stuff we’ve been talking about. There’s nothing to do about it. It’s just making a mess of your life.
So you eventually get to the point where you are evolving, and that’s called spiritual evolution. Not physical evolution—spiritual evolution. So now you’re okay inside more of the time. Why? Because you said you were, because you let it be, because you didn’t resist everything and insist it be the way you want.
The biggest thing that I’ve learned in life is the only reason you want somebody to be some way and not want something to be another way is ’cause of the past experience you’ve had. You did not just make it up. Even a dream is a past experience you had. You could have a dream and then sit there and say, “Oh my God, I hope that doesn’t happen. It happened in my dream and it scared the heck outta me.” There’s still experiences you had, and you want them to either repeat or not repeat.
That’s where all your desires and preferences and hopes and dreams and concepts and views—they’re all based on your past experiences. They’re all based on your psyche. And they’re based on you staring at that, instead of understanding: if I wanna be high, I wanna be free, if I wanna feel the bliss and joy of life, I gotta let go of myself, not devote myself to myself.
And that is—that’s the essence of spiritual evolution. Christ called it dying to be reborn. To let go of what you’re staring at, so you can be reborn in who you are.
And it happens naturally. It’s like, yes, you can meditate, yes, you can do mantra, you can do all these techniques—they’re wonderful. But when it’s all said and done, if you let go of the stuff that’s holding you down, you will go up. Period. Every day of your life you should be a higher person. When you go to bed at night, you’re a higher person than when you woke up in the morning. You used your day well.
I don’t care about your money, I don’t care about your relationship. Fine, fine. You’ll dance with ’em. Something’s gonna happen, right? But I want that, when you wake up in the morning, “I ain’t storing stuff down there. It’s too heavy, too big of a burden, to try to make everything be the way I want based on my past experiences.”
I say that and I wonder, do you really get it? Do you understand, if you had one different experience when you were a child, you’d have a different thought pattern? Why did you have the experience? It just was what happened. You understand that?
My parents ordered the bicycle, one for my sister, one for me. And the one that was supposed to be for me was supposed to be red, but it was maroon. But the parents decided, well, I’ll give it to you for Christmas anyway. It’s a nice thing. And now you hate your sister ’cause she got the color you wanted. Do you hear me? It’s all meaningless. It’s just the flow of atoms passing through time and space on a tiny little planet, and you are making a big deal out of everything.
Instead, you work on yourself. You work on letting go. You work on accepting. You work on surrendering to the reality of life as it passes through you. And if you do that, you will start to feel joy. Well, I guess that’s what’s in there now. You feel joy if you get what you want, and you feel bad if you don’t get what you want, right? That’s not how it ends up working. It ends up working that you feel joy because it’s who you are. Nothing has to happen. It becomes your nature.
And so basically, I spent a little time talking about the fall from the garden and about spiritual evolution. You see it: you evolve by letting go of what you’re staring at. And then naturally the self, the awareness of being, I told you, is pure ecstasy. Consciousness is pure Sat-Chit-Ananda: eternal conscious ecstasy. As you get closer to yourself, ’cause you’re not staring away from yourself, you start to feel that ecstasy. It’s called Shakti. You literally start to feel these waves of joy welling up inside of you, for absolutely no reason, and it doesn’t make any difference.
You hear a bird chirp and your heart melts and it flies open. It happens naturally, because you’re not blocked anymore. That’s the stuff you store in there. Everything you push away, everything you cling to, makes it stay in there. And if it stays in there, it blocks your spiritual energy. It puts it on top of your energy. It’s like putting clouds in front of the sun. “God, it got dark.” Of course it got dark. You blocked it with the clouds. Well, what if I don’t put clouds there? You’re gonna find out the sun has always been there. It’s been there for 4.5 billion years, and it didn’t go away. You blocked it with your thoughts, with your emotions, and so on.
So you catch on that this is what it means to evolve spiritually, and this is what it means to grow spiritually. And this is what it means to use your mind properly and your emotions properly, is you don’t let them get negative. You don’t let them get dark. “I don’t understand. How do I keep my mind from getting negative?” You don’t store negativity inside of you. You sit there more and more, with little things at first, and say, “I can handle it. It’s okay. It is raining. Okay, I’ll get wet.”
You start as part of positive thinking, but it’s actually beyond positive thinking. Although positive thinking is a wonderful thing—it starts to create some openness inside of you. But why? Why do I say it’s beyond positive thinking? Why do you do positive thinking? ‘Cause otherwise it’s negative. You’re gonna find out if you don’t do positive thinking, what’s gonna go on in there is the stuff you stored in there. It’s gonna come back up, and it’s gonna start to make you feel weird.
