Michael Singer Interviews on Meditation, Sleep, Inspiration, the Untethered Soul & Motivation!

Mindfulness is about this. It is about finally waking up one day and saying, "I'm the boss. I've been here. I have a mind. I can do better with it than letting it scare me all the time, than letting it remind me of everything that ever bothered me." That's not fun, is it? Right? If, let's say, you're going to give a talk in your class, all right? A lot of people, the mind gives a little trouble before that, doesn't it? "Oh my God, what if I forget my lines?" Does anybody's mind ever do that to them? Doesn't that help you perform better? No, it doesn't. It doesn't. So I could just sit here for the whole hour and a half and remind you of how ridiculous it is what goes on inside your head, right? It is worse than an arm that won't stop doing this. And some people sit there and say— they want to sit there and say, but it's beneficial to go over this stuff. Yes, if something happens to you and you make a mistake, sit down, look at it, pay attention, learn from it. Then, for God's sakes, not for the next 20 years. Why did I do that? If I hadn't done that, this would have happened. Do you understand that? You can't tell me there's a benefit. There is no benefit. It's just that you haven't learned how to work with this thing called mind. Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I make these videos because I need them. Because I don't always wake up and feel motivated to go take on the day. And the thing that saves me, that helps me every day, is being around people who are thinking bigger, who are changing the world, and it gives me a little more inspiration to go after my mission. And so I hope this video helps you go after yours today too. So today let's get some incredible motivation from the one and only Michael A.

Singer.

Enjoy. If you don't take care of yourself psychologically, inwardly, what I call your inner being, you're going to make yourself sick. And then you'll have to go out and compensate for that by doing things that make you feel better. I was— everybody says, I need this in a relationship, I need this, I need money, I need things, I need a vacation, or what? I'm not okay. All the things they're saying, I'm not okay with myself, I'm not okay inside, I'm not whole. I'm not complete. All right? And so basically I need to get things outside to compensate for what's wrong inside. What spirituality says and what I've learned over 50 years of doing this, this thing is, why are you not okay inside? You've learned how to have your body be okay, reasonably, not always, but reasonably, right? Why is it not reasonably okay inside to where you feel love all the time? Sure, you can share it with somebody, But wouldn't it be nicer not to need them to be a certain way for you to feel love, but for you to feel love and you share it? You share it. Far more consistent. It's cleaner. All right. For both of them and you. Right. It's true. And you realize that's true of everything. So there's a state inside of ourselves where we have risen above— we talk about primal biological. Well, there's primal or basic psychological. Okay, I need things, I'm not okay, I feel insecure, I need to prove myself, I need to be treated a certain way. I just— over and over and over you've built this self-concept of how things— how I need to be, how things need to be for me to be okay. How's that? That's right, right? Hasn't everyone done that? How do things— we all, we all do. I mean, we all do at times, or all the time. Okay, well, since there's only one world out there and every one of us has a different idea how it should be, I wonder why there's so many wars and divorces and everything else. That's why, right? It's inevitable. Okay? And so you get to the point where you realize, I can do better than this. Just like you can do better than smoking or hurting your body by not taking care of it. I can take care of the inside better than compensating and expecting the world to make me be okay when I'm not okay. Basically, there are 3 categories or groups of objects of consciousness. That your consciousness is aware of. One is the outside world. If you close your eyes, you don't see the outside world. If you open your eyes, ah, there it is. Okay, it comes in. I discussed in the book, goes deep, tries to be somewhat scientific so that we fit into an intellectual model because everything is logical and intellectual and reasonable. So the fact of the matter is, most people don't think about this, you don't really see through your eyes. Your eyes are sensors. We call them senses, but they're sensors, just like computer sensors that are picking up light, turning it into signals that are being sent up your nervous system, your optical nerves, and then it is rendering it inside your mind. Just like you look at a flat screen TV and you look at it in there. That's hard for us to relate to. 'Cause we're used, our mind is so intelligent that it creates 3D and depth perception and everything, even though you're actually back in here watching what's coming in. And I like to have fun with people. I say, I'll prove it to you that it's really just light that's bouncing off of objects and coming into your eyes, right? Turn off the lights and you won't see anything 'cause then there's no light bouncing off of things. That's not how we think. We think it draws light, therefore I can't see. No, it's 'cause I turned off the light, there's no light bouncing off the objects. And coming reflecting back into your eyes. It's kind of neat, isn't it? All right, so it's fun to talk about this stuff. So one thing of the Three Ring Circus is there's an outside world with all of its objects, and there's a lot of objects out there. The second is that's not all you receive inside, not all you're aware of inside. You're also aware of thoughts, which I'm sure we'll be talking about deeper, so I'll just surface level it. You're aware of thoughts that go on in there. Are you not?

Right?

You notice your thoughts are talking to you. You notice you can make your thoughts think different things. So you, the consciousness, the exact same consciousness that is aware of the outside world, is aware of your thoughts. They're not separate, not categorizing it. This is the consciousness, here's my thoughts, and that's the consciousness that sees the world. You can do them both at the same time. You can be looking at something and thinking about it, and your same consciousness is seeing both. And then the third is your emotions, which are quite different than thoughts. And I'm sure we'll talk more about that. But basically, emotions are feelings. They're vibrations that come up. Thoughts are thought forms. You actually see a boat in there. You don't see words, but you can hear words. They're talking to you, that voice inside your head. Emotions are not like that. They're just basically shifts in energy patterns, vibrations that you pick up. But they're very strong and they catch your consciousness. So those are the three things in the Three-Link Circus. The outside world that you're aware care of: the thoughts that are inside your head, your mind, and the emotions that emanate from your heart. And the consciousness gets distracted by those things. It's really funny that the word distraction becomes a spiritual word. People don't think of it that way, but deep spirituality deals with distractions. That's what it's all about. If you weren't distracted by your emotions, distracted by your thoughts, or distracted by the outside world, you'd be sitting in samadhi. The consciousness would be able to come back into its source. There are things I've learned during my life. How did you learn them? Not by reading, by having experiences, right? I experienced that if somebody really loves me, I feel better. I've experienced if somebody goes out with my best friend, I feel worse. I feel that if I have the money to feel secure and take care of things and do what I want, I feel better. If I don't, I feel worse. So we're programmed by the experiences we have. It, in a sense, it's not our fault cuz we all have different experiences. To say it's not our fault doesn't mean we can't do something about it, right? It just means you have to understand and have compassion that we all had different experiences. We all went through different things and they left different impressions on top of us. I don't care if you're in prison, I don't care if you're the CEO of some big company. I don't care if you're rich, I don't care if you're poor. The same thing's happening. All right? You're having experiences and they're either making you feel better or they're making you feel worse. And you get programmed like data that now I know what kind of things makes me better. Now I know what kind of thing makes me feel worse. So if I'm not feeling well inside, I'm going to try to get those things to happen. I'm going to try to compensate for my lack of wellbeing by external situations. And that is what causes all the trouble, not just trouble with people in prison, That's why we have wars. That's why everybody gets divorced. That's why drugs, every single thing is going on because I'm not okay. And like you said, if I am okay inside, which we will talk about, can you be and how do you be? But if I am okay inside, I don't need the outside. I don't need it to be doing things for me or against me. I don't take it that way. I'm whole and complete within myself. I feel love. I feel joy. I feel inspiration no matter what's happening. All right? Because I live inside of me. So that's, that's the foundation for a good discussion is, is that true? And everyone knows it's true. I've never had anyone, anyone, I've, I've done this, I've been teaching for 50 years. All right? I've never had anybody say that's not true. No matter who they are, no matter what situation they're in, that if they're not feeling well, they try to figure out what can I do to feel well? And if they are feeling well, they're gonna figure out how do I do to keep it? So you're always struggling. Like Buddha said, Buddha's first noble truth is all of life is suffering. Doesn't mean you break your arm all the time, right? It means that's what's going on inside of you. I'm not okay and I have to struggle to be okay, or I'm okay and I have to struggle to keep it that way. If you felt full and whole and complete inside yourself, right? You're welcome to share that, but you don't need things to be okay. All right, so you start looking to say, well, why am I not okay? Why am I not okay? And that is what the essence of what we teach, which is if you will look, you are wise enough, everyone is, to see you're not okay because you stored every single thing that ever bothered you for your entire life inside of you. If somebody said something you didn't want to hear, if Mommy did something, Daddy did something, you didn't get the toy you wanted, your first girlfriend dumped you, Whatever it is, if it came in there and didn't feel good, I know what you did with it. You pushed it away, right? You can't change the experience because it already happened, but you can work with or manipulate what it feels like when it comes inside. So the experience happened outside, came in through your senses, and now it's inside of you. What are you going to do with it? Instead of saying, which a wise person would say, This was not a nice experience. I don't want to keep it, right? I can't change it. It actually happened, but I don't want to keep it in here. We don't know how to do that. We've never taught how to do that. So what we do is say, no, no, I don't like this. That should not have happened, right? And we push away the inner experience, even though the outer experience already happened. We can't do anything about that. So we push the inner experience away, and someday you will— everyone will hope will understand When you do that, you just destroyed your interstate. What do you mean? You just stored something that bothers you. It will come back in your dreams. It will come back because somebody said something. It will come back because you thought something. It's still in there, isn't it? 20 years, 30 years later. Freud says it's in there, you know, from childhood all through your entire life. Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight all of the lessons learned in this video, as well as pull out our 3 favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there. I don't want to see what I'm looking at. That's what judging does. You have to be excited. I remember when I first got to the point that instead of thinking that stuff inside of me that was causing all this trouble was what I don't want, it's terrible, it's keeping me from God, I try to meditate above it, I do anything I can to get rid of it, and then I realized, no, this is what's keeping me from God. Therefore, if I see something, it's exciting. You have to change your entire attitude about yourself. The worse it is inside, the better. The more trouble it causes, "Oh my God, I got myself a big fish." You have to feel that, "I am willing to deal with this stuff. I am willing to look at this stuff." Not get in it. That's the whole thing. Psychology goes the wrong way. They get you started, right? But we're going to see the difference between spirituality and psychology as we go through this. So first You have to be awake. If you are not awake— what does that mean, "I'm not awake"? We talk about it spiritually, right? They're awake. Not enlightened, just awake. What does it mean? It means that normally the stuff that's going on inside is so overwhelming, it is so strong, not only do you not want to look at it and you can't deal with it, but you are lost in it. You're in the rapids drowning. Well, you can't very well be outside looking at the rocks. You're trying to survive. You're trying to keep your head above the water. Aren't you, right? You're trying to take a breath, trying to— everyone not go down 3 times. That's where a normal human being is, is they are in the fear of drowning. So they're not looking what's causing it, they're just trying to stay, keep their head above the water. Can you relate to that? All right, the worst our times are, the more we're like that. You have to be able to get out of the water, which is again witness consciousness. Your consciousness has extricated itself from being in it. It didn't get rid of it yet, but it can watch it, it can see it. All right, and how do you do that? Meditation. Meditation is great. Mantra is great. See, all of a sudden there's techniques, but the techniques are not about going to God. The techniques are about first getting out of the water. Well, why would meditation work? Because the noise that's going on inside of you is creating disturbance. When you sit down to meditate What you're sitting there saying— I don't care how you meditate, it's your business— when you sit down to meditate, you're saying, for let's say 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes in the evening— that's what nowadays they teach you guys, fine, all right— you sit down, and for this 15 minutes, it's not about going to God. That's why people can't meditate, because they just set these standards and then they burn themselves out. It's not about seeing blue pearls. It's not about seeing white lights. It's not about going to God. It's about, I have set aside 15 minutes to practice being aware of being aware. That's what it is. Don't come to me and say, I can't meditate. I said, why? There's no such thing. I don't understand why. He said, well, every time I sit down, my mind just goes crazy. It won't stop. It keeps talking. I'm going to touch your feet. I'm going to pranam to you, bow down. I'll touch your feet. You have to come back 3 times where you figure out what I'm doing. All right, you just told me that for 15 minutes you were the witness of your mind. My mind won't shut up. It keeps talking about this. Somebody's watching. So during that 15 minutes, you actually watched that your mind wouldn't shut up. That's a very high state. Do you see why people screw up meditation? Because they define meditation as the mind shutting up. No, that's not— that's just a state that you can have there. But if your mind doesn't shut up and you're aware that your mind doesn't shut up, if your heart is bothering you and you're aware that your heart's bothering you— I was trying to meditate, but then this thing came back up from before. That bothered me. I don't know why, but it happened years ago, and my heart started hurting, and I just sat there and watched it. Like, good. How do you work on yourself in this, what we call the pathless path, in the path in which life itself is your path? It is your guru. It is your teacher. All the circumstances of life are attempting to free you, to liberate you. How do you do that work? First, You have to stay conscious. Some people still lose their center. What does that mean? You're there, you're saying, "I'm going to work on myself, and now I'm going to go into this room or be with these people or have this experience, and usually it bothers me, but I'm not going to let it bother me. I'm going to stay very aware and conscious of what's going on, and then I'm going to come out of the room and I'll be so excited that I was able to stay the same." before I walked in the room, while I was in the room, and when I came out. And you say that to yourself. You should do that. You literally should do that. You should remind yourself that that is your goal when you walk in the room. Not to impress people, not to do this, not to do that. Your goal is, now I'm centered and calm, here I am. I would like to walk in the room, sit down, do whatever's going on, be a proper participant, and when I leave, be right back where I was before I walked in without any loss of continuity of purpose or consciousness. That's the true meditation. Deep center. Karma Yoga is about everything else. That's why Karma Yoga is the deepest yoga. It's not about your relationship with your body, with your heart, with your mind, or even with your higher bodies. It's about your relationship with the rest of the world with the rest of what's unfolding in front of you? How do I interact with the reality of life that keeps manifesting before me? That is the topic of karma yoga, and it's often considered the deepest yoga because it is so expansive in one's life. In fact, one of the deepest spiritual scriptures in yoga, the Bhagavad Gita, is considered a treatise on karma yoga. So what is karma yoga? What is our relationship with the world around us. In order to understand that, to begin to truly understand that, you have to understand two things. One, who are you? Who's in there looking out? What is the nature of your being that has a relationship with the world around you? And the second is, what is the nature of the world outside of you? The first is actually quite simple. You are the one who's in there looking out. This is what the essence of witness consciousness is. Krishnamurti used to talk about objective observation. You are the indwelling being who looks out through your eyes, hears through your ears. You are the one who knows you have a body. You were the one that was in there when you were 6 years old, and when you looked in the mirror, you saw a 6-year-old's body. Now you see whatever age you are, and it will continue on. You are the consciousness, the awareness of being. You see the emotions that are coming up from your heart. You see the thoughts that are created in your mind, and ultimately you experience great love and sometimes bliss as you get deeper within yourself. It's all the same you. There's just one of you there. That's you. Well, what is the nature or the reality of the world outside of you? That is one of the most fascinating and beautiful topics. If you turn to science, they will tell you that 13.8 billion years ago there was this Big Bang, and subsequent to that, there were these thick gases of hydrogen and helium that fused together based on gravity and built the universe as you know it. A wise person realizes that every single moment of their life, what is unfolding in front of them is the result of 13.8 billion years of the universe unfolding and evolving until it finally landed at their doorstep. And presented the moment that's in front of them to them. So the world outside of you is not of your own making. The world outside of you belongs to science, belongs to God, it belongs to evolution, it belongs to cause and effect. It is indeed the moment in front of you, took 13.8 billion years to get there. You can't call it your own. You didn't make it, you weren't even here. The other way to know that the world outside of you has absolutely nothing to do with you, it belongs to itself, is to realize that the moment in front of you is no different than the moment to your left or the moment to your right or the moment behind you or the moment anywhere else in the universe. The universe is expressing itself everywhere. You're just seeing one particular moment, one particular point. You can't say that because it's the part that you see, there's something special about it. It's just the part that you see. So a wise person comes to the point of realizing that they are inside looking out. What is outside is the result of creation. It is not theirs. It doesn't belong to them. It is just passing by and they just happen to be seeing that moment. So karma yoga raises the deep question: What then is my relationship to the world that's unfolding in front of me? If it doesn't belong to me, and it doesn't— again, let's spend one more moment with that. If I picked you up out of the moment you're in and dropped you onto a street in Paris, then that would be the moment you see. Obviously, that moment was there before you got there, and if I take you away, the moment will be there after you leave. It has absolutely nothing to do with you. Eventually, a wise person realizes that is true of every moment. If I walk in a restaurant, that restaurant existed before I got there. It was going on. The people were there. Conversations were going on. Music was going on. Whatever food was going on. I then step in. I'm just seeing a moment that already exists. When I step out, the moment will keep going on. It doesn't belong to me. It belongs to itself. It belongs to science. It belongs to God. It's such a beautiful thing. To see that the world outside of you exists independent of you, but you are experiencing one particular moment of it. This whole thing about abundance and attracting to yourself what it is that you want and how to use mantras and spirituality to make sure you have what you want— true spirituality is about not wanting. True spirituality is about being filled with joy from inside and then sharing that outside. It's not about attracting to yourself what you want. Is there a law of attraction? People ask me, is there a law of attraction? Yes, and you better be scared of it because if it's true that you attract what your mind is thinking, you better take a look at what your mind is thinking. It's not only when you're sitting there trying to attract something to yourself with affirmation. What about your mind all day when it's complaining and it's yelling at people and it doesn't like stuff? What if you're attracting that way? So you eventually catch on. That it is not about getting what you want. It is about learning to find out that what you really want is to stay open and not have conditions on that openness. And then it comes down to how do you do that? Are people capable of doing that, or is that just reserved for, you know, some special beings, Buddha and Christ, that have walked the face of the earth? Everybody is capable of that. How do I know that? If I tell you to pick up 5,000 pounds. You may not be able to do that. In fact, you won't. You won't be able to do that. So I've told you to do something that you have never done and you're not doing it, so you may not be able to do it. But if you're actually already doing something, you're already doing it, and I tell you not to do it, you're always capable of that because you're the one who's doing it. So inside, you are the one who's closing your heart. You close it. You are the one who's closing your mind. You do that. They're your thoughts. It's your feelings. They're nobody else's. So you're in there doing these things. So if I tell you the way to stay open is to not close. I don't teach how to stay open. That's more like finding out how to get what you want. I'm interested in you learning to not close. What a difference. If I say to you, I want you to open your heart right now. You wouldn't even know how to start. But if I say to you, somebody says something you don't like, don't close, you know where to start, right? Because it's happening inside of you and you see the tendency to do it. All I'm asking you to do is don't do that. I'm telling you that will take you the whole way. Don't worry about opening, worry about not closing. There are going to be events that unfold in your life that naturally open you. A beautiful sunset, a bird singing. Sometimes you get what your mind wants, all right? You open, great. Nothing wrong with that. Don't close. How come it only lasts a minute? How can you see a beautiful sunset, you feel like, oh my God, I looked into the face of God, then you go right back into your mind with all your problems? Why? Why don't you learn to not close? Once you get some openness, start to work with yourself to not close. And this is how to get what you really want. The deep spiritual teachings are really teaching you how to get what you want. Because what you want is to feel love and joy and happiness all the time. And so if you can get that from within, you then can share it. One of the things the mind does is develop methodologies or ways of thinking that let it interact with life and not get hurt and be more comfortable. And it's the ego. When we develop a self-concept and we change it throughout our lives, but in general, there's a self-concept sitting under there saying, I was the one that did this and I was the one that went to this school and I'm the one that went there and the one that my father left or stayed or whatever the hell it is. Excuse me. And basically, uh, all of this unfolds and you end up developing patterns of thinking based upon the experiences you've had.

