The Resilient Mind - How to Deal with Suffering - Wisdom from Sadhguru, Eckhart Tolle & Wayne Dyer

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

In this powerful episode, thought leaders Sadhguru, Eckhart Tolle, and Wayne Dyer share transformative insights on the rising tide of mental distress and the timeless human struggle with suffering. Together, they explore how unconscious living, mistaken identity, and mental compulsiveness contribute to the pain we experience—and how conscious awareness can set us free. Tune in for a deep, thought-provoking dialogue that challenges conventional thinking and inspires a shift toward inner clarity and empowered living.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_Journal Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to How to Deal with Suffering. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Well, today, you know a few months ago, the WHO or the World Health Organization made a prediction that there is going to be a mental health pandemic. At least five years ago, none of us knew what is a pandemic.

Today we all know what is a pandemic. And they've gone further and they said the next stage is there will be a suicide pandemic. Just to put it in perspective. In 2020, when the pandemic was in full swing all over the world, in Japan, more people died of suicide than of the pandemic. So we don't really need the virus. That's all I'm saying. Because the virus has gotten into our head.

head because once survival is taken care of, if you do not become conscious the way you sit, stand, breathe, think, and function within yourself, if it does not become conscious, you will naturally head downhill. So if you're successful, you suffer, if you're failure, you suffer. See, look at the thing. Is there one thing that human beings are not suffering? Just tell me. Somebody is poor.

They suffer their poverty. somebody becomes rich they suffer the taxes no children they suffer that give them children every day pain something or the other so it looks like whole life is suffering so somebody makes a philosophy whole life is suffering

you must go to heaven if you know that much why are you not gone you are not gone because you don't know a damn thing whether there is a place better than this somewhere or not you don't know you're just claiming these things to somehow fix your psychological sloshing that's happening inside. You're making up things to somehow believe something

so that your psychology won't just splash all over the place and go crazy. You're trying to hold yourself in place, telling yourself fairy tales, all right? So what I'm saying is, do you believe that if you want to navigate your life through this time that we have, in a sensible manner, the most important thing is to see life as is, as it is. If I don't see in this room things as they are, I will walk into this table, I will bump into somebody, I will do crazy things every day.

If I see very clearly navigating myself through all these cables and tripods is not a big problem. Hello? But if I don't see, if there's no clarity of work, vision. If I'm not seeing things as they are, then what a mess it is, every little thing? That's all. The problem is. Not that what you're doing is wrong. The way you're seeing it is wrong. You think those people who committed suicide, everything was wrong with their life? No. Not everything was wrong with a life. I have a few things. As it goes wrong in your life, my life, everybody's life. something don't work, all right?

In everybody's life, something doesn't work in the outside world. If everything is working for you, obviously you're living a very petty life. In my life, 95% of the things that I want doesn't happen. Only 5% happens. Because I'm trying to fix everything in the world. Most of the things don't happen. So if anybody wants to die of frustration, it must be me. But I will not.

Because no matter what, I will die. blessed doubt, I live blessed out, and I blest doubt. Because what I do, what the situation is around me and how I am, are never connected. I'm the way I am. I'll do my best.

See, the problem is too much spiritual jargon is going all over the world because every idiot who's read two books can write us next book. If you read two books, there was a time when people read ten

and then wrote one book that was called plagiarism. Now they read two books and they write the third book. Say your background is full of books. I hope you're not read all of them. I've only read two and I'm writing one. Because just about everybody he's writing. It's all right. It's freedom of expression.

They can write what they want. But these are two things. There is expression and there is expression. and there is perception. Which should you invest in more? Perception. If you perceive well, your expression will be valuable.

Right now, everybody's on an expression binge without perceiving a damn thing. See, whatever you call it. You call it by whatever name you want. Stress, anxiety, tension, depression, bipolar, this one.

that won many things. I was talking to some of the top psychiatrists in UK and they told me there are 72 varieties of psychological ailments. I thought there may be half a dozen. But they said there are 72 varieties of psychological ailments.

I was really surprised, 72. That's like a golf game. You know? Then I asked, what are these? They told me quite a few things. one of the things they told was compulsive nose-picking even if they're bleeding in the nose

they can't stop it that explains everything in a way compulsive nose-picking leave the nose-picking it's compulsiveness you're compulsive in your thought compulsive in your emotion compulsive in your actions

that's all the problem is how do you fix compulsiveness if this room is dark how do you fix it Let's do one thing. Both of us fight with this darkness and push it out of the window. There's no such thing. If you turn on the light, it's gone.

So there is no substitute for consciousness. If you become conscious, compulsive behavior is gone. Suppose you are in thought, emotion, action, and energy. You are not compulsive. That you can create whatever thought you want, whatever emotion you want. Would you keep yourself blissed out or miserable? What's your choice? Bliss doubt.

