That's the highest technique because then the energy will go up and never go down, right? It just continuously flows up. Sometimes it's stronger than others, of course, but it's always feeding you and it will take care of itself. The Shakti always wants to go up and she will push out of her way whatever's in her way. The problem is we push back. We don't want to experience the garbage we stored inside of ourselves.
But as far as techniques, pranayama, breathing, this, that, they're all wonderful. If I see anybody doing anything on a willful basis to not be listening to this garbage they stored inside themselves, I honor them and I respect them and I do anything I can to support the technique that person's doing.
TS: Well, one of the things I want to highlight that you just said that I also picked up from the course with Sounds True is that you believe that surrendering is actually more powerful even than disciplined spiritual practices—that surrender is the most powerful practice. Is that true? Because that really got my attention, as someone who's done months and months and months of meditation retreats myself. I've thought, "Here's someone saying life itself, surrendering to life is an even more powerful practice."
MS: It is. It is the highest state. When it's all said and done and you get to that edge where you feel energy pulling you in and you're approaching the high states, there's only one thing that's going to take you across and that's surrender. It's just the complete letting go of your will, of your concepts, of your views, of your practices, everything. It's just a melting into the absolute, melting into the higher. So that is, in the end, the highest state and everyone has taught that: Christ taught that, Buddha that that. They've all taught that is you need to just completely let go of yourself. Christ said you must die to be reborn. They're all the same teachings.
The question is, what you asked is, OK, now, I'm not there. I'm not at that edge to fall in, right? Are you saying to me—I'm repeating the question you asked me. Are you saying to me, "Michael, that basically from the beginning even, that surrender is the highest technique?" And it is. It is. The problem is you're going to require those discipline techniques in order to surrender.
If you're not meditating, if you're not doing the mantra, if you're not doing different things that keep you centered, then what's going to happen is somebody's going to say something, somebody's going to do something, a driver's going to be slow in front of you when you're in a rush, and all of that noise is going to come up inside and you're going to get lost in it. So the techniques, the discipline techniques are for you to achieve a center that is strong enough so that you can surrender. But surrender is the highest place. Letting go is the highest state. Once you learn to do that, it all takes care of itself, all by itself.
TS: How might someone take a personal inventory or some way of examining, "Oh, these are the places in my life where I'm not surrendered?"
MS: They come up automatically every day of your life. I always tell people, It's kind of nice. OK, you fell in love. You had a good meal. You went to a movie. You're just feeling better, OK? You're feeling somewhat better than you were. I beg you to pay attention to what takes you down, because that's where you're not surrendering.
There are things that take you down, right? You love somebody. You're saying just the right thing, everything. All the sudden, they say one thing, or they blink at the wrong time or they sneeze when they're saying I love you—oh boy, it closes right away, doesn't it?" That is where your work is. In other words, you don't have to find where you're blocked. Your blockages come to you. They are what keep you blocked.
So the question is are you willing to let go? Are you willing to, when you're driving your car in a rush to work and someone is driving 10 miles an hour below the speed limit in front of you, are you willing to realize that all the noise going on inside your head of dissing this person and saying this, that and the other thing, which they're not hearing you, is not doing a single thing? The cost-benefit analysis is 100 percent cost, zero benefit, yet you're still doing it. Are you willing to let that go?
Once you get in the practice of letting go of yourself, the bigger things will come up. They'll all come up by themselves and you just keep letting go, and it will change so quickly. I get letters, emails from all over the world, people who read The Untethered Soul and people who've said that they really aren't all that spiritual and they weren't able to do practices before and they can't meditate, but they read that and they did what I just said. They let go when the driver was in front of them that was bothering them. They decided, "I'm going to let this go."
I had a lady tell me, just wrote an email from South Korea or somewhere, and said that she didn't understand The Untethered Soul when she read it, but she read it, and that sometime later she was in a toy store and somebody cut in front of her. It was crowded. Somebody cut in front of her with all their kids and she started screaming and freaking out and she remembered the book daring her to let go and it was the first time in her life she let go. And she said from that moment forward, her life changed, period. It just changed, day after day, just kept letting go and she became happier and her marriage was better. It's the truth. If you don't hang out with that part of your being, nothing but good things happen.
