The 3-HOUR GUIDE to INNER PEACE: Lessons from Tolle, Lipton, & Proctor That Reshape LIFE!

Life is difficult, and if you know that, if you're completely okay with the fact that life is difficult, then it's no longer difficult. How does that work? It's really only difficult if you think that it shouldn't be difficult, because then you're in continuous resistance to things and people and events.

So if you look at the brain as a computer, you would say the subconscious is the hard drive with programs in it, but the keyboard is where you can type your information in. So I say that's like the conscious. The conscious mind is the one that is creating creative, can type on the keyboard, put in wishes and desires and what you want. Subconscious mind is not creative. It's basically a hard drive with programs. Once you push the button, the program unfolds. You have no control over it at that point. It's just an automatic process. Now the question is this: which mind is controlling our lives?

Now let's suppose you're having a difficult time with money. You find that you've got more going out than coming in. You've got to change your concept about money. How do you do that? Through the repetition of an idea. That's where affirmations comes in. I'll give you one I've been using for years. Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I watch these videos every day because I need them for motivation. Being around successful entrepreneurs every morning helps me believe that I can do great things too. It's like your morning coffee, but for your goals, kickstarting your day with a blast of positivity. So here is a challenge for you. Try watching one video every morning for the next 30 days, and let's find out together if they help you do great things too. If you're in, leave a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can celebrate with you. So today, let's get some incredible motivation from Eckhart Tolle, Bruce Lipton, and Bob Proctor.

Believe.

The world will do all it can to challenge you, to pull you out of that rootedness, and it will tell you, not in so many words, but it will, in the form of events and people and happenings and things not working and so on, will tell you, 'This is all important. Give me your fullest attention. This really matters.' It may matter, But as I put it, all those things matter relatively. They may be relatively important, whether or not you miss your plane, whether or not you find that great job, or you lose that great job. Or whatever happens, it's all relatively important. But only one thing is of absolute importance, and that is your connectedness with being, so that that dimension is with you as you in your daily life. That's the challenge. A few things will be helpful in this. One is letting go of the unconscious assumption that there should be no problems and difficulties, and if they are, that they are undesirable obstacles that really shouldn't be there in the form of events or people or situations. But if you look back on your life, and I look back on my life, it's always been challenging. There are brief moments when it's not challenging, and that's great, but you know very well that Life won't leave you alone. It'll challenge you one way or another. If you look at the world situation, it's the same. There's all kinds of challenges in the news. First there were the communists, there was a Cold War, and then there are suddenly other huge challenges arising, and it goes on and on. So in the words of the first sentence in the book called The Road Less Traveled, which I never read because the first few sentences were so good I didn't need to read the rest of it, and the first sentence is Now this might go against certain New Age beliefs, and it might at first sound negative because the first sentence is, 'Life is difficult.' That doesn't sound very inspiring. And then the next sentence, although I don't remember it literally, says, 'And if you know that, you're completely okay with the fact that life is difficult, then it's no longer difficult.' So that's all I read, because that says it all already. How does that work? How is life— when you know that life is difficult, it's no longer difficult? You try to work that out. Well, here's the explanation. It's really only difficult if you think that it shouldn't be difficult, because then you're in continuous resistance to things and people and events. But once you accept it's an essential part of life of being difficult, then whenever the next difficulty arises, you say, oh, that's life again, being difficult. In other words, what does that do? It creates an acceptance of what is. If you carry around the assumption in your head, it shouldn't be difficult, there should be no difficult people and obstacles and problems and things should not get cancelled and plans should not be interrupted and nobody should fall ill and then people shouldn't die, certainly. That's a travesty. These things should not be— they're all dreadful. There's an underlying assumption things should go smoothly. And so of course sometimes they do go smoothly, but the irony or the paradox is that once you recognize the fact that life is difficult, that life is not meant to make you happy— it's not meant to make you unhappy, but it makes you unhappy if you have a wrong attitude towards life. Happiness comes with accepting the fact that challenges are an essential part of the evolutionary process for all life forms. So challenges for you, even if you don't call them challenges— challenge is a nice term because it is already something positive is already implied within it. If you call it problems or bad stuff happening, then it doesn't sound so good. Challenges are here to awaken you, and even if your awakening continues, life continues to give you challenges, and then the awakening accelerates and deepens. And at whatever stage you're at, you won't be free as long as you're here of challenges. So if you recognize that, you no longer need to be in a hostile, confrontational relationship with life, a I'm sorry about the term, you're not pissed off all the time with another thing happening. I'm so pissed off with life. Just can't go on. And people, just can't take anymore. Then you can, there's a kind of accepting, not necessarily welcoming, but sometimes welcoming, every situation that arises. That is, so if you welcome it, there's a book by Byron Katie called Loving What Is. That means you are in a an accepting relationship with whatever arises. Of course, it all arises in the present moment. Anything else that arises is in your mind. So you need to differentiate between challenges, problems, difficulties that are actual in the form of people, events, or situations, and challenges, problems, and difficulties that are fictitious. That are purely created by your mind creating pseudo-problems. For example, when you worry in the middle of the night, huge problems. Are those the real challenges of life? No, these are fictitious problems created in your mind, dwelling on things. Things that happened but should not have happened. Those are not the real challenges of life, those are the challenges of your mind, the mind-created problems. So you need to very clearly differentiate in your life between actual difficulties, challenges, or problems. There is a person who is shouting at you, that's an actual Or there is a thing, you just missed your flight and you can't get on the next one or the next one. Or financial challenges, relationship challenges, family situations, work situations, actual things that happen that need to deal with. But then there are there's a huge amount of suffering that is generated not by the actual challenges of life but by the fictitious problems that the mind creates, sometimes around the actual challenges of life and sometimes out of nowhere, out of thin air, things that could go wrong. So on the one hand, you have your mind creating a lot of useless suffering through unconscious thinking, and then you have the actual situations in your life. So you don't have to endure your mind. When it says life is difficult, that shouldn't really include your mind because that's something you can do something about immediately. You don't have to live with a dysfunctional mind. Millions still do. That is something that can be transcend it, and this is of course what we are doing here, what you are doing as part of the awakening, is a huge amount of the life is difficult, a huge percentage of that difficulty is created by the mind. That we can deal with, that can change, that does not have to be. Once when you do that, then the next part is actual situations will still occur. Once you know that, then you can come to a more surrendered approach to life and actually almost or actually welcome the difficult people in your life, the difficult situations in your life, loss, and so on, without demanding unconsciously, not in so many words perhaps, but demanding this should not be happening and there's something dreadfully wrong when things go wrong in your life. And that makes life really difficult. This is what the man means at the beginning of the book, the author, when he says, Life is difficult, but when you know that life is difficult and you fully come to terms with the fact that life is difficult, it's not difficult anymore, because the greatest difficulty is the mental resistance to things that arise and the underlying assumption that they should not.

People think that, "Oh, my mind," and I say, "The mind?" I go, "Yeah." Well, they say "the mind" like there's one single entity. There's a big mistake. There are two minds. That work together. They're interdependent. I have the conscious mind and what is called the subconscious mind. Each of them has a different function and a different way of understanding life and responding to life. So let's start with the conscious mind. That's the latest evolution of the brain. It's right behind your forehead, a lobe of brain called prefrontal cortex. This is the seat of consciousness. I say, well, what is consciousness? I say, well, that's your personal life, your personal identity. That's where your spirit enters into your biology is through the creative conscious mind.

Conscious mind.

Creative is the emphasis. The other mind, which was here long before that, was called the subconscious mind, and by its definition means below consciousness. Things that the biology has controlled that you have no control over. What's your pH in your blood? What's the temperature of your body? You know, what's your respiration? All of these are controlled by the subconscious, and the subconscious is a million times more powerful a processor than is the conscious mind, okay? So I say, so what's the point? Ah, the subconscious mind's not creative. Subconscious mind's got programs. It's a hard drive. So if you look at the brain as a computer, you would say the subconscious is the hard drive with programs in it, but the keyboard is where you can type your information in. So I say that's like the consciousness, conscious mind. Conscious mind is the one that is creative, can type on the keyboard, put in wishes and desires and what you want. Subconscious mind is not creative. Creative. It's basically a hard drive with programs. Once you push the button, the program unfolds. You have no control over it at that point. It's just an automatic process. Now the question is this: which mind is controlling our lives? Everyone thinks their conscious creative mind— my wishes, my desires, my aspirations, consciousness— they believe that's what's controlling their lives. I go, well, this is problematic because everybody has great wishes to be healthy, happy, be in love, great job, and they fail at doing that. And then they feel like victims because they say, "Well, I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to be in love. I wanted a great job. It's not happening." And then they go, "Well, then it must be the source outside that's interfering with me." They take on victim. Well, victim by definition means powerless. They feel powerless in the unfolding of their lives. I go, there's a great misunderstanding, and that is the conscious mind, which is the creative mind, which has the wishes and desires, can do two things. And I go, what do you mean? I said, well, imagine your body is a vehicle and the conscious mind is looking through the windshield and it's driving you to where you wanted to go— happiness, love, health, and all that. I go, that's one job of the conscious mind, but the other job of the conscious mind is to think. I go, so what? Well, thinking is not looking out at the world. Thinking is looking inside. A thought is inside. So the moment you are thinking, consciousness is no longer looking at the outside. Consciousness is looking for something on the inside, a thought. Where am I? What am I doing? Where am I going? Why this, that? And I say, well, wait, if the consciousness, the conscious mind is not looking out the windshield, And it's inside. Well, what happens, for example, if you're thinking when you drive the car? I go, what do you mean? I go, well, if you're thinking, you're not looking out the window with your conscious mind where you're going. What happens? How come you don't crash your car? And the answer is, when the conscious mind is thinking, the subconscious mind with the programs is autopilot. It takes over. Okay? So whatever program you got in your subconscious mind, it's running when you're thinking. And then I go, oh my goodness, science has recognized we think 95% of the day, we're in thought. I go, well, then translate that. And I go, yeah, 95% of the day your conscious mind's not running the show, it's inside thinking. So 95% of the day your life is being controlled by the programs that you downloaded in the subconscious. Then I go, well, wait a minute, if my programs are not very good, and it turns out 60% of the programs in the subconscious are disempowering, self-sabotaging, or limiting beliefs. So more than half of the programs are actually interfering with your life. I said, well, I would notice if I was playing one of those programs. He said, no, that's the part. I say, why wouldn't you notice it? Because why are you playing the subconscious program? Because you're not paying attention to what's going outside in the world. You're looking inside at a thought. So I said, well, then when the subconscious programs are playing, You yourself don't even see those programs. Other people see those programs and they respond to your program. And you're thinking you're the victim because they're challenging your life in some way. I go, no, you're the one that sent out the program that they're responding to. We are creating the problem, but we don't see it. And just to conclude with this very simple, which a point that I've made for 40 years, and that is this: you have a friend You know your friend's behavior very well. You happen to know your friend's parent. And one day you see your friend has the same behavior as their parent. So you volunteer, you go, "Hey, Bill, you're just like your dad." Step back from Bill. I'll tell you why, 'cause, and you already know, because I know what Bill's gonna tell you. He's gonna say, "How can you compare me to my dad? I'm nothing like my dad." And the fact is, but everybody else sees that he's like his dad. The only one who doesn't see it is Bill. And here's the problem. We are all Bill. Every one of us, 95% of the day, are creating our lives with programs that we don't even see them playing. We only see the result of those programs because the result is not supporting us when we have negative programs. Hi, I'm Bruce Lipton, author of the bestselling books, The Biology of Belief, Spontaneous Evolution, and The Honeymoon Effect. I'm here to thank Evan Carmichael for featuring me on his YouTube channel, and I want to let you know that Evan is giving away links where you can watch the first episodes of my special Gaia series entitled Inner Evolution for free. Evan is making this offer to thank you for watching this video. You will find the links in the description section below. Thank you.

