Evolution says that we’re supposed to be the highest species. What does it mean to be the highest species? Adaptability to your environment. You understand that? You can adapt your environment. “Well, this is my environment right now. This took place. It came into me, and I have to honor and respect and accept the reality of it.” It sounds terrible. People don’t want to accept the reality of it, but not accepting the reality of it didn’t change it one iota. All right, it did really happen. And so you come and you let it pass in and you feel the terrible vibration that’s involved with that. Everything has a different vibration and you’re capable of handling that vibration.
You’re not freaking out; you’re not closing down. This is part of reality, yin and yang, it comes in and you experience it. All right, believe it or not, that is the highest thing you can do to help. If you can’t handle it, you can’t help. You’re too busy trying to do something to make yourself feel better. You understand that? Because “I can’t handle this. I can’t handle this.” Then what are you going to do? You try to talk, you try to do this, you try to do that. In essence, “I can’t handle it, something has to change so that I can handle it.” That’s not dealing with the situation; that’s dealing with your inability to handle the situation, and those are very different things.
I always use this example: let’s say there’s a car accident and people are hurt, but you can’t stand the sight of blood. You’re of no use. You’re of no use to that accident. You can’t help anybody. I can stand the sight of blood, I don’t like it. I don’t have to like it. I don’t have to want it to happen, right, but I can handle it. Now you can come forward and help people that are having a problem.
The first thing a spiritual person does, who understands the depth of the truth of life, is to accept the reality that it took place. Now what? That doesn’t mean that’s the end of it, acceptance doesn’t mean walk away, don’t do anything, but I’m not doing anything personal. I was personally able to handle the reality of the situation. Now, what can I do to help? Not help me, not help my anger, not help my resistance, not help my hatred. That’s not going on. What can I do to actually help the real situation? What can I do to help them pass gun laws or do whatever it is that needs to be done?
If you’re in denial, then you can’t help. What if, unfortunately, you’re very close to that situation and you freeze and, “Oh my God, no,” then you’re of no use. You can’t do it. It starts with acceptance, but it doesn’t end up meaning you don’t do anything.
TS: But now let’s talk about that person who has a strong, emotional response—you said we’d talk about emotions—and part of them is like, “No, the sadness and the rage I feel, I don’t know if I can handle this,” and they are resisting in some way, because the amount of heartbreak is so extreme that they do close down in some way. How could this person do this inner work that you’re describing right in that moment when they’re noticing?
MS: As I would expect, you asked the deep questions. If you read the book—and you did—I almost want to sit there and say it’s too late. In other words, if you have not worked with yourself sufficiently to where you can handle reality, you’re going to get lost at times. And that’s fine, that’s just part of your growth, all right.
If you’re riding a bicycle as a kid and you fall over, don’t come to me and say, “Oh, I shouldn’t have fallen over.” No, that’s how you learned your balance. You need to go through situations. So, in the book I talk about what’s called low-hanging fruit, you of course, went right away to the very difficult hanging fruit.
TS: I did.
MS: I know.
TS: But we can also talk about low-hanging fruit too.
MS: Well, I’m going to do that as the answer to your question. What you do is you realize there are things that are going to go on in life that I’m going to have trouble handling. A divorce, somebody dies, I get sick, all kinds of things go on in life. If I’m going to do well in life, I have to start by being able to handle reality and then working with it to raise it.
Remember, acceptance and surrender do not mean that you do not interact with life. They are not giving up, they are not a white flag, it’s not that kind of surrender. What you’re doing is surrendering your resistance to the reality of the situation. That’s a very different kind of surrender. Then you are dealing with the situation to raise it. By all means, be an activist, put your whole heart into it, but not because you can’t handle it, because then you can’t think straight, then you’re making all kinds of decisions that are not really productive.
What do you do in order to handle things? And that’s what you just asked me. You start practicing, like you learn to play tennis. You learn to play the piano. You learn anything. You have to start from where you’re at. We’re not going to make believe we’re somewhere else, putting on a fake front, all right? You start from where you’re at and you sit there and say, “Do I resist even little things? Or is it just these giant things that I can’t handle?”