All right.

And what I'm saying, at least certainly in my experience, is that's not what makes you wake up. That's what keeps you from waking up. All right. The fact that you're identifying with these past experiences and saying, that's who I am, Well, it's not who you are. You are watching your ego. You see it get upset. You see it fix things. You see it have concepts and views and et cetera, et cetera. And even, you're obviously very intelligent. You can use your intellect to support the ego, to support that and so on, right? And yes, you're a very special person, very intelligent person. And therefore that becomes part of your self-concept. Okay? And then you say you're a religious person, part of your self-concept. All of these things are ways you think of yourself. And there's nothing at all wrong with that. It's wonderful. You've been successful. You're happy. You're doing well. All right? I'm not happy. I'm not doing well. I just said that. I'm so stupid. I'm also like weeping openly at this moment. Okay. But listen to me, right? That identification with your personal self, which is just your mind's thoughts, are what keep you from wisdom.

Instead of looking at the decision you're trying to make, ask yourself, what are you trying to get from this decision? What's your motive? What are you going to find out? Is Every single time, it is either I'm trying to make a decision that will make me feel better, make me happier in the future, let me achieve a better state inside myself where I'm more content and more excited, more enthused, you know, feel higher, etc. Or I'm trying to make a decision that will save me from having to experience something that I don't want to experience. Which way can I choose this so it's a path of least resistance? So you find that the motive behind your decision, as opposed to getting all involved in the decision, step back and say, what am I trying to achieve? And you're going to see that it's either a desire or a fear. You're trying to achieve a desire by moving to New York or moving to California, which won't work for me, right? You're trying to make your mind be psychic to figure out which one will make you happier versus I'm trying to avoid a situation that I don't want. And then you take a look at that and you realize what I'm really trying to decide is how to be happy inside, how to be in a better state inside myself. Well, why don't I say that honestly? It's not really about this decision. It's about how can I find a more beautiful state inside myself? And that's where it leads to yoga. That's where it leads— everything leads to spirituality because it says the state you're looking for is inside yourself. What in the world has it got to do with where you live or what your job is or who you're married to? It's got to do with how you're doing inside yourself. Why don't you work on that a little bit instead of trying to put the burden on your mind of thinking that some decision you're going to make down the road is going to decide the quality of your life? Because the truth of the matter is the state of your being is going determine the quality of your life. If you're whole, if you're complete, if you're enthused, if you're filled with love, it doesn't matter which place you live in, you're going to be wonderful. And if you're disturbed inside, it's not California, New York that's going to make the difference. It does for a short period of time because it's new, and therefore you're more open to it. So you step back behind the decision and you look to see where you're coming from. And at some point, if you come deep enough at looking at that, you'll realize, I have put a burden on my mind of saying this is going determine the quality of my life. And it's not true. You're going to determine the quality of your life. So at least come back to that center, that deep center inside that undercuts all this. Then you're going to find out that you don't put the pressure on yourself for that decision. And often it will unfold naturally. It doesn't mean you don't make a decision, not indecision, but you'll find that if you make— get rid of the noise inside of you, you'll be able to see more clearly what is actually happening and what is maybe a better way to serve, a better way to balance the energies as as opposed to how can I make myself happy with this decision? Or how can I avoid my fears with this?

So instead of asking why am I not okay, why am I not okay? You're asking what do I need to be okay? That's the major difference of whether you're growing inwardly or you're attached to struggling externally is you think I can only be okay if I get the things that I got before or similar extrapolate, right? Things that made me had a relationship and 8th grade, and it was so beautiful, and she was redheaded. Okay, my wife— no, it's not true. All right, she was redheaded, and she left, you know, her parents moved, right? And it was never a bad experience in that relationship. It was just the most perfect relationship you ever had, right? You understand now, if I'm grown up and I, I go on a date and she's redhead— she's redheaded— I have a propensity toward being open. You just ask the question, why do we think we need these things? All right? Because we're not okay inside and we've had experiences. Either a movie, you read a book, it'll tell you you need that to be okay. You watch a movie, meet somebody, you can have a thought. If I had a Tesla, okay, it used to be a Ferrari, now it's a Tesla. All right? I, man, everyone would be proud of me and I feel like I'm helping the ecology. And so all of a sudden I'm not okay unless I get a Tesla. And if I get a Tesla, oh my God, for a while, how am I doing? Wonderful. So that's how you develop your preferences is through programming. You get programmed by your past experiences. What do you really want? We talk about wisdom. People talk about attracting to themselves, the laws of attraction and all those sorts of things. But the question really is, from a spiritual point of view, what do you really want? And religion's about what you're supposed to want, and we know how that works. Spirituality is not about that. Spirituality is about looking deeply within and seeking truth, clarity. That's what it's about. So this discussion has nothing to do with my feeling what you should want, or you even feeling guilty or weird about what you do want. The question is, what do you really want? And the way to do that and I'm going to be very bad in doing this, is to say, here's a piece of paper, not really but figuratively, and I want you to write down what you want. Just take a little time, don't do it, take a little time and write down what you want. And if you're like most human beings, probably first on the list is a good relationship, something that makes me feel important, needed, wanted, loved, secure, all that kind of stuff. And so whether you're in a relationship, I'd like it to get better, so-and-so should behave in different ways, should understand me better, etc. Or if you're not in a relationship, how to find my quote soulmate, somebody who just fits perfectly with me and just fulfills the meaning of my life. And if we're really honest, we write down a nice house and a Ferrari, or at least some sort of a car, and perhaps children, and or perhaps a little time without the children, and we make our list. Nobody's judging, just be honest, you put that down. The purpose of this discussion is no matter what you put on that list, unless you're very highly evolved, my experience is it's not really what you want. It's not that it's wrong, it's just not really what you want. And the way I prove that is as follows. Let's say you put down, 'I want a relationship.' I want to meet somebody. I want to have that special relationship. And then I would ask you, what if you walked outside after this conversation and all of a sudden there was this bush in front of you and it started burning like it did to Moses and talking to you, and its opening sentence was, I am the Lord your God and I would like to discuss some things with you. And said enough things that it knew about you to where you were pretty freaked out that you're actually talking to an omniscient, omniscient, omnipotent being, or at least Bush. And the question that gets asked of you is, what would you like? What do you want? I can grant whatever you want. And having gone through this exercise with me, you feel, God, thank God, Mickey, I'm prepared. This is neat. I thought about it. And you say, I want a relationship. I want to meet somebody. I want to have that thing I've looked for my whole life, or I want a house, or I want the perfect job. I want a job that makes me, you know, that fulfills what I'm looking for. And what this bush, what God tells you at that point is, I can give you that. I have the power to give you that. But there's a caveat which you probably want to hear before I give it to you, which is I can give you that perfect person. They will be loyal to you. They will stay with you your entire life. But the caveat is that you will be completely unfulfilled. You will feel sad every time you come into their presence. You will not feel any love. You will not feel any joy, happiness, meaning. But they'll be there and they will dote all over you and they will just be the most perfect partner that they could possibly be. Or give you the job that you thought would be the most amazing thing, but it's hollow for you. You go there and you thought it would turn you on, but it doesn't. And you just loathe going to work and you're just not excited about it. So therein lies the 'what do you really want?' Because what you're going to find is if you were given the opportunity to have a relationship with that person I just described or have the job I just described, but it didn't do squat for you and it left you hollow inside, you would say, 'I don't want it. In fact, if it's going to make me miserable inside, I really don't want it. Keep it away from me.' And so to move quickly, because we only have a little time here, then I say to you, 'You lied to me when you said it was what you really wanted, because it isn't true you wanted a relationship, it isn't true you wanted children, it isn't true you wanted money, it isn't true you wanted to travel around the world, it isn't true that you wanted,' etc., etc. What's true is you wanted to feel good inside. You wanted to feel love. You wanted to feel joy. You wanted to feel inspiration, excitement, meaning. Those are inner things. They're not outer things. You listed the things you listed because you thought they would give you what you really want. And so wisdom, yoga, spirituality is about going deeper. Buddhists talk about working at the root. So the truth of the matter is, the only thing you needed to write on a piece of paper when I asked you, what do you really want, is a sense of total well-being. I want to feel love, I want to feel joy, I want to feel inspiration, I want to feel meaning and depth. What you want to do is say what's behind the anxiety. So when people talk, I don't help people make decisions, but we talk about decision-making, is the first thing that matters is what's your motive, not what should you do. How can you figure out what to do if you don't even know your motive, right? And you became the spiritual teacher with every word you said about this, which is start from the point of view, do I want to get a house or not? Well, okay, yes, I'd like to have a house. All right. Can I afford a house? Don't worry about what house. What's your motive? It's very simple. I'm just on to express myself and have a house and that's that. And then stop there. Don't say it has to be a certain way. When it's all said and done, if you're afraid of making the wrong decision, who defined it as wrong? You. Well, then don't. That's what Maya was saying, right? If you don't define it as wrong, I was a builder, okay? Before my personal improvement, before the program company, I did Built With Love, my company. I built this house for this beautiful lady all right, who happened to be the manager of the local bank, and her name was Penny Dollar. I swear to God, her name was Penny Dollar, right? This is a long time ago, back in the '80s. And basically, she once came to me and sat there and said, I'm so scared. I said, look, I'm going to build a beautiful house for you. We've got it, everything's fine. So I stay up at nights, I can't sleep. What are you worried about? Isn't it turning out nice? I'm afraid— listen to this— I'm afraid that I will build a house and then I'll go to plug in a lamp and the cord won't reach the outlet. Wow. Wow. Thank you. I said, wow, that's why they make extension cords. I was gonna say, that's why they make therapists. But yes, when I was, you know, 22, 23 years old, I realized that that voice was running my life. And that's what you're saying. If it wasn't comfortable, I left. If it, you know, whatever it was, it was determining what I said, it was determined how I acted, it was determining everything about my life. And yet I didn't know a thing about that voice. Why was it saying what it was saying? Why is it like one person and not another? Because when you like somebody, your voice says, "I like her." So where did that come from, right? And if all of a sudden it said, "No, I don't think so. I don't think—" then you don't. It's like telling you and your emotions go along with it, and it's this whole psychological system that's going on inside. So I made the decision, and I'm not saying people should, right? But it's nice to share that I wasn't going to live my life without understanding what was going on because it didn't make sense. Okay? And it had already caused a lot of trouble in my life, just like it does everybody else's. All right? It's like, "Oh, your relationship is so hard." and everything else and changing jobs. It just decides, I don't like my boss, I don't like the boss anymore. It's telling you that. Why didn't it just say, I like the boss? Like, no one actually pays attention to how much control it has over your life or why it's saying what it's saying. So what I did was to say, I'm going to take a little sabbatical hiatus, about a year or so I meant to put aside, and devote my life to watching that voice and figuring out why it says what it says, what is my relationship to it. And I, in essence, dropped out. I don't like teaching that now because people shouldn't drop out. I mean, not they shouldn't, but they don't need to. And I'm not teaching them to, right? But I did. I was, I think, you know, I was in a doctoral program for economics at university. And last year, ready to get my doctorate, and I stepped aside and went into solitude, relative solitude. And I watched very, very carefully, and what I saw made me more uncomfortable than what you were talking about. All right? Like, watching it when it was in its glory, because, you know, you pull yourself aside, it's going to say a lot of stuff, made me realize I don't want to listen to that thing. That thing's crazy. It just changes its mind all the time. It says this, it says that. Like, the reason people drink and do drugs is because that thing's driving them crazy. Do you understand that? Where you're trying to get away from that inner mess that's going on inside. So basically, over the course of many years, I started an experiment, which was what would happen if I didn't listen to that? What does that mean? It tells you what to do, so on. Well, what if I listen to life instead? And that's very subtle. What if the events unfolding in front of me were more important than whether I like them or not? And I was willing to listen. If I'm meeting this person, perhaps it has some meaning. The fact that I'm not comfortable with them maybe has no meaning, right? And I started practicing letting go of myself instead of letting go of what it told me to. And, and sometimes it told me to do something, sometimes I wouldn't do it. What I got was as follows: just because it told me to do it is not going to be the reason I do Just because it told me not to do it, or that it doesn't like it, is not going to be the reason I don't do it. That doesn't mean that I'm doing or not doing. I will let life, the unfolding of life, the circumstances that unfold in front of me, talk to me instead of that thing talking to me. So that, that's the basics of what I call surrender. You're not surrendering to life, you're not surrendering to people, you're not saying yes to everything. You're just basically saying, "My head doesn't know what it's talking about. It's just a bunch of noise, and I'm better off not listening to that personal noise." It doesn't mean intellectually, if I'm solving a math problem or I'm trying to decide, you know, create air conditioning or building— I built for a while— reading plans and so on, the mind's wonderful for that. I'm talking about the personal mind. "I like this, I don't like that, I believe in this, I don't believe in that, I want this to happen, oh my God, I hope it doesn't it rain tomorrow because I'll die if it rains. That kind of junk. Just the personal noise that instead of honoring and respecting life is judging it and trying to tell me how to make life be my way instead of my respecting that life took 13.8 billion years to get here. That's a big shtick I have, right? That every moment in front of me took every single thing to happen exactly like it did for 13.8 billion years for that thing to be in front of me. Do you understand that? In other words, if you're— if your great-great-great-grandmother didn't meet your great-great-great-grandfather, you're not here. Everyone has total will over everything going on inside, over your thoughts, over your emotions, and over all physiological things within yourself. That is the nature of the indwelling soul. It is omnipotent in relationship to itself. Do you understand that? Okay, I'm not telling you to develop these powers. They're called siddhis. Yogis develop siddhis, right? There's no reason to do that. But I am telling you that if you are living within yourself and your mind is driving you crazy and your emotions are causing you trouble and your body is not healthy because the food you eat or because of this and the other thing, right, you are not subject to that. It is absurd to allow that to take place. Sit there and say, "I'm smoking and I know I shouldn't be smoking. I'm getting sick. I'm starting to get pre-cancer type stuff, but I can't stop." That's absurd. I'm sorry. Okay, I'm sorry to tell you that's absurd. That's like saying, "Nothing wrong with you. My arm is here. Every once in a while it picks itself up and there's nothing I can do about it." That's not true. All right, it's just simply not true. So what do you mean you can't stop smoking? I can understand the tension right here. Okay, I feel the urge to smoke. Of course you do, you're a smoker, you have a habit. It's called a habit. So you have both a physiological and a psychological habit that when you get uncomfortable, your mind starts bothering you to get a cigarette, doesn't it? Or a drink, I don't care what it is. It's bothering you, it keeps talking about it, and it keeps saying it's okay, you can get it, just one doesn't hurt you. And it does that. Yes or no? Right. That's what it means to have patterns, neurological pathways that you carve in your neurons. Right. You have pathways that are going to start generating thoughts like this. And you have physiological urges because they stick all that nicotine in there and it's addictive physiologically. All right. And so there's this discomfort. And therefore, the discomfort physiologically and psychologically urges you to do something about it, and therefore you go and you do these things. Do you have to? Of course not. Of course you don't have to. That's ridiculous. If you went there and tried to grab the cigarette and all of a sudden somebody said to you, not only does that one have the Surgeon General's poison skull and crossbone on it, right, but that one's laced with arsenic, You'll put it down. I said, go ahead, get this straight. You're going to put that thing down. You say, I want another one. All right, you had the ability to put that down. There is no way you are telling me, and I won't believe you if you say it because I know it's not true, that you do not have the ability to not take that cigarette out that says arsenic-laced, put it in your mouth and light it and say, I knew I shouldn't, but I just couldn't help myself. You can help yourself. You can help yourself if you intend to. If your intention is, I don't want to smoke that, you are not going to smoke that. If your intention is, I wish I didn't want to smoke it because I know it's not good for me, but I really want to smoke it, you will smoke it. And if something happens that's challenging, then play chess. Be challenged. Chess champions put themselves in these amazingly challenging situations, don't Mountain climbers. Oh my God, that's pretty challenging and life-defying. There are people that go out of their way to purposely put themselves in very challenging situations. Why? Why do they do that? Because it brings out the best in you. It makes you dig deep and bring out the best that you are and makes you better than you were before, doesn't it? That's why we have competitions. That's why you climb mountains. That's why you challenge yourself to your limits. Why can't you let the everyday events that are unfolding in your life be your mountain climbing, be your chess match? They are just there. If they're challenging, good, good. I'm glad they're challenging. That's exciting. That's better than being bored, isn't it? It's better than just floating through empty dark space. It is not true that when you are born that necessarily you are more centered in the seat of self, and then some terrible things happen. and you get that. The masters— Yogananda used to teach this— says the moment the consciousness, the self, drops into the body, the experience is so intense, it's overwhelming, right? It's like you're all of a sudden thrown into water with fish swimming all around. You've never been there before, right? It's so distracting, it's so powerful, the experience is so is so powerful that it pulls your consciousness into the experience. So that happens immediately, all right? That you have become separate from who you are because you're busy paying attention to the object of consciousness instead of your seat of consciousness. So the more distracting something is, the more powerful the experience is, the more distracting it is. Distracting is the most spiritual word you'll ever use. It means it pulls you away from yourself. It means consciousness— I was looking at that book, then you started talking, it distracted me. My consciousness went to you, pulled, right? So when something distracts you, it draws your consciousness toward it. So when you drop into the body, when you take birth, right, your consciousness is pulled into this experiential unbelievable experience of the senses coming in, of noises and sounds and things and blah, blah, blah, right? And so it immediately becomes distracted into the body and into the world, okay? And then what happens is that's not comfortable. There's a sense of loss of self, okay? I don't know who I am, right? This is where, as a psychologist, and based on this stuff, it becomes very interesting stuff psychology, then the self is not the self-concept develops. We do it. We pull the self-concept around ourselves to protect ourselves. The self does that. The consciousness doesn't know itself. It loses itself. It's been drawn away from itself. So there's this sense of loss, a sense of discomfort, a sense of disorientation. It's very much like if somebody has amnesia, and when they wake up from amnesia, They're not comfortable. Has no one ever been comfortable when they wake up and they don't know who they are or who their family is or where they live or where their house is? They don't know a single thing. They panic, right? That is what happens when you lose your seat of centered self. So now, because you are uncomfortable, you immediately try to define yourself, try to cling or hold on to things that will help you define the reality that you're dealing with, right? Exactly. And that's where the self-concept comes from. And as a mother, you know that starts pretty early, right? That they start developing, "You're my mommy." That's the first one. "That's my daddy. This is my crib." The psychologist will tell you the worst thing you can do to a child is put them in a different place every single night with different toys and different people. You understand that? Because they can't find the solidity of defining themselves. And so we start to develop this self-concept in our mind. That's why we call it a concept. It's not the self, it's a concept of self. A concept is something that's not real. It's a mental image. It's a mental thought. Okay, so we start to develop in our minds, this is mommy, this is daddy, this is where I live, this is my crib, this is my toy. This is— except that's