Original subtitles

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When I was very young, I didn't really believe any

of the theories about how the world worked,

whether I learned it from school in science or my religious

teachings, my Methodist religion.

I didn't believe, really.

None of it really satisfied me.

And so I started exploring other types

of spiritual kinds of text.

So things like Kabbalah or theosophy or anthroposophy.

Those kinds of things really interested me.

I also read "The Dead Sea Scrolls," books of the Bible

that they claim weren't put into the Bible,

because I wanted to know what was really

going on with our world.

What was our purpose?

Why are we here?

And I couldn't find these answers.

And eventually, I realized from all of the reading

that I did that the best way to find out

is through personal experience.

And meditation was something I had learned

about that you could get quiet inside

and learn how to access things like maybe your intuition

or telepathic abilities.

And so I wanted to learn how all of this worked.

When I first tried to meditate, it was really impossible.

I would simply watch more breath and close my eyes

and wait for my mind to empty, and it wasn't so simple.

I would try to meditate and all I would hear is grocery lists

or what conversation I wanted to have with my boss next week.

This was not quieting the mind at all, until I found sound.

And certain types of sound really

helped me find that quiet space inside.

So at first it was things like gongs or tuning forks

or brass bowls, crystal bowls.

[HUM]

And this kind of sound really helped me to quiet the brain.

Now in modern times, we have something

called binaural beats, and these are

sounds created with digital frequencies that

create that wah, wah sound, but in very deliberate ways.

And what those sounds are designed to do,

binaural beats are at their most basic

putting one frequency in one ear and a slightly different

frequency in the other ear.

And it's the difference between those two frequencies

that's important.

And that difference is driving what

we believe is a brainwave state associated

with states of meditation.

When you take an EEG device that measures the electric signal

that comes out of the brain, it comes out

in hertz or cycles per second.

And zero to four hertz is delta, and that's

the state that's associated with sleep or coma.

Four to seven hertz is theta, and that's associated

with deep meditative states.

Seven to about 12 hertz is alpha,

and that's associated with being relaxed or very focused.

12 to, say, 30 hertz, that's the beta state.

That's the state we're in when we're walking, talking.

And that's the state we want to kind of remove ourselves

from and get into that lower state of awareness associated

with meditation.

Between delta and theta, that's the state

between asleep and awake.

And others call this the hypnagogic state.

When you can get the body very profoundly relaxed,

but the mind is still aware, that's

the state we're very interested in, because this

is where we can start to make real change in ourselves

and also start to notice things that

are beyond the physical body.

And so one of those things is the observer.

We call it the inner observer.

That's the part of you that's behind the thoughts.

And so one of the most common meditative sort of directions

is to watch your breath.

And when you notice your mind wandering,

return your attention to the breath.

And it's the part of you that notices your mind

is wandering that we're most interested in.

This is not your thoughts.

This is not your reactive emotions.

That's what we're used to thinking of as who we are.

But when we can get behind all that-- and binaural beats

can help us do that, because they

help to reduce our awareness of those ongoing thoughts

and get us into an awareness that's more

associated with maybe dreaming.

But we're very aware.

These kinds of sounds can be used for all kinds of reasons.

Some people use them just to get a better night's sleep,

because we can feed those signals that will put you

into a more restful state.

But other people use them to gain more focus

when they're studying.

People use them to get more creative, to access creativity

that is from within.

So painters or writers can use it to kind of open up

those channels.

And not only that, you can use these recordings

to relieve stress and anxiety.

And I think this really speaks to this correlation

between our inner world and our outer world.

And so when we get ourselves kind of in order

in our inner world, that's when things in our outer world

really start to change.

And this can be kind of counterintuitive,

but the way this works is when we can think of things that we

want to have in our lives--

let's say it's a more fulfilling job,

more fulfilling employment.

How do we get there?

Well, many people use affirmations

where they speak the things that they want in their minds.

But a more powerful way to do this

is to bring your feelings into it.

And so the idea that we recommend

when people want to bring something new into their lives

is to imagine, what would it feel like if you already

had that fulfilling, satisfying job?