“Well, the other day it was raining, and I wanted to go play a sport and it disappointed me because I really wanted to be with the person.” OK, can we handle that? Can we learn to handle that? Because if you can’t handle the weather, you’re in trouble. You understand that, because you’re not going to change the weather, it has nothing to do with you. If you’re supposed to be the highest species on the planet, this thing about adaptability to reality, to the environment, we can start with the weather.
I really see the weather as a tremendous chance for growth. I’m not kidding. “It’s hot.” Yes, it’s hot. Can you handle it? “No. I have to complain all the time and freak out all the time and get all sick and get myself upset.” Well, you don’t have to do that. You can sit there and say, “All right, today it’s hot. Am I okay with that?” You better say yes because saying no doesn’t make it not hot. It’s so simple and silly, all right.
The same thing with the rain. I’ve pulled up somewhere, I need to make a delivery, which means getting out of my car, and it started pouring, but there’s a time factor and I have to be there. “Tami’s waiting for me, and so I can’t mess around with this. OK, I’m going to get wet.” Can you handle that? Or is this a freak experience that for the rest of the day, you tell everybody how terrible it was and you’re afraid—this is silly. You start to practice little things, the low-hanging fruit.
And how do you do that? You let go, you just look at that part of you. It’s not like because you decide to do this there won’t be a part of you that doesn’t resist. It’s trying to resist. You have a habit of resistance. We all do. You have habits of resistance. Let them go. How you do it? There are all kinds of techniques: breath or a mantra; it could be positive thinking. I don’t generally have to do it, but I still use positive thinking. That’s a good foundational thing. Every time I have a negative thought, I replace it with a positive one.
In the book I give the example that it’s hot out. If I feel really hot and I want to complain about it—I like astronomy—I ask myself, “Why is it hot? What’s making it hot. Is there a heater somewhere?” I say, “Yeah, 93 million miles away there’s a star. 93 million miles. It’s hot enough to make me hot here on the planet.” Wow. I ask everybody, I am in Gainesville 350 miles away, 250 miles away, “How big would a fire have to be in Miami for me to feel the heat in Gainesville?” Are you ready? The entire city could catch fire and I wouldn’t feel a single thing. And that thing is 93 million miles away and I’m complaining about the heat.
Now you start to marvel: “Isn’t that neat, I can feel the heat of a star.” That’s an example of how you start to work with yourself. You’re not lying to yourself. You’re just replacing this lower energy of resistance with an acceptance, with an awe, until eventually you do that with everything. You just do that with more and more things. And that’s how you work with yourself.
We’ll talk about another low-hanging fruit a little bit later, but if you’ll do that, you’re going to find out that all of a sudden something happens—not as big as the shooting—but something happens in your life that’s bigger than the weather: somebody doesn’t show up when they were supposed to. Somebody says to you, “They’re my favorite.” “Listen, I don’t have time right now, but I want to talk to you when you come home tonight.” Oh, you’re not going to have a good day. Well, they want to talk to you because they’re going to take you on a trip and they want to know which place you want to go, but your mind’s not going to do that; it’s going to freak you out. Well, there, that’s a little bit bigger than low-hanging fruit, but it’s not as bad as what we’re talking about.
Next thing you know, it doesn’t bother you. You all of a sudden sit there, “Okay, I’ll see you then.” And all day, it doesn’t bother you because you learn to let go of being bothered. My favorite line in the book—and when I talked with Oprah, she said it was her favorite line also—is as follows: “The moment in front of you is not bothering you. You are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you.” I want people to contemplate that because that’s always the condition.
The driver in front of you that didn’t use his blinker is not bothering you; you’re bothering yourself. The blinker didn’t get used, the car turned, whatever, now you’re bothering yourself for the next five minutes: “Why don’t they use their blinkers? What’s going on?”
You’ll find, if you think about it and contemplate it, that you are causing all this bothering. And so if you start with the small stuff and you work on yourself, that’s what it’s called, working on yourself, you’re going to find out amazingly something will happen that used to freak you out or at least knock you off center, you wouldn’t even remember that it used to.
You just reached a level inside, of letting go of that baby inside that can’t handle things and you become a stronger, greater person.
TS: I wanted to ask you, Michael, about positive thinking, and then you offer another technique as well: working with a mantra, some kind of repetitive phrase. And then the third option as we’re practicing, not being disturbed by what’s happening is that we can actually work with the process of transmutation.