I went through how the conscious mind works, how the subconscious, and how the body is an expression of the mind. And as you go through that, if you go through it a few times, you're going to see, yeah, that's exactly what happens. Now I want you to think of this for a moment. When you impress an idea upon your subconscious mind, that alters the vibration of this instrument we call our body. See, our body is a molecular structure. Really what it is, it's a mass of energy in a very high speed of vibration. Now we invented a word to describe our conscious awareness of vibration, and that word is feeling. If you ask a person, you know, how are you today? They'll say, well, I'm feeling fine, or I don't feel that good, I feel great. You never hear a person say, oh, I'm consciously aware of being emotionally involved with a negative idea, so therefore I've moved into a negative vibration. But that's exactly what happens. So you see, as we start to understand this and we become aware that we're not feeling too good, we can change it. Now it takes a little training, but you can do it. We are really in charge of how we feel. Now we let other people upset us, but we don't have to let other people upset us. We don't need to react to them, we can respond. We can listen to what they're saying and they say, "Well, you're entitled to your opinion, but that's just not what I'm like." And we can hold our own idea of ourself. You see, it's important that we grasp how the mind works and that we understand the relationship of the body to the mind and the mind to the body. Now it's our results that we want to change. Now our results could be in our physical body, it may want to be You may want to cast off a few pounds, you may want to put on a couple of pounds. You may want to have a little higher energy. See, all the energy there ever was or ever will be is 100% evenly present in all places at the same time. Everything's energy. You know, you'll hear people say, where does he get all the energy? Where does she get all the— Nobody gets energy. Everybody releases energy. Desire is the triggering mechanism that, whoo, lets the energy flow. Now, let's go back and have a quick review. Here you've got the little stick person here. There you've got the conscious mind, and remember, you have the sensory factors hooked up to the conscious mind. And then you have the subconscious mind, and then you have the body. Now, the conscious mind has the ability to choose thoughts. Those thoughts turn into pictures. We turn the pictures over to the subconscious mind, and then the subconscious mind expresses the action. All right? Now, what is the problem? Remember we said the subconscious mind had no ability to reject? We said the subconscious mind cannot differentiate between what's real and what's imagined. How did we arrive on the scene? I'll tell you. When you arrived on the scene, you did not have any conscious faculties developed. The sensory factors weren't even developed. This is how you arrived. That's called the little life. That's the baby, no conscious mind. So there's a subconscious mind, it's wide open. You can put anything in it. You see, your subconscious mind is programmed genetically. That's why we look like our relatives, it's built right into the genes at birth. But then we're programmed environmentally. Carl Menninger from the Menninger Foundation in Topeka one time said, environment is more important than heredity. Why do you think you speak the language you speak? You speak that language because you were surrounded by people that speak that language in your little life. And the language just went right into the subconscious mind. If you grew up in a home that was bilingual, you learned both languages. I had an associate over in Kuala Lumpur, had a little boy, he spoke 4 languages at 4 years of age. And you'd look at that and you'd say, my gosh. No, no, the baby was programmed. Why do you like the food you like? It's programming. That's right. Now, let's stop and think about the environment we were raised in. Here's the baby, and look at the ideas and the thoughts and the concepts that are going on around that baby are going right into that baby's subconscious mind. Now, through repetition, over and over and over again, and remember, the baby's getting it all day, every day, all week, every week, all month, every month, all year, and this goes on for 4 or 5 years. And the baby reaches the age of 4 or 5 where they can start to think, that baby's programmed. That baby is programmed to think like the people it had been surrounded by. If the people that surrounded that baby had gone right through school, the baby will probably grow up and go right through school. If the people that were surrounding that baby always lived in hard times, never had any money, always in debt, that's probably how that baby's going to grow up. Now this is bizarre, but this is how it happens. It's how it happens for me. I was raised during a depression. We didn't have any money. There was always talk about no money. You should be satisfied with what you've got. Well, that's not true. You should never be satisfied with what you've got. You should be happy with what you've got. Dissatisfaction is actually a creative state. So here we have now a baby that has been programmed. Now, Let's take and think for a moment. What happens when that baby starts to think for itself? Now think of this. The paradigm controls the vibration, the vibration controls the action which produces the result. Now here we go. Here you got the baby with the paradigm and the conscious faculties have developed. They have the ability to think. There's a power flowing into them. What are they going to think? They're going to think thoughts that are in harmony with that paradigm.

That's right.

We've been raised to believe you go to work to earn money. Do you know that working is the very worst way to earn money? That's right. You should go to work for satisfaction, not for money. You provide service for money. You can earn money while you're sleeping. In fact, we have programs where we teach people to actually earn more money while they're sleeping than they'll ever need to use while they're awake. You say, well, that's a pipe dream. No, no. That's a paradigm that causes you to think that's a pipe dream. There's people doing that that are nowhere near as bright as you. But here we are now, we've got the person, they've been programmed in their little life genetically and environmentally. That paradigm is nothing but a multitude of habits. A habit is an idea that's been programmed into the subconscious mind over and over and over again. Now the paradigm is literally controlling the behavior. Consciously you can think of one thing, but subconsciously the other idea will be controlling you. See, we can sit down and we can read these self-help books, we can listen to the recordings, and we say, yeah, well, I can do that, that makes sense, that's logical. But then we can't do it. Why? Now think of this for a moment. I want you to imagine that you're going to accept an idea right now to turn your annual income to a monthly income. You say, well, I'd like that, but will you do it? Probably not. Your paradigm will stop you. See, your paradigm literally controls the results. Now let's think of how the paradigm was formed. The paradigm was formed through repetition, the ideas being planted in your subconscious mind. Now understand, your paradigm dictates your logic. Your paradigm controls how you utilize your time. Your paradigm controls your perception of situations. Your paradigm controls your effectiveness. Your paradigm controls the amount of money you earn. If you want to change your life, you must change your paradigm. You see, to most people, it's illogical that they could take and turn their annual income to a monthly income. But if you follow our teachings, we'll show you exactly how to do that. We'll show you how to accomplish anything you want to accomplish. Because what we're focused on is showing you how to change the paradigm. When the paradigms change, your life changes. It's a beautiful concept. It's an absolutely phenomenal concept. Now you know why you're getting the results you're getting. It has nothing to do with your intellect. Your intellect, you can figure out how to do things. That doesn't mean you're going to do them. You'll hear people say, 'I believe that,' but their behavior would indicate they've never even heard of it.

Why?

We believe something on a conscious level, on a subconscious level, the paradigm believes something else. There's a word called praxis. Praxis is the integration of belief with behavior. We've got to take the beliefs that we have consciously, that we determine by thinking, and plant them in the place of the old belief. See, I used to believe that I couldn't do anything better than I was doing. I felt fortunate that I was on the fire department. The idea of building a company that operated all around the world furthest thing from my mind. But you know something? As I changed my paradigm, my whole world changed. That's what we do. That's what it's all about. You've got to change your paradigm if you want to change your life. Now you can study all you want. If you don't gain an understanding how to alter that program, and that's what the paradigm is, it's a program. It's a multitude of concepts that are fixed in your subconscious mind that literally control your your behavior. It's a beautiful concept to understand. It's a terrible one if you don't understand it, because it literally controls your life. Why do you think most people go right through their life and keep getting the same results year after year after year? Well, it's just the way it is, and they don't know. We should be taught this in school, but we're not. How was the paradigm formed? Through the repetition of information. How's the paradigm changed? Repetition of information. Now let's suppose you're having a difficult time with money. You find that you've got more going out than coming in. You've got to change your concept about money. How do you do that? Through the repetition of an idea. That's where affirmations comes in. I'll give you one I've been using for years. I am so happy and grateful now that money comes to me in increasing quantities, through multiple sources on a continuous basis. I am so happy and grateful now that money comes to me in increasing quantities through multiple sources on a continuous basis. You don't just say that once or twice. You've got to repeat that maybe 1,000 times a day, every day, for maybe 90 days, and you'll start to change your whole concept about money. Wealthy people all have multiple sources of income. Now I'm going to tell you What happened to me? I drove around with a battery-operated record player and a long-playing record, and I played it over and over again every day for probably a couple of years. This was so totally illogical. It was behavior everybody thought I was losing it. And I'm reading the same book every day, Think and Grow Rich. As a matter of fact, I'm still reading the same book. And it was the repetition of Earl Nightingale's information and the book that changed the paradigm. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't understand what I was doing, but I did it. Do you know I had a man come up to me in the Waldorf Hotel in New York, Waldorf Astoria, at the end of a 3-day program and he said, 'Bob, I really want to thank you for what you've just given to me.' He said, 'For the first time in my life I've understood how I accomplished what I did. I said, what did you do? He said, I won the gold medal in the decathlon in the Olympics in Melbourne, Australia in 1957. That's right, Milt Campbell. And he said, I never understood how he did it. He said, the next time you run a seminar, I want to bring my boys. And he did. Milt and I became great friends. In fact, Milt has a key to our house. He can come stay there anytime he wants. I live in Toronto, he's in New Jersey. But here was the top athlete in the world, the very best athlete in the world. He didn't understand how he got there. Most people that are very accomplished cannot tell you why they are. That's why they are. They've rewritten the program, they changed the paradigm, they might not have understood how they did it, but they did it. That's what our company is all about. We teach people how to change paradigms. I want to thank you for watching this, but I'm going to ask you, to share it with other people. Share it with them. Say, "Come and watch this." Start a rapport. Build a rapport with people, you know? It's a great way to live, and this is great information to understand.

Presence and stillness are really synonymous. There are different words you can use to talk about it. Another word you could use is awareness. So let's look briefly at what presence is, both conceptually and experientially. Knowing something usually involves these two levels. So to know what presence is, it helps to understand it conceptually to some extent. But there's also a different way of knowing something, not only presence, anything, knowing it directly without concepts. The example often given, I think it originated in India, some— I don't know who, which spiritual teacher gave that example. So you can ask, do you know what honey is? Yes, I know what honey is. You could know a lot about honey. You can write a PhD about honey, and I'm sure people have done it. There's a lot to know about it. That's knowing through conceptualization. And then there's direct knowing, which is tasting the honey. Now, it could be that you know honey only as a taste, so you might not know anything about it conceptually, and yet you might experience the taste of honey every day, and you have an intimate relationship with honey without knowing much about it. Maybe you don't even know that the bees produced it. That's already conceptual knowledge. So for many things, both are needed. But in our world, we have placed excessive emphasis on conceptual knowing, cutting things up into little fragments, interpreting it through the veil of concepts, interpreting your entire reality. Every moment, every experience is immediately conceptually interpreted And that's the mind.

There's a place for that.

We need it, but we should not be consumed by it, possessed by it. That's the danger. And this is where presence comes in. Presence is another way of being and way of knowing that is non-conceptual. So if I talk about it conceptually, I could say presence is a dimension of consciousness that is accessible to a human being, although many humans don't even know that it exists or that it is possible. But quite a few humans occasionally experience moments of presence without knowing what it is. They may experience it as a moment of just inner peace or clarity or an intense sense of aliveness, uh, feeling totally at one with your— the present moment and your surroundings and other human beings, a sense of oneness. For most humans, when it comes, it doesn't stay for too long, and then you are back in the— what is really the ego state, which is you identify with a conceptual self-image, a narrative in your mind, and the narrative you call me or my life, and you think that is your true identity. But it's not your true identity, it's a superficial kind of identity. There's a deep identity that connects you with something that far transcends who or what you are as a person. We don't necessarily need to name it, but it connects you with something deep, profound. The source, and that is presence or awareness. And it's a state of consciousness, or a dimension of consciousness, that all ancient spiritual teachings have pointed to, spoken about, using different words to talk about it. So people who have never tasted the honey of presence, they think all those different teachings from different spiritual traditions are totally different. They don't realize that they talk about the same thing, just using different terminology. So if you hadn't tasted honey, you could read different books about honey and they use totally different words or different languages to talk about it, say, oh, they're all totally different. No, they all point to the one thing that honey is. So, so let's taste the honey then. We've spoken about it. Presence is when you're able to experience this moment without the— without a screen of mental concepts and interpretations and judgments. Clarity of perception, that's the beginning of it. So they would mean— it implies that perhaps briefly the stream of thinking that is usually behind your sense perceptions, continuously interpreting, calling it this or that, that stream of thinking temporarily subsides. there's a moment of not thinking. Maybe it's just a few seconds, but you haven't fallen asleep at all. You're completely awake, but you're not thinking. So to even have a taste of that, even here and now, to be completely awake into light. But there's a moment of a space of no thought, just awareness or presence.

You can take everything in.

Or the visual, auditory perception, any of the senses. And there's a stillness around every— all the sense perceptions, or behind the sense perceptions, a still presence. You can look at a tree, a plant, see it even know it through presence, not conceptually. You might not know what this plant is called— that's concepts— and yet you can look at this plant and there's a background to the sense perception that you could call stillness because you're not thinking. And then that enables you actually to go deeper, to relate to things, seemingly external things, without a sense of separation. You can sense, for example, you can sense the being of the plant. There's a stillness in it. Or trees, natural things are helpful in this. Trees are very still. Plants are very still. Some trees have been there for hundreds of years and just always— they can just give them some attention without concepts, and they almost— they don't speak to you, but they— there's almost a sense of communication or oneness. You can sense that they're being because you can sense your being. Being recognizes itself. That's presence. So it's a moment of no thought, of awareness. Thought subsides, awareness arises and replaces thought for a little while. Thought comes back when you need it. It probably comes back even when you don't need it. It'll push its way back into your mind until you become a bit more familiar with presence, then it stays there for longer. And after a while, even while you're using your mind, there's still a sense of presence in the background. As I'm speaking now, there's— I'm using the mind, or maybe even that's not the correct way of saying it. Not I as a person is using the mind. The deeper I, which is presence, is using the mind and talking about presence. The deep I, I call it. The surface I is you as the person with a history, a personal history, some good, some bad. Personal problems, everybody has them. But there's a deeper I, a deep I that's consciousness itself, that's presence. And so that is the most important realization in any person's life, in anybody's life, the discovery of that dimension within, within them.

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 our favorite lessons from the video that will inspire you to remember what you learned today and actually apply them. 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.