We can all imagine what it would feel like to have something

that we wish to have.

And so this is what needs to be added to just our thoughts.

And very often, when you start to go within and start

to pay attention to that inner world, at least

in my case and many that I've spoken to,

we start to find little things that don't seem to belong,

things that we maybe thought we had dealt with.

So things like deep loneliness or despair

might come up when you start to get quiet inside.

And I know I thought to myself, well,

when I felt this kind of despair,

I thought, well, I'm not lonely.

I have friends.

What's going on here?

And what I eventually discovered is

that I was triggering an emotional trauma that I

had maybe 20 years ago in my childhood

that I hadn't really dealt with, and I had just

stored into my system.

And so when we start to imagine things

that we want to have in our lives,

if there's conflicting feelings inside,

that can really put a damper on everything.

And so it's really important to understand

all of your emotional reactions, all of the kinds of limiting

beliefs you might have about things

that you want to generate happening in your life.

By going within, by establishing this practice of triggering

emotional traumas and releasing them

and understanding where beliefs might be getting in your way,

these are the subconscious beliefs

that maybe we're not quite aware of.

We want to clear out all those conflicts

and find real clarity inside.

And when you can really release all

of the limiting beliefs and emotional reactions,

that's when you really start to align

with that more expanded nature of who we

all truly are made of.

We are souls at our most basic, and we are in a body.

It's not the opposite.

We weren't a body that created a soul.

We were a soul that inhabits a body.

And so really understanding how your soul works,

why it came here, you know, what it needs to accomplish

can be very useful.

And any practice of going within can get you there.

But for me, binaural beats have always

been a very useful way of getting past that surface

kind of thoughts and emotions.

One of the more useful techniques that I learned

was awareness of the heart.

And I was very, very fascinated by all of the research done

by HeartMath.

This is an institute in California

that's been scientifically studying the heart for decades.

And what they've found--

and this is for all of us, all of us who have a heart--

that it emits an electromagnetic field

that comes out of the body like this,

and it's in the shape of a torus.

What they found is it actually expands and contracts

based on your emotional state.

So emotions like joy or happiness, that'll

create a very large field.

But emotions like sadness or grief

or anger or greed, emotions like that

will create a more constricted field.

And this is important, because our electromagnetic field

of the heart actually expands and contracts.

And as it does that, it has the ability

to influence other people around us.

Now, our brains have an electromagnetic field too.

And people like to think that the brain is

in charge of everything.

And of course, it's a very important organ

in the body, no doubt.

But the brain has a much smaller electromagnetic field.

The heart is 60 times greater than the brain's

in the electric part of the field.

And in the emotional part of the field,

the heart is 3,000 times bigger than the brain.

So you can imagine as it's expanding and contracting

that it's reaching some rather far distances.

And this ability to influence others is quite remarkable.

They've done studies at HeartMath

where someone will be sitting across the table from someone

else, and the one person who's in on the experiment

is doing what's known as a coherence technique.

Now, a coherence technique is simply

generating a feeling of gratitude.

Not a thought of gratitude, but a feeling of gratitude.

And the person who's doing this is actually

able to influence the heart rate variability

and the brainwave state of the person sitting across

from them, bringing them into a calmer state.

And so as we're walking around in the world

and interacting with others, this

is going on, whether we realize it or not.

Our hearts are influencing the people around us.

And we can pay attention, and we know

who those people are who maybe make us feel uncomfortable

and those others who make us feel very good and welcome.

And this is really interesting to note.

But along with noting what is going on in other people's

heart fields, it's most useful to pay attention

to what's going on in your own heart field.

Your own heart field is the only one

that you have the ability to manage directly,

and you do it by learning to manage your emotional state.

And so this idea of generating feelings of gratitude,

for me this was very difficult. I

knew how to think of things I was grateful for,

but generating a feeling was different.

I seem to be one of those people--

and there may be many of us out there--

who learned how to shut down my feelings in order to protect

myself from being hurt.

But at the same time, I lost the ability

to generate at will these really good types of feelings.

And so I had to practice for a while.