Let’s put the process of transmutation to the side because I want to go deep into that and understand what you mean by that. But in terms of positive thinking and the repetition of a mantra, there’s a part of me that’s always thought, isn’t that a form of suppression? Isn’t that a form of like pushing something down? It’s not really going to change the actual patterns of resistance inside me if I’m just making replacements at the surface level. I’d really love to know what you think about that.
MS: Very good. Let’s start with positive thinking, and I make the point very strong in the book. You’re not trying to not have the negative thoughts come up. You’re trying to replace, not beat down, not stop, but give an alternative for your consciousness. It’s sitting there saying, “Oh my God, it’s raining. What the heck am I going to do?” Just put in there: “I love the rain. I love the rain. Imagine if it didn’t rain, we wouldn’t have crops. There are probably farmers that are so happy right now.”
It can still say, “I don’t like the rain. I don’t want to have the rain.” I don’t want you pushing that away. This is not about suppression. I give a whole discussion in the book about automatic thoughts and willful thoughts, right? That’s an automatic thought, you didn’t decide to be upset by the rain, it started talking about it as a habit that you have. It’s a mental habit. You have the right to create another thought willfully that just says, “I’d rather think like this.” I don’t just throw the other thought away, over time you’ve carved a new channel, neuro pathways, call it whatever you want.
I live in the country. If it were to rain a lot, it might tick a little pathway through the grass that’s been mowed, and it’ll flow down the hill that way. Next time it’ll definitely go that way. Third time it will cause a rut. And that’s how you build a habit of thinking.
By being willing to create this positive thought—not fighting—but just to create a positive thought, put your consciousness there, pay attention more there than you do to the other. The other can still be there, that’s the key. You’re not saying, “Get out of my mind, I don’t like you.” You’re saying, “I like this better.”
If you pay attention to that, over time I guarantee you the positive will win over the negative. Light dispels darkness. Positive energy is much more enjoyable than negative energy. It is just like eating something that doesn’t make you feel well, but you’re in the habit of doing it. You have to replace that by eating something healthy, which may not taste as good, but over time you feel better, and it becomes a natural thing to let that go. That’s what positive thinking is.
More so with mantra—I teach this all the time. People say, “I’m saying my mantra: God, God.” No, you’re using a sledgehammer inside your head. You’re using the mantra to beat down your thoughts. No, no, no, no.
I make it very clear in the book. Your consciousness is what determines what you’re experiencing. If I focus on a picture on the wall, then I focus on another one, where I shift my consciousness determines what I’m experiencing. If you’re experiencing some negative thoughts or some negative feelings or along with it, whatever. But as I say, instead of positive thinking, if you’ve got that mantra going on in there, you just shift your consciousness back to the mantra. You pay attention to mantra.
If there are two pictures on the wall and I’m looking at one, I don’t have to rip it off the wall to look at the other. I don’t have to throw it away or do anything. I just shift the focus of my consciousness to the other. It’s the same thing inside. If these are the thoughts that are going on inside, but I bother to instill the repetition of mantra behind a different layer of my mind, if you will, I don’t touch the other thoughts.
I don’t want you fighting with your mind, ever. I’m just shifting my consciousness to whatever the mantra is; so, basically, it’s not fighting, it’s not suppressing. You should definitely not suppress, and what will happen is because resting back into this positive layer of your mind, the mantra, the other will fall away. Why? Because light dispels darkness, high energy is more powerful than negative energy. People don’t know that, because they’re used to putting their conscious into bad feelings and bad things. If you put it higher, it falls off naturally.
TS: Now, what if you put some positive thought in your mind and you hear a voice inside that just says, “Well, that’s not true. Come on, really? Whatever.”
MS: Good. Kiss it on the head.
TS: You can’t really invest in this new positive thought because it feels phony.
MS: I want it to. I like that. There’s no problem with that. I’m telling you, if I’m eating food that tastes really good and I feel good after eating it, but an hour later I’m sick, OK. Then somebody gives me something that’s holistic—it’s not going to taste as good, but I have to make myself eat it. In order to shift from something that’s making me not well to something that in the end will make me well.