When I started to understand the nature of how environment was controlling genetics and all that, uh, I got out of that conventional Darwinian, you know, competition thing, started to understand this, uh, uh, the true story is when I first understood the mechanisms between quantum physics and epigenetics, the science of environment controlling genes. I said, "Oh my God, if you understand these things, then you can create this most beautiful life." So I was so excited by the science, you know, I was a science geeky guy, and I thought, "Oh, I'm gonna grab a bunch of people, bring 'em in here, I'm gonna give 'em, this is how to create the most beautiful life." Well, about before midway into the lecture, people were looking at me going, you know, Lipton, for a guy who says you know this stuff, "Your life doesn't look that good." And then, the truth hit me in a very sobering way. It's like, I'm talking the talk, but I'm not walking the talk. I was just giving the science. Yeah. Well, wisdom is taking your own advice. Well, that was the part where I said, "I'm not lecturing unless I apply this." And I was thinking, "Boy, maybe I'll never lecture again if it doesn't work." But, the fabulous thing was within days of applying the new knowledge as a way of life, my life changed profoundly. I live today, I live a honeymoon experience with my partner, 28 years every day, 28 years honeymoon, wake up going, "Hey, we're still here. What's fun today? What are we gonna do?" And I've let go of the stressors that almost everybody has. What it actually did is it brought better things into my life. When I was holding the stressors, I was actually I was keeping things out of my life because of the perception of stress. When I let go of the stress, more positive things came in. So I walk around today and say, yeah, man, I live heaven on earth in the middle of all this stuff. You know, you can walk across a bed of hot coals, you know. I love it. I show a video of people in the South when they work themselves up into religious ecstasy, they do testifying that God protects them. One of the things they do is drink strychnine poison in toxic doses and they have no harmful effect. And it's like, how's that happen? The answer is your thought was going to let the strychnine into your body, the conventional belief. But their belief is protection. So guess what? They can swallow the strychnine. People think if you put something in your mouth, it's in your body. I go, no, no. There's a pipe. It starts at the mouth, goes to the anus. If you can stretch it out, it's a tube. Anything in the tube is not in the body. It comes in, goes out. But will it get absorbed? Well, the absorption is then, this is the better insight too, because it's based on your consciousness. Are you building a healthy body? Is that your intention? Or are you just, you know, more sugar and more carbs and all that kind of stuff because you don't care? Well, if you don't care, then the body will make a picture of I don't care and you're gonna get unhealthy. If you wanna be healthy, then you start living healthy and your body gets healthy. And I say, so what's the difference? I say, what comes across the gut is to manifest the picture. If the picture is I'm healthy, then only good stuff is gonna come across the gut. If it's like, eh, you know, then anything can come across the gut. Strickland did not come across the gut. It went down the tube and came out the other end. Why? The belief system said, I will not be affected by this. I will not take this in.

I think we should be thinking about the greatness, like it's the School of Greatness. I think we ought to be thinking about the greatness that we've got locked up within us and bring it to the surface. Everyone has deep reservoirs of talent and ability within them. And they can bring it to the surface to accomplish anything they want. Now to sit in fear and wonder what's gonna happen, that is a dumb waste of your talent and your time. And unfortunately, that's what most of the media is promoting right now. To believe in fear is to believe in something you can't see. To believe in faith is to believe in something you can't see. Well, if you have a choice, I think I'd choose faith over fear.

Absolutely.

I think I believe where I can really see something happen. I believe we're going to have a phenomenal year in our company.

Wow.

In fact, our business partner, Sandy Gallagher, and a very bright lady, was a securities attorney prior to joining us. She ran a program this morning for our entire company. We have about 70 people in the company. She was teaching masterminding to them all and saying how this is important that every one of us get involved in this, that we learn the basics of masterminding that Napoleon Hill brought to the world, let's say way back in the '30s. Now, I think that's what we should be teaching people. Sandy was on the right track there. So I think we ought to be thinking about what we're going to build. How big are we going to do it? Where are we going to do it? When are we going to start? Our goals have not changed. They're very big. They're very ambitious. And we're not letting this virus slow us down one bit. As a matter of fact, We're trying to figure out how can we use this to speed it up. There you go. You can't get rid of it, use it to your advantage. There is a way we can use it to our advantage. People are more dependent upon the phone. I've got a computer here. They're dependent on their phone, their computer, more than they've ever been. We can reach them anywhere in the world through those mediums.

As you're awakening, many people at fast have this binary experience. You have—

you're either—

you're present when you're out in nature, or you're sitting quietly in your room, or you're meditating, and you're able to be present, be the presence. So the thinking mind subsides, although some thoughts may drift in and out, but Primarily thinking subsides and awareness or presence— awareness is another word, right— arises. Thinking subsides, presence or awareness arises, and you can sense that, the reality of it, and it's beautiful. And then those quiet moments, they experience these quiet moments, come to an end because the world challenges you again. So you come back into challenging interactions with people, etc. Or you're just challenged even though you're still in your quiet— in your room sitting quietly. The mind starts coming in. You're just meditating, it was going fine, but suddenly some thought comes in and leads to another thought and leads to another thought, and then you're trapped in a stream of thoughts. And again, you're lost in the same way that you can be lost in verbal interactions. You can be lost in the stream of thinking. So many people who are awakening experience that— moments of presence and then completely losing it again, especially when being challenged. But challenge, as I said, is not necessarily an external challenge. Very often the challenge is you're challenged by your own mind. You're challenged by when the mind is creating all kinds of scenarios and creating monologues or dialogues. It splits itself into two. You have an argument with yourself, all kinds of things. Worry, what is normally conventionally called worry, arises in the middle of the night. You can't stop thinking about all these critical situations that you're going to encounter tomorrow or very soon, and all kinds of scenarios. So That's the important work is to— it's still, of course, wonderful to be able to be just in complete stillness and have moments when you're really at peace. That peaceful alertness at his presence. But eventually the daily life and presence have to merge.

They have to come together.

And the challenges of life can— I've said it before, but it's important to say it again. The challenges of life, whether they're external challenges that are actual challenges or pseudo-challenges, whatever the mind creates, they can either pull you back into complete unconsciousness, or they can be more your motivation for deepening the presence so that it becomes— you become really rooted in presence. And so whenever a challenge arises, it can go either way— completely lose yourself, or the challenge will contribute— contributes to the awakening of consciousness. So when you The moments of undisturbed presence are important because during those moments, meditation periods, or just out in nature, or wherever you may be, they're important because during those moments, presence power— as I sometimes put it— presence power grows in you. The power of presence is able to manifest more fully. Presence power is growing in you, and you need that presence power to face the challenges of life. And the challenges of life require you— unless they pull you into unconsciousness— they require you to to, so to speak, to turn up the light as if it were a dimmer switch. And on the dimmer switch, you can turn up the light. And when you're being challenged, you have to turn up the light of presence.

Let's say you're challenged by your own mind, as is often the case.

Well, ultimately everything happens, is a mental event, But there are certain external challenges that are real challenges, like I've lost my job, I've lost my home, my partner has left me, I'm running out of money, my health is deteriorating, whatever it may be. Many kinds of challenges can come real challenges, but the mind amplifies— even if they're totally real challenges, the mind makes them much bigger than they need to be because the mind creates a stream of very painful thoughts, fearful thoughts, angry thoughts. Around those challenges, which may be very real. And then there are the imaginary mental challenges. I might lose my money. I might lose my job.

Is my partner betraying me?

All kinds of things that you can come up with. Is the stock market going to collapse?

'What am I going to do then?' So that can be just as painful as somebody saying, 'I don't—

I've only got a few dollars left. What am I going to live on tomorrow?' Could be equally painful as a mental event. So The thing that saves you is knowing that you have lost yourself in the stream of mind. When you know that you've lost yourself in the stream of mind, then you are there. In that moment, an element of choice has come in. When you don't know it, you have no choice because the thinking happens to you. You have no choice in the matter. It just happens to you. Thinking is actually you. The thoughts are using you. The thoughts are little energy fields that are using you, pretending to be you. This is why I've sometimes described them as parasitic entities, all these useless thoughts. They're like parasitic entities. They live in your mind, pretend to be you, and using all your consciousness. They're using up all that. They are parasites, mental parasites. And when you're totally in the grip of a mental parasite, choice just doesn't come in. You have no choice because you are not even there. You have been replaced by the parasitic entities. So it sounds like science fiction. But that's how ultimately how it is energetically. Choice comes in the moment you realize that this is what's happening to you, because then that realization comes from that which is behind the mind. There's a little bit of presence, and from there you can realize, oh, I'm completely lost in the mind. I'm completely lost. That is. Now, if you have to realize, when you know that, in that moment you have a choice. When, when you realize you've lost yourself, you have a choice, and you're not completely lost anymore. But you have to know that, because if you don't realize that, that you now have a choice, then this moment will pass very quickly. And you're back again in the stream of useless and ultimately destructive thinking. So realize that you have a choice in that moment. And your choice is to take your attention to, let's use the word, to reclaim consciousness from your mind, to take it back. And then you have to use something to help you as an anchor for presence. And I recommend inner body awareness or breathing. So your choice is, instead of thinking, for example, becoming aware of your breathing. And then that can become one with becoming aware of the inner body. And when your attention moves into your breath and into the inner body, there's virtually nothing left for thinking. So you have reclaimed consciousness from these parasitic entities.

You don't—

you cannot fight the parasitic entities. You can only reclaim consciousness. And when you do that, they deflate like a balloon. That is, the air comes out of the balloon and The parasitic entities suddenly go dissolve into nothingness. Ultimately, they were always nothingness, but now, you know, so this is a miraculous process. When you reclaim, you realize you have a choice, and your choice is not to think right now, to reclaim consciousness from these entities that make your life miserable. and suddenly you're present. And when faced with raging thoughts, you need to be really present. You need to be intensely present in order to— so that these thoughts do not quickly reappear and pull you back into that stream of painful thinking. You have to be really present because they will come, these little— they're still there in little— they have lost most of their energy, but potentially a little thought will come in and 'You must think about this again. This is a very bad situation, very bad. Think about it.' And then, 'Oh!' And back you are.

And then you may have to—

it may have to happen again. You realize you have a choice, okay, to take your attention elsewhere, away from the mind. So that's a very important practice so that you don't lose yourself completely in your thoughts anymore.

90% of health issues on this planet, 90%, probably more, is due to stress. What does that mean? I say that the chemistry of stress in the blood negatively impacts the body Originally, just to make a difference, why would the body have a problem with dealing with the stress? Because I said, when the body is evolving, what stress did we actually have? I'll give an example. A saber-toothed tiger is chasing us. I said, that's a moment of stress, folks. And I said, what happens? The stress hormones go into the body and they prepare you for running, fight or flight. Then you get away from that tiger and guess what? No more stress. So how long did that take? 10, 15 minutes. Okay, I go, so when we had stress in our history and in our evolution, it was only for a very short period of time, just temporarily get the body ready for fight or flight, just temporary. But today, stress is every day, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. All of us are under stress. Do you have enough money? Will you be able to get healthcare? Will you be able to pay the rent. My God, there's stress all the time. This is why we have a healthcare crisis. Okay? And I say, why? The chemistry of stress, and I'll explain it in 3 steps. This is the result of stress so you understand where the problem comes from. When you're in fight or flight, your mission is to run away from the saber-tooth tiger. And they go, so what does that mean? I say, well, You need all the energy in your body to run away from the tiger. And I said, well, what systems do I need to run away from the tiger? I say, well, mainly your arms and legs, because that's gonna carry you away. And I say, okay. And I say, so why is that important? I said, because that's where you need the blood. Why? The blood is the energy to make those arms and legs move. So the more blood you have in the muscles, in the arms and legs, the more powerful you are to run away from the problem. Okay, so I go, so where was the blood if there was no stress? And I go, oh, what else is in the body? Take the arms and legs off the body, what do you got left? You've got the gut, the viscera, you got the guts. And I say, well, what do they do? I say, oh, they maintain the body, they clean it, filter it, put nutrients into it, remove waste products, replace the cells that are damaged, blah blah blah. I go, oh, So the gut is where all the maintenance of my body is being taken care of. And I go, yes. Now here's the point. You're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger. You think you need to do all the work on the body right now? Maybe you could just like have an air raid siren or something and say, look, stop work. We're going to run. I say, well, what happens? And here's what it is. The stress hormones cause the blood vessels in the gut to constrict tight. I go, what does that mean? It pushes the blood from the gut to the arms and legs. That's the one I need to run with. Yeah, but what does it mean about the gut? And I say, it stops functioning. Maintenance of the body's out. Taking care of the system is out. Why? The energy's getting ready to run. So the moment the stress hormones are in, you stop maintaining the body. Number 2, and this is the big one, you ready? Stress hormones shut off the immune system. Oh yeah. I say, why is that important? Well, if you've ever been sick, you might have known maybe you didn't even have the energy to get out of bed. When the immune system is operating like that, it uses so much energy you probably can't even move sometimes. I go, yep. So I say, you're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger, you have a bacterial infection, How do you want to split the energy? How much energy you want to fight that bacteria back, or how much energy you want to run away from the tiger? Let me help you with the answer. You want all the energy to run away from the tiger. So stress hormones— listen to this— stress hormones shut off the immune system to conserve energy to escape the stress. Oh my God. That means the more stressed you're under, the less effective your immune system is because the stress hormones are shutting it down. I said there were 3 things and the third one is also very important. When you're in a fight or flight, it's not time to think. And I say, what does that mean? I say, well, thinking is a very slow process. I ask you to think about something, you go, oh. I go, when you're running away from the tiger, you don't have to go, oh, you don't have time for that. You gotta run. So stress hormones shut off thinking.