So one of the steps is positive thinking. But when it’s said and done, let go of that stuff. You do not want that stuff in there. It’s just amazing that people miss this. They sit there and say, “Maybe I’ll meet somebody, somebody who matches what I want, that I’ve always dreamt that I could meet, somebody that knows what I like and what I don’t like, and they behave in a way that I feel comfortable”—as opposed to, why am I not okay meeting people? Why am I not okay with everybody? Why am I not feeling love for every person that ever walked the face of the earth? Because I have a particular way I want people to be.
They’re not that way, are they? Come on. And if they were that way, they’re not that way now. “I never thought you would’ve done that. I never thought you could say something like that.” Come on, you’ve been around the block. What if you’re not doing that? You sit there and say, “I’m in here. And I built these preferences based on my past experiences. How do I know that the future’s gonna be the same way?” The things that turned you on before turn you off now.
And you just take that position inside: I’m in here, and this is my house, and I am not gonna store negativity inside of me. I’m not gonna store darkness in me. And then question why it’s dark. You can store enough darkness inside to become depressed. Ever depressed? What does that mean? It means you’re staring at dark energy, right? You’re not depressed. You’re staring at a psyche that’s dark. You’re staring at a psyche that’s depressed.
Can you get out of depression very quickly? Don’t shake your head. I’ll give you an answer, because I have examples, right? Somebody just dumped you. Just walked out of your life. “I don’t ever wanna see you again. I don’t wanna talk to you ever again. I’ve had it with you. We’re done. I don’t know why I even hung out with you ever.” And people talk like that, don’t they?
Okay. How you doing? “I’m depressed. I love that person. She’ll never see me here, she’ll never see me again. I don’t take showers, I don’t go to bed. There’s pizza crust all over the floor. I don’t clean anything up. I’m just sleeping all the time. I can’t do anything. I have no energy at all. Depressed.” Ever been there? Good and depressed.
Phone rings. You generally don’t pick it up. “I’m depressed, I don’t talk to anybody.” Pick it up. Pick it up. And there’s your girlfriend. She says, “How can I apologize? I was so stupid. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I don’t know how I got into that head. Please forgive me. Really, can you possibly forgive me? I don’t know how you can, ’cause I was really mean, but I swear I love you so much. I didn’t realize it till I got away. Can we get together?”
How depressed are you? Huh? I asked a serious question. How much therapy did you need? You’re out of that bed and in that shower in two seconds, right? You’re filled with energy, filled with excitement. Yes or no? There. I just taught you something deep. You laugh all you want. Okay?
You are staring at negative energy. When something happens that matches what you want, all of a sudden it naturally is high. Does that mean I need to go out there and make everything match what I want? No. It means you need to stop storing that junk inside of you. And if you stop storing it inside of you, you’re gonna find out it’s okay.
Is it what you want? Of course it’s not what you want. How could it be? She doesn’t want what you want. She didn’t even want what she wanted yesterday. How can it be what each person wants? There’s just one world out there unfolding, and you’re interacting with a part of it. It’s not about manipulating it, controlling it, and making it be what you want. It’s about letting go of this craziness that you stored, all this junk inside of you, so that now you’re open.
It’s called being an open being. Life can unfold. Do you interact with it? Of course you interact with it. Of course you do. That’s the entire sport of life. God creates creation and then experiences and dances with it. Are you willing to let that happen? If you’re open, you let it happen.
Then what? You look and see how you can help. At some point, it’s not about you anymore. “Why? I’m trying to be selfish.” No, you don’t try to be selfish. You are selfless. You let go of the part of you that was constantly attracting your consciousness to you. And when you do that, all of a sudden there’s other people out there. It’s not all about me. Maybe I can help.
It doesn’t mean you become a therapist or a doctor. It means you’re a person walking through life smiling. First of all, walking through life. And if something happens, you see—you can’t always do something, but you see if you can just raise the energy a little bit and just bring light down, as opposed to focusing on yourself all the time to see what you can do so you are okay. See a difference? And that is spiritual evolution.
I didn’t intend to talk on spiritual evolution today, but do you get it? So why does God need to evolve? He doesn’t. He’s up there, believe me. He’s experiencing everything. It’s all one. But the ray of consciousness gets caught down here. And so is God still whole? Yes.
I can sit here—listen—I can sit here in this chair and look at that picture, or that picture, or that picture, and never leave the chair. Can I? Did I have to get up? Did I? My consciousness projects itself, my awareness projects itself onto the object of consciousness, without leaving at all. Okay? So the divine being, the divine consciousness, is seated in the divine consciousness, focusing and concentrating on something that it’s looking at. Doesn’t mean it left where it is. It’s always in that state, but it focuses down.