For yourself, every human being, for themselves, they want the highest level of pleasantness. So the intent is already there. I don't have to inspire them. Be blissed out. There's no such philosophy. Every human being wants the highest level of pleasantness for themselves. Those who think it's hopeless here,

they are the ones who created heaven. They said, there is a place which is always pleasant. But they don't have any proof that we are all, we are not already in heaven and making a mess out of that. See, whatever kind of mental ailment you talk about, essentially when your intelligence turn against you, there is no power in the universe which can help you. But why is my intelligence turning against me? Somewhere we have not learned how to handle it, isn't it? your education systems, your society, nowhere is there anything to teach a child how to handle

their own intelligence, their own emotions, their own thoughts. There is no such thing. All fixing mechanic shop, you know, repair jobs everywhere. Leave the repair jobs. The simple thing is this. The reason why people are struggling with this is they have, pardon my words, but otherwise people won't get it. They have a mental diarrhea.

This doesn't create anything except distress. Anything that runs loose without your control is called diarrhea. Why has it happened? Even today, even if somebody gets physical diarrhea, immediately somebody will pop a pill. But traditionally what did we do? If somebody has diarrhea, first thing is we understood we have eaten something wrong. First thing we did was just don't eat, just drink water and wait.

And next identify what did I eat yesterday or today morning, what happened to me? What is it that I consumed which caused this? And avoid that. But no, we will plug it in. No, if you plug it in, it'll all rise within yourself. This is all that's happening. Right now, our way of doing life is very forceful. I am saying people are not thinking enough.

This is a serious problem. But they think they're overthinking. They are not overthinking. It's a diarrhea. It's happening. Why is it happening? Something wrong food has gone in. What is the wrong food?

This is all it is. The moment you identify yourself with something that you're not. Your mind, you cannot stop. Do what you want. Do whatever you want. It will not stop. See, what is it that human beings are suffering? What happened 10 years ago?

They're still suffering. What may happen day after tomorrow? They're already suffering. This is what you're saying. What happened 10 years ago? Is it here now? Does it exist? No.

What may happen the after tomorrow? Does it exist here? No. So if you're suffering something that does not exist, what does it mean? Tell me, bluntly, if you're suffering something that doesn't exist here. It's like insanity, but it feels like you.

Yes, insanity. It is insanity. That's why I'm saying once you start doing this, how far you go, when will you graduate? When will you end up in a doctor's place? When will you end up in asylum? He's a question of time. But now, world bodies are predicting

is going to happen large scale very soon. Do you have moments of sadness? See, you're asking a very question which is hard for me to say because I have done this to myself. that nothing happens within me the way I don't want it if that was your situation

nothing happens within you unconsciously everything that happens happens the way you want within yourself what is the experience that you want to have right now is always determined by you what would be your choice

grief and misery is it no see you are the only creature who can decide your way of being. No matter what is the surrounding. Every other creature is an instinctive reaction to what's happening around them. Because they are only fired by their survival instinct.

They don't have any other aspiration. Once their stomach is full, their life is settled. For a human being, stomach empty is only one problem. Stomach full, 100 problems. Because life doesn't settle with survival. You want to be. something else all the time. The problem is you're a being.

You're supposed to know how to be. How far away have human beings gone from the definition or that aspiration? If I want to, I do. If you want who you do. Okay. I said it doesn't happen as... It doesn't happen by itself.

If I want, I can be loving. If I want, I can be joyful. If I want, I can be sad. Yes. When somebody dear to you is no more. You will love yourself that. But do you stop doing anything? No.

See, if you get absolutely committed to your purpose, you will be called a fanatic. If you are willing to do whatever it takes to achieve that, you will be called a terrorist. So there is no purpose to life. If you are not a vested interest, and you can be not a vested interest only when you're joyful by your own nature

that how you are is determined by you. So this is the fundamental you have to set that your experience of life is determined by you. When I say experience of life, people are always thinking experiences happen because of external stimuli. No, if you dream of a tiger, you can experience fear, isn't it?

You can dream of somebody. beautiful and experience love. Yes or no? So I'm saying all experiences cause from within you. Human experience happens from within you, never from outside of you. There may be a stimuli. Now, the stimuli means just like this.

You know, you're too young to know these things. There used to be wax-all cars in this country. They always used to bucket in a slope like this. Because morning, you need two people to push that car in the morning in 50s and 60s, I'm saying. Later on, they had crank start. We need one person to do that. Otherwise, you can't get your car started.

Today, all cars are self-start. I'm asking you, your peace, your joy, your love, your blissfulness. Would you want to keep it on self-start or push-start? Self-start? I wouldn't want it to relax. This is the question you're asking repeatedly. You want push-start. Don't be on push start.

Inner experiences are always in self-start. Outside world will never happen 100% our way. Little bit your way, little bit my way, little bit somebody else's way. And that's how it should be. Because everything happened your way, where the hell do I go? It doesn't happen your way or my way. It's fine.

