E219: Removing the Obstacles to Love

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: Mm-hmm. Jai guru dev, jai masters. Let’s talk about love. Very few people… People experience love, but very few people truly understand love — what it is, why it is, when it is, what to do about it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. To most people, if they even can open the heart enough, or allow it to open enough to where they feel love, that is it, man.

It’s like you just run after it. It’s like this is a beautiful experience, and it is, and you better get it. You better grab it. You better keep it. You better do something about it because it’s very special. So let’s talk about love. You can’t talk about love unless you understand energy, and most of the world doesn’t understand energy.

They understand external energy, but they don’t even know that there is inner energy, which is really funny, because you experience it all the time. It’s like the fish doesn’t know they’re in water. It never got out, therefore it’s the normal state of affairs, one way or another. So let’s talk about energy.

In yoga, they say there are five bodies: Annamaya Kosha, your physical body. Pranamaya Kosha, your energy body. Manomaya Kosha, your mental body, your mental plane, the thoughts and so on. Vijnanamaya Kosha, which I’m sure I don’t pronounce properly. Vijnanamaya Kosha, which is above the mental body, which is the wisdom body, inspiration, wisdom.

That wisdom drops into the mental body. Where does it come from? These sudden flashes of brilliance and so on, they come from a higher plane, which is Vijnanamaya Kosha, and beyond that is ecstasy, bliss, Anandamaya Kosha. The koshas, I should have said it to start with, they are shells of bodies. So you have a physical body, that’s a shell made out of physical matter, made out of the physical plane.

Then you have another body which is bigger than the physical body, your aura. You’re used to auras and so on, but it’s much bigger than just the aura. It’s the entire energy that’s pouring. Each body pours into the one below it, and it’s just a higher vibration. So at a higher vibration, Pranamaya Kosha, the energy body, pours into the physical body.

That’s why there’s acupuncture and Tai Chi and all these kind of things that are dealing with energy, tying the two bodies together so there’s a clear flow. You want a clear flow between the bodies. You don’t want blockages. So when you’re working with all this energy work — people do energy work, right?

They do massages, and they do this. They put helmets on their head with lights and they… You name it. And there’s a lot of energy work going on. People say, “I’m an energy worker.” Well, what does that mean? They’re saying they’re working with the astral body, with the aura body, the energy body, Pranamaya Kosha.

That’s what you’re talking about, and it affects the physical body, just like if you pour water out, it affects where it’s landing, right? It pours down. Gravity pulls it down. So these bodies have to feed each other, and so that’s that. The mental body, you’re aware of that. Those are your thoughts. That’s a vibration rate, a higher vibration rate than the prana.

Higher than the prana, okay? It’s higher than the aura body, and people don’t think that. They think, oh, well, the emotional body, the energy body, that’s higher than the mental body. No, it is not. The mental body is a much, much higher vibration rate. That’s why it’s so brilliant, okay? It can create thoughts that are phenomenal.

It can do all… It can do anything. It literally… Where do you wanna go today? Your mental body can do anything, unless then you do it right with it. We talked about that the other day, how you misuse your mental body, your mind, okay? But that is a vibration rate of energy. It’s all energy, just energy vibrating at higher and higher and higher rates, and the mental plane is higher than the energy plane, or than the aura plane, or they call it Pranamaya Kosha.

People don’t think that. They say prana, oh, it’s… No, prana is still closely associated with the body. It is what feeds the body. It flows through the body. And yes, you can work with that energy for meditation, pranayama, all that kind of stuff. The mental body is a higher vibrational rate. I’m sorry if you don’t know that, if you don’t understand that.

The mental body is not even close. Just like the aura body, the energy body, the prana body is higher than the physical body. It’s more subtle. The mental body is much higher than the Pranamaya Kosha. That’s Manomaya Kosha. And then above that is — okay, the mental body can deal with thoughts. It can rationalize, it can think, it can bring them together, it can do all kinds of things with logic.

It can also cause a lot of trouble. The whole ego is built in the mental body. It’s built out of the mental body, not in. It’s made out of the mental body. We’ll talk about that. So you build this whole psyche, this whole psychological stuff in there, right, you feel is you. It’s not you. It’s something you built inside the mind. But then there is Vijnanamaya Kosha, which is the wisdom body, higher than the mental body, higher than the mind, higher than the thoughts.

The mind can only go so high. The thoughts vibrate at a certain rate, and then you can’t go higher. That’s why deep meditation is higher than the mind — when you go way back in there, you can touch inspiration. And inspiration can just drop into the mental body. It’s actually a phenomenal thing to watch.

There are great scientists, great musicians, great authors, great people who have one moment, a moment of inspiration that lasts their whole life. Beethoven was that way, okay? He heard this music playing in his head. That was not his mind. That was coming from a higher level and had to express it. His entire life, his passion.

That’s why a lot of the artists are crazy. You know, they are crazy because what’s coming in is not rational. It’s just… But I said, a person can have one moment of inspiration that comes from Vijnanamaya Kosha and drops into the mind, and in order to bring it down on this plane, you can spend your entire life thinking, writing, organizing.

Just that one seed can drop in and create all of that. It’s very beautiful. Have you had an inspiration like that, that all of a sudden, bam, it’s like the light turned on, but then you have work to do, because it happened at such a high level that it can’t be expressed on this plane. So the mind brings it together, and then the energy’s used to express it.