And one of the pieces of advice I got

was to recall things from my past that I was grateful for.

I remembered back to when I was six years old.

My mother had taken in a stray dog,

and that dog was a girl dog, and it was pregnant.

And it proceeded to give birth to puppies underneath my bed.

And this was a very magical kind of moment

for me, all of this wiggly life coming

to fore underneath my bed.

And so this memory of this experience

caused me to feel these kind of flickers of gratitude

in my heart.

And the more I practiced this feeling,

the more I felt it grow.

It's this sort of warm kind of energy

that you feel in your heart.

And when you really focus on it, you

can feel it expand around your body.

And all of us can do this.

Say, in a line at a bank or a grocery store

where maybe some people are in a bad mood

because it's taking too long, when

I imagine my heart expanding around

my body with these good feelings,

I can see people's mood change.

And so this can be very useful to just try in your own life.

It's fascinating to read about this kind of research,

but applying it in our lives is what

I find to be the most useful way to kind of use this information

to help myself and also others.

And I call this the ultimate golden rule.

You know, how we want to treat others

as we would like to be treated.

Well, the ultimate golden rule is

placing this kind of self-love, these loving

feelings in your heart, knowing that it's affecting people

around you in positive ways.

And so if all, all humans on the planet

or even the majority of us can learn how to do this,

imagine how our world might change.

This idea of feeling gratitude is really a beautiful way

to think about this idea of loving yourself.

I know when I grappled with that concept,

it was very challenging for me to think about directing love

towards myself, because many of us, when we're

very young usually, we try to protect ourselves

from things that happen.

In my case, my parents, my mother and father,

were divorced at a very young age.

And they involved me and my brothers

very directly in this decision by sitting us down

when I was seven years old and asking us, which parent would

you like to live with?

They asked us to make that choice.

Now at this time, my father had been in Vietnam for two years,

and I didn't really know him that well,

because he hadn't been around.

So for me, it was a very easy decision.

I said, well, of course I want to live with my mother.

And I decided in that moment that I didn't need my father.

Now at that moment, it felt like the very thing

I needed to do to keep myself to be

strong to not miss him and feel so sad that he wasn't around.

But what I effectively ended up doing

was shutting down my ability to receive love

from men, basically.

And so this worked fine when I was a child, but as I got older

and I wanted to get into relationships with others,

I had built this wall around my heart,

a wall I didn't even realize existed.

And it's when I started meditating, especially

when I started doing Sufi heart rhythm meditation where

we started to put a lot of awareness on the heart,

and we did this by imagining our breath was

moving in and out of our heart.

Just that simple act alone triggered

these feelings of abandonment, of being alone,

of having no one there, and despair,

and I didn't know where it came from.

And then I realized eventually-- it wasn't quick,

this can take a little time--

that I had done it to myself.

And we all do this.

When we're rejected as children from our peers,

maybe from an abusive parent, or maybe a teacher or minister

says something in a certain way that

hurts us and we don't understand--

and I call these baby wounds, because they happen to us

before we can really have the bigger

picture of maybe why a parent or teacher said a certain thing.

They're wounds inside that happened before we understood

what was going on, and we set up little systems

to protect ourselves.

And so as adults, as grown-ups, it is very useful

to go in and understand maybe if you're

having issues in relationships, or maybe you're

having an issue where you can't hold down a steady job, what

did you potentially do when you were very young

and didn't realize how it might affect you later in life?

It can be called an abandonment wound,

a universal abandonment wound.

We all seem to create these reasons

for not being good enough, for not

being deserving, any of those things

that we want to have in our lives.

And these are very often subconscious beliefs

that hold us back, and other times they're very conscious.

But all of them are related to things that we probably

didn't mean to do to ourselves.

And it can be very useful to go within, find out

what those things are in your own life, and release them.

These kinds of things can really set

you free to really manifest the things that you

want to have in your life.

It's so easy, especially in relationships

or any kind of issue, to blame others for our problems.

It's always something else beyond our control.

Now in psychology, there's something called locus

of control, internal or external locus of control.