It is only fine if you're joyful by your own nature. But if your happiness depends on what happens on the outside, then you being happy, is a remote possibility. So, let us say, such a terrible thing we had to face that we may lose our child. Tell me,

can you do the best for the child if you are in your sanity or is it good to go into insanity? Sanity will make a difference. Maybe we can save the child, maybe we cannot. Because all aspects of life we don't determine. Our experience we can determine. See, what happens in the world around you.

Even if you're just two people in the family, never will it happen 100% your way. If you try, nobody will be around you. It's as simple as that. I've read your story so I know that there's moments in your life where you've lost people that you loved. A lot of people, not one or two. because my family is so large,

almost every other day I am burying somebody who's very dear to me. I don't let anything drive me into insanity. This is a brief amount of time that you have as life. Here we create many things. You're creating businesses. I have large moments where millions of people are involved. There are relationships. You cannot take these things lightly

because other lives are involved. but you cannot prevent anybody from dying. You can attend to them. If something is going to happen to them, you can make attempts to save them, but you cannot prevent anybody from absolutely dying, including yourself. It's a fact.

So the only two things that we have is a certain amount of time and a certain amount of energy. This is all that you call is life. What do you want to make out of it? You want to make a message. out of it, see, the thing is, first of all, they are living an emotionally constipated life. They only loved their child. I saw everybody as mine.

Everything that happened hurts. But that's part of it. If you walk in a forest, there are thorns in your feet. But this doesn't mean you don't enjoy the forest, all right? This is just September 23rd. I completed 40 years of this work. So 40 years ago, I was a young man. one afternoon

when I had nothing much to do somehow an hour and a half gap was there for me in the work I was working like morning 5.30 in the morning, 11 in the night, building various kinds of businesses around me. So when I got a break, there's a small hill. This hill is a place where we go

and for the youth. When I was a kid, I cycled up this hill, we camped on this hill, we partied on this hill. If you want to test our motorcycles, we went up the hill. Just about anything you want to do, the youth, go to Chamundee Hill. This is the thing.

I just walked up and sat on a rock. My eyes were still open. I thought it's just 10, 15 or 20 minutes. Suddenly I started feeling every cell in my body literally dripping ecstasy. I thought this lasted 15, 20 minutes. But when I came back to my normal senses, four and a half hours had passed for the first time in my adult life

tears, me and tears were simply impossible. Tears to a point, my shirt is all wet. Then I shake my skeptical mind and ask what the hell is happening to me. All I knew was I had hit a gold mind and there was no context. Nobody around me could tell me what was happening with me.

Nor did I know what was happening with me. This is something that most people will explain. in their lives on a certain day when they're very happy, 24 hours feels like 10 minutes. Another day when you're depressed, 10 minutes will feel like 24 hours. Time is a very relative experience. When you're so blessed out, what is 2 minutes, it's 8 hours, 10 hours, just gone like that. So in about 6 to 8 weeks, I came to some kind of stabilization within myself and started experimenting as to what is happening to me, then I realized, if I keep a little distance from my physiological

and psychological activity that's going on, if I just remove myself a little bit, then within a few seconds or within a couple of minutes, every cell in my body is bursting with ecstasy. Now, this is not just my experience. Today we have it measured out in Howard Medical School, how there is endocannabinides are bursting out in people simply because they do a simple practice. So I made a plan in two and a half years time. I will make the whole world bliss out. I knew the methodology. If you just keep a distance, it'll happen.

So you can think that survival means two meals a day. Or you can think survival means Bentley. So it will keep you busy a little longer. Still survival process. As long as the survival, there's an instinct of survival and there is a longing to expand within the human being. So for most human beings, these two things are mixed up. It is their instinct of survival which is finding expression

as their longing to expand. It doesn't matter who you are, where you are, anybody. You want to be something more. If that something more happens, you want to be something more. You can go on like this, how much more? Whatever you want, if I make it true for you right now. Next moment, you will be thinking what more. Suppose I make you the king of not England, the planet.

Don't look at me hopefully. I will not come at such a blunder. Suppose we make you the king of this planet. Will you be fulfilled? No, you will look at the moon. You look at other planets. You look at the other galaxies. If I give you one galaxy, you'll say, what about the other galaxy?

Because there is something within a human being which wants to expand limitlessly. Right now, you want to expand limitlessly. Can you expand this body limitlessly? No. Please don't. Don't try. In the gym, I've tried. So physical expansion is a limited expansion, and your longing is to

expand limitlessly because there is something within you which doesn't like boundaries. The moment C, if I imprison you in a 5 by 5 cubic, you will feel terribly imprisoned. Then tomorrow I will announce your liberation and release you into 10 by 10 cubicle. You will feel wonderful for two days. Then you will feel horribly imprisoned. Then we will release you into 100 by 100 cubicle. You will be fine for a week. After that, you will feel miserable.

doesn't matter where I set the boundary. Once you feel the boundary, you want to break it. So there is something intrinsic within you which doesn't like boundaries. This is a consequence of the evolution that you've gone through. Once your cerebral cortex flowered, now you don't like boundaries.