It’s all one beautiful system of higher and higher vibration rates. So Vijnanamaya Kosha is higher than mind. It’s very, very beautiful. And there are so many examples of people like — well, Einstein once said, you know, his final equation, all that stuff’s on the board. You wanna look at that stuff on the board, that’s complicated stuff.

And all over sixteen blackboards written all over the place, right? And then there’s a little corner down there, circled: E equals MC squared. That’s what all that math said. All that math, you know, when you factor it down, when all that complicated stuff comes down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, boom, out comes E equals MC squared.

It was one of the greatest realizations that energy and matter are the same thing, and he literally calculated how much energy can come out of matter, how much matter it takes to create a certain amount of energy, and unfortunately, they built it. Not unfortunately, I don’t judge, right? But the Manhattan Project took E equals MC squared and said, “Well, let’s not make a theory anymore.

Let’s prove that we can take this tiny little block of uranium and blow up the world.” How is that possible? Because E equals MC squared. He once stood before that board with reporters, and he said, “I did not reach that conclusion through the process of my rational mind.” It just, boom, comes out, right? And it’s like the same…

I don’t think… I tell the story as though I know exactly what happened, but there is a story of how Darwin came to natural selection, all right? And one story I heard, he was walking in a churchyard. I never found it, though. I tried to look it up. He was walking in a churchyard, and he had gone to the Galápagos Islands, and he’d studied this, and there were all kinds of birds and things and everything, and he’s just looking at all this stuff, right?

And there was this island where a certain kind of bird was a certain way, and another had big beaks, and he just couldn’t figure it all out. And what was said was, at one moment, all of a sudden, bam, the understanding of natural selection took place. That the birds on this island looked like those, but they had bigger beaks.

Why? Because there were islands where the rocks had big crevices in them, and over time, the birds grew beaks so they could get the beaks down into… And that’s a true story. They got the beaks down into the rocks. And then he saw evolution taking place, and he saw that this is how all these different species came about, and so on, right?

But it was like a flash of realization that he spent the rest of his life writing the books on natural selection and all that kind of stuff, right? It’s just neat. That’s coming from a higher plane. That’s coming in there, drops into the mind, then the mind has a lot of work to do to bring it down into a place that can communicate with others and so on.

And then higher than all of that body, the shell that’s bigger — and I’ll talk about that in a moment — is Anandamaya Kosha, which is what? The shell of ecstasy. And that’s where the masters went, and so on. I, myself, had the honor a couple of times of being in the presence… And you don’t know it when you’re there, unfortunately, because you’re in your own stuff, maybe for a moment. But I’ve been in a room that was, you know, ten times this size, and walked in, and I couldn’t walk forward. There was a master standing in front of that room, and the aura was that big.

You could not walk through it. I couldn’t. And every step you took, it got stronger and stronger. What was emanating off that being was like, oh my God, okay? That’s Anandamaya Kosha. That’s the ecstasy. And the problem that you have is you say, “Well, I’d like to meet someone like that.” I’m not so sure. Why?

Because a higher vibration of energy tries to pass itself through to the lower vibrations. Nobody has to do it. If you take a tuning fork into a room that has crystals, when you hit that tuning fork, it can hit a very high note that starts the glass breaking, because the vibration is stronger than what the matter can hold together.

That is what it’s like to hang out with a master. You are going to go through a washing machine. You think, wouldn’t that be great? Just hang out with some great enlightened master. Whoa, you go read about them. It’s like, you don’t have to do it. You don’t have to do anything, right? That’s what’s emanating off of them at such a high vibration rate, and you’re not ready to vibrate at that rate.

And what happens? It tries to bring your energy up to that rate, and it is not always pleasant. It’s like being in a washing machine. Cleanses everything, like great masters. Anyways, what we’re talking about is that this energy vibration rate is what is going on, and now we’re gonna talk about love. Where does love fit into that?

I can’t talk about love without you understanding these energy vibration rates, and that’s really your chakras. And I don’t ever teach this stuff. I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight, okay? But your lower chakras, they are what pass the lower vibrations of energy. And so your lowest chakra, right?

I don’t even wanna know the names. Muladhara or something. I don’t know. I don’t wanna know. Okay? But you know you got one. You know you feel threatened. Your life is threatened. There’s something wakes up in there, defensive. This animal takes over. There are stories, actual stories. You look them up.

I looked them up once, back in the seventies, where, you know, ninety-seven-pound mothers look out the window and a car fell on top of the husband or the kid, ran out there and picked the car up and took the kid out. Just under that state of total emergency, the energy that woman had to lift that car off that child was phenomenal.

All right? So this is the first chakra. That’s where the energy starts down there in the base, and it has tremendous power. The second chakra, of course, is your procreation, and that has tremendous power. And then you have the third chakra. All of these are — talk about working my way to the heart, I’ve worked my way from the bottom up, never popped down.

We haven’t touched it yet, because unless you understand this stuff, you can’t understand love. So what’s the third chakra? Once you have managed to get past the first chakra — you know, cave people, they don’t let people in their cave. Men don’t let women in their cave.

They’re dangerous. Until… I gave a whole lecture on this once. Until it quiets down enough to where the second chakra has enough power to where you allow the opposite sex in. You allow that energy and whatever it is. And so all of a sudden now there’s two people living in the cave together. But the energy of it is strong enough to overcome the fear of being hurt, the fear of being with somebody else.

