E118: You Are Not Your Mind: The Journey Back to Self

Michael Singer:  Jai guru dev, jai masters. A very fascinating spiritual journey to take is to understand once and for all who you really are and how it got this way for once in your life. People won’t tell you. They coach you to succeed at what you’re doing and how to make money and how to attract friends and influence people.

It’s all down here. It’s all assuming that you are this human that is struggling and suffering to be okay. Well let’s start with who you are, but in order to start with who you are because you’re a very great being. I don’t know how to impress it upon you. Every single one of you, nothing you ever did will ever change that.

Nothing you ever do will ever change that. I’m talking about who you are is the highest thing I walked the face of the earth. That’s who you are and you cannot blow it. Nice to know. And who you are you in there? Hi, let’s start. Are you in there? Are you in there? Hi. How do you know you’re in there? Well, wish you heard me.

You see me? Whatever. You’re a conscious being that’s in there. What does that mean? Alright, so let’s start from the beginning. And this is things that the great yogis have experienced. This is what Enlightenment is. This is what the great ones have all taught. Every single one of them, every religion, every tradition.

The ones who really merged in the beginning. There was something, if you wanna give it a name, God, I don’t care. I don’t wanna give it a name because that’s mine. One of the very Hasidic rabbis once told me that he was taught that the ancient and Judaism is very ancient religion that the ancient ones taught.

Don’t give a name to God. And when they wrote, they would write GD, they wouldn’t even assume they had any idea. When you write a word, it represents something. So you’ve just limited God to what you think it represents. Over forget it, go home. Okay. So they’re very beautiful. So in the beginning, it’s funny when.

Moses went up to the, the Mountain Har, Mount Harra, whatever it was, and he was talking to God. God shows up as a burning bush and tells him to go down into Egypt and tell this tremendously powerful Pharaoh to let my people go, to let all the Jewish people go, which is very unlikely, you know, when you’re a warlord and have all the power in the world.

Moses asked him, he said, well, you know, they have lots of gods and goddesses. In Egypt, who should I say, sent me? What’s your name? What did God say? I am. That I am now, you can just pass that over as some interesting little thing in the Bible, in the Old Testament, or you can understand what it’s saying. I am.

That which is, but it’s that. No, no, I am that, which is, there is nothing else. There was nothing before. There will never be anything after. I am just that, which is I am. That I am see the difference as opposed to giving a name or saying I’m this some universal. I, I just, I am that. I am Mayor Baba. I’ll be talking about some of the great ones because that’s the way we know what we know they taught us.

Plus you can have your own experiences. Mayor Baba was fully enlightened. He was a nator. He was as high as they come. His devotees once asked him, he, he was here like a human. He sat in a chair. Baba, who are you? ’cause they felt his power and they saw what was, I said, Baba, who are you? And he said, I was before all else was created.

I will be after all else, falls away. There was never a time I was not, and there will never be a time I am not. In other words, I am that I am. What that means is that’s where we’re gonna start this conversation. Do you understand? God, that’s ridiculous. It just that which always was, well, it was before God.

No. It’s that which always was. It’s that which will always be, it is the essence, the fiber of creation. There was never a time, it was not now the mind, the human mind gotta understand that that’s infinity and eternity. Okay. You know, we, we. Don’t digest that. And you shouldn’t try because if you bring infinity and eternity down into your mind, it’s no longer infinite or eternal.

It’s limited to your thought concepts. It’s limited to a thought. God is not a thought. It’s that which is, okay, fine. So now we have, in the beginning, that’s what Genesis starts. I like it. Alright. In the beginning that’s what was, that’s what is, is there any quality at all? That you can attribute. To that which is and always was.

And the answer is yes. And that is consciousness. What is consciousness? I asked her earlier, are you in there? You said, yes. If I played with you, I would say, how do you know you struck me frustrated. Okay, because I’m in here. How long you been in there? Were you in there yesterday? Are you sure? These are things you know intuitively.

They’re the essence of your being. You can’t prove, prove it, that you’re in there. I’m a scientist. Prove to me you’re in there. I’m making an AI model that seems to talk just like you, just intelligent of you. How do I know? It’s not conscious? It’s not Conscious. Consciousness is that which knows that. It knows that it knows.

It’s that simple. There are objects of consciousness, lots of them. Infinite number. There are objects of consciousness. What is an object of consciousness? Something you’re conscious of? Are you conscious of your hand? Do you know it’s there if I cut it off? Well, you know, it’s not there. Conscious did not change this thing called awareness.

Is always there. It’s inside of you. It’s there. Were you aware when you were three years old? You were there. You knew you were there. Okay? Babies cry. Why? They’re aware. Mommy, what’s mommy? They’re aware there’s an object called mommy. If you’re not conscious, you’re not there. But guess what? Neither than anything else, if you are not conscious of anything.

There’s nothing there. If you’re not aware of anything, then it’s not there and you’re not there. It takes you to be aware of something. Then I know this is what I’m aware of. I’m, where are my childhood? I’m aware of my mom. Where are my daddy? Where are my husband? Where are my wife? Where are my children?