The average individual is self-serving. They're always focused on themselves. I want you to just pay conscious attention today. Write a little note maybe that you fold up and carry in your hand. Why do you do that? Just to remind you that you want to pay attention to everybody you meet. What are they doing? Are they really trying to help other people, or are they really trying to find help for themselves? Are they self-serving or are they serving others? You're going to find the people that are the best at serving others, they are the big winners in life. Figure out how you can improve the service you're rendering. Now, I'm probably a little older than you, so I've been running around the park for quite a while. Longer than you. And I have learned one thing really well in life, that my success, my happiness is going to be dependent on how good I get at serving you or serving other people. I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to help other people. I do. I don't spend much time, you know, I get almost everything I want. Almost everything I've I want. There's very few things I can't even think of anything I want. Christmas, birthday comes along, well, I don't know, you know, send a donation in my name. I think I don't want anything. And it's got to a point where I just want to serve others. So all I want to do is serve others. Now I'm a pretty happy guy, pretty healthy guy, pretty wealthy guy. What have I done? I learned how to fall in love with the idea of serving other people. Our company's success is going to be dependent upon how many people we can serve and how well we serve them. We have a phenomenal staff of people in Procter Gallagher Institute. I choose to believe that we have— I just, I just love our staff. We have some of some of the most phenomenal people. And we've got people come, like we have a guy, Tommy Collier, the guy is a creative genius. He came, he wanted to come to work with us. I said, you want to work with us? I thought, wow, guy's so good. You will attract good people if that's all you want to do, just serve other people. That's what we do. And we've got everybody in the company, that's for they're going. We got some pretty happy people, very successful people, and all we did is focus on serving other people. Companies that are enjoying the most success, they're the ones that provide the most and best service. This is the way it works. It always has worked that way, and I'm inclined to believe that it always will work that way. Fall in love with the idea of serving others. You'll be very happy, but you'll also be very successful.

Is there any Is there a dimension that is deeper than this self, this person that you are here for a little while?

Everybody has a history, and you are a person, you are a conditioned entity.

Is there anything beyond this conditioned entity, the self? The Buddha calls it the self. And he— another, other than the fact of suffering, another important part of his teaching is the ultimate unreality of that self, the ultimate unreality of that self, which was also Jesus' teaching, but it's usually overlooked by churches. And theologians, because Jesus said literally— here's another little quote that I'm sure he actually said literally— he said, deny thyself. Oh, I thought the Buddha said that. It was actually Jesus. Deny thyself means— what does it mean? What is the point in denying yourself If your self is actually real, if it has a substantial ultimate reality, then to deny something that is real wouldn't make sense. So, but deny thyself, he said that because he agrees with the Buddha that that identity that people carry around with is ultimately an illusion. There is something deeper that is beyond that. So when Jesus says, deny thyself, what he's really meaning is recognize the unreality of yourself. That's what is deny yourself. Recognize that ultimately this is not who or what you are. Yes, it has a certain function here. It is a part of who you are on the level of form, physical form and psychological form. This is why I call it your form identity. Everybody has one. You have a body that's a physical form, and you have a mental form, which is you, you as this person. That you can think about and talk about, and it has its emotions that go with that, conditioned by the past. Whatever happened to you in the past conditions you to become this particular person. Is there anything beyond that conditioned entity? And here we come to the realization that there is— it is possible to go deeper where you, your sense of who you are, goes beyond this personal sense of self. The personal sense of self is still there, but it is no longer all-consuming. And that's a very important difference. If you discover something— and we are here to— many of you already can sense what it is that I'm talking about, but we go in more deeply. There is a dimension in you that transcends the who or what you are as a person, as a self. There is a deeper, we could say higher But I prefer deeper. It doesn't matter what word you use. Higher could kind of take you out of yourself and you— I'm looking for myself up there, my higher self. But it's better to go within and encounter the deeper dimension of yourself. So how do we access that? How do we discover that? And that's the awakening. That is the awakening. What is it that you awaken from? Not sleep. That's the ordinary awakening. Every morning you awaken and you open your eyes and you realize there's a significant shift from the dream state to the so-called awakened state in the morning. You suddenly go, oh, here I am again. But before you were, there was a sleep state. You were dreaming, or perhaps you were in a state of dreamless sleep. And then you come out of that and you're suddenly awake. And that traditional spiritual traditions use this to point to another awakening that is similar but much higher than awakening from sleep. The ordinary awakening from sleep that happens to you every morning. There is another awakening, and that is the awakening out of the ordinary level of consciousness, which we could call unconsciousness, spiritually speaking, which is complete identification with the mental, emotional conditioning, complete identification with every thought that arises, every emotion that arises. It has you in its grip. Oh my God. There's nobody who is there who's able to say, oh, what a thought, where does— the witnessing faculty is not there. There's no awareness, no presence. You're totally in the grip of the conditioned stream of thinking and emotion. And you're like— people say, people say, I think, as if they had a choice. But most humans, there's not sufficient awareness or zero awareness, which is presence, zero awareness. So they're not able to step out of their thinking and become aware of their thinking. They're in it like a raging river that drags you along. And they're made unhappy by what, in many cases, they're made very unhappy by this thing that drags them along. They think, that's me. Oh God, can't stand anymore. Can't take it anymore. What's going to happen to me tomorrow? 'Oh, I must think about this. Can't go to sleep. Not sleep. Think, think. How am I going to solve this problem of me? Me and my problems.' Many humans consider their identity— for many humans is mostly their problems. And they take it to a psychiatrist or psychotherapists trying to get rid of their problems, but on the other hand, not wanting to get rid because that's all they know of their identity. So every psychotherapist knows you reach a stage when the humans resist. They don't want to let go because that's all they know. That's their identity, their problems. Well, at least I have my familiar I'm not going to step into the unknown. At least I know who I am. I may be unhappy, but at least I know who I am. It's delusion. So in ancient Indian— from India, in ancient Indian spiritual teachings, you have— they differentiate between different states of consciousness. And they have, they differentiate dreamless sleep. This goes back hundreds of years. They discovered, yes, dreamless sleep, the dream state, that's the second state of consciousness. The third state is normal wakefulness. But even normal wakefulness has different levels to it, but that's, put that aside for a moment. Normal wakefulness, And what they call the fourth state of consciousness, which in Sanskrit is called Turiya, the fourth, that is the awakened state. That is the state where you no longer identify with the stream of— you're not continuously drawn into the stream of thinking and it does not absorb your consciousness continuously. There is an ability to be aware of your emotions and to be aware of your thoughts. There's also an ability to step out of the stream of thinking that grows. That when that arises, you will find that in your life, that is the beginning of your awakening. For some people, the beginning of the awakening is they suddenly are aware that all the thoughts that go through their head is ultimately not who they are. They're just thoughts. And then who they are is beyond, is behind that, but it's not easily defined. You can't really define it at all, but I'll try just to use as pointers. So you are able to take your consciousness out of the stream of thinking, at least to some extent, and you're able to be aware of what your mind is doing. You're able to be aware of what your emotions are doing without being totally identified. You're able to step back. When are we most susceptible to that subconscious programming?

About 95% of the day. 5% of the day, the epigenetics, the mind controls genes. I go, the mind. And everybody goes, oh, the mind. I go, well, wait, there's two minds. And I go, and they're interdependent and they don't have the same function. If you don't make a distinguishing insight into why they're different and what their functions are, then it makes no sense. There's the conscious mind, which is the latest evolution of the brain right behind your forehead, prefrontal cortex part of the brain, the seat of your spirit and who you are as an individual. And about 90% of the brain back here is called the subconscious. There's two different functions. Conscious mind is creative. Subconscious mind is habit program.

Okay?

And the significance is, well, we've all been programmed. Everybody's been programmed. That's how you got to here. You know, the first 7 years of a child's life, the brain is operating at a lower functional level than consciousness is operating at something called theta, which is characterized as imagination, which kids under 7 bring into the real world, imagination. And this is where we download behavior by observing other people. So I said, where'd you get your behavioral program? Oh, I watched my father, I watched my mother, my siblings, I watched the community in which I lived, downloaded their behavior, 'cause state is hypnosis. And I downloaded, which is fundamental to get a kid off the ground, just as much as fundamental you buy a brand new computer, if you don't put a program in it, it's useless. You get a brand new computer, first you put the program in, then you can use it. Same with the brain. The program goes in in the first 7 years, From where? Not from you, but from observing other people. So I say, okay, so my programs, 60% of which are dysfunctional and self-sabotaging and limiting in behavior, are programs in the subconscious. But the conscious mind around age 7 starts to kick in. So now you can be creative, you can use thinking and do all that great stuff. The problem that people don't recognize is that the conscious mind can do 2 things. One, it could look out your eyes and see the world and lead you to where you want to go. I want to go here, I want to do this. That's conscious mind, okay? But then the conscious mind can think. And then all of a sudden the game is different. I say, why? Because when you're paying attention, you're looking out at the world and engaging the world. But when you're thinking, your conscious mind is not looking out at the world. It's inside because thoughts are on the inside. So the moment you're thinking, conscious mind is disengaged from control. That's when the subconscious mind comes in as autopilot. So the behaviors that you downloaded become the program that you play, and it turns out 95% of the day. And then there's a problem because you're inside your head thinking when the program is playing. You don't see— you didn't see your own program. You didn't even see your own behavior. But everybody else did. And they respond to those programs. So if you have negative programs, you're not going to get a positive feedback from the people around you because they're going to observe all your negative stuff. You're the one that's not going to see any of it. You have no idea.

We are building a picture in our mind here. This is an idea. We could say it's a goal. Then we impress that idea upon this part of our personality. That's the idea in our mind. Now, what we've got to understand is that this part of our mind, the subjective mind, is actually universal intelligence.

And this is really the way it is.

When you press the idea upon your subconscious mind, you are universally everywhere. Now to help you think of that, where, here's a phone. Let's suppose you're in, okay, Buenos Aires, and I'm right here in North America, Toronto, and I dial your number. I've got you on the phone. Time and space means nothing because I've got onto that frequency. And so you and I can communicate. We're connected. One person's in Buenos Aires, or you could say Singapore, you could say Shanghai, and another one is in New York or in Toronto, but they're connected. Why? The time and space means nothing because you're dealing with energy and you're dealing with laws. Now when you impress this idea upon the subconscious mind, the subconscious mind is universal intelligence. And everything anywhere in the universe that's in harmony, that is a frequency. Understand that. That idea is a frequency. It's operating on a frequency. And so everything that's in harmony with it begins to move toward it because inharmony is vibration and you attract it. Now throw a slide up, Scott. Look here for a moment. Søren Kierkegaard wrote something really great on intuition. He said, listen, you got to listen. You listen with your emotions. We can only get in touch with our own source of intuition and wisdom when we no longer depend upon others' opinions for our sense of identity or worth. We all tend to worship something. The question is, will we worship the god of opinion or the god of our heart? I found I had less and less to say until finally, I became silent and began to listen. I discovered in the silence the voice of God. Now look it, you're going to attract to you everything that you require to manifest the idea in your mind. Thoughts will come to you. It's your intuition that picks them up. And then act on them. And just because you've never gone there before, you've never done it before, that's okay. This is where courage comes in. This is where awareness and wisdom comes in. See, intuition is the mental faculty. Go back to our slide here for a moment, Scott. Intuition is here. In our conscious mind. It's one of our intellectual factors. We have perception, the will, reason, imagination, memory, and intuition, right here. Now intuition is that mental faculty on a conscious level we pick up thoughts that are flying our way. They're flying our way. What are they? It's energy that's in harmony with you. You've got on the frequency of this good that you desire, and you're going to start attracting. And that's what Kierkegaard said. We got to start listening. We listen with our emotions. Let's pay attention to what's coming our way.

If you respond unconsciously out of the ego, then usually it amplifies, it fuels conflict, and you bring more unconsciousness. But in a strange way, you also— your state of consciousness affects other humans, even humans you don't come into contact with. That's a little mysterious, but all humans at a deeper level are connected. There's one collective human consciousness which is an aspect of the greater consciousness of the universe, just a ray of the greater. There's a collective human consciousness on that deeper level. Every human is connected to every other human. And what you— if you embody, if you begin to awaken into the state of presence— it's not a state, but let's call it a state— if you awaken into a state of presence, dimensional presence, that makes it easier for other humans to also awaken into presence. And so in a subtle way, that's how humans are connected, for example, in a somewhat different way it has been discovered. When one person makes a new fantastic discovery, quite often almost at the same time in other parts of the world, some other humans have made a similar discovery at this almost at the same time. It's often been discovered that's because all humans are connected at a deeper level. So in that sense, even if you have little or no contact with other humans, if you're present, this— you still affect the totality of human consciousness. But most humans are continuously interacting with other humans, and then you become a teacher of presence, obviously If your profession is a— involves a lot of contact with other humans, let's even a helping profession, then more obviously you become a teacher of presence when you realize that whether you are a teacher or a social worker or a doctor or a nurse or a therapist, psychotherapist, physical therapists. So if you're in a kind of— some kind of helping profession, then you become a teacher of presence. You, of course, whatever you're teaching will be a different thing, but you realize when you convey the whatever it is that you your— the modality that you use to interact with those humans in helping capacity, if you're present, that presence flows into the way in which you relate to the other human being. Let's say you're a therapist. A therapist spends a lot of time listening to humans and their talking. That's usually encouraged in therapy. So you're listening and the other person, your client, your patient, whatever you call him/her, is talking usually about their problems. And then the therapist has a certain modality.