There’s not psychological hurt, physiological, you know, danger, pain. Okay? You have to be open enough to be that close to somebody else, and that’s the evolution from the first to second chakra. Then what happens? Okay, now we got our little family units going on in there, but you know, you can only do so much in one cave in terms of food and clothing and shelter and all this kind of stuff, and all of a sudden you’re looking outside.

I haven’t told this story in detail. I like it. Right? You look outside and everything you look at has a danger. Those are not part of the family. Those are not part of what I’m comfortable with. So you throw rocks at them, and you have wars, and you’re fighting. And at some point, you rise above that enough, this settles down enough, you realize, well, this guy in the cave next to me, he doesn’t seem to be that bad, right?

And you let him in. The third chakra is the social chakra. First is not very social at all. Don’t worry about that. The second is social — selective, extremely selective social. The third says, “We can get more done if we work together. We can hunt together. We can figure things out together. We can do all kinds of things.

We can protect each other together. While I’m sleeping, you’re watching.” Right? And all of a sudden, the society — that’s third chakra. That’s all third chakra. It’s called the social chakra. So you’re interacting with other people. It worked out really good. You’ve got all kinds of inventions. You have all kinds of society.

You have all kinds of power of multiple people. “I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. I can see from…” It absolutely worked out just fine. Doesn’t look that way on the front page of the newspaper. It looks like a giant mess, what society has made out of this social chakra. Why? Because what happens when you’re in the third chakra, you’re competitive with everybody else.

And so ego gets formed. And that’s what ego is. Ego comes out of the third chakra, the core third chakra, which sits there and says, “Yes, I’ll cooperate and I’ll work together, but I am different than everybody else. I’m either better than you or not as good as you.” There we go, ego. I developed this “I,” and all of a sudden I have to decide how I relate to everybody else.

I can get along with that person, not that person. It’s so big, I can’t even talk about it. So, fish and water — very few people get past the ego. It pulls you right down, more powerful than either of the other two drives. Okay, how do I know that? I always use the example of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.

These are highly educated people. You know, these are classy guys. Somebody insulted somebody, and they sat there and said, “I will not tolerate you say something like that. I will meet you out here tomorrow, and we’ll take ten steps away from each other. We’ll turn around and shoot each other in the face with our muskets.”

Oh, what happened to survival instinct? Ego stronger. Do you see that? That’s what that’s saying. Stronger than survival instinct is my self-concept, to prove myself, that I’m more of a man than you are. Got it? Okay, it’s kind of neat, isn’t it? So you’re working your way up the chakras. At some point — and we might as well talk about it, that was fun to talk about — you become comfortable enough with either a group of people or a person, but not second-chakra level, right?

Just — you rose above your personal self. It’s above your ego. Love is above your ego. There’s no love with ego. Why? ‘Cause ego only loves itself. Don’t look at me as if you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’re out there looking for someone who takes care of you. You’re out there looking for someone who will treat you the way you wanna be treated.

Well, who decides how you wanna be treated? Ego. So you’re looking for yourself. I always tell everybody, “You wanna have a really, really good relationship? Look in the mirror, have it with yourself,” ’cause it’s the only one that’s gonna work, right? Why? Because you expect the other person to know you.

They don’t know you. How can they know you? Psychology says that man is the sum of his learned experiences. How many experiences have you had? Why don’t you count them? Every single experience, every single… How many have you had? Who else had your experiences? Nobody. Therefore, nobody knows you, and nobody ever will.

So this concept that I’m gonna find somebody who’s gonna take care of me and know what I want when I want it, and treat me the way I wanna be treated, and if I change, they’ll change with me — that’s what I need, a soulmate. You are your own soulmate. You ain’t gonna find another one, I’m sorry to tell you.

Because everybody’s different. They’ve all had different experiences, okay? Well, that’s ego. That’s still personal love. That’s personal stuff. Or it’s higher than battling all the time and fighting — you’re trying to get along, it’s nice, I’m not knocking it — but that’s not love. That’s need. “I need you to be the way I need you to be.”

Why? Because I have needs. And when you have needs, you don’t know love, period. ‘Cause love is impersonal. Love is when the energy manages, for whatever reason — there’s a connection of energy fields, there’s experiences, or whatever it is. Maybe you remind me of my mother, and I love my mother, and she died when I was young, and you look just like her.

Smile is just like hers. I just… Love at first sight. There’s some reason that you opened more than you were open before. Before, you were looking at you. Now all of a sudden… Oh, you make me cry to say it. Before, you’re looking at you. What do you want? What do you like? What do you not like? What are you afraid of?

Okay? Now all of a sudden, you’re looking at somebody else. For some reason, that other person caught your attention, your consciousness, enough to where you’re focused on them, not to protect yourself, not for any reason. It just rose your energy up past the ego to where now you’re more interested in serving, loving, being, interacting with somebody else than you are yourself.

That’s why love is always selfless. Not that it’s supposedly selfless — there is no love unless it’s selfless, because then you’re saying, “I love you because you’ll take care of me. I love you because you’ve got a good job, you make good finances, I feel safe.” That’s conditional love. That’s conditional.

It’s not gonna last. Somebody loses their job, somebody gets old. “Hey, probably you look really good. You’re probably getting old.” I told you, I had a friend in college, I really did. He’d go dating somebody, and he’d say to me, maybe after a month, three months, “I wanna go meet her parents, her mother.” “Well, that’s pretty fast.