There are things you’re aware of, are they not? Let’s say I took away those things. You would know they were gone. I’m trying to get you back there. Do you understand that? Because you don’t live back there and it’s hard. If I took away your house, you’d know your house was gone. Who would know? Like you define yourself.

I am so-and-so’s husband. I’m so-and-so’s wife. That’s ridiculous. You just define yourself as something that happened to you. What were you before you met her? So consciousness is what you are. It is your awareness of being everything else is something you are conscious of that all. Objects of consciousness.

Look up at the stars. Can you see them? Forget to see them. Are you aware of them? Awareness and consciousness are the same thing. What is awareness? If you want go as a scientist. If they answer you, they don’t know what they’re talking about. Like they’ll sit there and say, well, you know, there’s these very, very tight compact neurons that are in the brain and you’ve put enough of ’em together, pop, there’s consciousness.

They’re wrong, and they have no evidence, and they have no right to be saying that, and they know it. They just are filling the gap. If you said, prove it, not a chance in the world consciousness. Your awareness of being is that which has always been there when Christ said, my father and I, one, when the Bible says man was created an image of God.

It’s talking about that. That who I am, who you are. We’ll talk about why you don’t experience it later. I just want to get down once and for all consciousness. Is that which is when the burning bush said I am, that I am. It was obviously conscious that it was, that it was. That’s the beginning of all the creation.

You can’t go further back. Consciousness is what is. Very good. So what happened? First of all, when I quote these Steve teachers, these, these yogis, these are enlightened beings. What does it mean to be enlightened? Okay, we got it. Now, what does it mean to be enlightened? Your consciousness right now, I don’t know you, but I know what you’re aware of and I know what you’ve been aware of your whole life.

Each one of you, you are aware of what happened to you. Yes or no. You are aware of what events and experiences happen to you in your life. Who is aware, awareness. Don’t give it a name. Buddhist said There’s no self. We used the word self for the capital S, right? The deep Buddhist teaching is ’cause Buddhist.

There he is merged. There is no self. That’s one of his great lectures. How Buddhist taught, there’s no self. Why to call it the self is to limit it to your thoughts and your thinking. You have to have a mental object. Oh, I’m the self. I’m realized. No, no, none of that. You’re not there yet. Do you understand?

Alright, so basically the great ones did what’s called merge. The word yoga means union merger. My father and I won, not, I got to know the father, not I seen the father. My father and I are one. When Yogananda came to America in 1920s to give a lecture in Boston at the World Religious Conference, he had never spoken in English before.

He’d never give a lecture, right? He had a tur on his head and he said the following things. Christ belongs to the Yogi. Wow. I bet that one are really good and conservative. Boston in 1920. Well, it did. All of a sudden, everyone’s inviting him. He had so much Shakti, he had so much energy. He had so much deep truth.

All right, that he ended up with the SRF whole. He can’t remember with no money, nothing. But he was a great being. A enlightened being. Okay. What does that mean? It means right now, I’m gonna jump back and forth right now if I asked you, what are you conscious of? Do you have a mind? Do you have thoughts? Yes or no?

How do you know? Mm-hmm. Oh, ’cause I’m aware of them. See awareness consciousness, same thing. Are you aware of your thoughts? I’m, then there’s a separation. Your thoughts are not aware of themselves. You are aware of your thoughts. But if I have a thought, it creates another thought. How do you know? But yesterday I had a really, really bad mind day come, I need to go to a, a therapist.

How do you know you had a bed? Blind day? I’m in here and I saw it and I heard a Do you have emotions? Do you feel jealousy, fear, love, need, anxiety, self-consciousness, embarrassment? Yes or no? Yes. How do you know? Oh, oh. ’cause I’m aware of them. See, you’re not them. You’re aware of them. If you’re aware of something.

You’re not to something, you’re what’s aware of it. This is not complicated. This is not, I don’t want you to have a single belief. I have no interest. I believe in God. I don’t believe in God. Words, words, words, thoughts. Alright. It’s like basically, are you aware that you have emotions? Have you ever felt fear?

Have you ever felt love? How do you know? So basically we’re back to, you are in there. You’ve been in there the whole time. You’re just aware of different things. When you look in the mirror now at your body, at what you look like, your face, your body, you see you’re aware of what you see. When you were eight years old, did you ever look in the mirror?

Did you see what was reflected in that mirror? Did it look the same as now, but your same awareness was aware of it? You’ve been under the entire time. You’re just aware of different things. So there’s a difference between the one that’s aware and what it’s aware of. NARS used to call it subject object.

You are the subject. Everything else is an object. It’s an object of your awareness. If I had you and I don’t do seminars or retreats or anything ’cause you wouldn’t wanna come. ’cause if I did, this is all I would talk about because until you understand who you are. You think you’re the object that you’re looking at, you think you’re your thoughts.