And you—I think the most important job you have in life is, am I experiencing the moments that are unfolding in front of me or not? Are they unfolding in front of everybody else all the time? Exactly the experiences you’re having, in the sequence you had them—nobody ever has. Nobody’s ever had the same sequence of events, not even one or two. You all are having different experiences right now. You look at me from different angles. Your minds are thinking different things. You are having a unique experience right now, and then you’ll get another, another, another. Everybody has totally different experiences throughout their entire life.
Well, your job is to have the experience. Your job is—God creates the heavens and earth, and now he wants to experience what he created. And you’re saying, “Not on my watch. It’s uh-uh. I don’t want that to happen. No, no, no, no. I don’t like snakes. I don’t like people to talk to me like that. No, you can’t have that experience”—even though you just did.
So you just start to understand: if you get out of the way, there’s nothing there but ecstasy. That’s where a master is. That’s what they realize. But it doesn’t mean you don’t deal with it. And when I say ecstasy—they asked Ramakrishna once, does an enlightened being ever feel anger? And he said yes. But it’s like writing on water. What’s the big deal? If you write on water, no one ever reads it. It makes no difference. It passes right through, doesn’t it?
So yes, there can be anger. Yes, there can be fear. It’s just, you’re open. It’s passing through. You’re experiencing all the vibrations of creation, and it all passes right through you. That is the state of enlightenment. It’s the state of total openness.
So you get to the point where you catch on to all this, which is, “I’m in here, and I’ve made a mess.” And psychology does not want me saying that, and doesn’t want you saying that, ’cause then that implies guilt. No. There’s no guilt. You did the best you could with the moments that were unfolding in front of you, didn’t you? But you could do better now, couldn’t you? If you relived your childhood now, you wouldn’t get as much stuck in there. You’ve been around the block a few times. You realize things happen. So you evolved. You naturally evolve through your life to be able to handle more things.
Okay? So now you get to the point where you sit there and say, “I get it. I’m not supposed to store the stuff in me ’cause it bothered me. If it bothered me enough, then I’m gonna be bothered for the rest of my life. If I can handle the fact that it passed through and it bothered me, then I don’t have to deal with it for the rest of my life.”
No one’s in there storing this stuff in there for you. But why does it stay there? Right? People talk about the neural pathways get carved. Yes, they certainly do. Know why? ‘Cause you’re pushing the energy down, and it has to go somewhere, and so it follows the neural pathways of least resistance. Does that mean it’s carved inside of me? Of course it’s not. If you let go from up here, it lets go down there. You can change habits. And you’re gonna use to teach the following every single day: break a habit and make a new one. In the habit of this food, then stop and eat that one. You’re in charge in there. Whatever’s going on in there is what you made go on in there.
“Well, why would I wanna be depressed?” You didn’t pay attention. You didn’t realize that if somebody said something in high school that bothered you—everything bothered you in high school, right?—that something that bothered you in high school, because you hadn’t grown through enough yet, you didn’t realize that, okay, it bothered me, fine, doesn’t have to bother me tomorrow. I have to hold it against the person?
Now, I’m a nice Jewish yogi, but there’s some words that Christ has said that are so yogic it’s ridiculous. They’re so in line with this. And one of them was, “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.” That’s what he said on the cross. He said it about everyone and everything. Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do. They’re lost in their stuff.
And you start realizing, well, that’s what’s going on. Alright, can I let go? Can I rise above it? And the answer is, of course you can. You can’t let go of the big stuff right away, but you can let go of the weather. You can let go of the driver in front of you. You can let go, in fact, if someone didn’t say hello or something like that. Let go of the person that said they’re gonna call and it’s five minutes late and you’re freaking out. You don’t have to do that. You can work with yourself.
And that is spiritual evolution. You’re working with yourself to not block the reality of life inside of you. So you have to deal with the fact that it’s stuck in there, right?
So here’s an example. You know, you’re close with somebody, and they said, “Oh, I wanna talk to you. I’ll call you at two.” You know, you’re at that phone, sitting right there. When that clock says two, that phone should ring, shouldn’t it? “If you care about me—you told me you cared—and now it’s two o’clock. And now it’s 2:01. I can’t believe it. I’ll never trust—2:02. Forget it. Don’t bother calling.”