TS: OK, well, let's take some more concrete examples. You gave the example of driving in a car and getting stuck in traffic and I think people could relate to that and say, "Oh, that's a good place where I could let go of my aggravation, that's not helping." Let's say something happens in your life like a death of someone who you really cared about and you feel just terrible. Is that an indication that I haven't let go, or am I just grieving?
MS: We are human. We live with a human and there are absolutely very natural feelings and expressions that match what's going on in our lives that's very different from a samskara, which means you're really just feeling the reaction of a past situation, right? If you love somebody and they die, there's a loss—there's a sense, a tremendous sense of loss. There's a whole rearrangement of the energy flow inside of you and it is naturally tremendously uncomfortable. Your heart hurts and you go through what you call a grieving process. This is fine. This is natural. The question is, are you willing to go through this or are you resisting it? The letting go in this case doesn't mean, "Oh, I should be happy and giggly." That's absurd.
What you should do is realize—the question I always ask somebody if they come and say, "My heart hurts." I don't do one-on-one, but if somebody [says to me], "My heart hurts," I ask them the same question every time, "How do you know? How do you know you're doing terrible? How do you know your heart hurts? How do you know you're grieving? How do you know you feel this sense of loss?" "Because I'm in here." "OK, you who's in there is watching the heart go through these perturbations, go through these changes. Is that OK with you? Is it OK with you that this is the music that the heart is now playing?" The answer has to be yes. The letting go in this case is the letting go of the resistance to the natural experience that's taking place.
TS: What do you think the obstacles are, the main obstacles people face in letting go? I'm sure you've worked with so many different people and seen where people get stuck.
MS: The main obstacle is the unwillingness to experience what it feels like to go through withdrawal. What is the obstacle for a person getting off of hard drugs or getting off of alcohol? They could be very committed. They said, "I want to do it," right? But there is that tendency that you have habits, you have tendencies, and to let these go require a certain amount of commitment and a certain amount of strength, of center of will that I really am committed to this and then you go through this process of withdrawal, this process of purification.
It isn't comfortable, but you have to want the result more than you're afraid of the discomfort. I always tell people, "It's not about whether you like something or not, it's a question of whether you can handle it." Don't ask yourself, "Do I like this or not?" Ask yourself, "Can I handle this? Can I handle this?" It's a rhetorical question, because you better be able to, because the alternative to be able to handle something is you can't handle it and I don't want to be around, nor do you, right?
We talk about that center of will, that center of volition. You sit in there and realize, "I've got junk inside of me. I've developed patterns that are not healthy, just like drugs." I'm not saying you're doing drugs, right, but it's like a drug. It's like alcohol. You have these patterns of reactions that just got formed inside of you when you weren't paying attention and now you need to let them go. The obstacle is your unwillingness to go through what it takes to let it go. The moment you decide, "I want out. I want to let this go,—and there's two reasons to let it go. One is the non-negative, because it sure cause you a lot of trouble, all that noise in there and the other is the positive.
Both are fine. I want to let it go, because I want to have a reasonable life. I want to let it go because I want to—I have one life to live and I want to experience the highest I can possibly experience. I want to explore the depth of my being. I want to know what Christ meant when he said, "My Father and I are one." I want to know where Buddha went with nirvana. Whatever level you feel the positive—and both of those, the inspiration of the non-negative and the inspiration of the positive should give you the drive, the inspiration, the intention that you need in order to say, "I'm letting go. I'm letting go." Because the alternative is absurd. The alternative is to give my life to the lowest part of my being.
TS: Michael, do you ever find in your own life currently, things happen and you're like, "Oh, I'm getting dragged down into something. I'm losing this high place of center. I need to go meditate for a bit." Something like that, does something trigger you?
MS: I told you, I don't see the big benefit. I've been doing this for a long time. I love to guide people and lead them. I don't see the great benefit of talking about those kinds of things. I'll do it abstractly and say is there a state in which that stops happening? Yes. Period.
TS: OK.
MS: If you let go, it's not going to happen. Things will come up, but you're so far away from it. Ram Dass used to say it was like standing under a bridge watching your life go by. The water underneath the bridge is not going to touch you. It's still flowing and it's going, so there are many, many different states. I like to defer to the masters, to perfect beings, the beings that reach the highest states, right? I don't want anybody looking at me. Look at them, right? Basically.