It has—

he has been trained in a particular therapeutic approach, whatever it may be. Could be old-fashioned psychoanalysis or something more modern. So the therapist will be applying their particular modality, been trained to approach the situation in particular. Way. But if you— when the therapist becomes a teacher of presence in addition to being a therapist, there's an energy that arises when the other person is talking, the therapist is listening. In that listening, there's an energy of presence because the therapist, if he's a good— if he becomes a teacher of presence. It's no longer listening so much through the conceptual mind, but listening in the state of the clarity of presence. Just— it's more than listening. Presence is there, and you, you embody the presence for the other person who does not have presence yet, hasn't discovered it yet. And then the most important part of your therapeutic relationship becomes a state of presence. And then you find yourself, regardless of your training, whatever you have been trained to say or do, you may find intuition coming in more and more. Maybe you've been trained in a particular therapeutic approach, but you would then gradually— your intuition will become more important than whatever you have learned when they're in your training as a therapist. More and more you'll find your intuition will come in more.

What is it?

Suddenly you say something and you didn't know beforehand until you said it. It didn't come— you don't come from a place of knowing, you come from a place of not knowing, which is very deep. And then you become an effective therapist. Only— and so I have met therapists, they've spent years, um, sitting with people and applying their techniques, whatever they learned. And then gradually, or maybe not even gradually, they began to realize— or maybe they didn't realize even consciously— just gradually, the ability to listen grew in them. And then that became just presence. And then they became extremely effective as therapists because presence was taking over. Whatever their training became secondary. In some cases, they all completely didn't use it anymore. But sometimes it comes only after— the question is, when can presence use you as a channel Sometimes it requires a lot of practice before presence can be used. Not always, but sometimes. This not only applies to helping professions, it also applies to presence arising in you when you are engaged in some creative endeavor. Whatever it be, maybe you're a musician or an artist or whatever it may be, um, composer, maybe interesting, um, is presence able to use you as a vehicle or as a conduit, can flow through you and inspire what you create and do? Yes, but often it requires many hours of practice so that the channel is ready for presence.

There was a—

I've often, a few times, quoted— there was a writer who discovered, who examined creative people like musicians who created things that were became classics. Now, whether it's classic, for example, in music, classical composers like Mozart or Beethoven, or modern pop music like the Beatles. And he looked at the hours they spent practicing their craft, so to speak, thousands of hours before presence was able to suddenly come in and they would came inspired. And he stipulated, he even calculated and said 10,000 hours you need, and then there's a possibility for presence to flow in. And then what you then create through presence— you don't create it, what is being created through you becomes unbelievable. You say, how can a human create such beauty or such, such powerful thing.

Even with—

I mean, if you look at the Beatles, is relatively compared to Beethoven, Mozart, a more complex classical music constructions. Nevertheless, the Beatles also, the songs are deeply inspired. There's a quality to many of their songs that this is why they stay around. They'll still be played in 200 years' time, 300 years' time, whereas most other music disappears after a few months or after a year definitely, or even a few weeks. It's popular for 3 weeks and then it's gone because it's just noise. With a little bit of hype, you can make that You know, it's popular for a little while and then it disappears. But some— there's a quality of what is created through presence. There's a quality to it that you cannot define, but almost everybody can sense it and feel it and even be touched by it. So that's how— so I wouldn't say that in a way, in a wider sense, you could say people like that, they are also teachers of presence. They teach through whatever they create through presence becomes extremely helpful to other humans because it still contains the energy of presence.

5% of the day we move toward wishes, desires, what we want. Even, you know, the addict is like, yeah, I don't want this, this is not my life, I really want this and all that. And then I say, yeah, but that only works 5% of the day. 95% of the day you're coming from the habit. Yeah, but the habit of it was other people's behavior that you put into the subconscious first. And so 95% of the day, you're not operating from your wishes and desires, you're operating from a program.

Sure.

Okay. But now here's the catch, and then we'll get on to it. And that is this: by definition, if I am thinking all of a sudden, I say, what am I doing next Wednesday? I go into my head and I'm thinking about what I'm doing, what's on Wednesday. By definition, I'm not paying attention. To what's going on. So that doesn't mean like you're walking down the street, you have a thought, and then you freeze while the thought happens, and then after the thought, then you start walking back down the street again. No. If you're walking down the street and you have a thought, the moment you have a conscious mind engaged in thought, the functions are defaulted to the subconscious program. So in other words, I know how to walk. That's a habit. I learned that, so I don't need I don't need my conscious mind to tell me how to walk. So my conscious mind goes in thought, I'm still walking. So whatever behavior I'm doing, driving a car, I don't have to pay attention to what's going on when I'm driving a car. I mean, the joke when I lecture about it is I say, "Look, I've been in a car with a passenger, we get so engaged in a conversation, my conscious mind is tied up with the conversation, and then all of a sudden I look out the window of the car and it dawns on me, I haven't I haven't paid attention to the road for the last 5 minutes.

How did I get home?

And here's what the neat part is. Well, look, driving is once you practice and learn how to drive, practice makes habit. Habit means that the subconscious mind doesn't need you to explain how to drive and what to watch out for. Subconscious mind's already got a program.

How do we reshape our self-image to serve us as opposed to bring us down? Well, It's interesting, Maltz, Maxwell Maltz actually discovered self-image as we know it today. He was a cosmetic surgeon and he found if he operated on a person, maybe they had a distasteful scar in their face and he removed the scar, he said sometimes there was a phenomenal change in the person's personality. But he said other times they'd remove the scar, it was very successful, no change in their personality. That led him to postulate that we not only have this physical image that reflects back from the mirror, we have an inner image of ourself. It's how we see ourselves. Now that inner image is an idea, and that idea is generally planted in our little life when we're infants. And it's planted by virtue of the environment that we're surrounded by, how we're raised. If a child's raised with praise, they're going to grow up very confident individuals. If a child's raised with criticism, they're going to grow up very insecure. So you see this image that we have, it's a picture of how we see ourself, But most of us, that image was planted by people that didn't know what the hell was going on. They didn't know the war was over and they were planting, they were developing a little mind. It was a mind, they were shaping it like fresh clay. They didn't understand that, it was a kid they're looking after and we feed them, we keep them warm, what the hell? You know, that's our responsibility. No, it was a mind and they were developing that mind. And if they didn't understand, What were they gonna put in? Well, all they could give to the child is the insecurities that they had themselves. So that was the picture that the kid grows up of themself. Now I grew up very insecure. I was born during the Depression. When I first went to school, the Second World War had just broken out, so everybody's rationed for everything. It was hard times. All the men were away fighting in Europe or South Pacific. There was no men doing anything. The women that were there were driving the trucks, they were cops, they did everything. So there wasn't a whole lot of time used for developing a little mind. So I just grew up and picked up what I could. I grew up very insecure. It wasn't until I met a man that gave me this book and gave me some damn good instruction that I started to pay attention to who I was. And I have never stopped being fascinated was studying me. I am the most fascinating subject that I've ever come across. And I have found out that you and I are exactly the same. We only appear to be different. Our physical body looks different. We choose different vocations. Some earns more or less than the other, but our potential is exactly the same. We both live in a physical body. We both have these higher mental faculties. We're both spiritual beings. We both draw on an infinite source of supply. We're the same. So the trick, I think, for the person that has insecurities, that hasn't got the strongest image they want, they should find a damn good mentor. That's what changed my life.

It's not a serious business. Now I have to practice presence. No, just Don't even call it anything, just be at ease in the present moment. There's only this moment. Don't try to be present, just be at ease in the now. And then look around and sense, and it's fine. And then thoughts come, don't have to stay there. No, and then thoughts come. And thoughts go around your mind for a few minutes, and then again you take some steps into your present again, walking from here to there, making a cup of tea, looking out of the window, and then thoughts come again. So you intersperse your day or your life with presence. And also when you're traveling, traveling, either no matter when you go to work, wherever you go, whether you go, whether you walk or drive or use a bicycle or use a train or use a bus, it's a wonderful opportunity for just go within and be present as you travel. Whenever you're waiting, just be present. It's not, there's no effort involved. At all. The effort is not being present, is more effortful. That's where all effort arises. You don't use willpower to be present, just an arising alertness. Don't demand that it should be there for long periods of time. That's frustrating. And then you say, 'Oh, it's gone. I can't do it anyway. Screw it.' I'm quoting, quoting reporting you. And that's the mind talking, not the presence talking. It's the mind saying it's useless to be present, it's too hard work, I can't do it, I can't stay there anyway. These are thoughts that arise in your mind and you believe them, but they are thoughts that are designed to take you out of presence and to prevent you from returning to presence. They're not the truth. They are created by your mind to take you out of presence, that's all. So the mistake you made is you believed in those thoughts. So even the thought, 'It's true,' is not the true thought. As Byron Katie would say, how do you know that's true? It's not a true thought. It's a thought that's there to take you out of presence and to make sure that you don't go back to it. And then another thought comes and says, what's the point? It's not working for me. Maybe it's working for others, but it's not working for me. All kinds of— you may be familiar with that kind of self-talk in the head. Be very aware of what kind of self-talk happens in your head. Very interesting because you can learn so much about the conditioning of your mind by listening to the way in which you talk to yourself. And everybody talks to themselves, and some people use the first person singular and talk as I, and many people use this use the 'you.' They talk to themselves, addressing themselves as 'you.' 'You are useless, aren't you?' 'Why can other people do it but you can't?' Who is talking to whom? So you're creating a split in your mind, and one part of your mind talks to the other part of your mind and calls it you. It's amazing. So recognize that the self-talk rarely speaks the truth. It's a form of conditioning that goes on in your mind, and it is associated with the ego, which does not want to go away. It wants to stay in charge, stick around. It knows what to say to take you out, but if you don't believe in every thought that arises, especially thoughts concerning presence, then you're free. The thoughts may still come, but you can say, "Oh, there goes a thought." You don't actually, you no longer comment on the thought, and this is interesting, you You become, from the awareness, you can see and recognize the thought as a thought that your mind throws up without calling it anything. It's a bit like holding a mirror up to something that arises. That's the awareness. The mirror doesn't judge what arises because if you criticize the thought that you just had, it's just more self-talk. And even you say, why are you always having this self-talk? You should stop. You should by now, you should be beyond that self-talk. You've been doing spiritual work for years and you still can't get out of your self-talk. What's wrong with you? More of it. So when you become aware of Observe your self-talk, don't formulate judgments around the self-talk, you get just more of it. Don't criticize yourself, hold up a mirror to it, and from there, there's a knowing there in that awareness. You know that this is self-talk and you know that it's not true without having to tell yourself through words that this is not true and this is self-talk. You just know. So this is in the same way that you can know, you can look at a plant or a flower, you know it's a flower, but you don't have to tell yourself, this is a flower. You know it without formulating any words in your mind, any concepts. You can look at the sky, beautiful, vast, blue, you don't have to say to yourself, this is the vast blue sky and I'm looking at it. That's knowing through concepts and words. But there's another kind of knowing that does not require words. You just know. And because you do not limit what you are perceiving through concepts, you can actually sense a greater depth in that which you are perceiving, whether it's the flower or the sky, you can sense a depth in it that goes beyond what you see on the surface of your sense perceptions. The depth becomes obscure to you when you look at everything through mental concepts. When you say, this is a beautiful, vast sky, you're still limiting yourself The true perception does not happen until the words disappear and there's only the awareness and the perception. And in that, the sky is more than just the sky. It suddenly— because every concept reduces it, and you think the word sky is the sky. You know the painting, I think, I think it's by Magritte, the painting of an apple, and he writes underneath, "This is not an apple." Of course it isn't, it's a painting of an apple in the same way that a word or concept is not it. Krishnamurti said, "When you teach a child the name of the bird, from then on, the child will never see that bird again because the child then begins to substitute the concept for the direct perception, which— and there's a depth to the direct perception in which the bird is more than a bird. There's a depth to the bird, and you realize that life form is more than a bird. It just appears as a bird. And what I'm trying to put into words comes from a perception that is beyond words. That's why it's so difficult. So you see, there's a depth to the flower and the sky and the bird that cannot be there when you look at it through concepts. You can feel the aliveness of the bird. You can sense its connectedness to the totality. You can sense its sacredness, you can sense it's beautiful, you could never realize that through concepts. So don't believe in the words that your mind throws up and that take you out of presence. That's the main lesson for you here, and it's a lesson for everybody because everybody is burdened, and some Most people are plagued and tortured by their self-talk in a way that would be regarded as indefensible cruelty if somebody close to you did it to you all the time on a daily basis. What are, I don't know what terms they use, the legal terms when you get a divorce, cruelty or inhuman cruelty or whatever, that would apply to your mind that you have to live with when you are not aware enough. For perhaps not, is perhaps not as bad for you, it just takes you out of presence. But for other, many other people, the self-talk can be extremely destructive and can make your life miserable, absolutely miserable.