You’re moving right along here, right? What’s that all about?” He said, “No, no, no, no, no.” I’m like, “I’m embarrassed to even say it. I want to see what she’s gonna look like when she gets old.” That’s pretty conditional stuff, right? All right. So when, for whatever reason — we’ll talk about the reasons — the very energy that was protecting you in the first chakra, that managed to open enough for the second chakra, that involved itself in proving yourself and competing and doing social stuff and so on, all of a sudden, wham, it got past that, even for a minute.

It’s special. It got past that, and all of a sudden it went into the fourth chakra. That’s exactly what that is. It’s just another level of energy vibration. Before, we talked about the entire koshas, the bodies — that’s way up there. Now we’re talking within the body: there are these energy expressions, and that’s why people are different.

So basically it comes up from the fourth chakra and you get blown off your feet. There are people who say if you’re not blown off your feet, you’re not in love. Don’t call it puppy love. Don’t call it childish. If it doesn’t blow you away, if you don’t reach the point where “I would give everything, I’d give everything to be with you,” it’s just…

I don’t… But you’re not clinging. It’s not need. And that’s very difficult. What happens when that first opening takes place, you like it. You’re like, “Are you kidding me?” Most people have never felt such a thing. Just all this beautiful energy goes pouring out of the heart, and then they start clinging. They start saying, “I need you.”

Well, that stops the love instantaneously. Don’t kid yourself. Need and love, they do not work together, period. So if you’re feeling need, it’s about you. If you’re feeling love, it’s about something other than you, and love can transcend the personal self, and that’s the beauty of it. That’s why so many spiritual teachers teach about love, because real love can raise you above yourself.

And so basically you start at the lowest level where it attracted you. You feel this energy coming out. I know, and I hope all of you at some point have experienced it, that there can be enough love pouring through this heart that you can sit down with no talking, just at a distance from somebody, and just be looking at each other and be intoxicated with the flow that’s happening between your hearts.

You ever felt that? You ever felt the heart go out, right? The heart’s not going out. It’s staying right in there beating. What’s going out is the Shakti. What’s going out is you’ve opened up that center, and it’s able to pour that energy out and connect with somebody else’s heart. All right? It’s pretty special stuff, and it seems like it will last forever and can’t possibly change.

It changes the moment ego gets hit, the moment somebody, while feeling that love, has somebody do something or say something that you didn’t expect. It stops instantaneously. Bam, it closes down. “Well, I never thought she’d say something like that. Never thought she’d do something like that. I can’t even believe you looked at me that way.

I was feeling all this love. Now I don’t.” Can it turn on and off that quickly? Answer me. Be madly in love with somebody, then have your best friend come and say, “Who? Sally? You’re in love with Sally? Didn’t you talk to George and see what happened to him when he hung out with Sally?” Right? Next time you see that person, you’re not so open, right?

You wanna find out about George. What’d you do to George? That’s not love. That’s third chakra. It just pulls it right back down. It’s very difficult to transcend the third chakra, but love can do it. So when the energy is open enough — we’re gonna talk about why — when the energy’s open enough and it pours up into the fourth chakra and it can go out, it’s very beautiful.

It’s not the highest state. We’ll talk about that too. I hate to do this to you. All right? You’re sitting there, fully intoxicated in love, with it pouring between two people, and you can’t even take your eyes off it. That’s very, very nice, but don’t talk to yogis, because what is that? That’s fourth chakra.

How many are there? Well, there’s seven within the body, and they say there are twelve if you include the ones higher. That’s fourth? Uh-oh. We got some work to do here, right? And that’s what you’re doing. You’re working your way through yourself. But love is a very major thing that can help you do that. Why?

Because it takes your attention off of you. But the moment something isn’t the way the ego wants it, it’s not taking it off of you. You’ve been around the block. How hard is it to stop feeling that love for somebody? They have to be exactly what you expect them to be when you expect them to be it, right? You forgot what?

You forgot the anniversary? Well, why am I hanging out with you? This is ridiculous. How could you forget my anniversary? That’s very funny. No. It has to be stronger than any personal thoughts and desires and fears, okay? It can’t be, “Well, I love you, but I’m afraid you might leave me someday.” Prove to me. No, forget it.

That ain’t love. They love. Love transcends the ego. Otherwise, it’s coming right back down to the third chakra, and maybe you can have a marriage counselor have it go back up a little bit. But in general, it’s very hard. It’s very hard for people who had love. They don’t fall out of love. They fall out of the fourth chakra down to the third all the time.

It’s hard to get it back. You can say you have it back until somebody does anything to remind you of what they did before. They closed you, and it’s closing right away. So that’s why there’s so many relationships — that’s why they’re so short-lived. That’s why there are so many problems. That’s why people stay together for the kids.

That’s why they tell you, “Oh, cope. You have to cope. Nothing’s perfect.” That’s not true. Yes, nothing’s perfect, but you are. You’re higher than your ego, and you can go through situations together, or even by yourself, within that transcendence… If you’re smart, when you feel that love, you would trade anything for that.

You would sit there and say, “I don’t care if you have money or not. We’ll live in tents.” Let’s see how long that lasts. All right? But you mean it when you say it. I guarantee you mean it when you say it. “I will never, ever leave you. I don’t care where we live. I don’t care what we go through.

I’ll never, ever turn on you.” Good. Say it. Okay? And then watch all your experiences in life and all your friends’ experiences in life and everything else. It is not that easy to keep that chakra open. Why? Because the third chakra is very strong, and it pulls right back down to I, me, mine — what I want, what I like.