And internal locus of control people

believe that their actions, their beliefs, their thoughts,

and their behaviors have an influence on their unfolding

reality.

But external locus of control people,

they think that everything is fate or destiny,

that there's nothing they can do,

that the world will deliver to them whatever it will,

and they're just a victim of all of this.

But in relationship, it can be very useful

when you're triggered somehow by something that someone else is

doing to not blame the other person,

but to look inside yourself and wonder, what is inside of me

that's causing that trigger?

Why am I responding to this particular behavior

in this way?

And so by focusing on the inner world, lots of things

can change in the outer world.

And this happened for me.

I didn't realize really the extent

of how this could go until I started meditating.

I did have a relationship I wasn't satisfied with.

I did have a job I wasn't satisfied with.

I lived in a location that I wasn't satisfied.

And I wondered, how could I change all of those things?

And it was very challenging to think about making

all of those changes.

But when I started going within and I

started to release all of these limiting beliefs

and these old traumas, I didn't realize that

by cleaning up my inner world, by really developing

and cultivating that peaceful inner sanctum,

then my outer world started to change.

All by itself.

It was completely amazing how all of this took place.

And I've met other people--

I'm not alone.

I tell other people this and they

will say the same thing happened to them, that when

they started to focus on their inner world

that everything in their outer world

started to shift on its own.

And this even extended to issues with my daughter, that teenager

I was having troubles with.

I used to want to fix her.

I would want to talk to her teachers

and straighten her friends out and change what clothes she

was wearing, and all of that.

But when I started focusing on my inner world and didn't worry

about her anymore--

of course, I still worried, but I didn't actively

try to make changes in her life--

she started to make changes in her life on her own.

It was amazing.

And so I think we all kind of set these templates for others

to follow.

Somehow I believe it's related to that electromagnetic field

of the heart.

When my electromagnetic field gets smooth

and I'm around my daughter, hers automatically

starts to get smoother.

And so again, this ultimate golden rule.

By focusing on ourselves and creating that self-love,

we end up helping others in ways that

are so mysterious, but obvious once they take place.

And these synchronicities are fascinating,

because sometimes these things will happen,

and we like to call them coincidences.

For example, if we're looking for an answer

to a vexing problem, and then suddenly you

see a billboard that has a word on it that triggers,

oh my gosh, that's the solution, many of us

call that a coincidence.

But really, a better word is synchronicity.

Carl Jung used this word in his therapy work.

And these are things that happen that maybe

are related in ways that we can't imagine from our place.

But when we start to realize that the universe is working

for us, and when we can create a resonance, for example,

of positivity and love and gratitude, all of that

is sort of a beacon that is radiating

these kinds of feelings.

And the universe has no choice but to line up

with that resonance.

By creating that within yourself,

you open up this opportunity for the universe

to deliver to you what it is that you're seeking.

But you must pay attention.

There's a joke I like to tell where a man was drowning

in the ocean, and he prays to God, God, will you help me?

And God doesn't answer.

And a boat goes by and he says, hey,

would you like us to help you?

Throws him a life raft.

He says, no, no, no.

I'm waiting for God.

Someone else comes by.

Hey, here.

A helicopter with a rope.

No, no, no.

I'm waiting for God.

He ends up drowning.

He gets to heaven and says, God, what happened?

I was calling for you.

And he says, well, what do you think that boat was?

What do you think that helicopter was?

So our expectation of how things should show up

is not necessarily how things will show up.

And the universe seems to know best.

And if we can just find this trust

and find this sort of flow with the universe

and realize that we energetically

are an integral part of it, all of us

together form one collective mind, and each of us

is an integral piece of it.

And it is our personal responsibility

to really maintain our energy so that it

is compatible with the rest of that collective mind.

One thing that really fascinated me when

I was doing all of the reading about alternative spirituality

is that I also read a lot about our alternative history,

and I was convinced as a young child

that our ancient history was not complete.

Everyone learns, at least in America,

about those Giza pyramids in our ancient history,

and they tell us that they were built by pharaohs as burial

terms by thousands of slaves.

But then when they try to recreate the engineering

feats of the Great Pyramid today, they can't equal it.