But you're trying to expand in an infinite way by counting one, two, three, four, five. Can you ever count one, two, three, four, five and one day say infinity. Now, you'll only get into endless counting. That's all that's happening. That's why I said, your longing to expand is a limitless process. But right now you're constipated. You're going one little step at a time.

Constipation means just this. It happens little by little. Why should you find balance? You must expand. Okay. What is the means to become a boundless expansion? If you look at that, then we say consciousness. This is what raising human consciousness means.

Because you realize physical expansion is not a realistic thing. We can make physical arrangements as we want, as we need for our convenience and comfort. But that is not the way to expand. Expansion needs to happen in a way that it's not physical in nature. Then you can also own the universe. I can also own the universe. when you say, where am I going wrong? The wrong is this, the fundamental wrong is this.

What is not you? If you think it's you, then you're trapped in that. If you think that I am this chair, because we sat on this chair for a period of time, if you think you're this chair, now this chair will go with you, stuck to your backside, wherever you go. That's a very ugly thing to do, isn't it? it's the same thing right now your thought you think it's you your emotion you think it's you

your physiological stuff you think it's you it's pretty ugly it's just because everybody's got this chair stuck to the backside it looks like it's normal after all it's convenient wherever you go you don't have to look for a chair you got a chair fixed

if I identify with all these things if I identify with this chair you're saying that that becomes that's all the thing is your identity whatever you are identified with, that becomes a part of you. And is that what's causing us a lot of our despair?

Yes. If you sit here just as life, what is your problem? I have never really, life, everything is fine. Yeah. So the only problem is you're identified with things that you're not.

So the whole lot of confusion about everything. And every human suffers, every life form suffers, because life is hard. and challenging and precarious for every life form. From the moment life comes into being, life is challenging and precarious for humans, for animals, for plants.

Every life form encounters obstacles in its attempt to grow and expand. And it continuously encounters obstacles to its expansion. every human. In one form or another, if you come into this world, very quickly you'll find obstacles, seeming obstacles to your expansion

and growths at well-being and flowering. I think you can all, if you think about your so-called life, how many obstacles life seems to have put in your path towards happiness and some people perceive life as life continuously is sabotaging my attempts to find happiness.

Why is that? And then they have these strange theories that God is against me, whatever the theory is. But it does seem like, and this is related to the Buddhist al-Ducah or suffering, wherever you go, you will find life is sometimes helpful

and then obstacles again. And this is perceived as some people believe if you only practice positive thinking continuously, you will no longer encounter obstacles. But that unfortunately is not the case. Positive thinking is a great thing, can be extremely helpful and bring about certain shifts in you, but it does not free you from experiencing the obstacles that life will put in your

path. And the challenges that come. So those obstacles, whether they come in the form of loss or illness or relationship problems, many of them arise from their own mind because your mind creates an enormous amount of problems that are quite unnecessary, but the mind doesn't. know that. So the mind creates an enormous amount of conflict that is unnecessary

in your life. That's one kind of obstacle is your own mind. Then and again you need to experience the consequences

of the obstacles that your own mind creates, the conflicts and the unnecessary problems that your own mind, because you identified with a mind, creates, you need to experience the suffering that you create for yourself out of that unconsciousness. Unconsciousness means completely identifying with the mind, the egoic mind, which in many cases transforms challenges, which could be solved easily into much bigger problems.

so you have the your mind created obstacles that you ultimately create yourself because you are not conscious enough and then you counter suffering this is one level of suffering and it is you need to experience the suffering that comes

through unconscious use of the mind in order to awaken it's only through the suffering that eventually you go can't take anymore as happened to me when I was in bed one night and said, I can't live with myself anymore. And then summer I realized this myself that I couldn't live with anymore was an illusion, an illusory entity and very unhappy mind-created entity.

But before I realized that, I had to go through this suffering for years and years. So the suffering worked. It fulfilled its purpose. And then you have another level of suffering or obstacles. Obstacles come to you seemingly from the outside that suddenly you have an accident, an illness that's the kind of outside. Something seems to happen to you that you have not contributed to. Something happens to somebody close to you, dies as an accident.

Many things can happen, but that you seem, I haven't. created that, of course, accept each moment as if you had chosen it. Well, that's a good recipe for working, because if it already is the case, you might as well accept whatever is as if you're chosen it, because it's already here. So I'm not telling people you chose it. Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. It doesn't matter. Still accept it as if you had chosen it.

That shifts things, that your whole attitude, you just. it shifts and it dissolves more quickly than whatever the obstacle is. But let's go back to the suffering. First, the suffering that derives from your own mind creates conflict and all those things that create suffering and then at some point you awaken. And then what remains is the suffering that comes with having a body, for example, because eventually the body gets older. No matter how much you go to the gym every day, no matter how fantastic your nutrition is,

no matter how many pills called longer life you take, which is all fine and good. But of course, every poem eventually dissolves and the time comes when the body can be perceived as a burden almost, the older you get, the more likely it is to happen. And so, of course, you might then say old age isn't so bad if you consider the alternative, which is you die younger and then you don't have to experience the body getting fragile and old. But if you get old, the body can become problematic, a source of suffering, potentially, But those challenges, if approached correctly, don't have to turn into suffering. Except each moment as if you had chosen it.