Okay, you lost your job. “You lost your job. I don’t know if I love you as much as I did before. I kind of expected we’d move…” Wow, third chakra. It just pulls the energy right back down until it’s third-chakra energy. It’s hard to get that back open. Okay? Can you? Of course you can. But what it means is, you have to reach the point where, within yourself, has nothing to do with anybody else, you look at that and you say, “That is really beautiful.”

Not — that person’s really beautiful — because that person’s gonna get old. That person could get sick. You can’t sit there and say, “That’s what’s beautiful.” What’s beautiful is this flow of energy. I haven’t experienced it before. It’s really beautiful. It’s really intoxicating. Maybe it’s everything I ever looked for. Maybe everything I was doing was an attempt to attract an experience like that, so I could have energy like that.

So maybe, if something happens that would tend to close it, maybe I need to work on myself and say, “No, I’m not gonna close it just because of what you said, or what you did, or what you wore, or who you danced with, or had a phone call I didn’t understand.” Maybe I don’t understand. Maybe there’s this pull to close.

Maybe I don’t wanna close it. That’s what it takes. It takes you inside to say, “This is more beautiful than I have ever experienced, and I ain’t giving it up. I ain’t giving it up.” You say, “Thank God this chakra opened.” I’m not gonna close it because somebody said something, or did something, or lost something, or found something, or…

You hear me? Are you willing to trade off the most beautiful experience you’ve ever had for the garbage of the lower chakras? Then you start fighting and arguing about who gets half. Okay? Do you understand? When people get married, they don’t expect to get divorced. They think, “We’re in love. We can share everything.

Whatever I make, you make, and we just have a community of trust.” It’s like, all of a sudden, when you’re having that divorce, it doesn’t look the same as before. Why not? Because you closed your heart, and so did she or he. You closed your heart. So if you close your heart, you’re a different person.

You were intoxicated with that flow of energy coming through the fourth chakra. And if you sit there and say, “But isn’t that stupid?” Right? I don’t know. Give me the most beautiful experience I ever had and tell me I’m stupid to want it. What’s that Beatles song? Can’t Buy Me Love. You can’t buy that.

You can stimulate momentary experiences. You can go on a vacation and then… Sit in a car, right? In my high school years, I worked on sports cars, right? And once, somebody pulled in with a Jaguar XK-E. That’s a very beautiful car. I was blown away. I just stood there looking at it. I was like seventeen years old.

I stood there looking at it. I was filled with love. It’s the same love you feel for a person. Same. It was just like, “Oh my God, this is so gorgeous,” right? You can love anything. You love a dog. You love a horse. Love an animal. Love a person. Love a car. Love the weather. The sunset. You can fall in love with a sunset, can’t you?

Trouble is, it doesn’t last. That’s a transient thing that comes and goes, but things can open you. That’s what we’re talking about. What is that experience where all of a sudden you feel love? It opened you. Something distracted you from yourself. That’s all it took. “The sunset was so beautiful, I just melted.

I felt like I was in the presence of God. It touched me to the depth of my being.” Why? ‘Cause it distracted you from what you were doing before that, right? Which was focusing on your ego and focusing on your problems and your thoughts and your worries and anxieties. Can something be strong enough to, bam, knock you out of that, right?

I wish that could happen to everybody. A lot of people are so closed, it doesn’t happen, right? It has to be exactly what they want. But there are situations, and a person can do that. The right aura, the right vibration, the right whatever, the right words, the right action, the right whatever they were wearing reminded you.

There’s different combinations of a human being that can stand up. Usually you’ll go moving down the aisle in Publix and turn that corner, and the baskets hit each other, and that’s it, ma’am. Love. Can that happen? Answer me. And it’s perfectly rational. It’s not an irrational thing. They have a vibration.

The vibration reminds you of something, all right? I don’t know what to say. It’s just, whatever it is, it opens you. What does “it opens you” mean? You stop being closed. You stop focusing all of your consciousness on you, on what you want and what you like and what you wanna do and what you wanna get and what you don’t wanna get and what experiences bothered you and don’t want to happen again.

It’s all you. You just built this stuff in there and built an ego. There are things, people, places, things that can knock you out of that temporarily. Unfortunately, people do drugs. Why do people do psychedelics or these, or various types of drugs? ‘Cause momentarily they can have an experience that distracts them from themselves.

I would imagine that if somebody did some drug, and all of a sudden they started seeing dancing elephants instead of all the garbage that goes on in there, they might say, “Wow, it was really nice. I wanna do it again.”

I’m just purposely staying away from this topic, okay? But do you hear me, all right? It’s like they want… They can’t do it themselves. They can’t get open. So they need help. If it gets stuck in the third chakra, and everybody’s stuck in the third chakra, anything you can do that gives a reprieve — there are people that are happily married, and then they go have affairs.

Why? Because it distracts them from where they were caught. “I’m caught in my — I have a family, I have this, I have to go to work, I take care of all these different things,” right? So all of a sudden somebody comes in and it starts to catch your energy, it distracts you, and now you’re not thinking about yourself, and anything that gives you a reprieve from being caught in your…

I’m not justifying this stuff we’re talking about, right? I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but come on, people do it. Okay? That’s not love. That’s distracting the consciousness from where it is stuck, and anything is better. You do food that way. “I wanted to eat something that blows me away, right? There’s this — oh my God, it was so good.

I want to come out,” right? It’s just because it distracts your consciousness from hanging out with the third chakra. Third chakra’s a killer. It’s very complex because it’s the sum of your learned experiences. “The very thing you’re eating, I can’t even look at. It makes me sick because I had some experience in the past — I saw the fish swimming around and somebody took it out and killed it when I was five, so I don’t eat fish.”