where the mind comes from. And that's why they're so strong about the mind and the terrible twos, right? Is, it's not that you took my toy, you took me. Me, right? I have defined myself in relationship to this object. Don't touch it. Don't take it away. And it's panic, right? You see the crying and the tremendous clinging to objects. That it is the self, the lost self, the fallen soul, all right, that has lost itself, that is trying to redefine itself in these objects outside. But that doesn't stop with the terrible twos. We then develop not just objects, but a concept of ourself as experiences happen to us. We define ourselves by the experiences we have. It's hilarious, right? You are not the experience, you're the one who had the experience. But if I played Dorothy in 5th, you know, 3rd grade Wizard of Oz, right? And I'm the big hero and I did a great job, that becomes part of my definition of who I am. If I'm 30 years later and talking about the school play, there's a reunion, and somebody else says, "I played Dorothy," you freak out. "No, I played Dorothy in that play." You understand that? It's like 20 years later you will fight for your right to hold on to your definition of yourself, because you literally defined yourself as the one who played Dorothy, as the one who married Paul, as the one who has 2 children, as the one who went to school over here. You're defining yourself as the experiences you went through, because those are the images that are— they're the data that went into your mind. And that's why every one of us define ourselves separately, differently, and our definitions of self keep changing, right? If you say, well, I'm, I'm Paul's wife, what happens? You get divorced, right? Well, now I'm Ben's wife. Like, you didn't die because you're not with Paul, you understand that? But you hold on inside of you, I'm the one who had that terrible experience with Paul. So that's how you develop this self-concept. Anger. You have trouble with anger. Anger is very strong, right? Yes, all these things can be very strong. The question is your intention. I guarantee you there is nobody, nobody that is not capable of working with their anger. Nobody. Because you are the strongest force inside. Well, how come anger overcomes me or overcomes somebody? It doesn't do it all at once. It is not like you're standing there in the middle of the field and all of a sudden you don't think anything, nothing happens, and this roaring beast overcomes your being. All right? I mean, they can be if there's mental illness. I'm not talking about that. Okay? I'm not saying there can't be something physiologically wrong. Okay? And that's the type, by the way, the type of mental illness I just separated out is is that there's a physiological problem with the brain. So basically, now here's how I see anger. He's talking to me, he starts touching sensitive subjects inside of me, purposely or not purposely, it doesn't matter to me. It sounds purposeful, I'll tell you right now. The moment that thing starts, okay, and I start feeling uncomfortable, right or wrong, and I start feeling this heat building up from down here, third chakra stuff, all right, and go on. And I can actually feel myself start to get heated. I might even say, "Stop it. I'm telling you, I am not going to be responsible if you keep going for what's going to happen." Oh, wow. That's beautiful. In other words, I'm still here. I'm conscious. I have my will. And I'm seeing this force begin to rise up inside of me. It builds, doesn't it? Anger builds. Right, very good. If your intention is to not lose your temper ever, ever— well, what if the person's wrong? That's a very different intention, right? What if they're trying to make me lose my temper? Now, right, if your intention is to not lose your temper, I would highly advise starting very early in the game I just talked about. All right, that the moment they start talking about a subject that you know is difficult to you, that's where you start. Your intention— if you're smart, that intention and the will-driven intention is so strong that the moment that starts, you take control, you step forward. It has to be that your only intention, your only intention is to stay centered to stay clear and to be with your hands on the wheel, and that's how you're going to drive. You live inside. You don't live outside. You live inside. There's a mind in there with you. There's a heart in there with you. There's energy flows in there with you. If you leave them alone, it's going to be a mess. People don't even understand what a mess it is because they don't know it doesn't have to be that way. You just get used to living in a mess. You're moody. You got problems. You're sensitive. You don't like things. You don't get what you want. You get what you don't want. You're afraid. You're desirous. It's just a commotion. It's just uncomfortable inside. Most people are always uncomfortable inside. Very rarely are they comfortable. So what this drives you to do, if you're not paying attention—and I'm telling you, people are not—it's a mess inside. It's uncomfortable inside. It's disturbing inside. Nobody wants to live like that. So instead of straightening it up inside, what will happen—and it will happen to everybody, all 7 billion of you—is you will realize that certain things can happen outside that make it worse inside. People can say things that disturb you. People who you love can leave you. You can get old and not be as good-looking as you used to be, get wrinkles in your face and so on. All kinds of things can go on and will go on that cause disturbance inside. Sometimes things will happen outside that make you feel good inside, but it's not as much. There are way more things that cause disturbance, that cause discomfort, that cause fears, than there are things that actually make you feel well. I'm not talking about maybe if I get this I'll feel well. The actual moment of I feel whole, I feel complete, I wouldn't change a single thing, Everything's beautiful. You must admit, you can count it on your fingers, on one hand, versus the things that bother you— there aren't enough stars in the sky, you're always getting disturbed by something. That is because it's disturbed inside. If it is disturbed inside, then events that unfold outside and come into you are going to stir up the disturbances. All of us have different disturbances, therefore different things disturb us. Turn us on or off. So a normal life, which you don't want— the normal life of a human being on this planet is as follows: I am not okay inside. I'm not comfortable. I'm always uncomfortable. It's not comfortable. I have found that certain things can happen outside that made me feel more comfortable, and I can find that there are other things happen outside that made me feel really worse. So my task in life is to try to control the environment outside of me so that more often It makes me feel good inside when it comes in, and less often it unfolds in a way that disturbs me, makes me worse. If you dare to be open and look at it, you realize that's most people's entire life— trying to figure out what they need or want outside and what they don't want and don't need outside, and then try to figure out how to make it be that way. And we end up going to war with reality. We end up going outside fighting with people, places, things, situations, everything unfolding because it's not the way we want. And then you try to make it be the way you want, and by the time you're done, it's very difficult to make everybody be the way you want. It's very difficult to have every situation unfold the way you want. It's very difficult to have things not happen that disturb you, since it's so easy for us to get disturbed. So it doesn't work, and we end up getting frustrated We end up getting tense and we end up getting anxious. This is the normal state of how people live. That's a worldly life. It's just an external life of fighting with the outside to try to make it so you can live with yourself inside. There's an alternative life. It's so simple it's ridiculous. And very, very few people actually walk it, which is: I live in here. I should straighten it up. I shouldn't try to find somebody who'll straighten up for me. I shouldn't try to find a job that will turn me on so much that I will be distracted by the disturbances inside of me. I should fix what's wrong inside of me. This is my house. I live in here. If I'm sensitive, if I'm scared, if I'm insecure, if I have issues going on in here that I don't like to talk about, that cause me trouble. I need to clean up. I need to straighten this up in here. I don't want to go for the rest of my life keeping garbage inside of me and then trying to make a life outside that either distracts me from it or fits what's wrong inside of me. So the great spiritual path, which is also the great way of life, is to turn this back is to say life has the right to be the way it is. It's very grand of you, I think, right? Life has the right— the moment in front of me has the right to be the way it is. There are forces— doesn't mean I like it, doesn't mean it's— I can give lots of reasons why it would be better another way. That didn't change anything. I think it'd be neat if we could fly so we didn't have to have planes and we'd have to go through TSA and get— it all takes so long, right? Come on, guys. How do you always grow up? You start by honoring and respecting reality. So you come into the moment and you do the work you need to do to stop making up an alternate reality and trying to impose it on top of reality. Oh, people get really scared with that. Well, how will I succeed? I want to know how you manage succeeding fighting with everything. I'm telling you, 90% of all of your Shakti, your Chi, your energy is wasted interested. Suppressing the stuff from the past, using your mind to make up how you want it to be, make all those decisions that are so important, and then fighting with everybody and everything. And you're using so much energy, you have no idea. Imagine if you were taking that golf shot and during— ask a golf pro, well, what I'm going to do is every movement, when I move my arms back, I'm going to think, am I doing it right? Maybe I should go another degree. And then I'll watch and I'll see and I'll see it. Try— how's that shot going to be? No one will tell you to hit a shot like that. It's supposed to be a fluid, free action, period. There's not supposed to be any mind involved. It is supposed to be a complete merger of your whole being and all of your energy into the oneness of hitting that ball. Go ask anybody. All right, that's, that's it. That's martial arts, that's sports, that's everything. It's the same way with life. If you stop this mishugas, this craziness that we are doing with our minds and come into the present moment and ask that moment, what is the highest we can do together? That's what you've asked the golf ball that's sitting on the edge of the rough. What is the highest we can do together? How can I join you in the rough and participate in this moment and bring the joy that can exist in this moment and do the best that I can, because the best you can do is the best that you can do in the moment. It's not something you made up hypothetically. If you live that way, each moment will be better in the next moment. You will have brought your best game to every single moment you're doing. That goes for everything. It goes for business, it goes for relationships. If you're in a relationship and somebody comes to you and says, I, I need to talk to to you. Those dreaded words. I need— when you come back from work tonight, that's really nice, we need to have a talk. I, I, I've been wanting, meaning to talk to you for a while, but I've been scared. But I, I, I'm ready. My therapist said I should talk to you. Okay, all right. So you're gonna have one hell of a day, aren't you? You're gonna— your mind's gonna make up what they're gonna talk to you about, right? This, that, what you're gonna say back. This is This is going to be terrible. And then you're going to sit down, and by the time you did all that, the person's going to sit down and start to talk. And so they're saying, you know, I'm really sorry, you know, because I, I, I, I care for you. It starts like that. But there are just some things. And right away, out of your mouth, because you've decided what they're talking about, right? It's not true. I didn't do that. I know you think— I always knew you— I thought that you thought that I thought that you did that, but it's not true. I didn't do it. George did He just lied to you. Wow, wow, I'm gonna jump the gun a little bit here. In other words, what you're going to do, you want to protect yourself from something you are not comfortable with, and you're going to try to use this conversation so that you walk away feeling a little bit better because you didn't feel comfortable with it all day. That's very different than you're going to use this conversation this person you care about has set up I need some help with something, rather than bringing yourself into the moment, trying to see, can I be of some assistance? You don't care about what that person's going through. You care about what you're going through because that person is threatening you. And therefore, every word you say and everything you hear and everything they do will be about you. It won't be about them. That's how it gets when the emotions get involved, isn't it? It'll be about protecting yourself. Well, if you protect yourself, you're the worst partner that ever lived. As you come into that moment, let go of the part of you that is your personal. Come into the moment. This is your friend. This is your partner. And listen to what the person has to say. Literally listen. Maybe you'll hear something. Maybe something can be improved. Maybe it has nothing to do with what you're thinking about anyways. Maybe they want to tell you, "I just wanted to tell you that I've always wanted to go back to Ireland, and I know you work hard. I bought the tickets." Please don't be mad at me, it's for our anniversary. Forget what I said about George. You can't have a nice life if your insides is that messed up, and then you try to control the life around you so it doesn't hit your stuff. So the alternative is to say, I don't want that stuff inside of me. What stuff? Any of it. I don't want any of it inside of me. I want to be open. I want to be receptive. I want to be able to handle the reality that's unfolding in front of me and finish it off. Told you, I maintain a rule. I'm very strict about it. Not always successful, but I maintain a rule: if it's not happening outside, it's not happening inside. I give them the room. If something's happening outside and it's disturbing, okay, you know, that's tough. Is hard. But when it's no longer happening outside, there ain't no way I'm letting that go on inside, otherwise it'll never go away. If somebody's yelling at you, it's not comfortable, it's not comfortable, right? Then they stop yelling. Don't worry, they won't stay there yelling. Nobody ever has. And then they walk away. I don't want this disturbance still inside of me. It'll never go away. I've got scars inside of me because somebody yelled at me. No, if it's not going on outside, it ain't going on inside. I'm going to let the energy pass through. I'm going to give it the room to finish so I don't have to carry it with me. That is the essence of spirituality. That is the essence of yoga. That is the essence of every single thing that has anything to do with spiritual growth. You cannot have that stuff inside of you. The highest technique you can do is to let go of your stuff, is to basically sit there and say, I don't want this stuff inside of me. I don't care what it costs. I spend my money on lots of things. You do too. Nothing buys what that's worth. In fact, the reason you spend your money on a new car or a boat or a vacation is because you're so disturbed inside. You need a vacation from yourself. I need a vacation from this junk that comes up inside of me. And I'm telling you, that's where you spend all your money. That's why you need a nicer house. You need a nicer house because the Joneses have a nice house than you. It makes you feel insecure because you don't feel good about yourself. So now you have to go out and get a nicer house. And so everything you're spending your money on, you're better off— this is a better way to spend your money. If you're going to have some pain, some discomfort, and having to do some work, get paid properly. And what gets paid properly is, I want less of me, I want less stuff inside. The most meaningful life is to grow. What does that mean? To notice that there's stuff going on inside you that's not so much fun for you or anybody else, okay? Can you raise above that? Can you change? Not, not— I don't like to change that, but change your seat of awareness. So I can look at this part of me that, you know, just silly, okay? I don't want— I don't give that out, all right? But if I suppress it, then it really becomes part of my personality. So you don't suppress things. Well, if I express it to let it out, then I'm dumping on somebody, you know? I don't like what you said to me. Don't you talk to me like that, okay? I get that. Well, what if I step back and say, I am aware that this is upset in here. I'm aware that this inner thing where I live, my house, is— it's got a little tornado going on there. All right, can I just relax and step back and be aware? I'm not denying that it's happening, but it's not me. I'm the one who's looking at it. And something very magical happens if you do that enough. It releases the energy to go to a higher level. Like, we hold You know, if you get upset but you don't want to, best you can do is push it down, right? We have that tendency with hands inside, don't we, right? With hands inside, like, no, push that aside, all right? Which is a form of suppression. You can instead learn, but it takes time, but you learn to relax in the face of all that. And what you'll find is it's all just energy being disturbed, and if you give it room it will go up instead of down or out. It will go up. It's called transmutation. The energy transmutes, and it could start as anger, but it comes up as love. It finishes— when it finishes passing through, instead of hitting you and your will in there, then it shoots out. It actually has the ability to go up. And if you do that enough times, you're ecstatic. You become ecstatic. Literally, the energy goes up all the time, not just when things are the way you want them to be You just relax and the energy feeds you from inside. And there's this, this river, if you will, of a flow of really beautiful energy that feeds you day and night. And that is the purpose of our lives, is to evolve. We've already evolved, you know, we don't have tails and we got two arms and two legs and fingers, opposing thumbs. We've evolved pretty good outside, right? Good girl. We've evolved pretty good outside, but what about inside? Yeah, we can't handle anything. We're supposed to be the highest species on the planet, which is called adaptability, right? But we're not very adaptable inside, are we? Right? We're very serious about pattern-making machines. That's right. What we like and what we don't like, and we're serious about that. And you better behave the way I want you to, or I'll, you know, you'll pay for it. As opposed to, it's just something that came in, something that you said, or something that I thought you said. And I don't have to be like that. I can relax, and then I can come with clarity and deal with the situation from a higher place. And that, to me, is the purpose of life, is to evolve inwardly. Are we here to experience the separateness as part of being human, or are we meant to transcend it? It's that we're meant to witness it and not let it become a part of us. Everything is a part of you, and I'm sure you've seen that, okay? Especially as you've grown through the years, right? There's all kinds of stuff in there, right? There's all kinds of stuff in there. What do we want to feed and pay attention to and build, okay, as we're growing? So the first thing you do is you look at your person. Well, first thing you do is you look at your body. Am I eating reasonably? You've already done all that, okay? You go through that basics. If I'm eating food that's making me sick, It's silly. Okay, I better be strong enough to be able to rise above the tendency to, you know, eat junk and to smoke and to drink too much and etc., etc., right? If we don't do that, it defines our life. Yeah, understand that the body will then define our life, the illnesses and discomforts of the body. Okay, so let's say— but notice it took will and it took the willingness to rise above the tendencies, that the habits that the body has formed. Okay, so the question you said is, even with dealing with your body, which, you know, most of us have done pretty good with that at this point, all right, and you wouldn't be where you are in life if you hadn't, all right. So basically, you write— they use the word rise above it. You rise above these primal tendencies to eat and lust and just go crazy over, you know, basic biological things, all right. And so you rise above that, but then you have this ego inside. That develops patterns of what it likes and what it doesn't like and who it likes and who it doesn't like and how you're going to treat me, how you're not going to treat me. And I don't want to get, I don't want to get old. I don't want to look old. I love when people do that, right? I don't want to look old. I want to look like I look now. What was your best years? 