It takes some will; it takes some effort. It doesn’t mean I have to deny that the other tasted better, I don’t have to deny that I liked it. I have somebody who’s a drug addict, who’s caught on hard drugs, heroin or something, they want to do it, they have to, they want that. If they want to go through withdrawal, they’re not going to sit there during the withdrawal and say, “I don’t want the hit, I don’t want the drug. I want the drug.” I’m not lying to myself, I want the drug, but I want more to get off of it because it opens up a whole new life for me.
It’s the same thing with what you just said. The mind is in the habit of complaining. The mind’s in the habit of not liking something. “I don’t like what she said. I don’t care what you say.” “I can handle it. It’s okay. Let’s give her some space.” “I don’t want to give her space.”
It’s like, if you can learn to give it some energy at a higher level, over time the other will fall away. I don’t care that it’s saying, “I don’t like it, I don’t believe what you’re saying, I don’t believe in God.”
I remember the first time that—Yogananda is my guru. And he is very, very much into God. I wasn’t. I didn’t ever think about it my whole life. Then I got an experience—if you read The Surrender Experiment, it explains all that. I had this experience and all of a sudden, I’m meditating, I’m living in the woods, and it happened very suddenly for me.
I remember the moment that I was standing up in the loft where my meditation pillow was and my mind stood up and it said, “But I don’t even believe in God.” I just stopped for a second and looked at it and said, “Here, God, here’s the part of me that doesn’t believe in you.” It never said another word from that moment forward. I’m just using the example of God. I don’t really talk about that.
It could be anything. Just be willing to see that you have a habitual way of thinking, a habitual way of feeling and a habitual personality that you built through the samskaras, through the stuff you stored, that you liked and didn’t like and now they’re expressing themselves through you. That’s what you are now. The sum of those samskaras, things that happened to you that you liked, you’re acting that way. Things that happen to you that you didn’t like, you’re acting that way.
At some point, if you really want to grow, if you want to untether yourself, you realize that’s not going to make it because I’m just going to keep fighting with the world to match me, as opposed to changing me. You remember Rumi? “Yesterday I was clever, so I was trying to change the world. Today I’m wise, so I’m trying to change myself.” That is essential for spiritual growth. If you’ve not reached that point that you realize it’s not about getting what I want and making myself feel good, it’s about changing all these patterns I have inside myself that are causing me to feel bad. “I feel bad unless I get what I want.” I don’t want you to feel bad. I want you to feel good all the time.
That’s what you do with the part of you that is still saying, “I don’t believe in this.” I don’t care. You can say all you want. “Yes, the sun’s 93 million miles away”—I used to say that. “The sun’s 93 million miles away. What’s that got to do with me?” It has a lot to do with you. “Big deal. There are 2 trillion galaxies out there and I’m just sitting in a little planet speeding through space. It has nothing to do with me.” Yes, it does. I don’t care what you say—it’s called reality. It’s big.
It’s good to think about that stuff, but at first your little self is going to keep expressing itself. What I want, and all the really great teachers teach this, is just be in a seat of consciousness, witness consciousness, notice that’s going on. No problem with that, he [the little self] is that way. All right, he was brought up that way, it’s his tendencies, but I want to raise him. It’s not wrong that he or she keeps saying that, it’s just that you are willing to stay higher. You’re willing to stay behind it and raise yourself all the time.
TS: Is there a mantra, Michael, that you recommend or that you found effective for people to use?
MS: I, of course, came up through yoga—you all know that. So, I have yoga mantras, whatever it is, Sanskrit. But I recommend [this one]: “I can handle this. I can handle this. I can handle this. I can handle this.”
What a wonderful thing to be going on in the back of your mind when your mind says, “I can’t handle this.” “I can handle this.” For example, as you were saying, someone might keep saying, “I can’t handle this. I can’t believe she said that.” “I can handle this.” Whoa, just shift your consciousness off this lower vibration of energy that you’re accustomed to working with to a higher vibration. I’m telling you it will fall off over time. It will just fall off. How’s that?
TS: It’s beautiful. I love it. And then I’d love to hear more about this word and the process of transmutation. We’re not suppressing, we’re not expressing when a difficult emotional experience arises, how do we transmute it?