Miserable.

You don't know that's only the self-talking that you think that's your life. You think your life is miserable, not realizing it's your self-talk that makes your life miserable. Is it a— I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this. So absolutely vital lesson Listen, hold up a mirror, the mirror of awareness to your self-talk so that you realize it's no more than self-talk. In particular, if you've had predominantly negative or even 50%, and many people have 80 to 90% negative self-talk, then realize this This is stuff my mind produces, and not verbally, you don't have to realize it verbally, it's the mirror of awareness and you look and you know, wow, and I've lived with that for so many years and I've survived miraculously even with that dreadful self-talk in the head, and because when you no longer identify with it, it begins to subside. It's only when you only empower it again and again when it takes you over so completely that you identify. It becomes you.

Knowledge is power. The media is paid off and it conforms to exactly what the companies want to sell you. And people watch TV like it's a true story and they watch the news like they're getting real They're not getting the real stuff. Behind the scenes, there's something going on and we are being manipulated. And the way to manipulate people is disempower them because if they have power, then you can't disregard them. So our growing up has been a whole process of being disempowered from the very beginning. Who are we? Oh, I don't know, nobody, you know. Oh, my genes control my life. I don't control anything. Thing, you know, or whatever it is. People have given up because their programming didn't say they were powerful at all. It just kept reinforcing the belief that, well, you're a defective human, you know, you got bad cells, you got bad genes, you got bad blah blah blah. And I go, people have no belief in their own power. Well, that means then they have no power, and that means then they're exactly where the corporations want them. So people need a reprogramming, 100%. And there's been a renaissance in science that changes even where those beliefs came from. We have a renaissance in physics which recognizes as a science spirituality. When I was teaching in medical school, you couldn't say the word spirit. That was forbidden. You couldn't even use the word consciousness. This. That was forbidden in trying to understand medicine. It was genes and cells, and don't bring that other stuff in. But now, hey, epigenetics, quantum physics, the whole thing about nutrition, which was never taught in medical school. This is changing the public. They're getting into it a bit, and they're asking questions where they never asked questions before. They just bought it. Oh, that's just the way it is. Now it's like, maybe it's not that way.

Most people don't use their imagination constructively. Most people use their imagination destructively. They imagine what they don't want. We've got to consciously and deliberately imagine what we do want. If we will take and sit down with a pen and ask ourselves, what do I really want? What do I really want? And write it down, and then make a written description of it in the present tense. Writing causes thinking, thinking creates an image, and you get these images going, you're building a vision in your mind. It's the visionaries that's changed the world.

Think of that.

The fact that I can sit and look into this camera And you can sit and look at me on your phone, or on your TV, or on your laptop. That was the result of somebody's vision. Do you know everything you've got, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, this microphone that's in front of me, it was all the result of somebody's vision. It's not an accident. You and I have a marvelous imagination. And everything starts with a vision. Van Gogh was asked how he did such beautiful work.

He said, "First I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream." There's a difference between appreciating something and being attached to something because you derive your sense of identity from it. This, by the way, also applies to possessions. Because in a way, you could look at the body as something that you have rather than something as you are. Although I've said somewhere in a book, just as a meditative practice, you are your body, but not the physical body. When you go deeper into the body, that's another story. But really, the physical body, you are not the physical body. Even language knows that. When people use language, In all languages, I assume, people refer to my body and they say, "I have a body. I have a good-looking body. I have an ugly body," whatever. But they say they have a body. So they must have realized language has maybe a little bit of wisdom has crept into language. And so You say, "I have a body," which means you are not the body. So everybody says they have a body, so they are not the body. But to appreciate something that you have, whether it's a body that you have or some kind of object that you have or some kind of ability that you have, whatever it may be, to appreciate that is fine, to like it, to love it, but not in a deeply attached sense. That you do not— to appreciate something is different from deriving partly your sense of identity from it. Let's say you have a nice object that you own, And perhaps it's been with you for a long time or not, and it looks nice, it has quality to it, perhaps, whatever it may be, and you appreciate it. There's nothing wrong with it. So your body, if you happen to have a lovely body, you appreciate it, you look after it too. Do your best to keep it going through good nutrition and exercise. Nothing wrong with that. And even to say, "Oh, I look great," but in a superficial sense, not that knowing that it's not going to last. Nothing is going to last. Everything will leave you or you leave it. And to have, to appreciate something is actually an important thing. You can incorporate it into your practice of gratitude, which is a spiritual practice strongly linked to present moment awareness. On this, gratitude is to appreciate something appreciate the goodness of things, whether you own them or not. You can walk and have gratitude for the beautiful things, the flowers, the trees, the sky, the sunshine. Gratitude doesn't necessarily mean, "Thank you for this." It doesn't necessarily involve words. It's just to give it attention and to appreciate it, its aliveness or its beauty. You can have gratitude for the flowers, that are here, which means you give, you appreciate the goodness of so many things in this world, but you are not attaching yourself or using it in the service of your sense of self. So there's a difference. I have a car, well, I talked about my car that I had when I lived in England. I had this Lada, beautiful Lada, lovely car, and I loved it. I had gratitude for it. People laughed at it, and I was sitting driving, sometimes people, ahaha, a Lada. And I realized the people who are driving this car are either relatively poor or they have no ego. In my case, both was true, both applied. And then 17 years ago, I was no longer poor and I bought a luxury car and I still have it and I'm going to keep it until either it dies or I die. And I love it just as much as the ladder. It's just, it just embodies quality. I don't use it that much, but it's still there. And when I go down, I greet it, say hello. And it seems almost that things, even so-called inanimate things, seem to almost respond. It's almost as if it could sense you. A weird thing happened when I left England. I sold my Lada. A friend of mine needed a car. I sold it, not very much. And this car had never broken down while I had it. And It was a month after he started using it, it broke down completely and couldn't even be repaired. Very strange. It— the car was not happy, it seems. So yes, the appreciation of things, the gratitude for something that is in their field of awareness, whether you own it or not, becomes secondary. There are people, of course, who tell you— I've met some very wealthy people who tell me, I have this wealth, but I'm not attached to anything anymore. And whether or not this is true, you can't really know until you experience loss. So if you say, okay, I have a Ferrari, I don't have a Ferrari, that's not my type of car, but somebody says I have a Ferrari Testarossa. I have to get the name right. But I'm not identified with it at all. And so, but of course, you have this car and it's red. It's red. And it's very noisy. It's meant to be. Extremely noisy because it attracts attention. Everybody looks when you drive. But I'm not attached to it. I'm not at all. And then one day you come back and somebody scratched your car. Oh, or somebody is gone completely. Somebody stole it. You were not attached?

No.

So when you say I'm not attached, you may not know whether this is true or not. Until you lose it. So appreciate the difference between ego attachment, to have something in the service of ego, or to really appreciate seeing something without using it in the service of the ego. There's a big, big difference. So whether it's a body or objects or abilities also, if you're good at certain— you have certain abilities, whether they are physical or You're very good at something. It could be playing an instrument, or you're a great expert at this or that. And again, that's lovely. Again, the question is, are you deriving your sense of identity from it? Let's say you're a great musician, piano player. And you derive your identity from it, and then something happens, perhaps something happens to your hands and suddenly you can't play anymore, that is maybe a certain amount of pain can be involved in that, but if there has been an ego attachment, if this function was the main source of ego identity, you as the famous, let's say, a famous pianist, then, or let's say a sports person who is very good, got the gold medal or whatever, placed it, and suddenly an injury, can't do it anymore. Does your whole life suddenly collapse? And the rest of your life you're unhappy, you're totally defeated. It does happen to people because their sense of identity was exclusively derived from that great ability that they had. And that is the difference between appreciating it, being grateful for what you can do, but your identity needs to come from a deeper place. A more real place, the only real place for being, not some kind of function that you may be good at, because at some point, most likely, you won't be good at it anymore. And so it's very— a huge difference between those two approaches to what you can do. Important, be careful that you don't derive your identity from something that is part of the flux of impermanence. It could leave you at any moment.

If I have a picture of fear in my mind, I'm afraid of something, my brain translates fear with different chemicals, stress hormones, cortisol, norepinephrine, factors that affect the immune system that are called cytokines or histamine. So basically, in a state of conscious fear, the brain releases chemistry that complements fear. That chemistry goes into the body's blood, and that changes the behavior and the genetics of the person. So that means there's a difference between having positive thoughts and having negative thoughts. And people say, oh, that positive thinking doesn't really work, but that's not true. The best example of positive thinking in a scientific study is called placebo. You have a disease and doctor says, here's this new pill and it's a brand new science and it's going to cure you. And you believe it and you take the pill and you get well. Then you find out the pill was a sugar pill. So then you're left with, so what made me well? It's not the sugar pill. It was the positive belief in that sugar pill and how it's going to help your life. So that's called placebo. Positive thinking, positive result. Unfortunately, most people don't recognize a more important point. Negative thinking is equally powerful, but it works in the opposite direction. So it turns out, for example, less than 10% of cancer is even connected to a family lineage. 90% of cancer just comes out of the blue, so to speak. But the reality is, no, it's a result of stress and negative thinking. So it's important point: positive thinking, negative thinking, equally powerful, because that's the level of consciousness that is translated into the chemistry that controls your genetics. I just want to add a very important point to this. Quantum physics is the most valid science on this planet. There is no science that has been tested more and verified more. I guess, so what's the relevance? Because the primary principle in quantum physics is consciousness is creating our life experiences. And well, when you add epigenetics to that physics, now we understand the mechanism of how conscious consciousness is controlling our biology. So biology and physics are coming together to reveal that we are very powerful creators of our lives.

You know, Don Shula, the coach of the old Miami Dolphins, he said it's the start that stops most people. And he's right. It is the start that stops most people. They're always going to get ready to get set to get going. What we've got to do is boom, just like that, move into action. Action. See, if you don't get started, you're never going to get finished. How do we do that? Start early. I believe when you wake up, you should get up. The second you wake up, get your feet, hit the floor, move into action. And you know, you'd be wise if you sit down at night before you go to bed and write down 6 goal-achieving activities. Now that isn't go to the store, go to the bank, get to cleaning. It's not that. These are goal-achieving activities. Write down 6 of them. And when you wake up in the morning, you move into action. You know where you're going to go. You don't even have to think about it. Step into action and get on the first one. When you get it done, forget it and go to the second one. Don't think about the first one. Focus on 2. Don't even think about 3. When you get 2 done, go to 3. But knock them off one at a time. If you don't get them all done, just move them over onto the next day. Now that doesn't mean if you only get 3 done that you have 9 the next day. There are 3 of the 6 that you're going to do the next day. 6 goal-achieving activities. And when you wake up in the morning, move into action on them. Quit holding yourself back. Don't wait. You say, well, I really don't know how I'm going to get started, and the way will show itself. It just appears. I have found when you get started, when you move into action, everything starts to happen around you.

In itself, of course, it's neutral. The technology is neutral. It's not either bad or good. It depends how it's used. It is, at the moment, it is to a large extent a reflection of the unconscious mind. So if you want to learn about human unconsciousness, you want to learn about the human ego, just go there and read what people post and look at the reactivity of people on social media and so on, the comments they leave. You can learn a lot about unconsciousness and identification with mental positions. So the first thing, of course, is Be careful with what you put out there, what kind of thing you post. If you post things online, is it reactive? Give yourself a moment when you read something before you type in an answer or comment. Give yourself a moment and go within and avoid making people wrong. You can talk about issues, but don't make people wrong and amplify your ego by making others wrong, even though their position, political or otherwise, you may regard as completely misguided or erroneous, there's still a human being behind that, so you can put forward arguments against somebody's perspective or viewpoint without making another human being wrong. So what you put out is very important. Is your communication conscious or not, or is it reactive, and then it can be used for other purposes.

The—

I'm there too sometimes. There are certain places where I appear on— could go to YouTube or whatever, and then suddenly there's a spiritual teacher talking. So do you professionally work with What exactly do you do in your work that involves the media?

Pretty much involves the creation, the ideas around the digital products and services. So creating the products that people actually use and designing the interfaces that people actually use on the phones and on the computers.

Right.