They can't align it to the four directions the way

it's aligned.

They can't stack the blocks as closely as they're stacked.

And in fact, none of us today really

can explain how those pyramids were built.

And yet, we think we're so advanced technologically.

So this immediately told me many,

many years ago as a young person that we

must have had some technology that we've forgotten,

that somehow technology used to exist on Earth that we

no longer know how to activate.

And so at first, I thought this must

have been bigger machines or somehow better tools

that we don't have anymore.

But one thing that I came across that makes so much sense to me

is that these pyramids were built using sound or vibration,

and that by somehow using the human voice or some kind

of instrument, they were able to alter I

guess the matter of stones into something more malleable

that was either lighter or easier to use or shape.

And somehow, this alteration in frequency

was a skill that was known to humans

who lived here on planet Earth.

And it fascinates me that this is

found all over the planet, these kinds of engineering feats

that we can't equal today.

And when you look at these, you find that many of them

are aligned to stars or different constellations

in our skies.

This also tells me that our ancient ancestors knew things

that we don't give them credit for.

And a lot of this can also be related

to spirituality, because way back in those times,

they knew many of the concepts that we hear about today,

that we're just starting to hear about,

that we're made of one consciousness,

that mind existed before matter.

These kinds of things used to be common knowledge.

And our more advanced academic types

like to say that our ancient ancestors maybe

weren't as smart as we are today,

but I would like to offer that maybe,

just maybe they were a little smarter in some ways.

And these ancient sites around the world are perfect evidence.

And so I love when people take time to study and learn more

about these ancient structures, because it informs us

on how we should be moving forward

with our collective world today.

I encourage anyone who's listening to find that hope,

because we've taken a wrong turn in our society,

and we're in the process of correcting that turn.

And that turn can really be attributed to this idea

of materialist science.

The idea that only the physical world exists

is actually a theory, but somehow that theory

has come to be known as truth, especially in our secular

society that has kind of taken religion out

of the equation for many reasons,

because there are some problems with organized religion

that many people have found.

But in doing that, we've kind of thrown the baby out

with the bathwater.

We've thrown out this idea of spirituality.

And by bringing back the idea that we

are more than our physical bodies,

that we do not exist only from birth to death and nothing

more, that there's a grander reason for all

of us being here, this kind of idea

can bring much hope to many of us.

And we can access this by going within.

We don't need to wait for scientists to get around

to telling us that mind is powerful,

that this is a good thing.

We can find out for ourselves.

By creating any practice of going within-- and again,

sound can be very useful for those of us

in the West who have trouble quieting our minds,

especially in the secular world where we're not

used to thinking of a higher power

or some kind of greater influence.

But when you go within and quiet the mind

and get behind all of those thoughts

and emotions and that despair and those triggers that we all

have, you find there is something greater,

and you are connected to it.

And I guarantee anyone who takes the time

to really find the techniques that

work for them will find this.

And this connection to something greater

is such an antidote to all of this in our world,

because the materialist science that

has infiltrated our secular world

has stripped all meaning and purpose.

They've told us we're just chemical zombies walking around

with this illusion that we're conscious.

It sends me into an existential crisis.

It's like, well, then why do I even bother to think?

And so it's no wonder that so many people,

if that's what they believe is true,

are turning to this kind of despair.

And so finding that connection to something

greater, whatever you want to call it--

the universe, the force, whatever word you want to use.

If god is uncomfortable--

I know god was uncomfortable for me,

and I prefer the word universe.

But that is a greater power.

Another thing that you can imagine

is that you are a piece of that greater power.

Think about the philosophy that we're all part of one mind.

We can come to that level of understanding

that we are creator beings and that we

are responsible ultimately for what's

going around in this world.

And so all of the despair we see is really a reflection

that many of us have despair in our inner worlds.

And if our inner worlds start to get

more aligned with peaceful kinds of feelings,

that's when the outer world will catch up.

And so don't despair, because each of us

has a role to play by really finding that unique spark that

makes us who we are and causing that to radiate

to the world around us.

No soul will be left behind, and we are all in this together.

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