MS: We skipped one step. You said I gave three techniques. It was positive thinking, mantra, and witness consciousness. In order to talk about transmutation, I have to talk about witness consciousness first. So, what is the difference between positive thinking, mantra, and witness consciousness?
Positive thinking is your mind is creating automated thoughts. It just does it by itself. You didn’t tell it to you. You wouldn’t ever tell your mind to do what it’s doing, nobody would, it just does it by itself because it’s expressing samskaras. That’s what it’s doing, your mind is trying to get these samskaras out, and so it’s trying to release the energy, but a lot of it is negative energy or a lot of it is—we didn’t talk about positive samskaras, which is, something happened that you really, really, really liked, so you held onto to it.
Buddhists call it clinging—I know you know about that, in the sense that you studied that stuff. Buddhas have this word called “clinging,” which just is perfect. So, if something happens, somebody says something nice to you, you have a nice experience, you don’t want to let it go. You want it to happen again. So, the next thing you know, you’re holding it in your mind and you’re comparing everything against that. And you can’t ever be happy again, unless the exact same thing happens again. But the exact same thing can’t happen again because this is the second time it happened. There’s no surprise concept to it, there’s no beginner mind. So, you really messed yourself up by holding onto positive things, the same as holding onto negative things. Basically, you have these samskaras, and they’re expressing themselves through your mind. That’s why you feel desires, that’s why you feel fears. That’s why you have all these likes and dislikes.
Positive thinking is to put some willful thoughts on top of that, so that you raise those thoughts, so that they can in the end, be higher. Mantra is getting a layer of mind behind you, it’s not the same layer, you are able to think of two layers at once. You read a book, the next thing you know, you didn’t read a darn thing. You have to go back and read. You thought you were reading it, but your mind was very busy doing something else. There are layers of our mind, get a mantra going in a layer. And then when something negative is coming in or whatever, shift your consciousness in a mantra.
The next layer, the next deep technique is witness consciousness. Why is it so deep? It is not about doing anything with mind. It’s not about replacing mind with positive thoughts; it’s not about shifting back to a layer of mind that’s deeper. It’s about sitting in the seat of consciousness and being willing to watch what your mind’s doing. It’s being negative. It’s being positive. It’s upset today. Your emotions aren’t good. You just notice. People say, “Well, how can you just notice?” Everybody’s noticing—otherwise, how would you know it’s there? “My mind’s bothering me today.” How do you know? I don’t know your mind’s bothering you, because you’re in there. Be the one that’s in there. Don’t mess with the mind. Don’t mess with the emotions. Don’t suppress them or express them. Just for the moment, are you willing to relax and release and be in there and notice that this is going on inside of me?
I heard a little clip from Eckhart Tolle, who I respect a great deal, and what he said was, when something happens and it is drawing you into it, you can see you’re being drawn out of your witness consciousness into a desire, into a fear—he was so beautiful—he said, “Just give me two minutes. You can do it.” When it’s all said and done, I don’t teach like that—I’m tougher. He said, “Just for two minutes, don’t go do it yet.” That’s really beautiful. That’s very tolerant. And it’s a way of sitting here saying, “I can do that. Here we go. I’m okay, I can do that. I can be here and see this desire or see this fear or see this messed up pattern that’s drawing me into it.” It draws you into it, it has power because you’re so interested in it. Can you wait a little bit?
I don’t care how you do it. Eckhart’s a great teacher, and there are many others, many, many great teachers. They all have different techniques. Are you willing to do the technique that gives you the intention of letting go of the pull that these lower aspects of your being have on your consciousness?
How do you do that? Relax. Ultimately, you relax. I notice this thought pattern. It has always bothered me. And now somebody said something and it’s bothering me again. Are you willing to notice it and not do anything about it? Are you willing to just relax? But it won’t relax. I know it won’t relax. I didn’t ask it to relax. It’s not going to relax. You can relax. You, who’s experiencing it, can just fall back behind it.
It’s really beautiful. People talk about, “But shouldn’t I experience my emotions?” Well, that can mean a lot of different things. It can mean going down there, get into them feel every aspect of them, enrich. Or it can mean I’m back here experiencing the fact that there’s an emotion going on down there. I’m not stopping it, I’m not doing anything, I’m experiencing the emotion. I’m experiencing the thought. That’s a very high state;
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