But the suffering is really that every life form encounters, the obstacles that every life form encounters, whether they come in the younger age, older age, middle age in whatever form, these things are absolutely necessary without which there would be no human evolution whatsoever and no life form would ever evolve if the life form did not encounter obstacles so that which looks like an obstacle is actually always

potentially an opening potentially it that seems to stop your progress in life always potentially can make you more conscious. So you can use every obstacle that arises

in your life. If you can, it works especially quickly if you accept each moment as if you had chosen it and when it looks with this moment is an obstacle, you go with it instead of

complaining or running away from it and then accept. and then act if action is possible or don't act if no action is possible be grateful for whatever your experience of this woman is and if you cannot be grateful at least allow it to be because it already is it you might as well now if you did this little thing, it sounds very little and it is very little, allowing your experience of this moment to be the way it is. Just this little thing would remove, how else, how to put it in percentage terms, let's say

95% of the suffering from your life. I don't know about the rest of 5% will get to that sometime. That would already remove a gigantic chunk of unambats. happiness in whatever form. Unhappiness is the most generic term one could use. The Buddha called it suffering. The moment you realize that you forgot it, it's there again. And then you can accept the experience of this moment as the unhappiness that is arising

in you because you forgot to accept your experience of this moment. And so you feel this unhappiness arising in you and you say, where does that come from. Oh, I forgot to accept my experience of this moment. And then you accept the unhappiness. And the weird thing with unhappiness is when you completely accept the unhappiness, it cannot survive very long. It doesn't like, it cannot actually co-exist with acceptance. So the weird thing then arises that you say something like, Okay, I'm unhappy, that's okay, I don't like being unhappy. And then the unhappiness goes, what's going on?

That's not supposed to happen. The unhappiness cannot survive for very long with the acceptance, even the acceptance of unhappiness, not indulging in unhappiness. But the acceptance, or the acceptance of unhappiness, the day that presupposes that there's an awareness there that knows that you are unhappy. Now, that might sound like something very natural, but it isn't, because the most unhappy people

and there are still millions, and of course they have reasons for being unhappy, yes. And it's not necessarily the people who you'd think would have the, the most powerful reasons for being unhappy, it's all from those you who are thinking, well, they. There are many millions you have it worse than they, but these are more unhappy

than those, so it's all for the case. So the unhappiness is something that when it's recognized as unhappiness and accept it, something happens to it begins to dissolve. But they're really unhappy people are so identified with the unhappiness which is a combination of certain recurring thoughts in your head the

certain narrative that is not pleasant whether it is about my life whether the narrative says my life or fruitful thing in my life why did it all go so wrong, so wrong, wrong. And now it's just nothing I can do. I do that, please. Or whether the narrative is about somebody else. You know what he did, what she said and did, what it. The narrative may be about something that hasn't happened yet,

and it goes on and on, or something that happened in the distant past or not so distant past. So there's a narrative, and then their emotions, that are reflection of a narrative. The narrative is thoughts, certain types of thoughts, certain thoughts that have a certain frequency. And then that awakens the emotional frequency

because the body thinks the narrative in your mind is a reality, that is the reality they're experiencing. So your body reacts with an emotion. There was a very famous Danish theologian, his name was Soren Kierkegaard. He once said that once you label me, you negate me. Once you place a label on me and put me into a compartment or a category of some kind,

I must then become what it is that you have labeled me to be. So that we want to be able to live our lives and to practice principles of higher awareness without being so consumed with what I call ordinary human awareness. An ordinary human awareness is just the recognition or the belief system that I am a human being. Maybe I'm having a spiritual experience, I'm not quite sure. But higher human awareness, what is sometimes in the east called city awareness. In the West it's been called higher consciousness or Christ consciousness. There's many names for it.

But when you get beyond just knowing yourself, as this body and this personality and this thing that you inhabit and begin to realize that who you are is that which was never born and can never die when you recognize your eternal self and that's what this program is really about

it's really about recognizing the power the energy the capacity to be able to do what it says in some of the most holy books that you've ever read that even the least among you can do all that I have done and even greater things. And that's not just empty words from Holy Scriptures. That's a very powerful lesson that each and everyone us can practice and live every day.

There are higher levels of awareness that are available to us, a level of awareness that allows us to do things like, and it may sound a bit strange, but to manage the coincidences of our lives, to be able to place our attention on what it is that we would like to create for ourselves in our lives to literally have the power to know that if I think about it and I keep it there and I keep that picture firm within me

that there is an energy, a source, a capacity within me that is in the universe and that is also in me and that I can use this energy, that I can manage it. There are many ways to get the things that we want for ourselves in our lives. But basically, it all begins with how we choose to think. As you think, so shall you be. Seven little words that I think are perhaps the most important things that we can learn and master in our lives. This old proverb notion that I become what I think about all day long.