If your thought says, I don’t know. I don’t know if I believe him. I don’t like what he’s saying. You get up and walk out. You honestly listen to what your mind had to say. Who did you did me that I’m talking about? Can’t hear that they’re in there. They’re busy being what they’re looking at. I don’t like her.

I met her before. I don’t like her. And somebody says, do you like her? No, I don’t like her. You are in there noticing that when your consciousness became aware of her existence, you didn’t like what she said or you didn’t like what she was wearing. Has nothing to do with who you are. I’m the person that doesn’t like.

Really? Is that who you are? What were you before you met her? You are in there. You are always in there. You have always been in there. That’s the reality consciousness and I haven’t tied you your consciousness to the consciousness. Alright, we’ll do that. I’m gonna give you a clue. They’re the same. If I take a drop of water in an eye dropper out of the ocean, am I holding a drop of water?

Am I holding the ocean? What happens if I drop it back in, find it? Do you hear me? It is the same thing. The fact that you separated part of it is still the ocean. That’s what it is, is the ocean. So your a consciousness that is in there and it like people talk about work on yourself effort. It’s hard to meditate, you know, meditate 10 hours a day, do it.

Okay. Go ahead, do it. It’s very healthy. It’s very good. You’ll have great states, but you’ll come back. How I’ll come back. ’cause I’ve heard you. Oh, I went to this retreat and I go, don’t you dare mean you’re not supposed to do this stuff. You hear me? I’m just trying to teach you. At the deepest level, people come and say, I went to this retreat.

We meditated six hours a day. I went so deep, it was unbelievable. Everything merged. I went into the great light. Who’s talking? Why is this past tense? It’s an experience your consciousness had. You’re not describing yourself. You’re describing an experience that got imprinted on your mind because you had that experience and now you held onto it and you’re telling everybody about it.

Who you in there now you got addicted to what you saw. You got addicted to what you experienced. That’s what a human being is. God addicted to what it experienced. And guess who comes very close to defining it that way. Psychology man is the sum of his learned experiences. Like I said, I could lecture on that forever.

It is true that the sum of your learned experiences are what are going on in your mind and your emotions. You did not make them up. If I say I don’t like her. I’ve obviously met her before and I had an impression made on my mind and I held onto it. It’s still in my mind. The white lines on the road are not still in my mind.

The trees I drove by are still in my mind. I was conscious of them, but I didn’t hold onto them. So your mind is a place that you can hold on to experiences you’ve had. Sometimes you wish it wasn’t, don’t you? Have you held on to bad experiences that come back and haunt you for how long your whole life, Freud said so, and by the way, it’s true, but they used to say with Freud, right?

I like Freud. Go in, lay down on his couch. I’ll tell you the first thing I say, and your mother. Why? Because you’re young and you’re having experiences that you are not used to. You can’t handle them. They don’t feel good. They do feel good. And you own them. What do you mean? I own them? You. The consciousness that is experiencing them uses what’s called willpower.

A search willpower to hold on in the mind. You’re not your mind, but you’re aware of your mind and your mind can store experiences. You know that I’ve election on this numerous times. There’s a vast difference between what’s called your memory and when a yoga, we call some scars. Impressions, blockages.

Suppressions. Repressions, sorry. What’s a suppression? Something that happened that you stored in your mind? How about that? I bet you they don’t have a better definition. Well, it’s a suppression or repression or denial events that you experienced doing there. If you didn’t experience it, not in there, you experienced it.

And for whatever reason, which we’ll talk about later, it had some impact on your consciousness that didn’t like it. That wasn’t comfortable with it, that couldn’t handle it. What does handling mean? It’s, it’s like the white lies. It’s like the tree. It happened. It came and went. Most experienced in your life came and went, didn’t they?

You didn’t realize that, but some of ’em didn’t. And what did you do with those? You stored them in your mind, just like you would store them in a suitcase or somewhere. Your mind is a place you can store things. Can’t you? And if it’s just pure memory, it’s beautiful. It’s, it is an aspect of mine that is capable of storing and retrieving experiences, but they’re not charged.

Every experience is the same. I went to school in the fifth grade and I went into eighth grade. I go, you have a memory. My teacher was so and so, but if my teacher failed me when I thought I should pass, my teacher was serious. So it wasn’t just an experience you had, it was an experience you were not comfortable with.

It couldn’t handle it purely. Therefore, you resisted it and you stored it. Where in your mind, now you understand you have this storage area in your mind that you, the consciousness we’re gonna talk about. This is deep. Like what is willpower? I’m gonna tell you during this talk, these are things you don’t learn.

You know them. Because you are them. You don’t have to learn that. You’re conscious. You’re conscious. You do not have to learn. That you have will. You know you have will they tell you you don’t have will? Of course you have will. You can hold the thought, can’t you? You can push it away, can’t you? You can do all kinds of things in there.

You have willpower. We’ll discuss shortly what willpower is, where it comes from, and why you use it the way you do. We’ll start with what’s really going on. Who are you really? And then why is it like this? Okay, we’re just going back and forth. So you’re, the conscious being is having these experiences and some experiences.