23. Then when they ask you to go to a conference, that's the picture you send out there even though you're 80. All right. And so you develop this ego inside, a self-concept that says, This is who I am, right? Well, you can rise above that. And how? You don't deny it. You don't suppress it. You don't dislike it. You just say, where's that going to take me? Like some people say, I don't want to die. Well, I'm sorry. Every single thing that was ever born died. It's a 1-to-1 correlation. It's amazing, Monica. All right? Somebody did a statistical study. It was 100% of everything that was born died. So to say, I don't want to die, what a ridiculous thing to do with your life. That's like saying, well, you'll be uptight all the time. You'll make yourself sick, just like the body things. If you don't take care of them, if you don't take care of yourself psychologically, inwardly, what I call your inner being, you're going to make yourself sick. And then you'll have to go out and compensate for that by doing things that make you feel better. I was— everybody says, I need this in a relationship. I need this. I need money. I need things. I need a vacation. Or what? I'm not okay. All those things are saying I'm not okay with myself. I'm not okay inside. I'm not whole. I'm not complete. All right. And so basically, I need to get things outside to compensate for what's wrong inside. What spirituality says, and what I've learned over 50 years of doing this, this thing, is why are you not okay inside? You've learned how to have your body be okay, reasonably. Not always, but reasonably, right? Why is it not reasonably okay inside to where you feel love all the time? Sure, you can share it with somebody, but wouldn't it be nicer not to need them to be a certain way for you to feel love, but for you to feel love and you share it? You share it. It's far more consistent. It's cleaner. All right, for both of them and you. Right? It's true. And you realize that's true of everything. So there's a state inside of ourselves where we have risen above— we talk about primal biological. Well, there's primal or basic psychological. Okay, I need things, I'm not okay, I feel insecure, I need to prove myself, I need to be treated a certain way. I just— over and over and over, you've built this self-concept of how things— how I need to be, how things need to be for me to be okay. How's that? That's right, right? Hasn't everyone done that? How do things— we all, we all do. I mean, we all do at times. Or all the time. Okay, well, since there's only one world out there and every one of us has a different idea how it should be, I wonder why there's so many wars and divorces and everything else. That's why, right? It's inevitable. Okay, and so you get to the point where you realize, I can do better than this, just like you can do better than smoking or hurting your body by not taking care of it. I can take care of the inside better than compensating and expecting the world to make me be okay when I'm not okay. What work is to most people is an answer to problems they have. I'm not okay, so I go to work to earn money so I can enjoy the weekends, so that I can go travel, so that I can have vacations. I don't feel tremendous meaning in my life, so I go to work to feel like I'm contributing, to feel like I'm succeeding in something. I'm not sure of myself. Work gives me an opportunity to prove myself. In other words, work is about me. Work is not about work. Work is about me, what I can get from it, what it can do for me, what is my career, what is my growth path, etc., etc., of being able to prove myself and compete with others. It all ends up being a place that I'm going to get something. That is not what work work is. Work is the exact opposite. Work is a place I go to serve. Work is the place I go to contribute to the unfolding of the universe. A wise person gets to a point where they understand that every single thing in creation has something to give. It has a contribution. The stars, the earthworms, every cell within your body—all of these things contribute to make the whole. You are part of that. So you have a job to do. That job we call your dharma, your work. You don't have to look for it. It's right in front of you. It's always right in front of you. It's not just the fact that you get up early in the morning and go to a particular place. It's the fact that you take care of the kids. It's the fact that you contribute to the community. Whatever it is that you're doing that's being asked of you, that is put before you, is your work. Work. So the whole attitude about work needs to go through a reset. Once you go through that reset and you understand, there's not something wrong with my work, there's something wrong with me. It's just like a relationship. You don't get into a relationship because you want something from somebody, that I'm not okay and somehow magically this other person is going to make me okay. You get into a relationship because you're filled with love, you're filled with joy, you're You're filled with excitement and you'd like to share it. Work is exactly the same. You go to work because you want to express yourself. You go to work for the same reason that an artist paints in her spare time in the woods when nobody will ever see the painting. I have something within me that wants to express itself, and work is the manifestation of that expression. And someday you're going to find out that it doesn't make any difference what you're doing. It is the expression and the act of doing it that brings about joy, that brings about fulfillment. Work is not a place that you go to get something so you can be fulfilled. Work is a place that you go that in sharing and giving, you achieve a state of fulfillment. It is an end within itself. And if you work on yourself, you will find that work is your spiritual growth. Wisdom, yoga, Spirituality is about going deeper. Buddhists talk about working at the root. So the truth of the matter is the only thing you needed to write on a piece of paper when I asked you, what do you really want, is a sense of total well-being. I want to feel love. I want to feel joy. I want to feel inspiration. I want to feel meaning and depth. And you made the mistake of doing it what I call indirectly. By saying, 'I want something outside that I think will make me feel that inside.' So without belaboring the point, to go deep and to really be on a spiritual journey, you don't let yourself do that anymore. Because I'm sure there are plenty of times that you said, 'Oh my God, if only this happened, I'd be fine.' And you know that didn't turn out that way. Even if it did for a moment, it didn't stay that way. It's not like there wasn't anything else you ever wanted. And likewise, If something was bothering you, you sat there and said, 'If only that would go away, I'd be fine.' That again is not the truth. So you come down to the point where eventually you'd be totally honest with yourself. It may sound selfish, but you'll see in the end it's not, to where you say, 'I want to be happy. I want to feel love. I want to feel joy. I want to feel inspired. I want to be turned on inside all the time.' So now if that burning bush was sitting out there and you were wise enough that when God said to you, 'What do you want?' and you said that, whoa, you're a winner, right? How can you lose if from the moment you wake up in the morning you're turned on, you're inspired, you're excited, you can't wait to see what's going to happen for the rest of the day, and you embrace it totally? And then at night you've given everything you have, you put your head down, you fall asleep, you wake up again, I'm back, ready to go. That would be a beautiful life, and that's what you're looking for. You just think you need all these things in order to get that. So now we go to the next step of what do I really want? And the question that gets asked by a person who's deep and wants to grow spiritually is, yes, I want to feel okay inside. That's really what I want. The outside is not what I'm about. It just seems to— in my past, I've had the experience that the outside changes how I feel inside. And that's what a wise person starts to realize, that if certain people walk up to me and they say certain things at just the right time in just the right way, it turns me on. If the same person walks up to me at the wrong time and says the wrong thing in the wrong way, it turns me off. So I now have taken on the task of manipulating, controlling everybody who walks up to me so that they say it right, what I want at that time, and they don't say what I don't want. And it just comes down to I have this list of what I want and what I don't want, And most human beings, most means 99.9%, have devoted their entire life to getting what they think they want and avoiding what they think they don't want. And the emphasis on the word think versus it becomes much simpler when you realize what I want is to be okay. I want to feel love. I want to feel joy. I want to feel happiness and inspiration. So now as you look at that, the next question becomes, why don't you? Because your experience is, I can only feel those things if the outside comes in through my senses in a certain way. So the depth where you start to get spiritual and you go deeper into this is you ask, why is it like that? Why is it that if I get what I want, it turns me on, and if I don't get what I want, it turns me off, and if I get what I don't want, it definitely turns me off, and if I don't get what I don't want, I feel relieved? We take that for granted. A yogi takes nothing for granted. A spiritual person questions everything. Why is it that the only thing that really turns me on is when the outside world is exactly the way that my inner state decided it wanted to be? I hope you're enjoying these sharings that we're doing about the workplace and how to make every moment of your work experience a spiritual experience and part of your sadhana, part of your spiritual practice. I thought we'd take a real fun one, which every one of us do regularly in a workplace, which is, what's so spiritual about writing an email? What's so mindful about writing an email? How do I bring consciousness to play and use it as my spiritual growth in writing an email? Truth of the matter is, writing an email is a very, very important thing to do. You are communicating with other people, so it has the whole aspect of communication. And you're also putting yourself out there. Where I grew up, in the size business that I worked with, we were told every single email you write, imagine on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. So that's a whole other aspect of mindfulness, is what you write matters. It's not just some innocent little thing. And when you talk, right, unless somebody's recording, it's said and it's gone. An email is not that. It is a permanent record, and it can be used as such. You have a lot of interesting dynamics in writing an email. One is that, which is you best watch what you say, and the other is obviously you have something to say, you wouldn't be writing an email, so you have to communicate it. It's just a wonderful case of mindfulness. So the first thing you do when you sit down to write an email is center. Always center. I don't care if you're just saying yes, sending an email back with a reply. How many times have I hit a reply and I thought I hit reply and hit reply all? Not too many, thank God. You have to be conscious every single step of the way. So you start off with, am I just responding to the person who sent it to me as a reply, or is what I'm going to say something that should be shared with other people? That's what mindfulness is, all right? It is being present and making a conscious decision instead of letting habit and mindlessness cause trouble. So to me, even that act helps you spiritually. The moment in front of you is not bothering you. You are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you. That is always the truth. That's a very hard truth to digest. I'll tell you that right now. Your mind does not agree with that, but stop for a moment and let's talk about it. The moment in front of you isn't bothering everybody else, maybe, but it's sure bothering you. So either the moment in front of you is bothersome, or it's a moment. That's something that I try to I try to get across in the new book. Every moment in the universe is a moment in the universe. That's all it is. I'll drop you down at some place in Paris and there's something going on. I'll move you 10 feet away, there's something else going on. I'll bring you back to Kansas and drop you in Wichita and there's something going on. No matter where I put you, there's something going on. Now I'm going to ask you a math question. How many different things are there going on at the same time on the planet Earth? There's no number that's big enough. Trillions and trillions of things are going on at the same time. If you're willing to let go of yourself, you realize they're all the same. They are what happens to be going on on the planet Earth at that moment. Don't worry, it won't be gone in the next moment, and the moment before. It doesn't happen again ever, ever. So the moment you happen to be standing in front of is just a unique moment in time and space, and you just happen to be standing there. It's not personal. How can it be personal? There's 800 billion of them. And that's just on Earth. What about the rest of the place? Are there moments going on there? Are there moments going on in every place in the moon? Moments going on every place everywheres? Well, that's a lot of moments. And you just happen to be standing in front of one of them. It has nothing to do with you. It's not personal. You didn't make it. It's just like a movie moving through and it passes by. It can't bother you, but you can bother yourself about it. And I'm going to tell you a secret: if you don't bother yourself about it, it won't bother you. If you don't bother yourself about it, it will not bother you one iota. How do I know? Because there's 700 trillion moments that are not bothering you. They exist just like every other moment, and they're not bothering you. Why? Because you're not bothering yourself about them. If I pick you up and I drop you there, you'll bother yourself about it. Well, why don't you bother yourself about it before I drop you there? The same moment, same thing. You have to be willing to let go at that level if you want to explore the deep states. The moment in front of you is not bothering you. You are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you. Why don't you learn to not close? Once you get some openness start to work with yourself to not close. And this is how to get what you really want. The deep spiritual teachings are really teaching you how to get what you want, because what you want is to feel love and joy and happiness all the time. And so if you can get that from within, you then can share it. And again, this is not selfish. What did Christ say? One of his favorite teachings, right? Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that leaveth the mouth of the Father. Only a yogi, a spiritual being, knows what that means. It means you don't live off of what's coming in from outside. Bread is much bigger than just eating. It's all of these circumstances that we need that feed us. All right, you do it by tuning into the energy within. Every word that leaves the mouth of the Father, that's where the spiritual energy is coming from. It's coming from the spirit. So as you're in there working with yourself, you will find out that if you don't close You have access to that energy all the time, and I mean all the time. No matter what happens to you, no matter what befalls you, if people are dishonest with you, if you don't get what you want, if somebody else gets the job you want, if you don't get the raise you want, these are not terrible things. These are things that make you close. And when you close, you give up the meaning of your life. You give up your joy. You give up your beauty. You give up your love. You fall in love with somebody, that's beautiful, it's wonderful. They do something. They slurp their soup, they leave the cap off the toothpaste, they whatever it is, they pull the blankets off in bed, right? They just do some silly little thing, and I'm telling you, you're going to close. Why would you trade love, which is so precious, for a stupid little thing like your mind not liking some little trait that somebody has? I'm encouraging you to look at it that way. And say, I'm ruining my relationship and giving up love by deciding to not like what this person did, or deciding to not accept this or accept that. That's why now you're at the core of spirituality— acceptance, acceptance, surrender. What does it mean? It means I'm not going to let the outside world close me. I have the right to have it beautiful inside. Nobody has the right to take that away from me. This is my world. I live in here. And that becomes your spiritual work. You're trying to make your neurosis or your anxiety relax. No, anxiety doesn't know how to relax. Anxiety is anxious. You understand that? It's his nature, right? It's all jumpy and stuff like that, right? But you, who's noticing it, you has the hands in there, you can relax. You can sit there and say, okay, fine, just relax. And lean away from the noise. Just go to that place. Okay, that's like a zone, right? Athletes talk about being in the zone, right? There's a zone inside. If you relax behind that noise, there's a peace back there. There's a quiet. That would be a big spiritual experience, but it's a heck of a lot nicer than hanging out with anxiety. Yeah, it's the observer. It's what it feels like. You're the observer and you relax. And if you do that over time, not immediately, but over time, you will find that that which was making you anxious, the neurosis downstairs— oh my God, my boss is gonna be mad, I told him I'd be there, I'm gonna be late— you're gonna be just as late anyway, sorry, it's not going to change a thing. You look at that and you realize, I'm okay, I'm okay. It doesn't do any good to show up neurotic, okay? So you let go, and as you let go, you'll notice amazing thing— that energy that was all weird because you didn't touch it It changed. It was able to come up. All right. Or you start using affirmation, right? You sit there and say, oh, come on, this is probably an older person like my grandmother, my grandpa. Right? I do. Yes. Yes. That's right. They get to drive, and I should not be honking at them or bothering them or even sending them bad vibes. Maybe they should not be driving any faster. Well, And the point is, it's the latter part of their life, and at least they get to go some places and do something, and it means a lot more to them than this neurosis means to me. And you feel like you're giving something instead of demanding and taking. You can change yourself. It's not about suppressing. It's not about denying. It's about raising. You raise yourself. Pausing almost feels like it generates compassion a little bit. What you'll find out is you back there, are the most beautiful thing in the whole universe. You are filled with love. You're filled with compassion. You're filled with inspiration. You're filled with, like, well, Shakti energy, the spirit energy, call it whatever you want, filled with it all the time. But you're busy looking down at this garbage. And so you learn to raise yourself. The other example that I like to use, because I'm very much into being broad and seeing the whole universe instead of just your little tiny world, right, is let's say it's hot out. Nowadays we have global warming, we're hot, okay? It's very hot out. You're standing there and you have to go from one place to another, and you're actually outside with no air conditioning. Isn't that terrible? And as you're walking, you're complaining, oh my God, it's so freaking hot and I'm sweating. I don't want to sweat. I don't like this sort of thing. And I always have to be so hot. What's wrong with these people? Blah blah. Okay, well, that doesn't help anything. It doesn't make it cooler. It doesn't do a single thing. It's the same thing like the car. But what if you sat there? I know I trained Mickey this— I trained Michael this way. All right, as I sit there and I look and I say, how did it get hot? Be quiet. How did it get hot? What do you mean? Why is it hot? Well, because there's a sun out there. You mean there's a star 93 million miles away and you're— it's hot? It's so hot that you feel this heat here? I'm in Gainesville, Florida. Miami is about 300 miles away. I asked them, how big would a fire have to be in Miami for you to feel it in Gainesville? If the whole town caught fire, you would not even know what happened. That thing's 93 million— here, that dog is 93 million miles away and you can feel the star shine. Okay, you can feel— is that neat? And all of a sudden you say, that's neat, that's— yeah, I can feel a star. The stars are neat things, right? And you start working with yourself that way and it works. You raise yourself and get curious. We call a mindset is the conditioning of the mind that makes it so that things turn you on and turn you off. And that's where you get your list of what you want and what you don't want. It is not true that you want those things. What you want is something that will open you so that you can feel the joy that is natural when you're open. And you don't want the things to close you so that you get blocked off from any joy and you get this sense of depression. So you have a choice even right at that point and we haven't even gone deep yet. You have a choice. Do you want to spend your life deciding what you want and what you don't want and then chasing it outside? Or do you want to sit there and work inside to realize all I really want is the joy and the love and if I stay open I can have those. I don't need outside conditions to keep me open. So I make it— I make a very important point because in spirituality it gets mixed up. Spirituality is not about renunciation. There's no renunciation. Renunciation says, I've decided what it is that will make me happy and I'm not going to do it. Well, that sounds rather absurd, right? Spirituality says, it was stupid of me to decide what will make me happy instead of being happy with life. Instead of being grateful and turned on by all of the amazing things that are happening in front of me and all the past experiences I got to have, why don't I just enjoy all that and then come into life filled with love, filled with joy, and give the whole of my being to the moments that are unfolding in front of me? That's what spirituality says. So it's not about renunciation, it's not about things are wrong and things are right, it's about understanding that you did this. You did this with your mind. You set up conditions in which your mind would open and then your heart opens, and conditions in which your mind would close and your heart closes. So spirituality is very— because some people say spirituality is not logical and rational. It is so. It's saying to you, why are you doing that? If you want to have a beautiful life spinning around a planet in the middle of nowhere, why don't you just open? It's your heart, it's your mind. It doesn't need conditions to open. It's just you don't know how to do it. As you become used to, programmed, habitual, that you had a past experience. This, by the way, this is where it comes from. How did you decide? How did your mind decide what it is you want and what you don't want? You did not make those decisions. They were programmed into you by your past experiences, all of them. So you had a past experience where something was nice with a certain person, they looked a certain way, they had a certain name, they drove a certain kind of car, whatever it is. And it really was, really was high for you, it was beautiful, years and years ago. Now one of those things shows up, you meet somebody with that name, as shallow as that sounds, don't kid yourself, you meet someone with the name of your ex, you close down even though it's not the same person. You meet someone with the name of who you had your first date with in high school, that it was a wonderful relationship, and you open up. And likewise, when you see a car they had a nice experience in, it turns you on. So you are programmed by your past experiences such that if they were good experiences, they tend to open you when something reminds you of them. When they were negative experience, they tend to close you. And that is where you get your list of what you want. That's why all of our lists are different. Everyone's list is totally different. Someone tells you this is the same as yours, they're manipulating you because everyone has had different experiences. And based upon those experiences, it left these impressions on your mind and you came up with this list of what I want. So when you make the list of what you want and what you don't want, you're really making a list of your past. That's how you came up with those things. Even colors that you like, anything, they are impressions. Skinner, the psychologist, said man is the sum of his learned experiences. It's not true. It's true that your mind and your heart, your personal heart, are the sum of your learned experiences, but you are in there noticing this. So I make a big distinction with BF, right? That you are in there and you are noticing that your mind is a sum of your learned experiences, and it is. That's where psychology meets spirituality. Psychology is right. All of the psyche, your thoughts, your patterns, your likes, your dislikes, your problems and neuroses, etc., are the sum of your learned experiences. But you are in there. You're the consciousness, the awareness of being who notices that what I'm saying is true. So basically you come to the point where you have to decide, do I want to continue letting my past leave impressions on my mind and my heart such that only certain things will open and close me, and then I will spend my life chasing after, manipulating, controlling, conniving, whatever you want, the world around me so that sometimes it unfolds the way I want? Or do you want to sit there and understand that you're the one who's making these decisions. It's your mind who's setting up the conditions. Why don't you just not do that? Start with positive thinking. That's one level that at least you should be doing that, right? You sit there and say, we'll make it through this, and even if I don't, whatever it is, I will be a better person because of this. If you're in— into God running everything, if that's your state, God knows what he's doing. There are so many different things that you can do with positive thinking to create a nicer environment inside. In my opinion, you have an obligation to do that, both for yourself, for the health of your body, for people around you. You just lift yourself up. The Gita says one should raise the selfless self, not trample down the self. This is a time to be doing that work. So you can't say, I can't do that. You can make your mind say things. You're going to be used to say, every time there's a negative thought, Replace it with a positive one. It's a good time to practice that. So it's woeing for itself, 'Oh my God, this is terrible.' 'I'll be fine. This is okay. God knows what he's doing.' Or, 'No, this is just reality. It's just reality.' Accept it either way. And then the next level is you sit there and if you do mantra, and mantra doesn't have to be an Eastern, you know, Sanskrit mantra, but just get something going behind that you're hanging on to at a deeper part of your mind. I'll be okay. This is okay. I'll use whatever it is. Right. Then what will happen is when the lower self starts, these situations happen, you just settle back into it. So you have a choice. Which mind do you want to listen to? The lower mind, which we know what it's like, or you've built something beautiful inside. And then ultimately the highest state is you relax every single time something hits your stuff. You relax, you relax. Relax and let go. Relaxing itself is letting go. People sometimes say, well, I relax, how do I let go? The very fact that you chose to relax— relax your shoulders, relax your tummy, etc.