And once you know that what you think about is what expands, you start getting real careful about what you think about. You don't allow your thoughts to be on anything that you don't want or that you wouldn't want to have manifest or show up for you in your life. Emerson said, the ancestor to every action is a thought. And you can look at every spiritual tradition, whether it's eastern or western, whether it's ancient or modern, whether it's civilized quote or uncivilized quote whether it's tribal and there is in all of these

persuasions this idea that inside each and every one of us in a place that is not material in a place that has no dimensions in a place that has no boundaries that in each and every one of us we have this power and we have this intelligence, and you can never see it. I've often said that when you die, if you're going to die and five minutes before you're ready to leave, they weigh your body. Then let's say it weighs, oh, let's pick a good number, 150 pounds, all right? And then life leaves your body,

and they weigh your body instantly after you're dead, and it still weighs 150 pounds, so that your body weighs the same, alive or dead, before it begins to deteriorate. And if that's the case, then your life, this thing that leaves your body, and your body still weighs the same, is weightless.

Your life is weightless. You can't put a dimension on it. You can't put a measure on it. Who you are is that life, and that life is not in the dimension of material. It's like if I want to wiggle my finger, I just have to have a thought.

And the thought says, I think I'm going to wiggle my finger. And then I do this, and you say, well, that's really no big deal. But it really is a big deal, because there's something invisible in here that says, I'm going to wiggle my finger. I've never seen that. I've never been able to, you can put that under an x-ray. You can try to measure that and find out what it is in there.

that allows you to say, I'm going to wiggle my finger, and you can never find it. It's not in this world, if you will. So I can do all the scientific studies, and what I can do when I do these scientific studies is I can find the command center inside of me, and I can go to the brain and I can point to a specific point, and scientists can do this and say,

there's the command center, which allows you to have a thought, I think I'm going to wiggle my finger. But there's no computer and there's no scientists and there's no technology that can ever allow us to go inside and say, there's the commander in the command center. Can't find it. And that commander in the command center, that weightlessness, is the part of us that we just don't pay enough attention to.

Once you start becoming aware of the power of thought, and if you look around, just look around you at everything that you see, it all began with a thought. We become what we think about. And that is probably one of the most important principles in learning to manifest. But in my mind, as I think about this idea of getting what you really want

and being able to attract it into your life, what we have to look at as basically the obstacles that we have conditioned ourselves, and you notice I say that we have conditioned ourselves, because I have never believed that we need to be putting the responsibility on someone else. If you're conditioned, it's because you have allowed yourself to become that. And if we conditioned ourselves to believe certain kinds of things,

and one of the things that we kind of believe and hang on to and live with is this whole idea that all of the things that happened to me in my past are what are keeping me from doing what I'd like to do today. So we hang on to these things and we fill ourselves with blame. He say, I'm the middle child. I'm the youngest child. I'm the oldest child. I'm an only child.

Any one of those is a great excuse. If you're the youngest child, you can say, well, you know, I never, how could I be making decisions for myself and be a fully functioning person today when I always had somebody else telling me what to do my whole life? How could I think for myself? If you're the oldest child, you can simply say to yourself, Well, how could I be expected to think for myself? I always had to think for somebody else.

I was always doing it for somebody else. And that leaves the middle child, you know, the classic identity crisis. Oh, poor me. My mother didn't even know my name. She's always calling me by this one's name or that one's name. So I don't know where I fit in. So that takes care of everybody except the only child. And, of course, the only child.

Well, your parents looked at you and said, we won't be doing that again. You have to live with that. I don't, huh? So everybody with their birth order, or with their mother like their sister better, or that we had enough or we didn't have enough or we had too much, or we lived in the north, we lived in the south, I'm too tall, I'm too short, I've got too much hair, I don't have enough hair, it's falling out, it's not falling out,

whatever it is, we all have these excuses. And I call all of these things that we hang on to and use to keep ourselves from reaching these higher places in our lives, the wake. I call it the wake. And the wake comes from a story that I heard Alan Watts tell one time. It was a very powerful story. He said, your life is like a boat. And it's heading up the river at, say, 40 knots, right? And as it's going, you are somehow able to metaphorically stand on the stern, the back of the boat, and look down into the

water. Now there goes your life in this direction and you're standing here and you're looking down into the water and you ask yourself these three questions. The first question, what is the wake? What is it? What is this thing that you see? And the answer? The wake is the trail that is left behind. That's what it is. Nothing more, nothing less. It's the trail that is left behind. Second question to ask yourself in this little metaphor, what's driving the boat? What's making this thing go in this direction? The answer? The present moment energy that's being generated by the engine.

And nothing more. That's the only thing that's making the boat go in this direction. And in this little scene, this means it's the present moment thoughts that I have and how I am using them that is making my life go in this direction and nothing more. Because the third question is the most important and powerful question. And ever since I heard it, I've always thought about this whenever I have a tendency to look back here and blame something. Is it possible for the wake to drive the boat? That is, can a trail that is left behind make a boat go in this direction? And of course the answer to that is, no, it can't.