You suppress, you hold onto. You do it all the time. You do it. Don’t just think of this as Freud’s couch. You do every minute of your life. A driver in front of you isn’t driving the way you want. It makes an impression not. Like every other driver, this is the one that you tell people about. This is the one, I’m never driving that road ever again.

This is the one. If you see a car that looks like that, even in Germany, I ain’t following that guy. You store the thing. This meaningless thing, alright? You couldn’t handle it, so you stored it inside. This suitcase called your personal mind. What is mine? Mine can think of galaxies. Mine can think of the universe.

Mine can do anything, can’t it? Your mind can do anything. But no. You did this and you started storing these very personal events. Why were they personal? You made them personal. This is a car driving down the road. But it’s not driving the way you want it to. Nice blinker, buddy. So you stored an impression inside the mine, and so now you use this tremendous mine that can do anything or go anywheres, but it doesn’t do anything to go anywheres.

It stores the stuff that you didn’t like and also the stuff you did like, but I don’t even bother doing that. It’s called positive negatives from scars. I always talk about the negative ones. Why I am telling you it is 10,000 to one. The negative ones you held in there versus the positive ones. You have not had so many experiences in your life that blew you away so much.

Oh my God, it was so beautiful versus, well, nice blink about it. When see, driving. It’s too hot. I don’t, oh my God. I draw something in my pants. Oh my God, I’m getting old. That’s my first gray hair. Do you understand? It ain’t even close. So have fun with your positive ones ’cause you don’t have enough of them.

Alright. A positive swim score or something that’s so positive. You, and by the way, you ruin your positive experiences. Why? ’cause you want them to happen again and you get disappointed if they don’t go out on a date and I blow you away. My God. That’s my soulmate. He or she’s Exactly. I’ve dreamt of all the time in my life since my childhood.

This is my prince or princess, whatever it is. Right? Good. Don’t go back on another date ’cause you have just stored in your mind. It wasn’t just an experience. You had have the experience by all means, but you didn’t just have it. You stored it and said, I wanna have it again. You wanna have one again? The tree that you drove by the bri.

No, no, that one. It’s not happening anymore. It doesn’t even exist anymore. It came and it went, but not in you. So you stored it inside and now when you go back out, you’re gonna expect the same thing to happen. I don’t wanna, I hope we not me, you’re going back out with one, I’m neurotic trying to behave a way that you liked me and I haven’t figured out what that is.

Right? And you’re neurotic as you want me to be. The same has the same experience that you had before. Otherwise there’s this word called I got disappointed. What does disappointed mean? You’ve walked into the situation having appointed what it’s supposed to be like. It’s not gonna be like that. It can’t be like that.

Everybody’s different. Every minute’s different. Every experience is different. So you went in the first time you had this date, it was just wonderful. And you pick somebody up and they say to you, can I be comfortable with you? I again, I love you right away. Love it for a second. Yeah. Okay. I’m gonna smoke in the car.

You smoke. Oh my God. I’m taking you home. Good luck guys. You understand that? So that’s what your positive experiences are like. They don’t last so long, do they? Because it can’t happen again. Nothing happens again. It’s all new. The whole universe recreates itself. Every Adam is in a different place all the time and everybody’s psyche.

If you, the some of your learned experiences, so is she, that means that between the 24 hours that you went out with her, she’s a different person ’cause she had more experiences. Like she really, really liked you. She acted like she really, really liked you, but during the 24 hours she met somebody she liked more.

You don’t wanna go back out with her. Okay. So that’s the difference between memory, which just a clear experience that can be brought back willfully or not. What we call a samskara, an impression that you stored. It didn’t happen by itself. You stored it in your mind By resisting it, clinging to it, you made it an object.

’cause your mind can create objects. It does it during dreams all the time. ’cause you stored that one and you’ve done this throughout your life. And that’s why psychology says man is a sum of learned experiences. What they’re really saying is what’s going on in your mind? And your emotions are the summary of your learned experiences, and they’re absolutely right.

You’re not just making this stuff up if you like somebody, ’cause you saw a movie once that looked like them. There’s a reason. It’s not just a random thing. Okay? It’s the summary of your learned experiences. Okay, that’s wonderful. But they’re wrong. You are not the summing learned experiences. You are the consciousness that’s aware that you stored the summing learned experiences inside your head, and you’re aware that they come back.

But instead of being interested in who’s aware of all this stuff I stored in there, you’re trying to figure out what you can do to get people to behave. So it feels good in there. Did you hear that part? Okay. I almost talked about why it’s the way it is. You now understand that’s what a human being is.

Someone consciousness. That has will, has the power of will and when experiences are happening, it the reason, we’ll talk about it a little bit. It’s hard. It accepted some didn’t accept others. It likes some, didn’t like others. Wow. That’s really interesting. Okay. It’s just aware of it. It’s just like a camera doesn’t care what’s taking a picture of.

Go take your cell phone and take a bunch of pictures. The camera don’t care. Oh, that’s disgusting. The camera didn’t say that. Oh, that’s beautiful. The camera didn’t say that. It’s just your mind is experiencing the reality of the experiences outside. It’s you in there. They can’t handle it as doing stuff with it.