Don’t tell me you’re not that way. Fine, busy yourself, and when the phone rings, it’s time to—you could be doing other things than sitting there driving yourself crazy ’cause the phone didn’t ring. What if the phone doesn’t ring? It’s 2:10, 2:20. It’s 2:30. You gave up on that guy. “That’s it, don’t even bother calling me ever again.” He finally got in a car accident and he’s trying to call, but he can’t. Like, now how do you feel? What are you doing in there? It’s crazy. You’re always better off letting go of yourself, letting go of that personal stuff that you stored in there. And then what happens is you can handle reality.
So that is everything I learned in 55 years of doing this every minute, every day of my life, is doing a practice. You wanna do—if you don’t practice this, if you don’t practice letting go, if you don’t practice acceptance, you’re gonna get high and then you’re gonna come right back down. Because you still got that stuff in there.
And you’ve gradually reached the point, you say, “I’m not putting more in there. I’m not putting more in there.” Have you noticed that it takes one second to close and put something in there, and it could take months or years to get it out? Form an opinion about somebody ’cause they didn’t do what you’re expecting ’em to do, and they keep apologizing, they keep this, they keep that—it doesn’t go away, does it? Even if you say, “Okay, I accept your apology,” if they do anything that reminds you of how much that hurt, you say to them, “You said you wouldn’t do that anymore.” “Well, I didn’t.” “Yeah, you started.”
Okay. And so you say, no, I don’t wanna be like that. I don’t wanna be like that. I don’t want you to have to deal with me being like that. It’s like giving a gift to the world that you’re gonna accept things. Alright? Not that they have to be your way. You just keep relaxing.
And people say, “Well, how do you do that?” I thought the talk alone should encourage you, right? But how do you do it? What’s the technique? They want techniques. Here’s the technique: stop storing it. How? Okay, take me one minute. Ready? Are you in there? Answer me. You sure you’re in there? Do you notice when anger starts to come up? Do you notice when your heart starts to close and starts to hurt? You notice when your mind starts to make something out of something? “What did he mean by that?” Right? It does start somewhere, doesn’t it?
And you’re gonna find out that when it starts, you’re gonna resist. You, in there, are gonna push it away. “I don’t want to experience this. I don’t want it happening.” And you do what’s called close. You close your heart, you close your mind. Don’t do that. “Don’t do what? How do I not do that?” Relax. Relaxation is the opposite of resistance.
If you start to resist what’s coming up and push it away, it’s gonna stay. And it’s an amazing thing, but you have to go very deep to understand what I’m talking about. If instead of pushing down—see me pushing down—you let go. That’s all. That’s all it takes, is instead of pushing it away, you say, “Oh, well, I don’t want it inside of me.” And you understand. Let it go. Don’t resist it. Let go.
Anybody hear me? That’s the entire path. If you will let go when that stuff starts to come up, eventually you’ll catch on: you want that stuff coming up. Why? ‘Cause it’s a reflection of what you stored down there in the past. And when it comes up, it bothers you. Then relax. How? Because you want to.
Women go through childbirth. I heard it’s not so much fun. And they go back for seconds and thirds and fourths. Why? Because it’s worth it, right? And eventually it’s the joy of childbirth. “But doesn’t it hurt?” Of course it hurts. But the joy of the process of what’s happening is worth every drop of it. I can talk big, I’m a man, right? But I hear tell. Right? And basically it’s worth it, is it not? It’s babies.
Okay. Well, how about the birth of your soul? How about the birth of liberation? How about the birth of the fact that this stuff’s holding you down, and now it has decided to come back up? Does it hurt? Of course it hurts. You stored it with pain. It’s coming back with pain. That’s the reason you stored it—’cause of pain, ’cause you couldn’t handle it. At some point it starts to come back up, and you learn, I want it to come back up. I wanna relax. Relax. Non-resistance. There’s relaxation. Non-resistance is relaxation.
You’ll feel the tendency to protect yourself. Nothing in there needs protecting. You’re protecting God from God going on in there. It’s just energy trying to release. That’s what you find out: there’s this energy trying to release. And eventually you welcome it. You go to a very beautiful spiritual state where, when it needs to come up, I am there to help it. I am there to welcome it. I’m there to offer it to God, however you want. But I ain’t pushing it back down, in no way. So my whole life, with that junk in there—I don’t need it in there anymore, but I have to be willing to let it go.
So now I’ve said the essence of everything. I wanna say that that is spirituality: the purification of the junk you stored in there. And I’m telling you, every time you let it go, the more you let it go, the more this natural joy starts welling up inside of you, till it’s there all the time. You understand that? It’s just, you wanna feel joy, waving your hand across the chakra, and it goes boom, flying up there. Right? Why? Because you’re open. You’re open.
Alright. Thank you for listening. 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.