There are some— meditation sites on all these things. So there's great potential for raising consciousness there. Somebody recommended to me several apps for meditation, which I now have on my phone. I haven't tried them yet. They've been there for a while, but I have 4 or 5 that are there. I want to try them out. So that's the very thing that otherwise would clutter your mind can actually also be used to bring about space or spaciousness in your mind. So it doesn't necessarily mean that when you have your phone, or the 99% of cases when people look there, their mind is being cluttered, but maybe they're on a meditation app, maybe they're looking at a beautiful space picture, or listening to some sound, or saying, "Take a conscious breath." Have a little reminder every 2 hours to take a conscious breath and bring spaciousness. Oh yes, spaciousness. So the very same thing that otherwise clutters your mind can now unclutter your mind. It's possible. So I believe that is also going to grow now, and it has to because otherwise that technology could potentially drive humans completely insane, remove their ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds, create young people who are totally uncentered, have no spaciousness within, don't even communicate with humans anymore because they prefer to communicate digitally. So these things are important, but what you put out is important. So always take into consideration whether this brings people to presence or whether it clutters somebody's mind. And perhaps you can combine— of course, what you do needs to be also commercial commercially viable. But I believe you can combine the two. It's not necessarily a question of either it's commercially viable and it clutters people's minds, or its presence and we are going to go out of business. It doesn't have to be like that. It's up to you to be creative. The more still you are, the more creative inside you will have into— and you might get some amazing ideas of what is possible. I can't tell you what is possible, I don't know enough about it, I know very little about it. So, but you're in a wonderful position, so allow yourself to go deep enough within, because then it is then the creative ideas seem to come. And if you find this thing that not only brings people to presence but also helps your company to grow, then that then becomes a conscious business, which is wonderful. It's challenging, of course it's challenging. So don't let all your attention be absorbed though by that kind of activity. You still need to connect with nature. Take it as much as possible away from there, with nature and then bring it back. Another thing that's just in connection with this, not perhaps directly related to your question, but related to this. What tends to happen is that these devices, people are never, they're still in bed and they're still doing stuff on it. And that takes you over there at dinner, and they're doing stuff on it. It breaks the relation with other people you're at dinner with. I can see people in restaurants, the couples sitting, having dinner together, and both are on their phones. Now that probably means they've known each other for a while, If it happens on the first date, that's— the first date will probably be the last one. But if it happens after they've known each other for 2 years, then it's almost a normal thing that they're not present with each other. Or then they exchange a few words and then she looks at the phone again, and then he stares into space, and then she's still on her phone.

Phone.

I've actually observed it. She's still on her phone and he's staring into space, and then finally he gets out his phone too because he doesn't want to be staring into space. And then I wonder, are they texting each other? Two good things that I'd I learned that in some huge companies, I believe it might be VW in Germany, well, they've had enough problems, but now they tell their employees after 6:00 PM, they're not allowed to use the company phones anymore, not to deal with emails or anything. They need to get off. And that's a very wise thing. Because the more people's attention gets absorbed by this, the more confused and non-creative they become, the more cluttered their minds become, the more ineffective they're even at their work, not to mention as human beings, their quality of life decreases enormously. So don't give yourself spaces, don't allow these things to take over your life. That's vitally important. So it's wonderful that some big companies like that have this policy now, no emails or anything after 6:00 PM. Well, that's wonderful. I talked a couple of years ago to Arianna Huffington, who has a famous news website, website and has also written some books. And she describes in her latest book how her life deteriorated more and more, although she was making a lot of money. And finally she collapsed and hit her head on her desk and it was a complete breakdown. And now she has, for example, in her private life, and that's a good thing, she has this policy of no digital digital device in my bedroom. So in her bedroom, she still has books. Sometimes she reads in bed, but it has to be a book, not a Kindle, not the iPad, not the iPhone. No digital device in my bedroom. And that's a good thing to have. That's at least you have that space for yourself.

Bruce, do you have in your work a general perspective on, or a definition, or a way that you look at addiction?

Well, basically what I have to understand about biology is that throughout evolution, biological systems are given information in response to how they, how they deal with the world around them. We call them emotions, sensations, feelings, symptoms, etc. Like that. One of the major aspects is this, is that nature has designed two senses of pain and pleasure as a way of of teaching an organism to go in the right direction. In other words, we're smart, we go to school, we learn, you know, cross the street, look both ways, and all that kind of stuff like that. But you got smaller, lower forms of life, animals that are moving through the world. How do they know where to go and where not to go? How to do the right thing to stay alive? Well, nature has endowed them with a sense of feeling. And the significance about that is is we are given two completely opposite senses. One is pain and one is pleasure. When pleasure is received by an organism or perceived by an organism, it really represents that you're doing the right thing. That's why nature encourages you. It says, "Look, this is really good. Go this way." But when you start to do something that threatens your survival or is really not supportive, we receive a sensation of pain. And that's nature's way of saying, look, this is threatening to you, this is inappropriate behavior, whatever it is, do something different. And it's kind of interesting because in our civilization and throughout history, that was manipulated a bit by the original church, which looked at pleasure as negative and pain as positive, which is like complete turnaround of the table of biology.

Some confusing messages there.

Absolutely. But it really causes a profound conflict in our biology when our biology is telling us we're doing something right, gives us pleasure, and then our psychology is saying, no, no, that's wrong, don't do that. Then we have a conflict between programming and biology. And so basically what I see is this, is that when we find ourselves in trauma and problems. A, we try to seek a way to get out. If you can't seek a way to get out, then you actually do some kind of other behavior or something else to lessen the pain because if you can't move and you're stuck in pain, then what are you supposed to do? Just live in that? Well, at our level of cognition and awareness, we can put in some other behavior and then actually override the, the current experience. So what we have to recognize is when people really are generally dealing with an addiction problem, they're really first trying to overcome some kind of pain in their life or threat to their survival or their existence, and then choose another alternative behavior. Unfortunately, the alternative behaviors don't necessarily take you out of the problem. So you stay in the problem, but even though you're trying to get mentally out of the problem.

You know, the law of success is a pretty interesting concept. There's been books written on it, stories told on it, lives have been spent looking for it. Let's understand that everything operates by law. The whole universe operates by law. By law. The best definition of success I have ever heard was one that Earl Nightingale originated way back in 1959. He said, success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Let's break that down for a moment. Success is the progressive, continually moving, progressive realization, constant awareness, of a worthy ideal. An ideal is an idea that you have fallen in love with. An ideal is an idea that you're intellectually, emotionally, and physically involved with. An ideal is an idea that you've fallen in love with. Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. So you don't ask, are you worthy of the idea? Are you worthy of the good? Is it worthy of you? Now you're getting into to Law of Success? Is it worthy of you? You see, what you're going to do is trade your life. You're trading your life for whatever it is you're going after. So you want to make up your mind, whatever your goal happens to be, whatever you are pursuing, make certain it's worthy of you because you're trading your life for it. The Law of Success calls for you to continually moving toward a predetermined objective in life and bringing your life in harmony with the laws that govern the entire universe.

So here you practice being, and one of the very helpful practices here in order to avoid adding to the clutter of your mind and in fact Letting go of the clutter is a practice, awareness of the simplicity of the present moment, the sense perceptions of the present moment, acknowledge the is-ness of all things. Give it attention and refrain as much as possible from labeling your sense perceptions. That is not impossible. It is, of course, a deep-seated habit to continuously have to label your sense perception, what you're seeing. Oh, look at that. Isn't that nice? Oh, this was something I saw last year. My aunt had that same— oh, I wish I had that in my book. Where can you buy that, I wonder? Oh, isn't this interesting? I wonder what the tree is called. There's nothing wrong with finding the names of trees, but don't lose yourself in that. There is another way of being in the world that is non-conceptual, that awakens the non-conceptual dimension, the non-conceptual intelligence in you, because there is a vast intelligence waiting to be awakened. And I call it non-conceptual intelligence. It cannot be measured in IQ tests. So you might have a high IQ, doesn't mean you're closer to awakening. In fact, if you're identified with all the knowledge, then you're further away from awakening if you're identified with it. Practicing sense perception without labeling mentally And it's a beautiful— and this is part of the beingness of the practice, being. Sense perception is visual, auditory, the birds, visual sky, amazing things to see, vegetation, plants, even feeling the breeze on your skin, the warm air. Sometimes the wind gets quite strong here. We had it on the first day I came here. There's trade winds that sometimes blow across the ocean that can last for hours and days, and it's a continuous— and you can feel it on your skin. It's not unpleasant. And so you can feel that and breathe whatever scent there may be in the air, all senses, and experience that. Be there as the awareness for the sense perceptions, and that awareness is the space. So you are the space for whatever arises, but knowingly, Right now, here we can practice that. Sit here, aware of the room, the totality of it. Look around, ceiling, there's a man sitting on the chair up here. Who is that? The body? Okay. Quite pleasant, but I'm already labeling it, but there's no need to label it. Just let it be. So in this moment, there are your sense perceptions, mostly visual probably, and auditory because there's the sound of my voice. Sense perceptions. And yes, of course, you might feel the weight of your body on the chair, all that, yes. And what else is there? That which enables the sense perceptions to be. We could call that consciousness, but that is the essence of you, that is the deep I. So can you be aware of that deep I at the same time as you perceive through your senses whatever is there? So you have There are two dimensions here now. One dimension is the world, whatever it contains, and you take that in through sensory perception. And then you are aware of the awareness that makes sensory perception possible. You can feel that you are. You can sense the 'I am.' And here things happen. But in the depths of your being, nothing is happening. It's beyond any happening because there's no time there. There's time here, everywhere. Time is The thing that enables you to do everything that you do. Time does that, and then it takes everything away. Time gives you all kinds of stuff, and it makes you grow, and you get stronger, and then it starts eroding you. And then in the end it kills you. Oh my God, time is killing me. Some people, I already realized that a long time ago that time is killing, but the older one gets, the more you realize that time is engaged in killing you. That's scary if all that you know of yourself is the physical body and the personality. Then there's great fear, because that's all you know. You've never gone any deeper. Oh, So the timeless dimension, present moment. Present moment is the portal into that dimension, transcendent dimension. Now, this is a beautiful practice. Sense perceptions without— let go of labels. When they arise, just don't become too interested in the labels. They are thoughts. Just let go. And then while you're here especially, the practice is to be as present-moment-centered as possible. Because your life, otherwise, normally your life usually consists of your past, the present moment, and your so-called future. Now, for most people, either future or past are completely, almost completely occupy their attention. For younger people, until you get old, it's usually future. When you reach a certain age and you realize that you don't have much future left, then you become more interested in the past and you start thinking about it. Oh, that was then, now, oh, I remember that, yeah. But the present moment is rarely fully acknowledged. Acknowledged. It's always just a stepping stone to the next moment, which is the future. Or you actively hate it. That's not uncommon too. There are people who live in an antagonistic relationship with the present moment most of their lives. And sometimes older, some older people, They get the cantankerous old men, "Don't talk to me about that, I know it all. It's all rubbish, nonsense." So here you practice living in the two dimensions, the deep I and the surface I. It's fine, it has its place, you acknowledge it, but practice present-moment living The future and the past never— obviously everybody knows that, that they actually don't exist as such.

An adult has all different ranges of vibrations of brain function, but when a child is born, for the first 2 years it has a very low vibration called Delta. And a child is in Delta. Well, adults, when they're in Delta, that's called sleeping. Well, yeah, for the first year and a half or two of a child's life, they spend most of their time in Delta. So that's the predominant vibration of a child's brain. But around 2 years of age, the vibration of a child's brain increases at a higher level of vibration, and this level is called Theta. Well, Theta that's characterized by imagination. And that's true. A child between the ages of 2 and 7 is mixing the real world and the imaginary world at the same time. So for example, the child's on a broom pretending it's a horse. Well, to that child, that broom is a horse. So if the mother says, "Give me the broom," the child looks at her like, "What are you talking about?" Because the child really experiences that as a a broom. Oh, and the old famous tea party where they pour nothing into the cup and they drink nothing and they go, "That was the best tea I ever had!" Well, mixing imagination in the real world is what happens between ages 2 and 7 when a child is experiencing theta. But by the time the child reaches 7, the vibration goes a little bit higher and we call that vibration alpha. And alpha is calm consciousness. Well, that's the child's life in the beginning of consciousness. It's very peaceful and loving. But then around age 12, the vibration goes up even higher. Now it's called beta vibration. Well, beta vibration is the brain activity when a child is in school or when an adult is working. And the beautiful part about this is every year of the child's life, the vibrations get greater and greater. And then when we're adults, we have the whole range. Yes, at night when we're sleeping, it's delta. And just in the morning before we wake up, called twilight reverie, the brain kicks into a higher vibration, theta. And then as the alarm clock goes off and we're ready to wake up, The brain is now in alpha, calm consciousness for the morning. And then on the way to work, the vibration even gets higher. Now it's called beta. And at work all day long, that's a very high functioning consciousness, beta. You know, the interesting part, though, is when you come back home, it goes back in reverse. So you come home from work and you've been working all day. You're in beta. And then when you get home, you start to calm down and relax and the vibration slows down to alpha, calm consciousness. And then guess what? The moment you fall asleep and your eyes close, the brain is now in a lower vibration, theta. And then as you go a little deeper, guess what? Delta, and you're in sleep. And every day this cycle works. Delta, theta, alpha, beta, coming home, beta, alpha, theta, delta, cycling and cycling. Well, this is really a very interesting aspect of brain function for this reason: theta, the brain activity between 2 and 7 years old for a child, is not just imagination. Theta is hypnosis, and this is This is how a child can download so much information as a little kid under 7 years of age. When we understand the nature of the progression of our brain vibration, it then becomes important for parents to know this for a very important reason. When does a child start actually downloading behavior? Well, very interesting fact, even before the child is born. In the last trimester of pregnancy, the brain is already beginning to hit on theta. And when it's doing that, the child is experiencing what the mother is experiencing. So a happy mother is sending happy information to the baby as programs. But a mother who is afraid, frightened, not sure of the world she's living in, sends kind of scary messages to that fetus as it's developing. And the child is actually beginning to download these messages. The mother is Head Start program. She's the one that sees the world, and her interpretation of the world is translated into programs into the baby even before it's born. And why should they be able to download so much information? Well, think about it this way: how many rules must a child learn to be a functional member of a family? And then how many more rules must that child learn to be a functional member of the community. Thousands of rules if you think about it. For example, how a father talks to his own child is different than how the father talks to the neighbor's child, which is different than how the father talks to the mother, which is different than how the father talks to the neighbor's wife, and that's even different than how the father talks to the policeman. You gotta learn a lot of rules to grow up and be a functional member of a family and community. And the idea of, can you teach this to a child, a youngster? They can't read, they're going to go to school. No, they're kids. So the most important insight is that a child between the age of 2 and 7 is observing the community. So it's important for us to all recognize that around children, we really must be behaving at our best and highest level because we are now programming the future of that that child. The problem is this: when we grow up, 95% of our life is coming from the programs that we downloaded starting even before we were born through age 7. And these kids, when they grow up, are going to be the world that we're moving into. These kids are our future. So it really is incumbent upon us to recognize this. We should be helping them with the best behavior. We must be on our best behavior. Because they are copying our behavior between ages 2 and 7 especially. And therefore, if we want the future to be better, then we have to be better people as parents, as community, as family. We have to be the models that we want these kids to be because they're watching us, they're recording us, and they'll become us.