And so what we tend to do is to store it. You store it in the mind, and the mind becomes full of all this stuff. That’s what personal is. Your mind is not personal. People don’t like when I say that. Your mind is not personal. You store it stuff and label it personal. I don’t like that. I like that. I don’t like that color.

What’s that all about? Colors. Color. It’s for the electromagnetic spectrum. Atoms are atoms. The world is what it is. It’s nothing. It’s everything. It is just something you experience. No, it’s not, and I better not experience that. Again. You say that again. I’m never gonna go. That’s really beautiful. So you stored this stuff in there, made this tiny little package inside your mind of the stuff that you didn’t like or did like and might tell you most of it you didn’t like, and you stored that in there.

And now every single event that takes place comes in and has to pass through that package so you, in their consciousness, no longer see what’s actually happening. You see it after it passes the filter of the garbage that you stored inside your mind. And they don’t like when I use their garbage. He, he and I do it all the time.

Okay. I call it your stuff. No, it’s important. It is not what you call important are the events that happened to you that you couldn’t handle. They either were too good or too bad, so you stored them. It’s the garbage that you are unable to handle. A great being doesn’t have that. Now, there are many levels of gurus and many levels of what are called enlighten.

Ram Krishna was one of the greatest beings that ever walked the face of the earth. I love, that’s why the pictures hang up here. I respect something worthy of being respecting. He made a statement and I was actually thinking about it today and just blew me away. I’ll never forget that he said that. He said the purified mind.

It’s no different than the self. Now, that’s high stuff. It’s not something you can think about, but what does it mean? It means if you don’t have that stuff in there. The mind Buddhists call it empty mind. The mind is not full of it. The mind is empty, but the mind is empty. Consciousness is not focusing on any particular thing.

It’s just completely open. It’s, it’s God, it’s Adam and Eve before they fell from the garden. It’s just experiencing everything exactly the same, even though it has different feelings and feels different, it comes and it goes. It doesn’t get stored in there, but you store something in there. All of a sudden, as the world comes in, it has to pass through what you stored.

Therefore, that’s your personal self. You do not have a personal self. You created blockages in your mind, created a mental image called your ego. You did that. This is how I am. I like this and I don’t like that. How do you know? I’ve never liked this and I like her until she said that. Then I did. That’s who I am and I’m very successful.

I’m a failure. I’m really gonna be good. I’ll never be good. It’s just your ego has made stuff up. It’s something you made up based on your past experiences and it’s very complicated why you’ve had trillions of past experiences and they did not all agree with each other. Do you understand how complicated it is to live in there?

’cause you collected all this junk and then defines yourself as, as something that works in there. That’s your self concept. That’s what psychology calls your self-concept. It’s nothing. It is a made up thing. Your ego is a made up thing. It doesn’t exist. He has made it up in your mind based on these experience that you stored and now your consciousness.

Now we get through the good part. Well, but you said I was consciousness, and consciousness is God, and consciousness is that which was from the beginning, and that means I am God. No, not your ego. Let’s not be saying that. But the consciousness itself is what always was. You know the ocean’s, the ocean, but you don’t experience that.

Why? ’cause the junk that you stored in your mind is so powerful. It’s so specifically aimed at you why they were, your experiences that you couldn’t handle. Therefore you stored them. They became personal. I was standing right next to you when you had a personal experience. It wasn’t personal to me. I couldn’t imagine five years later still talking about it.

I never even thought about it again. Okay, so you made this part of your mind. It’s not your mind. It’s a subset, a tiny subset of what the mind can, it’s like a computer. Can you computer do recipes? Can it do math? Can do ai, can it run accounting? It can run all kinds of stuff. That’s your mine. It can do anything.

And what you did with it is run this program, you loaded it and then never took it out called Igor.

The some of your learned experiences and it keeps playing it over and over again and they’re very charged. ’cause they’re the things that bother you. They’re the things you either want to happen again or don’t want to happen again. And you’ve built this whole thing within this mind. It’s nothing. It’s not even plea.

Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. 1% of your mind. Your mind is open and expansive. So when Robert Krishna says, the purified mind is no different than the self, he’s saying that it is God. That’s why Buddhists talk about God is mind for the capital M. Zen does that right? That means the word God. It’s mind. Well, that’s right.

’cause the purified mind, the empty mind is no different than itself. It’s just energy of wisdom, of experience. There’s no object of consciousness in the mind. Therefore, the consciousness doesn’t get the key word. I teach it all the time. It’s distracted. You get distracted by your mind. We normally were so distracted by our mind that what we mean by distracted mean.

I was distracted before by this, but now I’m distracted by that. I got distracted. You’re distracted all the time, every single second. You’ve never gotten out. Your consciousness is distracted by your mind. If it wasn’t, how well you can struggle and try to fight to not be distracted. That’s what they teach you, and it’s fine.