It's just a trail that is left behind. And in that trail, there are an enormous number of things, and every one of us has a wake. And we have a whole lot of stuff in it. And one of the problems that we have is that we have a tendency to look at the wake and all of the stuff that's in it, to explain why it is my life isn't working the way I would like it to work. so that you can take a look at the experiences of your life. I look at the experiences of my life. In the experiences of my life, I spent some years in a series of foster homes.

People have said to me, oh, living in a foster home, that must have been terrible. I said, no, it wasn't terrible at all. When you're six years old, you don't wake up every day and say, oh, my God, I'm living in a foster home. Isn't this awful? Poor me. How come me and nobody else? You don't do that.

You don't do that until you're 40. And when you're 40 and your life isn't working and you're bankrupt and you're a drug addict and your relationships are all falling apart and your family's leaving you and you say, why is this happening to you? You say, what do you expect from me? I had to live in a foster home. My mother liked my sister better. We were to this.

We were to. And so it's like we take a look at all of these things in our wake. And I'm not saying here that you shouldn't be in touch with your past and all of the things that are back there. But to use it as excuses for why you can't get where you'd like to get today is something that if you do that, you will never get to this place that I'm talking about in this program, which is this place that I call higher awareness, way beyond ordinary human awareness. One of the most powerful lessons that you can ever learn. I had to learn as a young man. My own father was a man who walked away. He left.

He left home when I was just a baby. Left my mother, who's sitting right here, 107 years old. No, you're not 1007. 82 years old, though, and with three little boys. And all I had ever heard when he walked out about this person that my older brothers told me about and that when my mother got her family back together again when I was nine years old

and did all that she could to make a family again, all the hardships. This was a man who never made a phone call, who never sent a penny, who spent some time in prison, who was an alcoholic, who died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 49 and was buried in a pauper's grave in Biloxi, Mississippi. And it wasn't until I went to his grave. and I was able to stand there, and I used to dream about this man and have this enormous hatred for this person

whom I had never seen, just based upon what he had done to my own mother and to my brothers and so on, and all of the stories that I had heard and all the research that I had done. And I ended up at his grave 10 years after he had died when I finally found out that he was dead.

It was on the 27th of August. It was 1974. before. And what I did transformed my life. What I did is I believe I was sent there by God, or whatever you want to call that divine spirit, the divine presence. And my life at that time wasn't working. I was overweight. My relationships weren't working. My writing wasn't working. There were a lot of things that weren't going well for me in my life at that time. Not badly, but they weren't going at the level that I knew I was capable of getting to because I was filled with this hatred, this anger, this bitterness.

And so what I did is I stood there on his grave, on this little marker in the ground, and I said, from now on I send you love. I forgive you. Mark Twain said that forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. And once I let go of that anger and that hatred and all of my attachment to the bonding,

that I had done with these wounds and let go of that and cleared that out of my life. My writing began to take place at a much higher level. In fact, I wrote erroneous zones in very, very short time after that. I began to get myself back in shape. I began to eat better. I began exercising, getting my weight down, and the people that were supposed to come into my life,

like my beautiful wife, who sits here with me this evening, and all of our children, some of whom are here this evening, All of it was allowed to flow when I released that energy of negativity and blame and hatred. They say that you never die from a snake bite. It isn't the bite. And you can't be unbitten. It's in the wake. What kills you is the venom that continues to pour through you long after the bite has taken place.

And that's something we have control over, and we can't change. And I'd like to suggest that what happens is that many of us bond ourselves to these wounds of our past. If I were to cut my hand, just cut it and watch it. My nature says, close up the wound. And I just have to watch it. And there's no doctor out there, there's no medicine out there that's going to heal that wound. There's something, there's a healing stream that I am connected to that will allow that wound to heal. So my nature says, close up the wounds.

Don't bond to them, don't hang on to them, close them up. But supposing I say to myself, oh, no, you don't. There's no way I'm going to let you close up. You see, if I can keep you open, and I can go to you and say, look at this. Say, what happens? Well, look at this kind of got. Oh, you poor, hey, look at that. It seems to be getting worse.

It's getting infected. Isn't that terrible? And if you practice this kind of a mentality, when your nature says close up the wound, but you keep it open before long you lose your hand. and after that you'll lose your arm and the whole organism will be destroyed if you don't let your nature take over

and your nature also says close up the wounds of your past close them up and oftentimes we ignore our nature and one of the things that he talked about when he was asked the question what's the difference between say a saint

or a highly functioning human being a spiritual master a spiritual teacher and the rest of us is that they have unconditional love in them? And you don't or we don't? And he said, no. He said, saints have unconditional love in them, and so do you. He said, the difference between ordinary human awareness and higher awareness people is that they have nothing else inside of them. That's all they have. And it's almost like we have to learn how to get that in ourselves.