Okay? It’s just beautiful to watch what’s going on. All right, we’re trying to get up to love. Love means something has taken place that you’re distracted enough from your personal self, from that ego, to where the energy and consciousness of your being focuses on something other than yourself. There are people who still go to the Met and sit down on those beautiful benches and bury themselves in a Monet or a Renoir or whatever art they like.

They’re sitting there for hours, just completely immersed in the energy, the beauty of the painting. Art can do that, can’t it? That’s what art is. I once had to write a newspaper article about something, right? And I described art — true, long-term art, the great masters, right — that they had that energy coming through them, and they put it down in a painting, or put it down in a pot, or in music, and therefore anyone who comes in contact with that, if they’re open enough, experiences what they experienced when they were feeling that love, when they’re feeling all that stuff.

It’s a beautiful thing to transcend yourself. That’s yoga. You’re transcending yourself. So the problem is, as I say to you, if there’s a cause, it’s not gonna last. It has to be what’s called unconditional love. If you have a condition, it can change. Not it can — it will change. Even on a block, don’t look at me weird.

You know what I mean? I know you’re still waiting for your ship to come in, right? The love is inside of you. It’s not about anybody else. I’m sorry. And if it’s about somebody else, it will not last. But first, it won’t last because you’re gonna change, and second, it won’t last because they’re gonna change.

Then they’re gonna try not to change to please you, and they don’t even know you, and they think they’re doing something to please you, and they’re really pissing you off, right? You can’t figure it out. The only thing you can do, really, if you want love — and you do — is to come in here and say, “I’m not gonna close my heart.

I’m not gonna close my heart, whenever. Ever. It’s too beautiful. The experience of that heart being open is precious. It’s at that level of a very deep meaning of life, to have that love pouring through you.” If you have that love, you can go to work and enjoy every minute of it. If you have that love, you can take a job that used to bore you and can’t wait to get there, because you’re doing it for your beloved.

It’s amazing what love can do. Why? It’s energy. You can’t sleep. You got all this energy, all right? Just wanna express it, and you wanna paint. There are people that never painted a day in their life, and all of a sudden they’re painting or making music. Why? To express that love. It’s a very beautiful thing.

But it has to be unconditional. I’m sorry. It’s not gonna last if it’s not unconditional. Why? Because it has conditions, and the conditions will not stay that way. Whatever condition you had that made you fall in love with this person is not going to stay. And if you think it’s their fault, you’re crazy.

If you think you screwed it up, you’re crazy. Things do not stay the same, right or wrong. They’re constantly changing, all right? Somebody goes to work, you weren’t with them. They come back, they’re a different person. I don’t care whether you like it or not, they’re a different person. They can put on whatever face they want.

Whatever experience they had at work, you didn’t have, and they’re the sum of their learned experiences, aren’t they? Have you noticed? And you expect them to be a certain way when they come back, and you think that’s what ruined the relationship. No, you ruined the relationship by not understanding things need to be unconditional.

What does that mean? If somebody goes to work and they come back in their grumpy old mood and they say not-nice things, okay, it does not affect your heart one single moment. There’s no way I’m coming down because of their grumpy old attitude, because someone had a bad day. I’m not sitting there saying, “I don’t need to hang out with this stuff.”

No, I need to be able to keep my heart open. That is what love is about, and that’s what the fourth chakra’s about. I am not going to close this heart. You reach a point — and I remember when I reached it — where you sit there and say, “Not only am I gonna not close the door of my heart, I’m taking the door off.”

There won’t be one — taking it off the hinges. I don’t want this thing to close. There’s not a door there I can close. What does that mean? Whoa, you bite off that thing, you bit off something serious. Why? Because it’s gonna try to close. What is the third chakra? It’s gonna pull you down. It’s gonna pull you down.

The energy gets blocked in that center because people do things that weren’t what you wanted. And there was, “I didn’t expect you would ever do that. I never thought you would do something like that.” Of course you wouldn’t. You have some of your own experiences. I’ve got some of my own experiences, and I’m sorry they’ve bothered you, but I don’t know what to say.

It happened. And you have to sit there and say, “I understand. I understand the third chakra. I understand how people get lost in things. I ain’t closing. I ain’t closing, period.” Okay? That’ll put you through some stuff, won’t it? Now you’re in there struggling with yourself instead of somebody else, and you just took on the challenge of a lifetime.

“I ain’t closing this heart,” right? This is the meaning of life, and nothing’s taking it away from me. And in order to do that — like I always say this — in the Christian Bible, which I read once back in ’71, ’72, right? Go read the Sermon on the Mount, and you don’t need this lecture, because every single thing he said in the Sermon on the Mount is how to keep your heart open. You understand that?

Love thy neighbor as thyself. Every single thing says you have to be selfless. Every single thing is the teaching that you’re in there, and to come close to God and to grow spiritually, you have to let go of yourself. But there are no buts. There are no buts. “It is said unto you, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you, resist not evil.”

It’s not the exact words, but go check it out. How in the world do you tell someone to resist not evil? If you are busy resisting evil, you are not opening your heart. You’re fighting something outside that doesn’t fit with you, as opposed to — it’s all Christ’s teachings — if someone slaps you in the face, turn the cheek.