— and, and just relax inside, you— that is letting go. You're not getting all involved in what's going on. So that's the highest state, is you just keep letting go. And the worse it is, the better. Just keep letting go. You just commit yourself, I'm going to use this All right, then you of course put aside some time in the morning and evening to remind yourself that this is what I'm doing. I would love to feel that what we talk about today and what you end up doing with it can help you be the best at whatever you chose to be, because we're talking about your choice, which you choose to be. All right, and you have a lifetime to do it, but there are things that can help you be that. And one of those, like I said, the most simple level is you take take decent care of your body. If you don't take decent care of your body, it doesn't do well, does it? And when it's not doing well, you can't do well. You can't go to work, you can't concentrate, and so on. I want to talk about what mindfulness really is. It gets pigeonholed into different things. It really is about saying, can we have a discussion about what you're doing with your mind? There, that's mindfulness. Be mindful of what you're doing with your mind. So what does that mean? You raise your hand, you say to me, me, well, I use my mind to study. I say, wonderful, great, I hope you do well at it. I use my mind to do research, I'm into research. Wonderful, that's a great thing to do with your mind. I use your mind, I love to read and learn about history. And whatever it is that you are doing with your mind, that is fine. Be mindful of what your mind is doing, or you're going to be in big trouble. What is your mind doing? It's really very, very easy. I guarantee you, it takes 10 10 seconds. You won't like what you see. What you're going to see is that when you are not using your mind— when am I not using your mind? When you're driving down the road going somewhere, when you're sitting on the potty, whatever you want to call it, right? All the moments you take in your life where you are not consciously doing something, I guarantee you there's something going on in your mind. What's it doing? Oh my God, I can't believe I said that. I am so embarrassed. That was ridiculous. If I hadn't said that, I was doing— does anybody Why does anybody's mind do that? Answer me. Okay. What is the benefit of that? The answer is zero. Do you understand that? How about this? You're driving down the road, you're going on vacation or driving to Miami, and there's a sign, a billboard on the road, and it reminds you of a relationship, a problem you had with your father or your mother 25 years ago, and your mind starts reiterating the discussion as if it was going on now, or your ex-husband, or whatever it is, and it's still going on in there, isn't it? What in the world is that? Of what benefit is that? Very few of you in business, in relationships, in life would allow a cost-benefit analysis take place of which the cost is 100% and the benefit is zero, and you would still do it, correct? That's what I'm telling you that is. The cost is 100% and the benefit is absolutely zero. All it does is cause you trouble. It makes you neurotic, it makes you nervous, it makes you scared. Do you understand that? So why are you tolerating that? That's what mindfulness is about. We define a world inside ourselves that supports our self-concept, and we need that because we're hiding from ourselves behind the self-concept, right? Because we define the world that way, we need the world to be that way. But the world has nothing to do with what we made up. The world is what it is. It's reality. It's beating to a whole different drum. It's beating to science. It's beating like, "Hey, Ben, it rained today. It's my birthday." That's stupid. What are you doing? The rain has nothing to do with your birthday. It has to do with meteorology and low-pressure zones. Right? So you've now left yourself vulnerable to the unfolding of reality He's going to destroy you. So that's what you were saying, and that's absolutely true. So even if I sit down and I write my list to begin the day, and then I follow that list in order to basically make myself feel less insecure, the truth is I'm more vulnerable. Yes. Because things may interrupt that list that I don't have control roll over and then I will be sort of subject to that experience. If you are living your life to hide from yourself, you're not going to get anywhere. It starts— you asked me, how do you do this? It starts when you say, I don't want to live like that anymore. I don't want my state of being to be completely dependent upon somebody else's mood, upon how somebody else does or doesn't doesn't do, etc., etc., etc. From the unfolding of the weather, the unfolding of the world, right? I want to find my true being. I want to find me in here and be okay. Then I'll come into the world. It's not that you don't come into the world. Let me come into the world and be motivated by love, be motivated by compassion, be motivated by creativity, by inspiration, instead of be motivated by fear, which is what we are motivated by. Right? Okay? It's like the most powerful of us try to stay really powerful because the thought of— I mean, some of these very powerful people, the minute they're out of office or out of this or finances go wrong, they're jumping off buildings. Right or wrong? Right. It did happen, didn't it? Right. Okay? That's because they were not powerful. They were supported by something because they were needing and it was weak and that strength came from conditional, by the conditional state. The moment that conditional state went away, well, it's over. I don't want to face this. These things inside are our darkness and you call it transmuting, right? That we're transmuting this energy that we've stored. And you also say the energy wants to go up. It does. Is that right? Always. Always. It always wants to go up, right? And it's funny, you call it darkness, that's like saying that night is darkness. Night is not darkness. The sun is shining out there exactly the same as it did the entire time for 4.5 billion years. There's no winter, there's no summer, there's no this, there's not— right? It's because something's blocking the light. It's not that the light is not there, right? The cloud is blocking the light. You don't have to find the light, right? You don't have to make light underneath the cloud. Get rid of the cloud. And there's nothing but light. That is your natural state. It's your natural state, right? Period. Period. And isn't it beautiful when people start to realize that, that, hey, I made a mess of myself. Nobody else did it, right? They did things that I couldn't handle, but I'm the person that couldn't handle them, and I'm the person that then stored them inside and made myself angry and made myself fearful and weak and, or whatever. All right? I did that. I'm in here. Let go. Let go of the cloud. I don't want to call it darkness. Let go of the cloud. Let go of the blockages that you put in there and stored in there. Even if somebody did something terrible to you, they didn't do it inside, they did it outside. Right. Do you understand that? Right? Yes, yes. You don't have to keep it inside. I've kept lifetimes of my parents and my sister and my boyfriend, all these things that happened to me have just clouded my life. Yes. Made a mess of my life, my inside life. That makes a mess of your inner state. And then what you try to do is manipulate the outside to make it feel better. Understand it? What can I do to distract myself from that? And what can I do to make sure that everybody behaves, everything, the weather, everything behaves in the way I need it to? So when it comes in, it doesn't hit my stuff. And it never behaves in a way that hits my stuff. You follow me? Yeah. Next thing you know, you're just manipulating and struggling, whereas open up to life. There's nothing wrong. Life is life, you know. Is it right? No. Is it wrong? Is it just? No. Is it fair? No. It's just life, right? The Buddhists say, very deep, it's deep stuff, right? Zen Buddhism says, flowers are red, the water's blue, and the grass is green. That's the teaching. Go home. In other words, things are the way they are. Understand that? You're welcome to say, I want the flower to be blue and the grass to be whatever, all right? That's just your stupid mind fighting with God, fighting with reality, right? So instead, you just be willing to say, okay, nobody said it was fair, nobody said it was just, nobody said anything. They just said reality is reality. It happened. You can work with it to make it better in the future, but you can't do a thing about the past till they develop time machines. It ain't gonna happen. So you have to accept the past, let go of the fact that you couldn't handle it before. Now you're in a better position to raise the future. Otherwise, all you're trying to do is make sure the future doesn't do what bothers you in the past and does do what made you feel good in the past. And since we all had different experiences, we're all fighting with each other. As you become clearer in life, you realize that spiritual growth and personal growth are exactly the same thing. They're just looking at two sides of the same coin. Why is that? Spiritual growth is supposed to be about God, and personal growth is supposed to be about making something good of yourself. Cleaning out yourself, raising yourself. I would prefer that nobody knew anything about God, that they only knew about cleansing themselves. Because if you're not there yet, God's just gonna be a concept to you, a belief, which is of no use. Nothing. If you work with yourself to raise yourself, you will come into a state where you will understand what they meant by the word God. You don't have to use the word God, use any word you want. It's just describing a state of being. So what does it mean to grow personally? It means to notice that you have issues inside yourself. You think you have issues outside. No, you have issues inside. There are fears, insecurities, desires, needs, wants, Self-consciousness, embarrassment, guilt— these are all words that describe things going on inside ourselves. Guilt is not something outside, it's something inside. Need is not something outside, it's something inside. Yes, you're guilty about something. Yes, you need something, or you think you do, but the actual experience is inside of you. Those experiences, these terrible things I just talked about, That's how you go to God. Those are your pathway. You cannot ignore those. You cannot run away from those. They are literally the roadmap of achieving spiritual states. You will eventually, as you grow spiritually, come to realize there is no stress. There's only resistance. Energy is coming in a given direction, and if you are participating in that dance compliance of that energy, there is not stress. If you are resisting at all, to whatever degree you are resisting, resistance creates stress. It's the same thing with engineering. Do you know that I-beams that they build buildings with, they measure stress? That's because there is a force that is opposing them, and that creates stress. Nothing in isolation has stress. So the The question isn't what's going on outside. Again, as usual with me, it's a question of what's going on inside. If you are feeling uptight, if you are feeling stressed out, if you are feeling burned out, I appreciate that, I respect that. Start looking inside at a minute-by-minute level as you go through your day. Where am I resisting? Where am I resisting? What is it that a phone call happens Fine, I told you it's a phone call. You're sitting on the planet Earth and you get a phone call. That's exciting. Here you get the entertainment of a phone call. You have this opportunity, but that's not how you look at it. If you look deeper inside, you'll see, I'm afraid of failing. I'm afraid something will go wrong. I'm afraid I'll get in trouble. I'm afraid I'll get yelled at, or I'm afraid I won't get what I want. I want to get something from this. How do I get that? Fear and desire creates stress. Yes. Why? Because fear is saying, "I don't want something to be the way it might be or the way it is," and desire is saying, "I do want something to be the way it's not." Right? You don't ever desire what you already got. And you know fear was not happening. It's something is happening and you have resistance to it. That's what creates fear. Something isn't happening and you want it to. That's what creates desire. Both of those those are coming out of yourself. That's your personal self— fears and desires. There is no stress without fears and desires. There's just the beauty of the experience, the awesomeness. I mean, do you feel stressed when you look at a beautiful sunset? Do you feel stressed when you hold your beloved in your arms? "Oh, I held you too long." You don't do that, all right? Because you are open. You're receptive. You're completely open to the experience. Why are you not open to the phone call? Why are you not open to the meeting? Why are you not open to going to work? Why are you not opening to put in a couple extra hours if you have to? There's a whole stack of papers left over there. You would never want to see what I took home every weekend, right? And I never felt burned out. I never felt stressed. It was passion to me. I wanted to do it. I wanted to have it run the best that it could. I wanted to help everybody. So you look inside and say, don't let people tell you, well, of course you're burned out, you're working 40 hours, or whatever the heck, you've been doing the same job for such and such. No, it is not true. You are burned out and you are stressed because you're resisting. And the only reason you resist are fear and desire. Your blockages are blocking this beautiful flow of Shakti, of energy. It doesn't want to be blocked. It will push them out of the way. It happens every day of your life. Stuff gets pushed up. You're driving in the car, you're doing okay, and all of a sudden this thing comes up. You remember what your mother did, what your father did, what your first boyfriend— I hurt you. You see a sign that reminds— what do you do? Boom, push it right back down. I don't want to deal with this. I'm telling you, the Shakti, the spirit, the chi down there is going to push this stuff out of the way. It does not want it to be there. It doesn't want blockages to be in the way of the flow, just like the river doesn't. But you will not let it happen, will you? There's no way. If all of a sudden you're sitting there and somebody says something and you feel the insecurity you felt when your father yelled at you, you do something to avoid that. Tell the person to apologize. You can— excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom. You walk away. Okay, I'm doing better now. That's how you deal with it. Do you understand that? I'll teach you how to deal with it, but that's how you deal with it. So it is coming up all the time. It gets pushed up a different situation in your life, and you don't want to. So you're scared of this stuff coming up, and so you resist it, you push it away, you fight it, you avoid situations that would make it come up, even if they're totally natural situations. You want to go to the party? Yeah, okay, let's go. We're getting all your friends together. I'm all excited about it. Well, you know, Paul's going to be there. No, I don't want to go. I can't deal. I can't deal with that. You can't deal with that. I can't deal with the stuff coming up that's being pushed up by the Shakti, by the energy. I can't deal with it. All right, so now you're getting a little taste of what it really means to work on yourself. You don't have to do anything. In fact, if you would not do anything, you'd be fine. All you have to do is not resist, not fight the process, not not be able to handle this natural process of purification that is going to take place. You don't have to go down there and make it happen. Like, people write me sometimes, there's a lot of stuff down there, how do I know which one to work with? It's right in front of you. Oh, but, but this isn't my major one. I don't care. If you will work with the one that's coming up now, wait till you see what happens. And then you're actually going to see it's perfect. It knows exactly which one needs to come out. Like pulling a string to unwind a ball of thread that's tied together. You better pull the right string or it all gets tighter. It knows exactly what needs to come up next. And if you can let go of that one, the next thing happens, the next thing happens. You don't have to pay attention. Why I'm in this— you call it the human predicament— that I keep getting pulled into all of these disturbances? Yes. Well, I love that you use the word 'dist.' I would like to call them distractions instead of disturbances. Okay, you know what it's like to get distracted. We get distracted all the time. You're doing something and then something else catches your attention, correct? That's what has happened in here. You are being distracted by your thoughts. Okay, you're being distracted by your emotions. You're being distracted what's coming in by your senses. Your consciousness is so distracted by these things that it literally identifies with them. It says, that's who I am because that's where I'm hanging out. I tell people, if I were to stare at a point, let's say the tile on the floor, if all I did was stare at the tile on the floor, that's my world. Because my world is what I'm conscious of. right? Okay. And so if I focus completely on something narrow like that, then I've narrowed my consciousness. I tell everybody, in the '60s we talked about expanding consciousness. I would never use that term anymore. The term is stop constricting and contracting your consciousness. Your consciousness is already fully expanded. My consciousness can see this whole room, but if I focus on just a point on the floor, then that's all I'm conscious of. So what we're doing is getting distracted by our thoughts, distracted by our emotions, distracted with what's coming in through our senses. That's a very small part of the universe, to say the least, right? It's like 3 feet by 5 feet high or 6 feet high. That, that's it. It's just a point on the planet Earth. And you know my favorite saying: 1.3 million Earths fit inside the sun. 1.3 million. And how much space do you take up on the Earth? And your consciousness is constantly drawn down to being distracted and focusing on these thoughts, your thoughts, your emotions, and what's coming in through your senses. That's minuscule compared to what's going on everywhere, okay? And that's why you get caught down there. That's our predicament. That's the human predicament, which is what consciousness, which I assure you is capable of experiencing much more than just staring at yourself It doesn't have to stare at yourself. What has— if I don't stare at the point on the floor, what do I see? Everything else. If you don't stare at yourself, what do you see? Everything else. And that's the great spiritual state, which you're perfectly capable— everyone's perfectly able of experiencing that. But the question is, how to not be distracted by our thoughts? How to not be distracted by our emotions? More importantly, not— I don't like to play how, how to not— why are we so distracted? By our thoughts. How many thoughts do we have? How many of your thoughts are meaningless? How many thoughts end up being, you were stupid to think it, right? It just didn't turn out to be real. It didn't turn out to be a problem. Didn't have to— the person wasn't really thinking what you thought they were thinking. You were just in a bad mood. You understand that? A lot of our thoughts, the vast majority of our thoughts, we'd be better off if we didn't have them. They're just distracting our consciousness from work, from relationships, and so on and so forth. So the question is, why are you so distracted by your thoughts? And until you learn to not be distracted by your thoughts, you're going to be distracted by your thoughts. Why are you so distracted by your emotions? Until you learn not to be, you're going to be pulled down into your emotions. So that's the foundation to me. That's the foundation of spirituality. Surrender is very, very subtle and very, very powerful. And you will find out that it is the entire spiritual journey. What surrender is, as we've discussed it, is you are in a predicament. It's called reality. Right now, where almost all of us are— I'm leaving the Masters out— is we are conscious and we are aware of what is unfolding in front of us. The world is coming in We're experiencing it. The mind is reacting to the world that's coming in because we stored reactive triggers inside ourselves due to our past experiences. The heart is reacting to the reaction of the mind, or we have stored so much within our heart that it's leaking. It just comes up with stuff all by itself. It doesn't need the outside world. To come in and stimulate. This is reality. This is what's going on. So you are in there overwhelmed at all times by this experience of releasing energies inside of you that most people know absolutely nothing about. And it's like a drowning person. I'm drowning. Well, while I'm drowning, I'm not very nice. While I'm drowning, I scream a little bit. While I'm drowning, I yell at people, help me, help me. I do all kinds of things while I'm drowning. If somebody swims to help me, I'll grab them. They may drown too. I'm not in charge of my actions. I'm not a rational human being. I'm not centered. I'm not clear. I'm drowning. And we are drowning inside. So what do you do when you're drowning? You try to grab something solid. That's what you do. You try to grab a floating board passing by. You try to grab anything you can in order to not sink. That is how almost everybody is living their lives. What are we grabbing? You're trying to grab on to form outside. If people will respect me and talk nicely to me, I won't be as caustic in here. If she'll love me instead of loving him and pay attention to me and say nice things to me and marry me— not to mention marry me, like take vows— and tell me she'll always be true to me. And so that's pretty solid, right? Excuse me. And you grab ahold of that and you hold onto it and you try to not drown until he or she goes out and does something that doesn't reinforce that. And then you drown, right? If you want to see how much you're clinging and holding on by trying to create a solidity inside via the outside world, see what happens when it's not the way you want. I mean, it's like trying to even ask it. What happens when somebody does something who's very close to you, who you have depended on and are clinging to, if you will? All right. What happens when they do something that does not reinforce your ability to cling? They say something or act something, you think they say something, somebody tells you they acted something, or you think maybe someday they will. Even that, even if they've done nothing and your mind thinks, well, what if they do? Sally's husband left her. What if, what if Saul leaves me? That's all it takes, isn't it? And what do you feel? Pain. You feel pain. You feel disturbance. You feel destruction. All these energies shift inside. That's right. Because what you have been doing is trying to build a place of solidity within your mind that you can hold on to. And as long as everything reinforces that, at least reasonably, you feel feel you're safe. You have distanced yourself from the core of the energies that you've stored inside by clinging to something else. That's how we live. That's what we do. One opportunity that always presents itself constantly in a workplace is perfecting your interaction with other people. It's a relationship, just like your personal relationships that you have at home. You have relationships with every single person you're interacting with. And we need to learn to perfect those. And by perfecting those, we perfect ourselves. Why? What happens naturally, as we've discussed earlier, is we've had experience in our lives. Those experiences have carved you. They've carved your sense of good and bad and, and what you like and what you don't like, what you're afraid of and what you desire, etc. These They're not things you decided. They are things that your environment and your experiences left these impressions. These impressions got left on top of you. So now what happens is when you look out into the world, what you see is yourself. You know that. You've all heard that before. So you look outside because you're looking through the glasses of your own personal experiences. Everything looks that way. Well, that's not a good foundation for working with other people. And what you're going to find out is that you become very critical of other people. So if you're a boss, when you look at other people, you think that your employees, they should be doing things the way you thought, the way you do them. So what it comes down to is, how do I use my interaction with the people in my workforce, in my workplace, to perfect myself so that I learn how to get along with people that are different than me? The beauty of when you go