Do you know that the law of attraction is always working? It's like the law of gravity. If I let this go, it's going to go down. It's never going to go back up, it's going to go down. That is the law of gravity. Anything heavier than earth is attracted towards the center of the world. Well, the law of attraction's always working. Now, how does it work? Well, I use a diagram to explain the mind. Now let this circle represent your mind. And let this little circle here represent your body. I want you to think of this for a moment. Your body is a molecular structure. This is a mass of energy in a very high speed of vibration. If you looked at your body through a microscope, you'd see that energy dancing right before your eyes. And here's something that'll keep you thinking for the next 20 years. When you move out of it, the body does not stop moving. If you go to a funeral parlor and pick up the remains and look at it, you will see get moving? And if it wasn't moving, how would it ever change to dust? You move into your body and you will move up. And it's how you use your mind that's going to dictate the vibration you're in. Now stay with me. You have an imaginary line right across here, and that separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind. Now the subconscious mind has been programmed. When you were a little baby, this is the way it was. You were just like this, subconscious mind wide open, and everything that was going on around it went right in there. And all the energy that went in there when you were just a little baby formed something called a paradigm. Now, a paradigm is information. It's a multitude of habits. You are the product of your product of your environment, but prior to that, you were the product of a genetic strain that goes back for generations. Now I'm going to say that the paradigm is X-type energy. Now you've got the ability here on a conscious level to think, and you can think anything you want to think. And as you think, you build ideas. There's a power that's flowing into your consciousness. It never stops. It flows to and through you. You can actually photograph this power leaving you. It flows to and through you. Now, as it flows in, you will start thinking, and you'll probably think X-type thoughts. Therefore, you're going to be in an X-type vibration, and that will produce X-type results. Now, it's the results you want to change, and to change the results, you're going to have to change what you attract. You see, the thoughts that you think control the vibration that you're in. Vibration is nothing but an idea. It's a law of the universe. Everything vibrates, nothing rests. We live in an ocean of motion. And it's the thoughts that you're thinking that you impress upon your subconscious mind that control the vibration the body's in, and that dictates how you act, but it also dictates what you attract. You attract energy that's in harmony with you. You attract people that are in harmony with you. You see, everything operates on frequencies. There's an infinite number of frequencies, but you and I operate on a frequency just like a radio station does. And the only music you can attract is the music that is tuned into the vibration you're in. Now, it's the paradigm that has been controlling the vibration. You can change your thinking, but that doesn't do anything. You got to change the paradigm. And if you don't change the paradigm, nothing happens. Now, talking about paradigms is another subject. We'll do that at another time. But it's the thoughts that you think that control the vibration you're in, and that dictates what you attract. So if you keep attracting what you don't want, understand this: it's the paradigm that's causing the problem. You can think a Y-type thought, which is totally different than the X-type conditioning. It isn't going to go anywhere, because when you go to get emotionally involved— and this is the emotional mind— when you go to get emotionally involved with that Y-type thought, the paradigm will kick it out. You know why? It's so uncomfortable. That's stepping out of the box. That's doing things different, and we don't like to do things different. Because it causes a lot of discomfort. But understand this: the paradigm and the thinking control the vibration you're in, and the vibration you're in is going to dictate what you attract. People that are in a poverty consciousness will continue to attract lack and limitation. It has nothing to do with this, what's going on here. This is your educated mind, and you could gather all kinds of information. Have you ever wondered why why some people have such an educated mind. They have degrees coming right off the end of their business card, but it doesn't show up in their results. Why? Paradigm. The law of attraction. You've got to change this. You've got to change the vibration you're in, and your whole world changes. Listen, in 1961, a man gave me this book, and he said to exactly what I tell you. He was giving me Y-type ideas. It caused an enormous amount of discomfort, but I did exactly what he said. And you know something? My income went from $4,000 to $175,000 in a year, and then I took it over a million. It took me 9 and a half years to figure out what happened. This is what I'm showing you. Watch this over and over and over again. There's a number of lessons in here. And another lesson, I'm going to show you how to change the paradigm. When you change the paradigm, the change in results is automatic. You know why? You start to attract something new, something different. And what we want to do is program in positive information and eliminate the negative. I'm going to show you how to do that. Law of Attraction. You attract according to the vibration. You're in. This thing we live in is a molecular structure. Your body is a mass of energy. Do you know if you put your body in front of an infrared television camera in a completely dark room, your whole being would be nothing but a glistening, radiating, gleaming form? Feeling is conscious awareness of the vibration we're in. When we don't feel good, we're in a negative vibration. You want to feel good? Move into a positive vibration. Stop and think of what you're grateful for. But understand this: you will never attract to you wealth, happiness, health until you get the paradigm, get you on that frequency.

As promised, I checked the news this morning so that you don't have to to do it, and I didn't find anything extraordinary. But as I was reading, I got inspired to share with you the first— although it's not extraordinary— to share with you the first news item today as a spiritual practice. And for this reason, I brought this device. The good thing about it, it saves trees which otherwise would be used for newsprint. So what I'll share with you is a very brief news item which was at the top. If I read it to you in the normal way, it would take 30 seconds to read. But I'll read it to you in a different way so that it can become a spiritual practice. Listening to it can become a spiritual practice. And that is with lots of spaces between the words. And the spaces between the words and sentences, while they happen, I'd ask you, as part of your spiritual practice, to pay attention to the silence in this room. Because the silence in this room is ultimately, one could say, what makes the sounds possible. If there were not silence in this room, there could be no sounds. And as you know, I mentioned yesterday, and you probably know it already, both conceptually and from your own experience, that when you pay attention to external silence, immediately there's inner stillness. So that's one way of accessing inner stillness, is to notice when it's there, to notice external silence around you. Once you are able to connect with inner stillness, you no longer need silent conditions around you, although you might welcome them when you encounter them. It's lovely. But you could be still in the midst of traffic and a shopping mall and a noisy restaurant, because most restaurants these days are noisy. I don't know if it's the same here. It's hard to find a restaurant without loud music because people who are identified with the mental noise actually become very uncomfortable with silence.

Ooh.

And so you have in some places in North America Elevators, some of them even have music playing, and some elevators not only have music, they have a TV screen too. So while you're ascending or descending, you're not condemned to having to suffer this dreadful silence for a few seconds. You can continue to scatter your mind by watching the screen and continue in your state of habitual hypnosis. So, to be able to listen to something and then be aware of that dimension, the underlying dimension, ultimately, of course, it's consciousness, the formless dimension, so that you don't get totally drawn into, hypnotized by the world, the mind. And that By doing that, you bring sanity into this world. Now, the news item I'm going to read is— it could be regarded as funny, it could be regarded as potentially terribly, terribly serious. It's a mixture. But no matter what perspective you have on it, whether it's funny or potentially terribly, terribly serious, it is important that you connect with the transcendent dimension. Otherwise, you contribute to the lostness, if that's a word, the lostness of the world. The world is lost. Humans are lost, lost in their minds, lost in crazy, compulsive, habitual mind patterns, collective mind patterns. So even if it's serious, it's very important to be aware of the transcendent dimension. And even if it affected you, it's particularly important to be connected with that, and then you no longer You become free of fear by being connected to the stillness within, which is more than that. We just— it's one of the words we can use to talk about it. So be as interested in the words that I read, be as interested in the silence, noticing, listening to, being aware of the silence in this room, which ultimately is the stillness within you, because only with the stillness within you can you be aware of outer silence. So be as interested in, so to speak, it's not the right word because silence is not interesting, It's deeper than interesting. Only things that you can dissect and think about are interesting. So the news item may be interesting, the underlying silence is not interesting. There's a vast depth to it, but it's as uninteresting as the most spectacular sunrise or sunset. You go, "Wow." But nobody says, "Oh, that's such an interesting sunset. Let's think about it. What can be so interesting, this sunset, isn't it?" No, you don't, because when you respond to beauty, some vast beauty out in nature, you don't approach it with a thinking mind. Because the moment when you really are overwhelmed by some grand spectacle in nature, your mind stops and awareness remains and you go, "Ah." In the past, if you looked at it, people have perceived themselves as victims of everything around them, victims of circumstances.

And then we go, "Oh, I'm sorry, life did not give me those wonderful things that other people have." And the simple reality is, no, no. If you haven't issue, it's not the outside. This is what we've always— oh, universe, give me something. We now know that our issues are internal. It's our own subconscious beliefs that we've been programmed with of disempowerment. Like when a child is growing up and getting its programs, just think of what things parents say. Oh, you don't deserve this. Who do you think you are? I mean, the parents didn't mean that for your whole life. They just— they were trying to, you know, goad you, you know, needle you to make a change. So they would say these things. 95% of our life comes from those programs. So if you have disempowering beliefs about who you think you are because you got them from other people, that's how you know who you are. These disempowering beliefs play 95% of the day in an average person's life. So I say, yeah, well, my wishes and desires of I want success, I want great relationships. I want all these wonderful things. I want health. I go, well, that's conscious mind, because conscious mind's creative. But as science reveals, only 5% of the day are we operating from our own personal wishes and desires. 95% of the day we operate from the programs that we got in the first 7 years. And if those programs, which psychologists have told us 70% are negative and disempowering and self-sabotaging, I say, Good. Apply these 95% of the day in your life and you realize why your life is a struggle. It's not a struggle because the universe is not providing. It's a struggle because your own consciousness is not accepting. And this is where we have to change. And so getting control of your mind, taking charge of your consciousness is a way of overcoming those limitations. There are many different ways to, to take this control back in your life. And one of them is the ability to, like in yoga, for example, to be the master of your mind and not let it run the monkey mind. Let it run. No, I want this.

I don't—

don't let this other one go.

William James from Harvard said, believe and your belief will create the fact. All things are possible if you believe. Well, Well, you know, I studied for a long time. I started to study this book, Think and Grow Rich, and he talks about belief in here. He says you're not ready for what you want until you believe you can get it. I found that the only two sources of reference we could go to to find out anything about ourself is science and religion. They all say you've got to believe. So I kept figuring out, how do you, how do you believe? How do you change How do you change a belief? Interesting subject, because I'm going to tell you something. Your results are nothing but the manifestation of your belief system. Well, our belief system, now listen carefully, is based upon our evaluation of something. And frequently when we reevaluate a situation, our belief about that situation will change. Let me repeat that. Symptom is based upon our evaluation of something. Frequently, if we reevaluate a situation, our belief about it will change. I began reevaluating who I was. I started to study. I never stopped studying. And I found as I reevaluated, I had a much higher opinion of myself. I found out things about me that I would have never believed if you had told me. The power that's locked up within us, marvelous system we've got. Do you know the blood circulates through your veins every 33 seconds through hundreds of miles of passageway? Bang, just like that, colors all the food in and all the garbage out. Stop and think of the central nervous system. It's the most complex electrical system in the world, and you've got it. Think of your brain, an electronic switching station. Like that, you can change the vibration of yourself and everything around you. We have awesome powers, and it's all based on what you believe about you. For some incredible Eckhart Tolle motivation, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it.

Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

To take your responsibility for— what is it that you can take responsibility for primarily? It's taking responsibility for your state of consciousness, which determines what kind of world you create.