He’s not talking about physically. He’s saying if somebody does something and it bothers you inside, turn the other cheek. Don’t suppress it. Just sit there and say, “Okay, that’s what happened. I ain’t closing.” That whole thing is about not closing. Isn’t that beautiful? You have to be willing to let go of yourself.

Otherwise, you’re stuck in yourself, and if you’re stuck in yourself, you don’t know love. That’s not love. That’s need. All right? Okay, so now we’re getting the drift of what love is. Love is the Shakti. What’s Shakti? The Shakti that was blocked in the first chakra and worked its way through, blocked in the second chakra and worked its way through, blocked in the third chakra, and very few worked their way through.

Other, short periods of time. But you can. That’s the essence of all the spiritual teachings, of yoga, of everything. How to not close the heart, how to relax through it, how to be open, how to… Look, wait a minute — isn’t it a tenet of Christianity and of Islam and of all the… And Buddhism? Judge not, that ye shall not be judged.

What does that say? Don’t even bother judging somebody else, because it’s gonna close you, and if you don’t want to be closed, then don’t do it. Just don’t do it. Don’t judge. Okay? Again, what did Christ say? “You who is without sin, throw the first stone.” Don’t judge. But that’s hard, isn’t it? ‘Cause I’m telling you, the third chakra is very strong, and it’s all about me.

My hopes, my dreams, my concepts, my views, my opinions, my likes, my right or wrong. You know what it’s about? “I’ll be here, and that’s what I’m about.” I am distracted. My consciousness is distracted by that. Therefore, it can’t rise up to the next center. Okay? So — but you can, but you have to work with yourself.

This is how you get love. You don’t get love by finding somebody. You get love by saying, “I’m not gonna close. I’m gonna go through this day without closing.” Oh, boy, wait till you say that to yourself. Wait till you see what happens when you say that. “I’m gonna go through an entire day without closing my heart, no matter what happens.”

Well, how do you do that? You can’t get a crowbar and prop the thing open, okay? It’s not about opening your heart. It’s about not closing your heart. You don’t know how to open your heart. “Open your heart right now. I want it to make all the love come out.” You can’t. Don’t close your heart. You know what that means?

You feel it closing, don’t you? You feel that tension. You feel that resistance. You feel the thing closing, right? So the whole spiritual path is: let go. What do you mean, let go? You’re in there, you’re participating in the closing. Don’t. Just relax. Let it go through what it needs to go through. Don’t try to pry it up or get rid of the third chakra.

Don’t you dare do that. Just relax through it. And all of a sudden you’ll find out — you’ll go through it, it’ll start to close. Relax, breathe, relax, relax, and it will pass. Okay? Maybe not the first time, but it passes. It doesn’t pass if you fight it. It doesn’t pass if you don’t like it. You can’t not like the ego.

You cannot hate the third chakra. Otherwise — resist not evil. You just sat there and said, “No, I’m not pure. I have these problems. Oh my God, I know what I did in the past. I hurt people.” Don’t you dare do that. There’s no room for guilt or shame or that kind of stuff. What does that mean? I ask you all the time — you do something you’re really embarrassed about, you screwed things up in the past or hurt somebody, and I ask you a question.

“Would you do it again?” “If I do what again?” “If the same situation presented itself, would you act the same way?” You know what they say? “No. No, I would never.” Then you grew. You grew. You changed. That’s what this is about. It’s not about staying the same. You transcended that part of your being. How dare you look back at the way it was before and judge it?

You can’t. He wasn’t there. You’re there now, and you say, “No, I wouldn’t do it again.” Then good. Let go. We get caught. Like, you’re sitting there letting go of the third chakra, and then you get caught in the third chakra because “I don’t like what I did. I don’t like the past.” No, you have to be willing to let go of yourself.

And so you just keep relaxing. If it starts to close, you relax. “But I did something terrible in the past.” Would you do it again? It takes one second. Would you do it again? “No, of course not.” Then let go. Otherwise, it’s gonna pull you right back down into it. The guilt, shame, that kind of stuff, they have no benefit.

I — that’s not true. If the answer, when I ask you, “Would you do it again?” is, “Damn right, I would,” then feel guilty and feel shame. They have a purpose, okay? They keep you from doing it again, hopefully. But if the answer is, “No, of course I wouldn’t. I was a child,” or “I wasn’t as clear as I am now” —

Then you did your work. For God’s sake, you should be celebrating, not feeling guilty. “I grew past this. This is wonderful. Thank you.” You can look at your lower self. Don’t ever dare not like your lower self. Look at it and realize, “I fed you. I made you,” right? All through my life, I built this ego with its likes and dislikes.

It’s not your fault. So come on up. Don’t try to push it away. Come on. You’re welcome up here. You’re welcome up here. If you feel bad feelings, bring them to me. Bring them up. I wanna bring them up. All right? And that’s how you don’t close your heart. You don’t create situations in your mind that close your…

You can close your heart in two seconds with your mind, a fraction of a second. One thought can close your heart. Isn’t that funny? Right. Takes a lifetime to get the thing open. Give it up in a second. “He didn’t even do anything. But what if he cheats on me?” Did he? “Shut up. He might.” You’re right, he might.

Okay. “Well, then I ain’t gonna love him. I’m gonna go put up that pain again.” Wow. That’s good. You’ll never get that heart open, will you? “Yeah, I’ll get it open when I’m absolutely certain that no one will ever cheat on me again, and they’ll keep their job, and they’ll earn the money that I want them to have, and they’ll always treat me the way I want.