home, there's a handful of people, you know, one, 2, 3, your family. When you go to the workplace, there's lots of people. And so you get this tremendous opportunity to learn how to work with diversity. People are diverse. So how do I go about working with people? First, you start by neutralizing yourself. You realize that your view of how it should be done, what everything is, is just your view. So you try to listen to what other people are trying to say through their actions about how they would go about doing Now, I can give you a nice talk about how everybody has contribution, everybody has something to give, and just give them an opportunity. Let's say you're past that, and what you see is that things are not being done in a way that is constructive, or ultimately constructive, or ultimately efficient. You're the boss, you're somebody in a position, that's your responsibility to get things running as good as possible, as even, as smooth, and effective as possible, efficient as possible. So how do How do I deal now with a person who's going about their business and it's not coming out that way? I look at it as an opportunity to perfect the universe. It is not something against the other person. I'm not criticizing the other person, even within myself. They're not doing anything wrong. The universe created them. They are the result of everything that caused them to be the way they are. Everything's that way. And I've now been put in a position where I can help to raise the universe, to help it run more smoothly, help it run better. So you start off with a constructive view that if something is not perfect in front of you, that's a good thing. That's an opportunity for you. It doesn't get you upset, doesn't make you frustrated, doesn't make you angry. Therefore, when you approach the other person, you're not putting them on a defensive point of view. If you cause defensiveness in another person, you've not done your job. Because nobody does good based on defensive or fear. That is not a foundation for good work. So basically, you approach it from the point of view of that person is me, and I have these blockages, I have this inability to see something. How do I work with myself? How do I change this? And a lot of times you'll end up working with the person not even about the thing that you want to talk about. You start working at another level with the person. And help them work through what issues they have that are causing them to be the way they are. And it becomes a friendship. It becomes a beautiful experience. You find that your entire interaction with every single person in your life is giving. You are serving. That's all you're doing. It is your job to help it be the best that it can be. They're not serving you. I'm CEO of a company with all these people. They're not serving me. I'm here to serve them. I'm here to help them be better. Once you get comfortable being with reality— this is very deep. This is what Lao Tzu tried to talk about in the Tao. Now that you are willing to let go of yourself, your personal self, and interact with reality, your awareness is now experiencing reality. You will find that there's not one single moment that unfolds in front of you that is not calling to you to interact with it. It is there. You are there because you are meant to be with each other. That's how perfect it is. It's like the most perfect relationship. People looking for their soul mates, it's right in front of you. It's called life. It is the most perfect fit for your being. That's why you're there and it's there, and you will feel it and you will know what to do. I'm telling you, you will never ever have trouble making a decision again for the rest of your life. You will never wonder. You will never have any angst or anything. It'll just be the universe. It's sort of Listen to me. You're on the ocean on a surfboard. How do you know when to go up and when to go down? You don't. The wave does it for you. You just ride the wave. The wave comes up, you go up. The wave goes down, you go down. But what if I want to go down when it goes up? You fall. What if I want to go up when it goes down? You fall. It's like you just interjected yourself into a system that you're supposed to be in harmony with. And if you are in harmony with it, you will know exactly what to do because it's telling you what to do. Is that telling you with words? But it is telling you what to do, isn't it? It's telling you what to do. It's a go to the right, go to the left, feel it, be in harmony with it. That's how you ride a wave. That is the Tao. That is what Lao Tzu was talking about, how you ride life. If you're not busy in there wanting it to be other than it is, then you are in harmony with what it is. The moments know where they're going. They're part of a harmony that's moving through time and space. You are here to experience that and participate in that. You don't have to do anything. It is happening to you. You're happening with it. And then you're going to see that what happens, you start just being with it, and everyone looks at you and says, oh, you're so good at everything you do. You're not doing anything. You're not doing a single thing. But you're neither doing nor not doing. That's the deepest of all the teachings. You are there with it. It's doing something. The ocean is doing something. So obviously, if you're on the ocean and the ocean's doing something, it looks like you're doing something. You understand what I just told you is the entire Bhagavad Gita. It's the deepest teaching you will ever even come close to. Everyone will think you're doing things. You're not doing a single thing, but you're also not not doing either, right? You are just being on the ocean and being with it, and the ocean knows where it's going. Therefore, you will be the one who's in harmony with everything. It's so simple that we miss it. If you want to play baseball and you want to pick up a grounder, I do not think that what you should be doing is guessing where it's going to go next. You should be watching it. Why? Because it knows where it's going. Going next. You see, that seems so weird. You're the smart one, you should be the one who can figure it out. I guarantee you right now, that ball knows more about where it's going than you do. The ground and the ball and the interacting with them knows way more about what's going to happen next than anything you're going to figure out. That's why they say keep your eye on the ball. They don't say keep your eye on your mind. They don't say that. They say keep your eye on the ball in every sport. Why? Because the ball knows where it's going. It just— it's the forces of nature. Therefore, it knows where it's going. It is perfectly in harmony with all the forces that it's interacting with, isn't it? So if you keep your eye on the ball, you have a better chance of being where it's going because you're paying attention to where it's going. You're not guessing, you're not figuring, you're not using logic, you're not worrying, you're not angsting, you're not hoping, you're not praying. Even a good religious coach— if you say, 'Coach, when the ball is hit, should I close my eyes and pray?' 'Did I get it, or should I watch the ball?' They're gonna tell you to forget the praying stuff at that time. Pray that you can keep your eye on the ball. All right, you are supposed to keep your eye on the ball. And it's the same thing with life. I'm telling you, it's exactly the same. You come into harmony with the moments that are unfolding in front of you. Well, why would I do that? I'm not even going to answer you if you sat here this long, because they are the moments that are sitting in front of you. What if I don't It has nothing to do with like and dislike, does it? It has to do with dancing with it. What if I don't like what the waves are doing? Then don't surf, because you're going to fall. And it's the same way with life. I'm here for a little while on the planet Earth, just a very little time, a few years, and I get to see— I don't get to see much, it's really embarrassing. I only get to see the little tiny bit that's in front of me at a given moment. They miss everything else. You understand that? Those of you who think you know something, you don't know anything. Here's a book. It's just the most brilliant book. Read one word. Give me the book back. Do you know the book? Here's a moment in life. There are 700 billion quillion going on at the same time. You saw one. You know what's going on? No, you don't know what's going on. You don't have the slightest idea what's going on. You only know what you picked up. I told you, statistically, what you picked up is statistically insignificant. In fact, it rounds to zero. Am I right or wrong? You see it? So therefore, what you picked up can't be anything. It's nothing. It's zero. But you think it's everything, and to you it is everything because it's the only thing you picked up. Your universal set is like nothing. It's just— God, I'm trying to talk to you intelligently. So the right way to come into the moment is to sit here and realize I'm a conscious being. That's a blessing. Where it came from, I don't know, but I'm here. I know I'm here and I'm conscious. And there's this moment unfolding in front of me. I am well aware that there are 700 billion zillion going on everywhere that I'm not experiencing, but I can't do anything about that. Let me at least experience the one I'm experiencing. Wow, it's kind of neat. Let me at least experience what I'm experiencing. It's like a gift. This is the gift that's being given to you. There's another gift being given to everybody else. There's 7 billion people on the planet Earth. Every single one of them experience something different every single moment. That's what they're experiencing. That's the gift that's being given to them. And so you actually come into the moment— I'm afraid to say it— with a sense of honor, with a sense of respect. With a sense of gratitude. You sit there and say to the moment, wow, thank you, this is the one I got to experience. Has nothing to do with what I want, what I don't want, what should be or shouldn't be. It has to do with my humility of realizing I'm not the creator of the universe. I am the experiencer of this moment. That's what I am. There are forces that are creating the universe. You do know that. You want to call them science? I love it. You want to call it God, I love it. Makes no difference. Just call it not me. That's the nicest name for the creator of the universe— not me. Because you know it's not you, don't you? Okay, you're just kind of sitting here picking up the moment that's in front of you. Then honor and respect that experience. Your will— now you listen to me— your will— and I mean by your will, your will, you in there, okay, the power you have is stronger than any force that can ever distract you or do anything to you, period. You are the strongest thing in there. Will is the power of self. It is the power of chitshakti, of conscious energy. When an event happens outside and the consciousness starts to get drawn toward it, you have every ability to relax and bring it back. Every one of you do. Don't tell me, I don't know, I don't have a very strong will. The fact that you took human birth means that your will and your soul is evolved enough to be transcendent to every single force that can draw on it. Did you know that? That's why people can do weird things. You know, people do all kinds of weird things, like Yakuza. I hate to tell you this, if they insult their master, they sit there and— it's Japanese. Why am I telling you this? I don't know, because I'm showing you, I'm showing you how powerful will and they sit before their master and their boss and they say, "I'm so sorry, I'll show you how sorry I am." They take a knife, they put their finger down, and they cut their finger off while they're talking and looking and staring at that, and they ceremonially batch up their finger and give it, give the finger in a wrapped cloth. This is true, right? It's a true statement. In a wrapped cloth, they give it to their boss, their master, the head of the mafia, that kind of thing, right? To sit there and say, "That's how sorry I am that I didn't live up to your expectations." All right, a lot of Yakuza running around with that. They leave their trigger finger last, right? Because they're mafia, right? I'm in trouble. All right, but what I'm trying to show you is that's a lot of will. That's painful. That's serious. Okay, all right, people do all kinds of things because they want to. They want to enough to where their will is strong enough that they can apply it. You want out. See, you're Yakuza, but for a different reason, right? You're a great being. You want liberation. You know what it's like to not have all the garbage go on inside of you? Are you willing, when you get consciousness, awareness, that the moment you see it's about to get pulled over here or over here, are you willing to relax? Are you willing to just relax? You let it go. And I always explain it this way: people think you have to be strong to do this. You do not have to be strong to do this. It's not a question of strength. What do you do if you can't stay centered when you go to visit your parents? Some people are that way, right? You go to visit your parents and you're fine, you did fine, and then you go and somehow you just can't hold it together and you find yourself falling back into your old patterns and getting into arguments and doing these things, right? What do you do? You work on it. You literally center yourself before you walk into that room. That's what you do. And you breathe just within yourself. And then you see how long you can sit there without opening your mouth. How many things can get said to you without you saying things back. And then you try to see why is it so hard to not get sucked in. Like you just do what you need to do to watch, and then you'll notice inside yourself deep stuff that you never noticed before. Insecurities and fears and resentments and things that you stored inside of you that these people stimulate, and you can't handle those things, and that's why you can't handle the people. And you keep staying centered, and you let that be the purpose of your life. And then when these things come up, you let them go. And all of a sudden, going home to visit mom and dad is a spiritual experience. All of a sudden meeting your ex is a spiritual experience. All of a sudden all of these things that you thought were so disturbing that you didn't want to happen, the fact that they can still get to you means you have work in that area. And you just decide to do that work because you don't have a choice anyways. That's what I think is funny. No, I'm not going to do that work. Okay, suffer. You either use it to liberate you or you suffer. It is either leading you to a higher state of consciousness and freedom and exhilaration and openness, or you suffer with it. And that is your choice. And so you do this work, and you just little by little stay conscious, let go, stay conscious. I told you, in the end— and you might as well make it in the beginning— because in the end, it is not a mental thing, it is not an emotional thing. It is as follows: you notice that the energy is starting to get disturbed. Before you figure out why, don't even think about it. Just relax your shoulders, relax your chest, relax your stomach, and let go. It is always highest thing you can do to harmonize with the moment that is unfolding in front of you. That goes for business, goes for relationships, goes for sports, goes for children. So many people make it so anxious to bring up a child. "Oh my God, what do I need to do?" Oh, it's the most natural thing in the world. Be present in the moment with each stage the child is going through and bring your best game. Not for you. "But I want him to be a lawyer. I was never—" Nah, don't you dare do that. You come into the moment with the child and you try to hear what they're saying, you try to see what they're going through, you're going through, and you try to see how you can raise that moment to the best of your ability. That's all you can do. That's the highest thing you can do, and it will end up with the highest results that can possibly happen. You need to worry about it. You need to think about it. You don't need to feel guilty. You don't need to feel shame. Nothing. You just, in the current moment, you bring your best game. What's your best game? It starts with honoring and respecting the moment that's in in front of you, period. Not just accepting, that's not even enough. Loving gratitude. I could be experiencing nothing. Somebody said to me the other day that— remember, I said this— how much of the universe is blank empty space? 99.99999%. Do you understand that? That's all there is out there is blank empty space. You do know that, don't you? You know, I think our nearest star, Alpha Proxima, whatever it is, is What is it, 4.5 light years away? The nearest star, nothing in between. 4.5 light years away. You know how far away that is? If I caught a light beam and held it above the Earth, if I let it go for 1 second, it just circumnavigated the Earth 8 times. Ooh, that's a little faster than that. Do that every single second for 4.5 years and you'll get to the next star. Star. The next galaxy is 2.4 million light years away. So I mean, there's nothing but empty space everywhere, and you get to have this in front of you. That's just interesting— colors, shapes, things. So what I taught, the person repeated it to me last night, is instead of comparing what is going on in front of you against what you you want, what you made up based on your past, compare it against nothing and feel gratitude. I am grateful that I get to have this experience. And be that way with every single moment of your life. That's the highest life you can live in it. That's the highest life you can live. And you'll stop storing stuff inside of you because you'll stop saying, I don't want this. It's all exciting. It's all challenging. I'm willing to go through anything. It's just a challenging experience. It's a fun thing, and you'll become empty inside. And that becomes your spiritual growth also. As you start to embrace the moments in front of you with the whole of your being, you become empty, you become pure, and all this energy starts to well up inside of you. For our next foray into how to bring spirituality into the workplace and make the workplace spiritual, this is something we ran into. I was in in program design for the medical industry. And so sometimes we'd have projects given to us where they wouldn't be defined at all. They'd just be, I want to know how to keep my medical records in the computer. It could mean a million different things. It was early in the game when no one was computerizing medical records. Or appointment scheduling. What does it mean? What are the criteria? There were no specifications. So there are times when you are given a project that you literally they don't know what to do. It's just that simple. It's not that you're blocked, it's that you haven't had the experience. There isn't someone to turn to that has had the experience. So you bring a team together and no one in that team knows what to do. So that brings up a really interesting teaching of how to work spiritually and how the benefits of all the deep Eastern teachings can come into the workplace. What we used to do in a situation like that is I'd bring my team together, 6 or 7 people would sit around, all very, very high-level developers, and the first criteria that I would work with is, are you all willing to admit you don't have an answer? You don't know. And I'm their boss, they don't like saying that, but you have to start with reality. Otherwise, somebody's walking into that room thinking they're supposed to have an answer. They don't, but they made some up. That is noise that just creates tremendous trouble in the workplace, in a meeting, in this creative environment. All right? That somebody thinks they know, but what they really know is, I want to know, and I want to impress everybody, and I'm afraid of not knowing. So it's just ego garbage. And so you don't want to bring that into the meeting. So what do you do? How do you start? Everybody's sitting there admitting, I don't know. So what I learned to do and what I taught them, I called it the yin-yang method of design, of solving problems you don't have the answers to. You don't know how to start, so let's start somewhere. You start with asking the question, well, what's the minimum that I could do? It's not the right answer, we're not going to do it, nobody's justifying it, but what is the minimum that we could do and claim that it satisfied the this project that we've been given. And you talk about it. Don't design it, don't get down to detail, because we're not going to stay there. You just get a feeling of what's right about the minimum, what's wrong about the minimum. And all of a sudden, you know about this. You know why that's not enough. You can get passionate about it. You know why it won't solve this problem or that problem or satisfy one of your clients, right? And you know why you have to have at least that We can't go lower than that, right? Because it doesn't do anything. And all of a sudden you're having a fruitful, engaged, beautiful discussion where a minute ago everybody was saying, "I don't know anything." And all of a sudden you realize you do know something. You do know what the minimum looks like. So you start with that. But you don't design it. You don't get down to, "Oh, what will we do? What will it look like?" Nope, nope, nope. Just talk about what the pros and cons of this being the minimum. Find the minimum. Minimum, find the lower edge. Then immediately, once you put that to rest for a moment, don't let anybody buy in, don't say, "Oh, I think that's right." I'm not interested. This is not about whether you like it or don't like it. It's about admitting this is the least we could do and here's the pros and cons of that. Then go to the expansive. What's the most you could do? What's the most you could do? There is a most you could do. You know, it could take you 3 years to do it, but Given that situation that you're talking about, just let your mind go. What is the most that you could do? You know, going beyond that would be ridiculous. There'd be no way you'd need to. There'd be no way you'd want to. What is the outer edge of what this project could look like?

All right, if you really just expanded it into what's the most it could mean, the main obstacle is the unwillingness to experience what it feels like to go withdrawal. What is the obstacle for a person getting off of hard drugs or getting off of alcohol? They could be very committed. They said, "I want to do it," right? But there is that tendency that you have habits, you have, you have tendencies, and to let these go require a certain amount of commitment and a certain amount of strength of center of will that I really am committed to this. And then you go through this process of withdrawal, this process of purification. It isn't comfortable, but you have You have to want the result more than you're afraid of the discomfort. So I always tell people, it's not about whether you like something or not. It's a question of whether you can handle it. Don't ask yourself, do I like this or not? Ask yourself, can I handle this? And it's a rhetorical question because you better be able to because the alternative to be able to handle something is you can't handle it and I don't want to be around, nor do you, right? So you just— that we're talking about that center of will, that center of volition. You sit in there and realize I got junk inside of me. I've developed patterns that are not healthy, just like drugs. I mean, I'm not saying that you're doing drugs, right? But it's, it's like a drug. It's like alcohol. You have these patterns of reactions that are just got formed inside of you when you weren't paying attention, and now you need to let them go. So the obstacle is your unwillingness to go through what it takes to let it go. The moment you decide, I want out, I want to let this go— and there's two reasons to let it go. One is the non-negative, because it sure caused you a lot of trouble, all that noise in there. And the other is the positive. Both are fine. I want to let it go because I want to have a reasonable life. I want to let it go because I want to have one life to live. I want to experience the highest I can possibly experience. I want to explore the depth of my being. I want to know what Christ meant when he said, "My Father and I are one." I want to know where Buddha went with Nirvana. Whatever level you feel the positive, right? And both of those, the inspiration of the non-negative and the inspiration of the positive, should give you the drive. The drive, the inspiration, the intention that you need in order to say, "I'm letting go. I'm letting go." Because the alternative is absurd. The alternative is to give my life to the lowest part of my being.