But clearly, the personal self can be released and when it's released, you don't get triggered anymore. It doesn't mean something isn't going to hit something, but it's not anything near strong enough to even distract you from the pull that's going up.
The pull that goes up is stronger at some point than any pull that could pull you down and the pull is so beautiful going up that you want to experience it. You want to fall into it. It's like love, the beauty. Why would you leave that in order to go down to the disturbing things? Then you just keep letting go.
But it doesn't mean you don't deal with the things in your life. You just deal with them from a place of clarity and a place of center. I know you read my books. No matter how disturbing something can be, you still have to deal with it, right? But you don't have to resist it. You don't have to leave the seat of self in order to deal with something. You can do it from the seat of self, and you're always better off doing that.
TS: You spoke of the masters, that we can look to them, and the filming of this eight-week course, Living From a Place of Surrender,occurred in the yoga and meditation center that you've established now for several decades, Temple of the Universe. I'm curious what you see as the role of devotion, devotion to the masters on the spiritual journey?
MS: That's, again, a very deep question, but all of us have a different nature. Some people are more heart-oriented. Some people are more mind-oriented, and so I don't push those things either, right? When I talk about someone like Christ or Buddha or Yogananda or some of these great, great masters—Ramakrishna—that reached these very, very high states. It's like hanging a picture or putting a bust of Beethoven on your piano if you're a pianist, all right? It's sort of like these beings inspire me. They have reached great states. I've read about them. I can feel their energy and therefore, they're great teachers for me. They are great lights and inspiration.
Can it create devotion to where you literally feel love? To me, if it does, it's because you're really loving the state that you're longing to reach, you're loving the energy level, all right, as opposed to loving a person or loving a being. But different people are different ways. Some people are very much into the personal aspects of God and that's beautiful too. Does that answer you?
But I don't push emotion. I don't ever talk about it. What I push is openness. If you will open and you will let go of what's closing you, you won't have to talk to me or anybody else. It will all happen inside of you. You are your own book. It will take you as quick as possible; if you will let go of every single thing that's keeping you down, you will go—this is how I always tell it. Let's say you have a gondola with a hot air balloon on it, right? It's "tethered" to the ground with the ropes, correct? If you want to go up, don't put more hot air in the balloon or more things that will lift it up. Basically, untie the tethers and it will naturally go up, the helium, right? The helium or the hot air will lift it up.
The right thing to do is not worry about going up, just let go of what's holding you down. And if you will let go of those tethers, believe me, your whole being will go up naturally, exactly at the pace that it should. Everything will unfold perfectly, but you have to be willing to let go of what's holding you down.
TS: Now, which I asked you the question, "How do I know what's holding me down?" you said, "Look at your life and see what brings you down, what exchanges with people, what events," and you have a couple of examples: being in the car, in traffic, etc. And I immediately thought it doesn't take much often for something my partner with say—something like "Would you mind doing this a different way than the way you just did it?" or something like that, I'll interpret it as critical and I'll feel grumpy for a bit. My question, everybody has their own thing where they can watch in an interaction where their energy goes down. Maybe it's something at work and they receive critical feedback or something like that and they're like, "Yes, that will ruin my day." What do you suggest I do in those experiences such that I'm living from a place of surrender? I'm triggered, I'm upset, I'm irritated, something like that?
MS: Right now, we're talking about where the tires hit the road. That is where the growth is. I know you would like to be able to achieve a state at some point in your life to where if somebody criticizes you, you sit and listen to see if there's something you should be learning from it, as opposed to getting upset or closing or getting defensive, right? You picked a perfect example, because defensiveness is the nature of ego. That's what it's going to do. It's going to get defensive, period.
What it means is, are you willing to let go of that part of you so that you're able to listen without that reaction? Is it going to happen right away? Of course not, just like you didn't learn to play tennis right away. You don't learn to play the piano right away. That's one of the things I find with people. They somehow think, "Well, I tried it once. It didn't work."