And I’m telling you. I did it. I do it. Don’t think I’m telling you not to do it. Okay? That’s your spiritual work. The truth of the matter is you stop storing that stuff in there. You don’t have to do anything. ’cause then you’re not getting distracted by yourself, distracted by humanness, distracted by these personal things you stored in there.

You understand that? Oh, I heard you were married before three years ago, and she left you. Yeah. What was that like? It was really interesting. How do you think about her now? I don’t. That’s fine. It’s like anybody else. I didn’t store this in here. I don’t have these problems. But if you do store them and they’re so power packed with your emotions and your.

Everything, they’re going to distract your consciousness. But if it distracts your consciousness and never doesn’t distract your consciousness, you define it as me. ’cause you don’t have the reference of not distracting, distracted. That’s why the astronauts go out into space. I love them. You go into space, they do an extra vehicle, uh, EVA.

Okay. They leave the vehicle. They don’t even have to, they look out the window. But I like the guys who float out there and they’re floating out there. When they come back, they are not the same person that left. They have this thing called the overview effect. I’m sure you’ve heard of it, which means you’re floating out there and you look down at this little beautiful little ball that you’re never saw like that before.

Nor have, you know, maybe 50 people have seen it that way. Alright? And you look at it and you just realize. Everything that ever happened to me happened on there, and it was just, I couldn’t go down there and visit the planet and be okay for a few years. Why is it so hard? It’s a really nice planet, isn’t it?

And they get this overview effect and you never forget it. I, one of the astronauts came and visit me once, uh, Edgar Mitchell. And he, I don’t think he walked on the moon, but he, he flew to the moon in circle and so on, and he had this amazing experience. He let go of everything. He just went and merged. He just, his whole consciousness stopped being Edgar Mitchell and it just merged.

And he started a whole institution called Ions, the Institute of Ntic Sciences. That was he, when he came back, he said, I don’t understand. How can I be the universe? How? How can my consciousness feel like it’s part of the galaxies? That’s what they study there, right? To try and understand the relationship between consciousness and matter.

But that’s all scientific. That’s all fine. Okay? But basically what we’re saying is that you get distracted by the garbage you stored in your mind. Who does you you in there high in there. That’s why you don’t know who you are. Because you’re always paying attention to what you’re looking at instead of paying attention to who’s looking, did anybody get that?

You are the awareness. It’s called witness consciousness, that actually transcendent witness consciousness. You are the awareness that’s aware of what you’re looking at, but you’re not because you’re addicted to what you’re looking at and you never get out. Most people never, ever get a distance from what they’re looking at, why I’m looking at it.

It’s not comfortable. I’m insecure, I’m scared, and so on, so I’m gonna go outside, which means go further away. First you went down out of consciousness of self, down into what you’re looking at and your mind and emotions. Now you go out into the world as a way out there. You go out into the world and attempt to manipulate every minute of every day of your life to make things be a way that make you feel better inside.

You want things to be the way you want, don’t you? You don’t want things to be though you don’t want. Do you have sincere you about that? Real sincere about it. I know now I’ve devoted my life to that. To what? Getting things the way I want. Meeting a person that will treat me the way I wanna be treated.

Having a job that turns me on, making the money that will let me travel and do what I want do. I am serious about getting what I want. And by the way, I don’t wanna have a marriage like I had last time. I don’t ever wanna meet anybody that treats me that way. And I don’t wanna have a college professor that gave me a B when I deserved an a.

You cue the button and you live there. You don’t live in self. You don’t live in the seat of consciousness. You’re always there, or you wouldn’t know this was going on, but you are so addicted and distracted by what’s going on in your mind and emotions that you’ve been sucked into them. And then they was, I think the funniest part.

Your mind’s screwed up. You know, it is. You’re insecure, you’re fear this, that and the other thing, right? You go to that very sick. Broken mind and say, oh, I don’t feel good. I’m insecure, I’m afraid. People reject me. I don’t feel accepted. I don’t feel this right. I’m not sure what I should do, and so on. Oh, sick, broken mind.

Tell me what I should do. And don’t tell me you don’t do that. Holy mackerel. You’re gonna get a very interesting answer. You know what? It won’t tell you, let go of me and hang on the self. ’cause it’s really nice up there, eh? Don’t tell you that. It tells you. Find somebody else. Maybe the relationship. I know I, I, I made a commitment to the relationship, but I only have one life.

And am I really, I think I can have a nicer relationship and it’s okay if I leave. Wow. I love it, mazeltov. Congratulations. I am my mind. You understand that you are not your mind. You’re aware of your mind, but you’re addicted to it. Way more addicted than than drugs or alcohol. The real addictions inside.

Once you understand what you, if you get out, I’m telling you, if you get out for 10 seconds, you’ll never be the same ever again. It’s like I’m a fish in water. Do I know I’m in water? Of course not. That’s the medium which I live. I have no frame of reference outside of that. I just jumped, whoa, there’s something else going on.

You’ll never be the same. That’s what’s going on. So basically not impure, nothing you’re doing is making the conscious impure. It’s just a, here a light is shining on something. It’s a beautiful palace that is shining on. Isn’t that beautiful? Right. Okay. The palace breaks, things start falling apart. Did the light break?

