Transcription
During my travels in India, I met a man at an ashram. He was about 45-50, a little older than everyone else. He tells me a story.
He had retired and was traveling on a motorcycle with his wife. At the time, coming behind them, a truck ran into them. It killed his wife, and he was badly injured, almost died. Told he wouldn't necessarily walk again. In a coma for a while. When he came out of it and found out what had happened, he naturally was devastated and heartbroken and physically broken. He knew that his road ahead of rehabilitation, physically and psychologically, was going to be hard.
He had one friend who was a yoga teacher who said, "We're going to get you started on the path to recovery." So she came over, and through yoga, helped him be able to walk again. After he could walk and regained his ability to move around, he decided to head to India and explore some more yoga. While he was there, he started to learn about meditation and Hinduism and Buddhism.
So he told me that, you know, he never would have thought to ever go down this path. He would have probably laughed at anyone who goes to India to find themselves. You know, I said, "Did you get what you were hoping for?" And he said, "Even though I lost my wife, I've never been happier because it put me on this path."
I remember joking with my friend in high school that, "Can you think about not thinking?" We noticed that the mind never stops thinking, and we noticed that you really can't think about not thinking. And that was a kind of a question that plagued me for a long time. There's a greater wisdom that comes when we're not clouded in thought, when we're not lost in thought, when we're addressing exactly what's happening and not some mentally constructed simulation of what's actually happening.
We always see movies, and they have this beginning and end. But any movie you see, something happened before it started. We just don't see it. So we fall for this illusion that things have this beginning and end. For a long time, physics believed that there was a beginning to the universe, and only now they're beginning to say there might have been something before that.
We get attached to certain people and forms and things and situations. The truth is, nothing is less. The truth is, things will always change.
When I was an ad man in New York, I had a unique perspective of how marketing and advertising works, and how it creates demand, and how it influences people to want products they would never normally have wanted. And I was responsible for a lot of that. [Music] More money, more clothes, more luxury items, more cars, vacations, nicer home, nicer furniture. We all know this feeling of, you want something, you get it, you feel this rush of dopamine, and then very soon after, you crash and you want something else.
The Native Americans have one of the most beautiful concepts in the world. They have 10,000 different languages and all these tribes, and none of them have a word for ownership or possession. They don't understand the concept of how something can belong to one person. It's really a man-made legal. You can't truly own anything. What you really realize is that so much of what people get obsessed about and go crazy over is just not important, not necessary. Yeah, I, I suffer because I crave things that I don't have, and I have an aversion to things that I don't want.
When you can just step back and see the big picture and know that good things will come, good things will go, bad things will come, bad things will go, then your happiness doesn't rely on any kind of external situation. That's the key to lasting happiness. A lot of people in our modern materialistic world think that success equals happiness. That if they just get this position or this raise or this bonus, they'll be happy. But personal experience, as well as scientific studies, have shown that once people's basic needs are met, more money, more success, bigger titles do not make us happy. We almost fail to see the blessings we have, and we focus solely on what someone else has, we don't have. [Music]
One book I read was called "Becoming Your Own Therapist" by a high Buddhist lama. And that's, to me, what I found that spirituality really is. When you realize that life is an illusion, that everything is one, that everything has meaning because we project meaning onto it, that you can kind of awaken from this rollercoaster of life, step off, and just appreciate in the marvel at the, you know, engineering of the roller coaster or the complexities of life, instead of feeling so attached to it and consumed by it.
We all have spiritual moments throughout our lives. That first moment you see a sunset or a flower, maybe a piece of art, and you just say, "Wow." And in that really true awe and wonder, you know, that childlike wonder that school's usually beat out of us, that is the moment we're all fully present, fully alert, fully appreciative. And there's a real connection made between the experience and the experiencer.
God and the universe are really interchangeable words. The universe loves us. God loves us. Have faith in the universe. Have faith in God. It's all, it's all the same. I mean, if, if God is everywhere, then God is the universe. And you don't have to believe in God to believe in the universe. I am God, but so are you, so is everybody. So treat everyone like God, including yourself. And remember, [Music] even though you're God, you're no better than anyone else. [Music]
A wise man once said, "The universe created itself to experience itself through us." Names are useful in that they help you know who someone's talking to, but they can also be a deception because the truth is, we're all just the same. We're all one. Who you are, who you think you are, the personality you've constructed, and that other people have told you you are, your name, your class, religion, whether it's a sexuality or a gender or nationality, this physical body is your house. You are the inhabitant. And the "you" I'm talking about is the life force energy, the conscious awareness, which there is no physical part of the brain or body that science has found that is responsible for consciousness.
And when we focus on these labels and identify with our temporary experience, we mistake our deepest sense of self with some temporary experience, and we see people as labels instead of infinite beings of potential. And it allows for a dehumanizing of each other. If you were to look at human skin under an electron microscope, you would not be able to tell where the human being begins and ends. [Music]
There is no fine barrier between the person and the universe. There is just a flow from one to the next. And the only reason we perceive separateness is because of the limitations of our senses. [Music] Human beings can only see [Music] 0.0001 percent of the spectrum of light, and we can only hear point zero zero zero one percent of the spectrum of sound. If we could see infrared, and if we could see ultraviolet and X-rays and energy, and hear the whole spectrum of sounds, the universe would appear very differently. There would be no empty space. It would be so full. We would just see this sea of energy, and there would only be oneness. There is no separate you, no separateness. There's a deep interconnectedness. There's only oneness.
There's a difference between loneliness and aloneness. Loneliness is when being alone causes suffering. But aloneness is ultimately recognizing others as yourself when you realize that you are one with everything. [Music]
All suffering exists in the mind. No matter what happens to you, [Music] no matter how terrible, there can be peace. You are not your trauma. You are not your circumstances. [Music] You are that eternal, unchanging light of consciousness. Your true nature cannot be hurt. Your body can be hurt. Your property can be lost. [Music] But nothing can touch the true you.
Space, silence, and our pure conscious awareness are similar in that nothing can alter those states. You can never freeze space or burn space or alter space in any way. It's eternal and unchanging. This is the nature of our true selves. The realization comes that it's not your life. You can't possess something. You are life. All the knowledge and wisdom is in each and every one of us. You don't have to read any book or belong to any religion. This is a universal and available to everyone way of living. Never forget that every moment is a miracle.
You know, that's, that's the goal of spirituality is to never forget that. Death is the beginning of the last great adventure and exploration of humanity. It's every person gets to go explore this thing that no living person knows about. Death, in and of itself, is a beautiful process. It's, it's like being born. Death is the great equalizer. No matter how rich or how poor, we're all going in that same direction. Everybody lives on through life living on. We're all the same life force energy. [Music] And that, that'll go on forever. Life will go on experiencing the universe as the universe intended. [Music]
We've all been everybody, and we'll all be everybody. [Music] It's, it's about enjoying the good times while they're here and knowing they won't last. And when the bad times come, we, uh, we know they won't last either. [Music] [Music]
Imagine a movie where the camera is shaking all the time. [Music] It would be the worst movie you've ever seen. You could barely focus on anything that's going on, and you'd probably walk out in five minutes. Stillness is everything. An opportunity to observe our chaotic mind and allow it to settle down, no matter what else is happening. [Music] You.