That's hilarious, right? If you sit down to play the piano, you have to play scales first, and you're not going to do really well at those either. You have to stay with it, if you want to be good at it. It's the exact same thing here. If you meditate and you come out of mediation and then somebody criticizes you, you were doing well, for just one moment more, are you willing to breathe through it? Are you willing to let it go? Sometimes you need to use your mind to raise your mind. You need to treat it like a little baby, to say, "It's OK. It's OK if somebody criticizes you. You can handle it."
You're still using your mind. That's better than giving in to the lower mind, and you raise yourself. You just keep raising yourself like you'd raise a child. If you will do this on a regular basis, someday you will notice the somebody comes and criticizes you and you say, "Thank you." There is no reaction. I love it when someone comes to me and says, "The most amazing thing isn't a spiritual experience that I had. It's that I found myself in a situation that two years ago, I would've reacted. Not only was there no reaction, I forgot that there used to be. I only looked back later and said, ‘Oh my god, look at that. Nothing happened.'" That's spiritual growth. That transformation is spiritual grown, not these lights and spiritual experiences people have. They just last for a minute, then you come back down. I want something real. I want people to change, to grow, to become great within their own being. Does that answer you?
TS: We're almost at a full answer, but I still have a little bit that's unclear for me that I want to see if I understand. So I notice that I'm triggered, and being criticized is something that would trigger me, so we can keep going with that. It probably would trigger lots of people depending, or being unfairly accused of something in front of others, things like that, that would. OK, so now I feel this agitation in my body and maybe some heat and maybe even anger or something like that and I'm starting to think of the snippy comment I'm going to make to cut the other person down, something like that. What you're recommending is that I somehow connect back to my breathing. You said expand your meditation practice or stay with it for another second or two and just let it go. I think it's the "just let it go" part that I'm looking for a little further explanation of.
MS: I understand. That's like my saying I want to play the piano, I want to play Beethoven, I want to play Beethoven's pieces, but I don't play the piano, and so I just said, "Do you play your scales?" And you just said to me, "You're saying to me play my scales and all of the sudden, I'll be able to play Beethoven." Well, that's not exactly what I said. I said, "Play your scales until you're good enough with your scales and then the next thing will happen, the next piece will happen, then the next piece will happen."
So if criticism creates reaction inside—which of course it does, like you said, most people, then are you willing—Ram Dass used to say, "Use it to go to God." I always loved that. I keep that with me. Are you willing to say, "Hey, I bothered meditating. You told me all these intense practices you did: fasting, you've read all the stuff I used to do, right?" Here it is. Here's a moment where the very thing that is keeping you from the ascent has shown its face to you. Are you willing to use that for your spiritual growth?
That has to be deep, deep inside. Then the answer is, "Yes, of course I am." OK, then you need to bring these energies up. What happened there when you got hot and the energy got hot and the breath went faster, and the snippy comments, is that basically that it hit a blockage. It hit a blockage, expanded out. Basically, what your willingness to do is to say, "I can stay centered in the midst of that blockage and I can relax."
The key is relaxing. You're right, we didn't talk about that—I guess "letting go," those are just words. The key is can I relax in the face of the reaction. When people come to me and say, "Well, the anger won't relax." Well, of course not. Anger doesn't know how to relax, defensiveness doesn't know how to relax, but you who's experiencing. I loved—you obviously were talking to me from a place of witness consciousness, because you described to me what it felt like to have that reaction. That meant you were there noticing it. You who notices it wants to do something about it to make it stop.
That's why you have these snippy comments. That's why you attack or whatever or run away or whatever it is, right? Fight or flight, right? No, what you need to do about it is relax. If you are relaxed instead, you gave it some space to release. So you're absolutely right. It is not breathe and let go. That doesn't mean anything. Breathe means something, but let go, those are just words. They don't mean a single thing. What it means is catch your breath for a moment, make a commitment: "I want to use this to go to God. I want to use this for my spiritual growth. I want to use this to liberate myself from my self," all right? There, now you have your intention.
Now, I'm asking you to relax. It's not easy. You'll see the energy tries to pull you into it, right? That's what it's trying to do, right? It tries to pull you in get you to feed the reaction. Instead you relax, and just the very act of relaxing leaves some space for a little bit of it to pass through. The more you're relax, the more you lean away from the energy that's making all the noise, the more space you leave. That's a very, very, deep spiritual practice, to relax and release. I call it R & R, to relax and release everything, all the time, right? First, let go. That's what I mean by let go. Relax and release. Now deal with the situation. Don't deal with your reaction, all right? Does that help?