The highest life you can live is that every moment that passed in front of you is better off because it did. Every moment, because it passed in front of you, you interacted with a way that when it went on its way, it was higher than before it passed before you. That's St. Francis' prayer, isn't it? "Make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there's sickness, let me bring health. Where there's sadness, let me bring joy." Not, "Let me take from the moment." When you're not okay inside, you're taking. You need. You're taking. When you're okay inside, you're giving to the moment. You're raising the moment. Not according to what you think should be happening. In accordance to what you're hearing the moment bring to you. It talks to you. That's not mystical. For example, if there are storm clouds up ahead and you see sheets of rain in the distance, life is telling you it is probably going to rain where you are. That's literally— Christ said, "Let those who have eyes to see, let them see. Let those who have ears to hear, let them hear." In other words, come on, get out of your head and pay attention to what's going on in front of you. That's all you need to do. That's all you need to do. It will tell you everything you need. Give you an idea where it's going, give you an idea where it's coming from, give you an idea what it needs on this journey. And you become a servant. You become a servant of the moment that's in front of you. And then you let it go. Let it go. How many of you have conversations with somebody, and then when the conversation is over, you walk away, the conversation's not over inside your head? Oh, I shouldn't have said that. Oh, if only I had said this. Oh my God. Oh my God, he probably thinks I'm so stupid. I should call him. No, don't call him. They're really stupid. What is that? You're missing the next moment because you're being neurotic about the last one. So you can't possibly be doing the best you can. Do you understand that? Because there's literally a moment unfolding in front of you while you're doing that. You're obviously missing that moment, aren't you? Because you're caught in the last one. You should have the ability to have a conversation, be present in the conversation, absolutely do the best that you can in that conversation to raise it. And if it's business, you can raise it for, you know, to do the best in business. If best for relationship, we raise it best for love. Nobody's saying you're not interacting with it in harmony with its purpose, but basically when it's over— I'm telling you, it's over— all that stuff you do of causing yourself a hard time and building all that junk inside, that's not helping. It doesn't help one iota, just makes you more neurotic. So basically you let go, then you come present the next moment and you live in the harmony of the moment. You give yourself to it. That is what Lao Lao Tzu meant by the Tao. Any of you ever studied the Tao? He called it the way. The way. The way of life. The way of— that is all of Zen. That is all of everything. It's all the martial arts. It's all of sports. Why do you think they teach football players and other people to meditate? It's because this state of openness, the state of harmony with what's going on, will give you that edge instead of being caught in your mind. So life is beautiful. No one will tell you that. All of life is beautiful. Birth is beautiful. Death is beautiful. Everything's beautiful, except that you make it not be beautiful because you've made up how you want it to be. Your house is beautiful. You're the one who makes it not beautiful because you think it's not big enough, because you wish the color would change, because, you know, the neighbor next door got a nicer one. Everything is beautiful if you interact with it with a sense of respect, with a sense of honor, with a sense of being. And what is amazing, that if you do that— I don't even know how to talk about it, that's the purpose of my second book, The CERN Experiment— was that somehow just by doing that, what unfolds is way higher than anything you could ever imagine. There are so many situations in our everyday experiences of work that are just excellent opportunities for growth. So for example, you find yourself in a meeting and there's a group of people and they're sharing ideas and their views. The first thing I want to talk about is if you watch, what you're going to realize is you're not really listening. You're doing one of two things, and this goes even not just for meetings, just even in conversations when you just sit there talking to somebody. Either when they're talking and you're supposed to actually listening, what you're actually listening to is your own view of what they're saying. You're listening to the voice inside your head say, "Well, I never did anything like that. I wonder why. Yeah, I wouldn't want that to happen to me either. And no, no, I wouldn't say it the way you said it. I would—" And you're in there talking. The voice inside your head is talking and you're actually paying as much, if not more, attention to your opinion, view, judgment, whatever whatever it is, extensions, add-ons, and subtractions to what's being said, then you are paying attention to the words coming out of the person's mouth. And that's if you're actually listening. What happens very often in a meeting, and I see it all the time with people, all right, is they're not even listening to what anybody's saying. They're thinking about what they're going to say when it's their turn. That's all that's going on inside their head is they're just thinking about, "Oh, how do I formulate that? That's unbelievable. I shouldn't even have to talk on that." If you're doing that, you don't belong in the meeting, because the purpose of the meeting is we're all different. We're all different. We all have different stuff inside of our heads because we've all had different experiences in life. We've all had different experiences and we process them different ways. Therefore, the data that we have for the foundation of our thoughts is completely different than everybody else in that room. Even if you work together for 20 years, still your background background, your upbringing, what happened outside of work. All of these things formulate the way you think. So when you walk into a room with a meeting, you understand that what you have is a whole bunch of data sets, and every one of those data sets is correct. There's not one of them is more correct than the other. If I look out a window, everybody looks out the window but looks at different angles. There's nobody who's seeing it right. They're just seeing what's out there is is bigger than any one thing you can see. So no person has gone through life experiencing what's there. All they experienced was what was in front of them from moment to moment. So therefore, everybody is right. Everybody has a different experience of life. Therefore, everybody has something to contribute. If you are open, if you are present, if you bring consciousness to bear, you are better at every single thing you do. You understand that? Including relationships and finances and every single thing. It's not just sitting in a corner and trying to enter some higher state of consciousness. Bring your awareness of being into the current moment and be present. It sounds good, but to me those are just words and it doesn't really come all the way home. So I'd like to start with an example, because we're not the first people to use the word mindfulness. It has been used in the in the English language for a very long time. Let's say you're driving. Driving is an excellent example of how we can understand mindfulness. When you are driving, there are traffic lights. And I don't know if you noticed, but they change sometimes. And it is really important that you know that. Did you get it? All right. And also, in front of you, there are other drivers. I hope you notice that. And they sometimes step on their brakes. And these red lights come on in the back of the car. It's very important that you notice that. This is mindfulness. It's best that you be mindful when you're driving. When you go to change lanes, are you aware that even if you look in your mirrors, that there's a thing called a blind spot? You best be mindful of that. So if somebody's teaching you how to drive, they might use that word. Be mindful of all times of what's going on around you. That is mindfulness too, all right? And it is exactly what we mean by being present in the moment and bringing consciousness to bear, all right? That's kind of neat, isn't it? So you really do know about mindfulness. What happens if you're driving and you're not mindful? You crash. Very quickly, all right? Aside from the fact that there are lights, there are other cars, there are blind spots, there are these things called curves in the road. It best be that you know that. That's funny, but do you understand what I'm saying? If you don't pay attention to this, if you are not present when you are driving, it will not take 10 seconds before you crash. Do you understand that? You are not— I mean, forget about this texting and so on. I'm just talking about if you're not mindful. Or sometimes I say to people, let's say you're driving and somebody cuts you off, which is really important when we start talking about mindfulness. It's best that you notice it. Now you're being asked to interact. You're being asked to be present and be present enough to decide what to do. What are your actions? I will ask you, is the amount the amount of mindfulness that you bring to your driving going to affect the quality of your driving? How many tickets you get, how many accidents you get in, and how well you do? Let's say you're a race car driver. Could you use the amount of mindfulness that you bring to driving for driving at Daytona at 180, 200 miles an hour with 15 cars passing you? And the answer is no, you better not. OK? You best bring a lot more mindfulness. To the presence. And what that means as a race car driver is that hopefully there is nothing else going on. You're not thinking about the fight you had with the wife. You're not worrying about this or that. You had best bring your consciousness to bear in what you are doing, or you are in big trouble. But it's not just in driving, because I'm going to put that aside. In that particular case, if you do not be mindful, you're in trouble. Not just as a race car driver, that's required more. So the more prof— I'm going to argue that the more professional you get and the better you want to do, the more mindfulness you better bring to bear. Whether you're talking about sports, whether you're talking about driving, right, the more consciousness you bring to bear— I like that term, right? I can use it because we're using examples. Isn't that bringing consciousness to bear in the current moment? The more consciousness you bring to bear in the current moment, the better you are at what you're doing. Anyone want to argue that? Right? Just take the extremes. Don't bring any. Let go of yourself. Let go of yourself. This thing you call yourself, your preferences, your desires, your needs, your bucket list and so on, is just a projection of the stuff you stored inside. Well, what do you mean? If you didn't have it, you'd be filled with love and filled with light. You wouldn't be asking any questions. You'd love having a child. You'd love bringing it up. You'd enjoy every moment of it. If you homeschool, you don't homeschool, It doesn't make any difference. Everything, because you're fine. And that's the environment they grow up in. How would you like to grow up in an environment where it's just pure love and openness and understanding? If they have a problem, they bring it to you. You don't think, oh my God, what did I do? What's it? You just, you have clarity. You can share with them and help them come to the solution themselves, right? So it's a healthy thing because you are healthy. So a parent shouldn't sit there and say it's so hard to bring up a child. It's hard because you didn't bring yourself up. You didn't let go of your own stuff, right? It's— there's so many things to learn. It's all about you evolving as a being, as a being of light, as a being of energy, and keep bringing yourself up and letting go. Then you spread that light everywhere. That takes care of business. Somebody wanted me to— because I did business and all the business— can you give a spiritual talk on business? Right? I generally will say no. I don't want to focus like that. Right? But the truth is, I would give the exact It's the exact same talk, right? How do you run a successful business? Let go of yourself. Then you're not making decisions based on your garbage and your fears and your past experiences and all that kind of junk. You're bringing good energy into it and it will attract good energy and people around you will work with good energy and they'll enjoy working with you. My company, we're technical, high tech, very few people ever left. They loved working there, right? And I didn't pay them the top salaries either because we're out here in the middle of the woods, right? And basically, You just create an environment for business, an environment for children, environment for love, an environment for everything you do that brings beauty and love and clarity and selflessness, true selflessness, into your environment. It will change everything. What is love? Shakti, the energy rising up to the fourth chakra and pouring out the fourth chakra. That's what you call love. And the tuning with somebody who you like, if, if, if they talk the way you want, dress the way you want, act the way you want, etc., etc. You open, and then the energy can come up, and you feel this experience of love. But what if you're not closed? What if you never close? Then it's all love. You know what it should take for you to feel love anytime you want? Just wave your hand in front of your heart, and bliss pours through your heart all the time, anytime you want. That is what it means to reach a state of happiness. A state of pure unconditional happiness. It's inside of you, it's available to you, anything. The challenges of life are amazing. What's wrong with challenges? We play sports, we like challenges. Nobody wants to play a team that you beat 700 to 1 every time you play them. You want to be challenged, you want to have to bring out the best of your being. If you can get clean inside where you're not being run by all these past impressions— we call them some scars in yoga— All these past impressions which are telling you, and they are telling you constantly, you can only be happy if this happens and you can never be happy if it doesn't and you will never be happy if such and such happens. And then you go out into the world chasing this as opposed to working inside on yourself to say, I don't need those conditions. Life is amazing. I'm sitting on a planet spinning in the middle of nowhere and there's all these events happening. Don't worry, they won't last. You're not going to stay here. But while you're here, do you want to run around and fight with life and people and places and things and even the weather to try to make it be what you think you want? Or do you want to work on yourself to clean up this mess inside so you can be open all the time? That's what spirituality is about. It's not about renunciation. Renunciation is too late. You've already decided that you want something, you need it to be happy, but you're not going to do it. Depth, spirituality is understanding you don't need anything. You don't need anything. Doesn't mean you don't do anything, but you don't need anything. You're whole and complete within yourself. If you open, there is tremendous joy, love, inspiration that wells up inside you the moment you open. The moment something happens that you like, watch how fast you feel joy. And if something happens you don't like, watch how fast you close. That is not teaching you about the outside, that's teaching about the inside. That openness is where it's at. Closeness is not. Openness is what you really want. Because what does opening mean? It's like opening the blinds. If you close the blinds in your house, your house is dark. It's like that chapter in The Untethered Soul, Take Down the Walls. If you close the blinds in your house, your house is dark. Now you have to run around with artificial light trying to figure out how to get some light. If you open the blinds, you don't have to do anything. The light is coming in, but you won't open the blinds until you're sure nobody's out there and only the right people are in your house and everything's exactly what you want. You're afraid to open the blinds, you don't feel comfortable. So you either decide to spend your life trying to build artificial light inside, or you decide to work on yourself so you want to leave the blinds open. Yoga, true spirituality, is about taking off the blinds, take them off the windowsill, throw them out, and never ever close them ever again. What is the purpose of closing? It makes you sad, it makes you dark. What is depression? Total darkness, total closeness. You have closed off to the flow of the energy. There is no reason for that, there is no excuse for that. This is your world inside, it's your mind, it's your heart, it is your responsibility to not close it. How dare you think you're going to meet somebody who will overcome your tendency to close. What a job! Don't give me that job. You've been in there your whole life building all these impressions that bother you, scare you, and turn you on, and then you say to me as a relationship that it's my responsibility to keep your mind open and your heart open when you're in there closing it all the time? I hope that seems silly and counterproductive. It is your responsibility to keep your mind open. It is your responsibility to keep your heart open. And once you learn to do that, they're your mind and your heart. Once you learn to do that, you will feel joy all the time, and I mean all the time. From the moment you wake up in the morning, you'll be inspired. You'll love to go to work even if you went to the same job for 30 years. You don't ever get bored. Why? Because there's energy flowing up inside of you. You will get the most out of your relationships. You will be able to give the most to all moments that are unfolding in front of you. Why? Because now you're a giver instead of a taker. When we come into the moment, into interaction with the moments in front of us, we're looking to see what we can get. We're looking to see how we want them to be. We're speaking to change things. We're dressing certain ways. We're doing all kinds of things to manipulate the moment so that they will be the way we want. And then when they come inside, they'll turn us on. A being who has learned to be open all the time never does that. They don't need to do that because they're already feeling what they want to feel. They're feeling joy. They're feeling love. They're feeling inspiration. So now when the moment unfolds in front of them, they can give to it. They can take this joy and love that they have and they can then shine it upon the moment, people, places, and things that are unfolding. There's always a voice in my mind, oh, I'm crazy. Like I'm doing something that's wrong. I'm going to be a gigantic failure. Like, you know, people would look at you and laugh at you and all that. But I think those voices are, I mean, you talked about actually in all three books about the preferences and things you like, how our mind works. I think it's pretty common. Yeah. Have you had those voices and how did you deal with those voices? Well, and I explained at the beginning of the Surrender Experiment, that's how I started my spiritual journey is I was sitting on a couch with a friend of mine back in, who knows, '69, '70 maybe. And there was a lull in the conversation. And somehow that's not comfortable even with friends. You know, that you were talking and then there's nothing to say and you try to think of things to say to keep the conversation going, that conversation about feeling comfortable. It's really about control. You have a certain amount of control that you know this person is interacting with you, they're okay. You know what I'm talking about. All right. And so I noticed that that was going on inside my head, that he was anxious even with a friend. All right. That there was this sense of discomfort. In the silence. And Mickey, Michael, was trying to think what to say. To this day, it was 52 years ago, I remember the whole exact moment where it is. And he's sitting there saying, "It's kind of hot out, isn't it?" Or, "Would you like to get something to eat? Maybe we can get a pizza." Jesse kept saying these things. And inside I noticed that that's going on in my mind. They all seem very stupid to say. And I didn't say them for the first time in my life. I didn't go along with that neurosis, with what the mind was saying. And then I realized, who am I that is noticing the mind saying that? And as simple and silly as that seems, that guided the rest of my life, period. That moment woke me up to realize, wait a minute, it's always talking, right? It's not always trying to figure out whether to eat or something. It's always saying something. It's busy judging and thinking and liking and not liking and figuring out what to do. But now I'm not it. I'm watching it do that. Awakening to witness consciousness. But I had no background. I'd never met anybody. I'd never meditated. You didn't go to yoga, guru. There was nothing. Nothing. It just happened. And I'm watching it. And I started to feel, I don't want to be that. I don't want to be like that. And so I remember the first thing I said instead of, 'Do you want to do this? Should we do this?' So I'm watching this voice inside my head telling me what to say, but I'm feeling distant from it for the first time in my life. And so instead of saying, when I finally talked, I didn't say, 'Where do you want to go? What do you want to do? Isn't it hot? You know, do you remember what Nixon did the other day?' or something. I sat there and said, 'I have this voice inside my head talking. Do you have one?' And as I said to him, and he was a famous lawyer, he was my brother-in-law at the time, and he was a big lawyer in Chicago, and he'd never thought about these kind of things. And basically he looked at me and he looked at me strange with this kind of look. And then all of a sudden, bam, this light went on in his eyes. It was so beautiful. A light went on. He said, yeah, I know just what you're talking about. Mine never shuts up. And there it was. That was, and the rest of all my years. I mean, it stops so I don't have to work with it as much, but everything was about that voice. Yeah. All right. So you're talking about how yours was telling you you can't do this. My whole thing from that moment forward was, wait a minute, I don't need this junk going inside my head. Yeah. It's so distracting. It's so negative. It tends to be negative, right? And so on. So by the time I was building the house, I had started to work with that voice. And I started working with it, but I told it to shut up. That's what I do. Shut up. Shut up. I don't want to talk to you. Right? Then you realize that's the voice telling the voice to shut up. Yeah. It took quite a while for me to wake up to realize how to work with that. Right. But at that time, I was not listening to it. If it said, you can't build that house, I said, shut up. Shut up. Which is not the right way. Do not do that. Suppress it. That is not the right way to deal with that voice in your head. All right? So it wasn't a problem because I wasn't listening to it. Yeah. So I was just letting this unfold as it was happening. Yeah. And putting my whole heart and soul into this is what I need to do to get to where I want to go. Right. So I'm going to do it. Yeah. There was no complaining, no this, no that. Yeah. So there's the answer. You start by honoring, respecting, and accepting the blessing and the reality and the right of what is unfolding in front of you. If you don't like it, you look at that as disharmonious. You let go of yourself. And that's— Christ said you must die to be reborn. We're talking about you literally do the process. Don't get mad at yourself for being a certain way. Just don't participate in that part of your being. You don't have to get mad at your hand because it wants to pick up a cigarette. Just don't pick up the cigarette. In fact, if you get mad at your hand, you'll probably be so stressful you will pick up the cigarette. Then you definitely need a cigarette. It's the same thing with drinking. Just don't do it. Don't get mad. Don't do anything. Just don't participate in the process that will not take you where you want to go. So if you find yourself making up a alternate reality, I am begging you to just let it go. If you find yourself not liking the reality unfolding in front of you, I am begging you, relax and let go. All right, that's not the end of your relationship with life, that's the beginning of your relationship with life. The world has its ebb and flows, it has its cycles, and it should have its cycles. And you do not understand those cycles, and you will never understand those cycles. How could you possibly? You only see this tiny bit of life. It's a whole, it's cyclic, particles are in harmony with its universal self. You only see the wave when it passes by. You say, 'Oh, I shouldn't be doing that.' Why? Because it messed up my face in the reflection. That's why. You'll always do it in relationship to you. You want to know how wrong you are? Every single time you say something's good or bad or right or wrong or better or worse or preferred or not preferred, I'm going to ask you, based on what? Every one of those things are relative terms. Good, bad, right, wrong, preferred, not preferred— those are relative terms. She doesn't doesn't agree, she doesn't agree. Everyone's got their own thing, don't they? They're relative. And I'm going to ask you, based on what? And if you're honest, you're going to say, based on me, based on my view of the world, based on my value system. So what? Who cares about your value system? There's narcissist again. There you are looking into the universe and seeing the reflection of yourself and saying that's what matters. So it's— you just get to the point where you stop putting so much weight on yourself. Stop being narcissistic. Your face is just one of 700 billion things in the universe. Your spiritual journey is about ceasing to think that you matter. It is about ceasing to think that you are the center of your universe. The universe is the center of the universe. It's about lake, not about face. It just keeps coming back to the same thing. You have to wake up to that. So your spiritual growth is not about getting into yourself or changing your views or Ugh, even to go in there and mess around with your mind is crazy. Your mind doesn't matter. It's a nothing. You wonder how long it takes to erase a hard disk? Just take a good magnet, pass it across, it's gone. So it's just meaningless what you have in there. Stop rearranging the darn thing. What matters is life itself. God, the universal. Get to know her. How? By ceasing to be so interested in yourself. So when you look into the lake of life, and that's what you're doing every minute of every day, you understand that? You're looking into the lake of life. When you look into the lake of life, will you please stop seeing yourself? There's lots and lots and lots of things out there. Stop seeing yourself. How do I know that I'm seeing myself? I will give you the biggest clue that ever was. It offends you. You feel a change in the force, in the energy, in the Shakti flow. Sometimes you do, don't you? Like lots of times. If you look out into this lake of life and it causes a change in the flow of the chi inside of you. You have projected yourself into life and it hit your projection. I want this to happen, I want that to happen. The cause of suffering is desires. Buddha, it's all the same teaching. You are projecting from inside out, therefore the innocence of life is hitting your projections, causing you to suffer, causing change to happen inside your peace. It's disturbing the peace. You want to stop that? You want to find true spirituality? You have to let go of projecting yourself onto life. Why don't we deal with it exactly the same inside as we deal with it outside? And just sit there and say, yes, there are experiences in life that are not pleasant. Good, I like to learn from them. Doesn't mean I want to have them, I'm not praying for them, right? But if they happen to present themselves in front of me, this is my opportunity to become a greater being, to be able to handle the reality of life. There. And so that's also the thorn you talk about, right? That you can carry. You let it go. Let things go. Yeah. Instead of compensating for them and learning how to be okay that it's there. It's only there because inside there are no thorns. There's no physical being. It's etheric inside. It's completely open. How hard is it for you to change your mind? Am I wrong? Right. Okay, there's nothing in there. It's just, it's totally empty, right? It's just loose, right? It's looser than the clouds. So why not make it nice in there? So if something comes in and it's disturbing, I always tell people, if you went through a traumatic, terrible experience when you were young, I wish I could go down there and beat the people up and go back in time and protect you. Oh, I wish I would love to do that, but I can't. I can't, and you can't either, nor can anybody else, right? So I will blame the person who mistreated you or did this thing to you when you were 5 years old, you was an innocent child, right? For causing that problem then, but they stopped. They went away, they moved, they died, you know, arrested, I don't care, it's whatever. It's over. It's over. Right. But you didn't let it be over. For the next 30 years, you did it. I have to blame you for those 30 years. I can't blame them, they're not there. I can't blame the experience, it's not even happening. How dare you blame the experience that happened 25 years ago? You are the one who chose to keep that inside of you and let it destroy your life. I always teach this: first let go, then if it's still there, deal with it. You're going to find out that 95% of the time, once you relax and let go, there's nothing left left to deal with. If somebody walks up, you say, hey Sally, how are you doing? She doesn't turn around and say hello. She's your friend. Okay, no, there's, there's an experience. It's not comfortable. What's wrong? Why shouldn't you know? Blah blah, you should not hear me. All that stuff goes on, right? Relax through it. Relax through it. Okay, okay, fine. That's what happened. Now what are you going to do about it? Nothing. She's not there anymore. There's nothing to do, right? And you're crazy if the next time you see Sally, why didn't you say hello? You wouldn't do that because you handled it. There's no reason to say anything. What a nice person you are. Maybe she didn't hear you. Maybe she's in a bad mood. Who cares, right? So if you are willing to let go, you're going to find out the vast majority of the time there is nothing to do about it except let go. If I go backwards, I can see that awareness at age 5, but then as I get younger and younger, I start to lose track, and I don't know what what that was before I was born, and I don't know if that will continue after I die. And so this promise of spirituality, you'll get to know the, the who inside— I'm like, okay, I kind of know that who while I'm alive, but I don't know what it will be like when I'm not alive. So I want to know what you have to say to that. I, I'm glad you don't know, and I'm glad you admit that you don't know. 