That’s how they call it, the light of consciousness. It’s like light. Your consciousness is shining on the object of consciousness, which is your stuff, which is what you built there, but that is so distracting that it never gets out, and that’s so sad. It made me cry. You don’t know who you are. You think you’re that thing you.

So basically you are distracted by your mind so much that I don’t know how to go distracting. ’cause distraction means I was here and that noise distracted me. I was here and had a thought that distracted me. Distraction means I was doing something and then something drew my attention. It drew my conscious away from it.

So I have, I have a DHD. We all have a DHD compared to the self, we never don’t have a DHD. We are constantly distracted on a permanent basis that says, I distracted. But if you’re a yogi, you’re deep meditate. You understand I’m distracted by my mind. But you don’t say that. You say, I am my mind and not even your whole mind.

I am the part of my mind that I built and held together and called me. The far I defined that was so beautiful. So if you are constantly distracted by it, which is the state of humanness, at this point in its evolution, you don’t know you’re distracted by it. And that’s where spirituality comes in. That’s where talk about this comes in at least once in your life.

Understand you are not your mind. You are aware of your mind. You are not your emotions. You’re aware of your emotions. Well, what do I do if somebody left me and my heart hurts real bad. I understand if somebody understands who they are. Being reached a state of understanding who they are. I’m not saying that to be merged, but they understand who they are and then someone talks to them like that.

Yeah, but I, you say, I’m not my emotional, you don’t understand My heart’s killing me ever since she said that to me. And so she left me, what do I do about this? See, that person’s more interested in stopping what they’re looking at from being, what they’re looking at than they are knowing who’s looking the spiritual path is when the only thing you care about is self-realization.

How to call it self-realization, realizing who’s back to looking. But when that heart hurts or that mind’s driving you crazy, you ain’t back to looking. You’re trying to figure out what I can do to make this stop or to get what I want. And when that becomes who you are and that’s what your ego is, you find yourself as that, as those patterns, then you’re lost and you will suffer.

Why do you suffer? You suffer because like, can we answer that question? Do I even have to answer that question? If you have within your ego, within this part of your mind, there’s this little sub-routine that you programmed in there by building from the parts that you couldn’t handle, right? You built this thing that has desires and hopes and dreams and preferences and dislikes and likes you all this stuff, right?

You are going to suffer. Why are you being so mean? Why are you telling me that there’s supposed to be spiritual discussion? It is. It’s based on you shouldn’t know the truth, and truth is that you’re free. Why will you suffer? It is not gonna be the way you want. Why? It can’t be the way everybody wants.

’cause everybody wants it to be different. You want it to rain tomorrow, you don’t. There’s no way in the world, and it can be the way everybody wants it to be. Well, it shouldn’t be. It should be the way I want it to be. Well, we got people like that out there. Call it megalomaniacs. I think they can just, the whole world should be the way they want it.

You wait and see what happens. When you start understanding yin and yang, it may look one way. If you push something down, there’s something on the other side coming up, period. It’s the nature of all things. They learning how to killing himself called a lot of trouble in between. But you know, there’s no win in saying, my way is the way it should be.

How should it be? First of all, it’s not a should. That’s ego, right? How is it? What would it be like? I cry. Talk about it. What would it be like if I was in harmony with what is, instead of trying to make what is being harmony with me, it’s called the Dao, the Dharma. That is what Lao Sue wrote about in the Dao.

It’s so beautiful. What is the Dao The way? The way it actually is, the way it would be if you were not trying to make it the way your combination of collection of thoughts that you put together. I understand that, but that’s how everybody lives. I started telling you that if you get out even a little bit and you see that’s how everybody’s living, you don’t get angry.

You don’t get mad, you just have compassion. You understand? I understand. It’s It’s tough, isn’t it? Is it tough in there? Answer me. It’s tough in there. Even if you get what you want, you’re afraid of losing it. Have somebody tell you, oh my God, they was a beautiful person I ever met. Like you walk on water, don’t go out with them again.

’cause you be nervous. What was I wearing? What should I do? How should I say it? What did I say to me? Yes or no? It’s a mess. And it’s gonna be a mess until you learn to get out. Can you get out? I said we’re running out time. We’ll need a few minutes to talk about now you understand what’s going on. Alright?

And I, I didn’t spend a lot of time with it. What is God consciousness? What are you consciousness? Ottman. Ottman. Same. Father, I’ve never discussed this with you, father, son, holy Spirit. Imagine the sun in the sky shining. It’s been shining for billions of years. There. That’s the father. That’s the cause of all light, cause of everything.

But the sun, even though it’s out there, emanates raves, doesn’t it? It stays out there, but it’s Ray come down and hit things. Okay? That’s the father, the son, SON, that would emanates from the father. It emanates there and then it hits objects. What happens when it hits objects? They get warm. Stay illumined.