I will keep my heart open, I guarantee you.” That’s called conditional love. Now, there’s an unconditional love, and unconditional love only happens when you let go of the conditions. You don’t go out there and try to make the conditions match your stupid conditions. Don’t get old. You don’t look as good.

You look wonderful, by the way. But you know what I’m saying. It’s like, “This is what I expected. I married this beautiful lady,” or “handsome man, and now look at them. They’re losing their hair.” Laugh all you want. If you don’t watch it, that’s who you are, okay? And so you start practicing letting go of closing your heart.

Just do it right there. I just want you letting go. Focus on that. You’re lost in your ego. You’re distracted by all this stuff going on. And if you feel some love, that’s precious stuff. Focus on it. Doesn’t mean try to keep it. You can’t try to keep it. Love can’t be grabbed. It has to spring up spontaneously.

It can’t be coerced by anything. It has to just spring up spontaneously. You can’t grab it and bring it up. But you can stop closing it. What did Rumi say? A great Persian poet. He said, “It is not for you to seek love. It’s for you to seek, find, and remove the obstacles you put in her place.”

If you let go of that junk that’s blocking you, love will come up, and then you learn how to let go within yourself, so it’s not dependent on somebody else. Yogananda used to say this: “Perfect your love with one person, then let it spread to everybody.” In other words, keep that heart open no matter what.

Like, again, what did Christ say? “When I was in prison, you came to visit me.” Yogananda was doing his teachings early in the 1920s, ’30s, whatever it is, and a judge said to him, and he told the judge, “I think everybody’s the spark of the divine.” And the judge said, “Well, you come to my courtroom, you sit in my courtroom and listen to this garbage that goes on in here for a day, and you tell me that.”

And he did. He went and sat in the courtroom, and stole this, that, all kinds of junk going on, right? And the judge came up to him and said, “Now what do you think?” He said, “I think everybody’s a spark of the divine. They’re just lost.” So you just get to that point, you don’t judge, and eventually what’s beautiful is you start with one person.

You find out, “I love you enough that I am not here to change you. I’m not here to make you be the way I want. I’m here to help you free yourself from yourself, and you can help me free myself from myself,” and that is a spiritual relationship. Nobody’s looking for anything else for themselves. It’s just strictly an act of service, that no matter what you go through, that’s fine.

“Go through what you need to go through. I am always here for you. I will always be here for you. I will never betray you.” But you only say that if you’re capable of doing it. Don’t say that to people, right? And then you can feel safe. How do you like to feel safe? Whether or not you felt safe.

Whether or not you felt totally safe. But you don’t feel safe because something outside made you feel safe. You feel safe because you let go of the part of you that makes you not feel safe, and you’re gonna sit there and say, “Nothing’s gonna close me. I will go through this entire day, and I don’t care what happens.

No matter what befalls me, it is not going to close me. I may work with it and do things to raise it, to work with it, to give it love.” I’m not saying I don’t try to help, but it ain’t closing me. You have to reach that state, okay? So now you understand fourth chakra. Pretty special thing, isn’t it?

Okay? And it’s only the fourth. They keep going up, all right? And so the fourth, we see as having two parts, all right? One is human love. So you’re working your way up out of the third chakra, and you start to feel human love, and it can get very beautiful, very high, but it’s still gonna have some conditions.

There’s still gonna… Ram Dass used to call it piercing the heart chakra, and you will go through that. So yes, the energy’s up, the energy’s up, but there’s still conditions holding it back a little bit. And then you get to the point where you wanna go past that, and you’re willing to go through a fire that most people will not sit through.

It’s just nothing’s happening, but it’s just burning through the heart. And when you pop through to the other side, it’s no longer human love. People ask me, “What is devotion?” You have transcended the personal self enough to where all that’s left is love of God, the love of creation, the love of everything.

It just broke through the personal completely, and that’s devotional love. That’s a very beautiful thing, and people do reach it. Meher Baba went through this. I can’t remember right now — time. Sorry. Meher Baba started what he called the New Life. Meher Baba was all about love. Father of compassion is what the word means.

He was a fully enlightened avatar, just filled with love and power. And at one point — I’ll do it very quickly — he took all of his ashrams, sold them, and told all of his disciples, “I’m gonna sell the ashrams, and I’m not keeping the money. I’m gonna put it aside. We’re giving it away to the poor, every single penny of it.

It will not be available at any kind of point in time. And I’m gonna travel in an ox cart wearing a burlap sack, and you’re not to call me Baba anymore. Just call me brother,” just a normal nothing, right? And they said, “If you wanna follow me” — and of course, they’re real devoted to him, right? They know his energy.

“If you wanna follow me, you’re welcome to follow me, but I have a couple of conditions I wanna tell you. First of all, you must always be cheerful. No matter what happens, you’re cheerful if you’re traveling with me. And the second is, if you’re traveling with me because you think it’s gonna be a spiritual benefit, ’cause I’m an enlightened master, I’ve given up all my power.

You will not get one single benefit by being with me spiritually. But if you wanna come, you’re welcome to come.” Whoa. And he wrote a script. It’s called The Creed of the New Life. Go look it up. It’s all about what we’re talking about, like selflessness, complete selflessness. And the last line says something like, “If no one is here to live it, it will live itself.”

That total die to be reborn. It’s Christ, right? You literally let go of yourself at that level, that there’s nothing left. Okay, we talked about love. It’s a pretty special thing, isn’t it? But you got some work to do. It’s not about finding love. It’s about letting go of what keeps you from it. All right.

Work on these things. 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.