TS: That helped a lot. I feel very satisfied with that answer, Michael, so thank you. Now, in the course, Living from a Place of Surrender,you give people what sounds like a pretty simple instruction and you say that this is one of the best ways to really get started with living from a place of surrender, which is to start surrendering to the weather. This practice will actually take you very far. I was wondering if you could share that with our listeners as something that will be helpful to them, I think.
MS: Well, I talk about low-hanging fruit. The course goes into all of this in great detail. I want to thank you, by the way, for doing that course with me, because I teach. I've been teaching for 45 years, but to be able to have the time—that's what I got with that course. We had the time to do eight sessions, ten hours that I could go fully into—like the explanation I just gave you, took a little more time, right? I felt very fulfilled in doing that course, that for the first time in all my teaching, I was able to have the time to go deep and create that clarity, so I really appreciate that. By the way, I want to tell you your people were wonderful to work with. I was very, very pleased with the professionalism and the quality of the people I got to work with at Sounds True.
That said, so go back to your question. What I was talking about was low-hanging fruit. That's why I used weather. What is low-hanging fruit? What does it mean? The ones that are easier to let go of. I define it as this: the cost of not letting go is you're disturbed. The benefit of not letting go is zero. You're not gaining anything, so why wouldn't I let go? Those are easy ones. For example, let's say it's raining. If it's raining, it's raining. You not liking it raining is a 100percent cause, 0percent benefit, right or wrong. You're not getting anything from not liking it raining.
TS: You are correct, yes.
MS: It's going to rain anyway, so right? Why not like it? It's a silly—if I put food in front of you and one of them would make you feel good and the other would make you feel bad, which one would you take? Every single time, you would take the one that makes you feel good, as long as there's no cost involved, right? They're both equal. Well, the weather is the weather. You can either like or not like it, and if you like it, it's fun and if you don't like it, it's not. You did that; the weather didn't do that. That's the epitome of how you start to work with yourself. There's no reason not to like the wind. There's no reason not to like the rain. There's no reason not to like the heat. There's no reason not to like the cold. They're just things you decided to do that are making you miserable, all right?
You just decided, "I'm not the kind of person that likes the cold." All right, change it. Let go. Say, "I love the cold. It's fun! I like to bundle up. I love it." Change the way you're looking at things, and that act of willfully letting go of the negativity is a very positive thing to do. As you learn to do that, those are like your scales; as you learn to do that, all of the sudden you'll find that when somebody criticizes you, you're better off at being able to relax and release because you were able to do it with the cold weather, with the rain, and so on. They're like practice fields. Every day, you have the opportunity to practice raising yourself.
TS: Well, I'm very happy that you shared with everyone this example that you call low-hanging fruit, but before we end our conversation, I want to get into something that I think is quite difficult for many people. As part of the course, you've included a bonus teaching on spiritual activism— "The Path of Accepting and Serving Reality," that's what you called the teaching. I think for many people, this is a place where surrendering and accepting is quite hard, when they look out at the world and whether it's a question of civil liberties or whether it has to do with global climate change, there's this sense of, "I'm going to listen to Michael in a lot of ways, but when it comes to the state of the world, I need to be an engaged activist here. I'm not sure." Can you address that for our listeners?
MS: It's obviously a very deep question, which is why I gave a whole teaching on it, and by the time they're done watching this course, they will absolutely understand. I do touch that during the course.
What it boils down to is—I'll use an example. I'm an environmentalist and I'm very much into cars that get high mileage and don't pollute, and I see that somebody's driving a Hummer. It's a classic example, somebody's driving a Hummer, and I'm radicalized and I blow it up. Well, you have just caused more damage to the environment blowing up that Hummer than any pollution it will ever cause by its burning gas. Do you understand that? What you did is you reacted to your own anger, your own inability to handle a situation.
What do you mean? There are people who don't care about the environment. There are people who don't care about the gas mileage they get. There are people
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Just wondering if Michael Singer ever studied under Lester Levinson
I love this! You have expressed with clarity exactly how I am feeling. Thank you!