It actually does something. When you feel Shakti, when you feel spirit inside, that’s what you’re feeling. The radiance from God radiating out and you feel its experience is that subtle heat, that subtle energy, that is what Father Son Holy Ghost is. Isn’t that beautiful? So when Christ said, my father and I are one, that’s exactly right, he said, as I sit by the throne of my father.

A throne is not a seat. It’s a state of consciousness. As I sit as a throne of my father, so you shall sit by my throne, and these things, which I do, should do these and even greater things. That is the truth. You are no different. Consciousness is consciousness. It’s all God. The trouble is God.

Consciousness, which is the fabric of the universe, is staring at your mind. That helped me be very devotional when I realized, oh God, I’m sorry. That’s what you’re looking at. I can do better than that. Alright. And the consciousness of consciousness is staring at your mind. And it got lost, didn’t it? It doesn’t even know who it is.

It thinks it’s the mind. It thinks it’s your ego. You think of your ego, you think of your emotions, you think of your body. No, this is light shining on that. And so eventually you wake up. And you realize, oh, I am wasting my life trying to get what I want. When you die, does it go with you? The Pharaohs tried, didn’t they?

They buried ’em inside the pyramids. People thousand years later went and stole it all. Alright, when you die, nothing goes, doesn’t go with you. The whole earth plane stays. Adam, stay great. You wasted your life. I’m sorry, but I succeeded in what? In relatively getting what I want all the time. No, not all the time.

But I had a nice family relationship and most of my kids grew up good. One of them was ended up on drugs and that didn’t work out well, but I handled it like. You’re suffering, you’re, you’re down there. What happened? What is supposed to happen? What is the meaning of your life? I say it this way, that you go back up with less than you came down with not more of this stuff clouding and pulling you down.

And the really highest is that while you are alive, you learn. To liberate your consciousness. It’s called, if I’m a liberated being, you’re no longer staring at this junk that you patterned of your personal self. You still have it all. The masters say that there has to be a little veil, otherwise you couldn’t interact down here.

But it’s not like a strong ego. Right? And I’ve met beings and you know, not, I’m talking about the highest. I’ve met some pretty high beings, but just very high beings that are ride in a car with ’em. And the energy starts getting weird in the car. ’cause they have a lot of energy. Right? Ready?

Bam. It’s flying down. I couldn’t even see straight two breaths. All it took was to turn it back around and go back into the high state. That’s who you are. That’s how hard it is to be, okay? How hard it’s to be. Okay. Stop not being okay. Stop defining yourself as not okay, which is what you do all the time.

I’m not good enough and didn’t really like me and I didn’t get what I wanted. Look what you’re doing. You’re buying into your garbage. So liberation, freedom. And ultimately merge with God. The great ones merged back. They merged back. Mayor Baba said, my consciousness was like a drop of water staring at me.

That drop fell into the ocean. Find it. My father and I are one. Merge. That’s who you are. So you go virtual life wherever you want. Nice relationship, this, that, and money. That doesn’t mean you don’t do that. Doesn’t mean you don’t work here. But that ain’t what your life’s about. Now that you hope, understand what I’ve talked about, you’re a very great being.

You’re the highest thing ever walked the face of the earth. And when you do that, as you step back and start to feel the power, you will feel the power pulling you up from inside instead of your garbage pulling you down from inside. That’s what happens. That energy flows off of you. You don’t have to do anything.

It’s healing, it’s love. It’s Shakti. It changes people. Only a fool would sit there and say, I’m gonna go out there and change people. Well, no, then that’s your spiritual ego. A great being does not do anything. It does itself. It has, uh. I like talking to you guys. Trouble is that I’ve run out time ’cause a lot more I like to tell you all right, that there’s a zen book, Zen uh, carvings called the docs turning pictures.

All. They’re very symbolic, but they start at the beginning and they show you lost and how you find it back. But I love is at the end in number 10, it says in the end he returns. To the marketplace, Gordon Hand, barefoot, and without use of any mystical powers, he leads all in the way of the Buddha. It just emanates off.

You are a very great being. Look at me. I know your ego won’t tell you that. Of course it won’t. It’s just some of your learned experiences. It’s not who you are. Next time you have a problem, next time your heart hurts. I beg you for one second, ask, how do you know? Instead of complaining about it, how do you know your heart hurts?

And eventually you’ll get, ’cause I’m in here and I’m experiencing it. Oh, not mistake. ’cause that’s who you are. And what you do is you learn how to handle the different situation in your life. ’cause if you can handle them, you don’t have to store them. If you can’t handle ’em, you’re gonna store them. Even little ones.

Read my latest book, Living Untethered. It lays down how to start at the beginning and work your way out of yourself. Okay. Anyways, I hope we’ve communicated. We see we went from the highest to the lowest and back up. That’s quite a journey for an hour. Congratulations.

Tami Simon: You’ve been listening to the Michael Singer podcast, produced by Sounds True in partnership with Shanti Publications. For more information on Michael’s body of work and all back episodes, please join us@michaelsingerpodcast.com. Thanks so much for listening. Sounds true. Waking up the World.