To be able to, well, I always like to use a metaphor of an orange. I love the orange. Perhaps living in Florida is why, but... An orange is a simple metaphor. You take this orange and you squeeze it, as hard as you can squeeze it, and you ask yourself, what will come out? And what comes out when you squeeze an orange?

Orange juice. Never, no matter how many times you squeeze it, will apple juice come out. There's no mistakes. You'll never get grapefruit juice out of this thing, ever. The only thing you'll ever get out of it is orange juice. And the next question is, why? Why wouldn't you squeeze an orange, as hard as you can squeeze it, does orange juice come out? And I asked that question up in Toronto one time.

There's a little girl sitting right in the front row. She said, that's dumb. She said, that's what's inside. It has to come out. I said, well, that's the answer. You are really smart. and she smiled, she thought that was great. But that's the truth.

The reason that orange juice comes out when you squeezes is because that's what's inside. Now you extend the metaphor, and someone squeezes you. That is, someone says something about you that you don't like. Someone behaves towards you in a way that you find offensive. Somebody does something or says something to you that you feel hurt by. And out of you comes anger. Hatred, bitterness, tension, fear, anxiety.

anxiety, stress. And immediate, you say, the reason that comes out of me is because of how he said it or the way that she said that or because they did that. But the truth is, the reality is that what comes out is what's inside. And if you don't like what's inside, you can change it. Now, if you ask me, how does orange juice get inside of an orange? I would say, I don't know. I can't figure it out. It's a mystery to me.

I just enjoy the oranges of my life and give God the credit for that. A lot of people think that other things make them the way they are. They will blame their past. They'll blame their parents. They'll blame the economy. They'll blame the Ayatollah. They'll blame somebody for things that are going wrong in their life. And one of the favorite things that we have to blame for why I'm upset at a particular moment is something called traffic.

Traffic made me upset. I've always reminded myself when I'm in a jam or when I'm on the freeway and I'm trying to get someplace, that traffic doesn't care, that you have within you the opportunity in this moment to really work on these things that are perhaps debilitating or creating anxiety or stress in your life, that these are tests, these are opportunities for you. Traffic doesn't care. Your anger is your choice, and you can always choose to be happy, angry, depressed, miserable, upset, or you're not. You're not happy. you can choose to be fulfilled and do something positive in this moment. It's always up to you. I'd like to give you what I think of as the great spiritual teachings of many various persuasions. There's a story that summarizes it. It's the story of what I call the four philanthropists

in a village. The conquerors had come through and they had taken all of the men or many of the men who were warriors at the time, and they had placed them into this prisoner of war camp right in the village. And many of the villagers knew that their compatriots were imprisoned. And the first philanthropist was a person who had great wealth. And he went to the people who had the prison

and were in charge of it, and he said to them, I understand the men are not able to have fresh water. and cold water, I would like to donate all of my earnings and everything that I have to purifying the water for them and making sure that all of them will not be sick. And he was granted that. And he felt like he had fulfilled his destiny, that he had done what he was here for. The second philanthropist discovered that the men were sleeping on rocks and that they were cold at night. They didn't have blankets. And he took all of his funds and he said to them, I would like to provide bedding and blankets for the people so that they will be. be comfortable when they sleep at night. And he was granted that right, and he donated his money for this purpose. And again, he felt that he was fulfilling his destiny. The third Palantibus

discovered that the food that they were eating was inadequate, that they were just given beans and water and some bread. And so he said, I own a farm, and I'd like to grow all of my food, and I'd like to take this food to all of these prisoners. And he was granted that right. And all three of these great philanthropists in the village felt that they had really completed their mission for why they were here. But the fourth philanthropist was a saint.

He was living not at ordinary human awareness, but at higher consciousness levels. And he went and he found out where the keys were. And he went to the prison at night, and he released. all of the prisoners. And this little metaphorical story really tells us that when we are living at ordinary human awareness, there's nothing wrong with those who are out there who can help us to suffer in comfort. All right. And many of us have learned to

do that and accept that and say, all right, as long as I'm comfortable, even if I'm suffering, it's okay. But there are those who have keys. And those keys can open the prisons, but I'm telling you that when you keep your attention on what you don't want, what you don't want is what will keep manifesting into your life. Addictions have been described as never getting enough of what you don't want or what you despise. So we keep our attention on what we don't want, and what we don't want is what we keep seeking after, and then we despise it.

When we put our attention on what we do want, when we shift to a place called unconditional love and begin to view it as something that I don't have to be dependent upon, you can shift right out of it. The currency for attracting what we want into our lives is our thoughts as you think. So shall you be. Begin to place them on what it is that you want and you'll start seeing it shift over and over. And people who are terrific at getting what they want, you start getting inside of their head and say, what do you think like? How are you organized in here? And you know what they always say?

I never, ever allow my thoughts on anything that I don't want. And no matter who out there is saying, yes, but you can't do this. Yes, but you can't do that. I never allow that kind of energy. I shift away from that energy instantly. That's what separates great masters from ordinary human awareness. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.