'Cause the truth is almost nobody knows. Like they believe, and I don't participate in that game. I don't wanna just be another person who tells you to believe something. This is what I'll tell you, and I know I'm right. You'll find out. That's as far as you should go with, I don't know whether I'll be there after I die. I guarantee you will find out. And if you're not there, it won't be a problem. It's not like I'm not here. Oh my God, I don't like this. No, you're not there. If you are there, which by the way you will be, but I didn't say that, okay, you'll find out what it's like to be there and not have a body. And what's going on? Where am I? Why think about it now? Live your life now. Be here now. All right, you'll have that experience then. And the fact that you didn't know what you were like before you dropped down— every master teaches really the same truth. Which is when you drop— you're gonna understand it like this— when you drop into the body, when the consciousness drops into the body, that is a traumatic experience, okay? All of a sudden there's all these sensations and all the sound and all these sights and all these feelings and things. It, it's freaky, okay? The consciousness totally freaks out, and so it's lost. It's called the lost consciousness. It, it's not like now I don't care if you think you have problems, you don't have problems compared to someone who has amnesia and just woke up from amnesia and doesn't know who they are or where they were. You understand that? That's like a panic type of a state. That's what happens when consciousness drops into the body. It's disoriented completely. It doesn't. And so what it does is start grabbing. You just call it clinging. It starts grabbing to mommy, to crib, to blankie, to toy, to, you understand that? It just grabs anything it that's steady, that it can get its hands on, and it starts to build some solidity inside. It's not really solid, it's just thoughts, it's experiences, but they're firm, they're regular. Always put the baby in the same crib. Don't do the experiment. What happens when you put a baby in a different crib every night and a different mother picks them up? Because every psychologist will tell you that's out of the question, right? Because the self, the consciousness is going through this experience of trying to ground, of trying to settle. Okay, I know who I am. I am this person's child. I am the owner of this crib. I am the one who has this blankie. Okay, so you develop a self-concept, and that gives you a sense of stability, and then you keep that throughout your entire life. So the fact that you don't remember what your consciousness was like before you did all that is completely understandable. Great masters say they do. It's none of my business, okay? That you're gonna understand, it was totally conscious in the womb, and they know where they were before, okay? So it's nice that somebody says that, but I don't want you to say that. I, I want you to be real. And what real is, there was a tumultuous period until you started to build this self-concept. And all psychology will tell you that you built a concept of yourself, and then the consciousness rested on that and said, at least now I know who I am. I'm a person who lives here. I'm the person that has this mother, daddy, this and that, right? And you've done that your whole life. I'm the person that married so-and-so. I'm the person that got divorced. That's not who you are. Those are the experiences you've had. Not denying the experiences, right? But you're collecting experience you had and then saying, that's who I am. No, you're the one that had the experience. So that's my level. I don't want to add to the belief structure that you're supposed to believe something about what happens when you die, or believe something where you were before you were born. To me, it's irrelevant. It should not be an important thing in your life. What should be important is finding out who's in there, who's in there, and why do they keep getting pulled down into the thoughts and down into the emotions and down into what's tiniest little things happen in the world If someone were to listen to this conversation from the seat of awareness, what would that be like? How would they do that? That's jumping ahead a whole lot, but let's start there, okay? You are aware. People don't pay attention to the fact that they're aware, but obviously they're aware. You see through your eyes, you hear through your ears, and you feel touch and so on. Who does that? What does that? Your eyes don't see. You see through your eyes. Your skin passes messages back to you. Your ears pick up sound vibrations, send them back to you. Who is that in there and where in there? It's not really everywhere. There's a place inside of yourself from which you listen. That's why some meditation techniques are very beautiful. They tell you to just listen, listen. To quiet, listen to whatever sounds there, pay attention, listen, then you really realize you're in there trying to listen. So basically, but you're asking a deep question. The deep answer is you are inside. And if you meditate and you pay attention and work with witness consciousness, you're going to find out that there is a place in there where you are and that the sights that are coming in are outside of you. Even inside, your thoughts are outside of you. You. You'll feel that they're at a distance from you because you're sitting in a center of consciousness, and then you're projecting your consciousness onto objects of consciousness. Why would meditation work? What's meditation got to do with me who's in here and struggling with myself? Meditation is very, very simple in the simplest sense. The simplest meditation nowadays that's taught is 15 minutes in the morning, 15 at night, sit down and watch your breath go in and out. Well, what's so holy about watching your breath go in and out? What's that got to do with yoga? If you are watching your breath go in and out, you are not watching your mind complain about what's going on. You're not letting your mind— you're not watching the mind that is participating in the game of what do I want, what do I not want, and how do I make it happen. You are instead focusing your awareness on the breath going in and out. Believe it or not, that will completely change your life. Why? For the very reason that you're not participating in the disturbed mind. The mind will always be disturbed if the foundation of the mind is, 'What do I want? What do I not want? And how do I make it happen?' That is very disturbing, because you have pitted yourself against the unfolding of reality in in front of you. If you watch your breath go in and out or any other technique of meditation—you use whatever is comfortable to you, works for you—if you're watching your breath go in and out, you're not watching your mind live your life, decide what should be happening and getting upset or excited about it. That very act of not watching the disturbed mind permits you—you in there, the one that I said, 'Are you in there? Hi!'—you're in there but you're You're watching your mind all the time and participating in the mind's attempt to make things be the way it wants. All you can be responsible for is yourself. Your starting position is right. You have to evolve with the different situations that are presented to you. And my experience is, if you do that, the rest will happen. The people around you will be raised. Naturally, understand that. Like, if you bring anger into a situation— imagine a household where it was always fighting— if all of a sudden somebody's not, and somebody's bringing understanding and love, that's all they have to do. It will change things, right? But you, you can't sit there and say, I won't change until everybody else does, you know, I'm going to protect myself. That doesn't work. That's the— nothing, nothing, right? So that you're asking, you like, they're so surprised. You actually say big things. All right. It's like, can it be better? Of course it can be better, but it requires that everybody work on themselves because while they're not working on themselves, they're working on everybody else. Every single moment is an exciting challenge to do your best, to bring your A-game to everything that's going on. It's like sports. I shouldn't talk about it now, but anyways, you know, sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. The question is, did you enjoy the game? Did you get better because of it? If you played a competitor that was better than you, that's wonderful. You learned. You understand that? It's the same thing with relationships. If you're in a relationship and it didn't work out, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. Did you learn? Did you grow? Are you better now to move on with your life? Every single moment of life is a learning experience. Do you understand that? The point that I see I get across to people, I say to you, you are always better— I'm in trouble now, I'll step back. You are always better off having had an experience than not having had it. You are a wholer person because you had an experience. Do you understand that? If you didn't ever travel somewhere, then you didn't have that experience. If you didn't ever fall in love, you don't know anything about it. You're a novice. You're nothing, right? You are— when you have an experience, when life gives you the gift of an experience and you experience it and you learn from it, how can you tell me you're not better off than you were before you had the experience? It can't make you worse off unless you resist the experience. Then it can really make you worse off, can't it? If you don't like the experience and you resist it, it can ruin your life. But the fact that you got to have the experience is really special. It's a special thing. It's a thank you. This gives you a taste of how a mindful person lives. But you can't just decide to live like that because then you're going to suppress the issues you have inside. You're going to come to me and say, "But what if somebody dies? But what do I do if this happens?" You didn't catch on yet. Get yourself together. Be happy inside. Be whole. Feel complete. Feel love pouring up inside of you because you don't have this junk stored inside of you. Then go out and bring that into this world with enthusiasm, with passion, with love. And interact with every single thing that life brings before you with a sense of honor and respect and gratitude for the right to be able to do that. You have the right to live like that. If you're a student, love going to school. Don't go to school so you can graduate and then go get a job. What, are you crazy? School is one of the neatest— college, that's got to be one of the neatest experiences you'll ever have in your entire life. Do you understand that? Somebody's paying for you to go and listen to smart people tell you stuff. You didn't have to go on the web and read. They sit there and tell you. Well, what do you do? I went to sleep. Come on. Right? You get to the point, or you— or you— I can't wait to get on and meet my boyfriend. It's always about something else. The reason is because you're not okay. And if you're not okay, you can't enjoy what's happening to you. You have to be looking for the thing that will be okay, that will make you be okay. So we have the groundwork down. The problem here is that you're not okay inside. If you were okay inside, your life would be totally different, wouldn't it? You understand that? Like relationships, You're wrong if you think a relationship is supposed to make you feel love. You're wrong if you think a relationship is supposed to make you feel needed and whole and important. That's wrong. That's wrong. You're supposed to feel love to start with. That's natural. Love is part of your being. You're supposed to feel whole and complete within yourself, right? Tremendous openness and power, right? Now go out and share it with another person. That's a relationship. Don't need and then get upset because they didn't give it to you. You understand that? There's no way— is my view, I've done for 45 years, right? There's no way that if you can't fix what's wrong with you inside, that someone else is going to do it. They don't even know you. They get their own problems. Do you understand that? Your mind is a very great thing. It is brilliant. It took metals and sand and taught the sand to ink and silicon and took metals and made a rocket ship, got inside and flew to the moon. Oh my God, you are brilliant. You have a brilliant mind. Okay, that's not the problem. The problem is what you're doing with it. When you go to that brilliant mind, you say, I'm not okay because I store all this junk inside of me. Figure out how everybody else needs to be so I can be okay. That is a total misuse of mind. Stop it. That's what you do. That's your technique. Stop doing that. Don't use your mind for that. That's the personal mind. Don't use your mind for that. Use your mind for great things. Don't use your mind for sick things. Well, but then what do I do about the fact that I'm not okay? Fix it. Don't make everybody else be different so you can be okay. Don't have all these rules about how everything needs to be so you feel better. Find out why you're not okay. How's that? Buddhists say work at the That's the root, right? Well, why am I not okay? I told you, you just weren't listening. You're not okay because you shoved all this stuff inside of you of every single experience you ever had in your life that bothered you, that you weren't comfortable with. There are going to be things that are not comfortable. You see a rattlesnake all coiled up rattling, that's not comfortable. I promise you, I've seen them, all right? It's supposed to scare you, you understand? That's why he's doing it. It's not wrong, it's not bad, it didn't ruin your life. It's a heck of an experience, in fact. Does that mean I should go pick it up? No, you respect the experience you're having and then you let it pass. You're a greater being because you had that experience. Every experience you have makes you a greater being because you had the experience. I don't know how to explain that to you. Why do you practice tennis? Why do you— when you practice tennis, you just have the ball, you know, ball server, the ball on my server, just have it come exactly where your strength is every single time? So you can get better at where you're strong? No, you hit it all over the place. Why? Because every single angle you get better because you use those muscles and because you came in tune. Right or wrong? Practice makes perfect. Well, if practice makes perfect in sports, why does practice not make perfect in life? Experience is your best teacher. Therefore, every single experience you have, you have it and it passes through you. Don't hold on to the rattlesnake so that you miss the next experiences. Honor and respect the experiences you had. Everyone, the divorce, the this, the children, traumas, I don't care. I'm serious. Stop it. You're not a victim. You're somebody who received the gift of experience. How's that? The fact that it wasn't comfortable, well, the rattlesnake wasn't comfortable. Fine, that's part of the experience. Let it go. I'm glad I had that experience. Now I know better about rattlesnakes. I met one. Okay? I know how to deal with it. Well, okay, fine. You've met divorce. Your parents got divorced. Wonderful. You win. The person whose parents didn't get divorced, they lost. They didn't get to have that experience. That's how you have to look at it. Every single experience you have is its weight in gold. It's a gift from God, and it's your gift because nobody else had your experience. So you process these, let them go. That's your spiritual path. If meditation helps, meditate. The mantra helps, do mantra. But the purpose is not meditation or mantra or any of the techniques. The purpose is, are you willing to stop storing inside of you the things that were difficult when you had the experience? Because otherwise you store difficulty inside of you. It's going to be there all the time. You understand that? If you have a bad smell, don't collect them and take them home so you put them in a room and remember how bad it was and how much you didn't like it. Just let it pass. Open the windows or don't. I don't know what to do when I get a skunk. I always forget. But just let it go and it'll be over. It'll pass. Don't never drive down that road again. Don't— hear me. Let your experiences pass and they will have fed you. You'll become a whole other person because you had them. You don't need to hold them in your mind. That is spirituality. And now I showed you why spirituality and life are the same thing, aren't they? That's the highest way to live your life. That's the highest way to become spiritual. So find a way to work with yourself inside instead of trying to use your mind to avoid yourself. Don't let your mind say how you want things to be or not. It's so foreign to people. No, I want things to be the way they are, and what I want is to be able to honor and respect the reality of the moment in front of me. That's the last want that gets left. That's your work. And you work on that one, it's over, isn't it? So little by little, work with the things that are unfolding in front of you. Don't store them. Honor them. Respect them. Let them pass. And because you're not putting more stuff down, the old stuff will come up by itself. I promise you. Don't worry. It will. You'll come complain. The old stuff will start coming up. Let it go. Let it go. You do not want any of it in you. Let it go. If it needs to come up, welcome it. Sing, "Hey!" Come on up. You're welcome here. Kiss it. Throw a party. Really, tell me the worst stuff you have in there. Welcome it up. Just relax and release as it comes up, and it'll go. It'll pass. Not all at once, but it'll pass. And wait till you see. I'm telling you, your energy will become free inside. You'll wake up in the morning with ecstasy pouring through your being, not worries about what happened. And then all through the day, it feeds you. Rises up inside of you, feeding you all the time. That's what your life's supposed to be like. Life's a happening place, right? If you can't handle it, no matter what it is— I don't judge that somebody else couldn't handle something I can, because there may be things I can't handle that they can, all right? So it's called compassion, understanding, right? So I don't judge that. But when it comes in, you say, I can't handle it. Well, if you can't handle it, you shouldn't be dealing with it, because you're the worst person in the world to handle it, because you said you couldn't. Right? If I say I can't pick something up, don't tell me I'm the one who should pick it up because I said I can't. So instead you sit there and say, and there's the entire path, and this works. People write me from all over the world. You know, my first book, you know, The Untethered Soul, 4 million copies published in 38 countries. All right. Why? I didn't do anything, right? You're just talking about what I learned and they said it works. What works? It works to say, I'm going to handle this because the cost of not handling it is it will bother me for the rest of my life. If I think that bothered me now, hear me, somebody yelled at me, but then they went away. They don't yell at you every second, right? They yelled at you, they went away. If I can't handle that they yelled at me, right, as bad as it felt, that feeling will stay inside of me my entire life. Which is better? Learn how to say, fine, people had a bad day, they yelled at me, they took it out on me, right? And that's all that really happening, right? People don't yell when they're okay. If somebody's happy and filled with love and joy and they just— their entire existence is filled with exuberance, they don't yell at people, right? It's when you're not okay inside that you see it as an opportunity to let some of this energy out And you yell at people. All right, so at some point you don't take it personal. That's very deep. We're talking very deep. You take it— you don't take it personal. Not yelling at me, they're just yelling. I just happen to be standing there when they're yelling. Okay, well, that's what happens to kids, right? You got a father that drinks, a father that had anger problems. The kid did fine. The kid didn't eat dinner right or didn't do this, a tiny little thing, and all of a sudden this— all this anger and frustration, a lifetime worth of anger, frustration. Is coming out on the kid. The kid didn't do anything. Has nothing to do with the kid. It has to do with the father. And at some point, you mature enough to realize that they're not yelling at me, they're just yelling, and happen to be standing where they're yelling. That's how I would like them to be. So the problem is that I'm so uncomfortable inside that my mind can't be free. It's too busy— excuse me— puking up all the garbage that I stored in there. It just keeps coming back up and I can't be okay. So the answer is to be willing to work on yourself and sit there and say, what if I could handle the day that's happening now and didn't store more of this garbage inside? Okay. And when stuff came up from before, you don't have to go find it, it'll find you. When stuff come up from before, I'm committed to letting it go. Right? And that becomes That's the spiritual path. That's the entire spiritual path, all right, is letting go of what is blocking you inside. And what is blocking you is the stuff you stored in there. You will find that as you let that go, all of a sudden every day is a little happier. All of a sudden every day is a little lighter.

If criticism creates reaction inside, which of course it does, like you said, most people, then are you willing to— Ram Dass used to say, use it to go God. I always love that. I keep that with me. Are you willing to say, hey, I bothered meditating, you told me all these intense practices you did, this fasting, this all— you've read all stuff I used to do, right? Here it is. Here's a moment where the very thing that is keeping you from the ascent has shown its face to you. Are you willing to use that for your spiritual growth? And that has to be deep, deep inside. And the answer is yes, of course I am. Okay, then you need to bring these energies up. What happened there when you got and the energy got hot and the breath went faster, the snippy comments is that basically it hit a blockage. It hit a blockage, expanded out, and so basically what your willingness to do is to say, "I can stay centered in the midst of that blockage and I can relax." So the key is relaxing. You're right, we didn't talk about that because letting go, those are just words. The key is, can I relax in the face of the reaction? And when people come to me and say, "Well, the anger won't relax." Well, of course not. Anger doesn't know how to relax. Defensiveness doesn't know how to relax. But you who is experiencing— I love you obviously were talking to me from a place of witness consciousness because you described to me what it felt like to have that reaction. That meant you were in there noticing it. You who notices it wants to do something about it to make it stop. That's why you have these snippy comments. That's why you attack or whatever, run away, whatever it is, right? Fight or flight, right? No. What you need to do about it is relax. If you You will relax instead. You gave it some space to release. So you're absolutely right. It is not breathe and let go. That doesn't mean anything. Breathe means something, but let go, those are just words. They don't mean a single thing. What it means is catch your breath for a moment, make a commitment. I want to use this to go to God. I want to use this for my spiritual growth. I want to use this to liberate myself from myself. All right, there. Now you have your intention. Now I'm asking you to relax. It's not easy. You'll see the energy tries to pull you into it, right? That's what it's trying to do, right? It tries to pull you in to get you to feed the reaction. Instead, you relax, and just the very act of relaxing leaves some space for a little bit of it to pass through. The more you relax, the more you lean away from the energy that's making all the noise, the more space you leave. And that's a very, very deep spiritual practice, to relax and release. I call it R&R, to relax and release everything all the time. First, let go. That's what I mean by let go. Relax and release. Now deal with the situation. Don't deal with your reaction.

Because you made it this far in the video, I want to celebrate you. Most people start and don't finish. Most people never actually follow through. Most people say they want something, but they don't ever do the work to actually get it. But you are different. You are special. Believe Nation, you made it here all the way to the end, and I love you. So as a special celebration, if you put a a hashtag #believe down in the comments below on this video, I will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome. For some amazing Joe Dispenza motivation, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. When you begin to create from the field instead of from matter, the only way you can do that is you have to learn how to take all of your attention off body and become a nobody. Take all of your attention off all the people in your life that you give so much of your attention