So what we’re talking about is this paradox that people have, and the paradox is this: When we know that we’re going to be okay, when we know what’s going to happen, when we know everything that’s going to happen forever, then we can relax.

Don’t you wish it worked like that? We think about it that way. But the truth, of course, is the opposite. It’s when you relax that you start to live happily and things turn out better because you can never, ever know the future, not even a moment, not even the rest of the afternoon or the evening, wherever you happen to be, the morning. You can’t know that. So in order to feel at peace, you have to feel at peace now.

So we were all practicing getting into peace now. And these are folks who have trained and they have the tools to do it. And still, it helps to be in community and do it together. So that’s what we were all kind of celebrating today. And that’s what I want—to keep the ball rolling and pass it on to you all.

So I know that you’re probably familiar with the sort of New Age idea of manifesting: “Yes, if you think strongly about something, it will come to pass.” No, that’s not how it works.

If you think strongly about something and then drop into peace in this moment, then it’s much more likely to come to pass. This has been my experience. This has been the experience of all those coaches I was talking to today. This is the experience of clients galore—from all of us. Everybody who enters this kind of line of work sees this in action. It’s still hard when we do it ourselves.

But yeah, there are still people falling into a panic and then having to sort of pull back—all the coaches laughing to themselves because we all do this and we all need to be reminded. And fortunately, they’ve been through enough training that they can laugh about it.

But let me give you a metaphor that I put in one of my books—I can’t remember which one, I think The Way of Integrity—that helped me, that I’ve always seen working for me and for clients and for other coaches. It just works if you think about it this way. Okay?

Imagine, first of all, there is in each of us something I call a chime of truth. You could call it the click or the chime or the ping or the note of truth. That is when we hear something that is deeply true for us at the deepest level, there’s a kind of resonance, a kind of fit, a kind of sense of completion, this kind of dropping into place. And I have gone all over the world talking to all kinds of people and asking them about what gives them the clearest sense of truth in their bodies, in their hearts, in their lives. And what I found is that there’s one sentence that really, really sinks in for everybody. And that means people who are in—I’ve asked beggars and unhoused people on the streets. I’ve asked people in prison. I’ve asked multimillionaires. I’ve asked a lot of people. And nobody felt that this wasn’t true. The statement is: “I am meant to live in peace.”

So I want you all, if you’re watching now or if you’re watching later, just to yourself, just turn your eyes down a little bit. Almost look inside and then just think the thought, “I am meant to live in peace. I am meant to live in peace.”

And feel how that affects your body. I just said it only twice. I knew I was going to say it. And still, when I said it, there was a sense in my whole core of openness, of calm, of things being in their rightful place. I am meant to live in peace. I truly believe we were all meant to live in peace.

I go out walking in the mornings and I see the rabbits and the deer and the raccoons and everything. And they all are living in peace. None of them has a plan to tell them what’s going on for the future. And they’re always in a peaceful state except when they’re actively running from me. So they’ll be 10 bounds away and then they’ll stop and they’ll be in peace again. So nature is always living in this state of peace. And I’m walking along worried about the future and I have to remind myself, “I am meant to live in peace. I am meant to live in peace.”

And here’s what I know. I learned to go to a state of peace just to feel better. People are always telling me, “Once I know what’s going to happen, then I’ll go into a state of peace. I need to be anxious, anxious until I know everything that’s going to happen, then I’ll be in a state of peace.”

And what I say is if you’re anxious in this moment and you get to a different moment, you will still be anxious. But if you can find peace in this moment and then get to another moment, you’ll be at peace. Now the fact that everybody I talk to feels that as a truth—I’ve never had anybody say, “I don’t think that’s true for me.” The fact that it rings so true says that the state of peace is the place we’re meant to live in. In other words, it’s our real home.

And when you try to manifest things— “I’m thinking intently, I really want them. I’m going to throw a tantrum till I get them” inside—when you’re doing that and it doesn’t work, it’s very discouraging.

But here’s what I think. I think the universe really is registering all your desires and all the things you’re trying to manifest. I just think it always sends them to your real home address. And you are meant to live in peace. So if you’re not now in peace and you’re thinking of a lot of things you want, then you can access those things, but only by going home to peace. I really, truly think that the disquiet and the anxiety of a human life is actually meant to make us try to conjure up the things that would help us be happy. To conjure up things we could invent, things we could own, relationships we could have. The discontent of human life is meant to make us think of those things. Because once we go into that and really, really ask, there is a delivery.

Asking for gifts from the universe is a powerful strategy if you know how to go home because all your presence, all the things you’ve tried to manifest, they are being delivered to your real home address.

So I’ve had so many examples of this, not just with things that I wanted coming into play into my life once I calmed down, but things that went way beyond my expectations. I may have told you before about how I used to, when I was a little kid, my siblings and I, we all wanted to live in this place called Oak Hills. And it was this subdivision in Provo, Utah. And all the cool kids lived there. We did not. I did not. I lived in a place that was not cool. And so my siblings and I would talk about Oak Hills, Oak Hills. “Oh my gosh. If we only had a house in Oak Hills, our lives would be so much better.”

So then I went off to college, but married a hometown boy. And in fact, when I was getting my PhD, finishing my dissertation, we moved back to our hometown. We both worked from there and it was a much easier place to have little kids, which we were having by then. So I went back there while I was doing my dissertation for a couple of years. And the house he had grown up in was in Oak Hills. And we bought it from his parents. I had a house in Oak Hills. Yes, I did.

And I thought, “Oh, it’s because I came to a place of peace in my life, and this manifested.” So I got more and more and more peaceful as the time went by. I learned to meditate. I abandoned all self-deception. I went on my no lying campaign for years on end. I was always really pushing myself to be in a higher state of integrity.

And over the years, many things happened. And then when I was 50, I had this overwhelming desire to move to this ranch in California. Not because I’m a rancher, I just knew I was supposed to go live in this place. The painting behind me was actually inspired by that forest because there was one place in all of California that, number one, looked exactly the way I had imagined this place of peace for me to be. And number two, I could barely, barely afford it. So I got it, spent all my money on it. And one day I was walking around under these huge, mighty oaks. It’s very, very mountainous terrain. And I was walking under the oaks up and down the hills. And suddenly I went, “Oh my God, I own oak hills,” like entire hills covered with oak. And I was a bit stunned.

It reminded me of a story I’d read where a guy did some work for a very wealthy man in the Middle East. And the man wanted to thank him. And he said, “Well, maybe you could send me a golf club. I don’t really need any thanks. You paid me, but a golf club would be really nice.” So he went home and he sort of thought he’d get a nice golf club from this guy in the Middle East and it never came. He was like, “No harm, no foul. I like the guy.” Then one day he got a big thick envelope in the mail. And it was the title and deed to an actual resort that had a golf course on it. It was a golf club, a club of people who played golf along with the greens and everything. That is another example of what I mean.

By the way, the things we ask for being delivered to that place of peace that is our real home, not only do our imaginary wants get supplied, but often as a reward for going to peace, we get hugely more than we could have expected in a way that almost feels like a pun from the universe.

And I have a bunch of examples of this that are smaller, but I’d really like this week, I’d like all of us because times are scary and hard. The cost of living is skyrocketing everywhere in the globe. Everything’s still unstable politically. The climate, I mean, there’s so much to worry about, right? We need to stay in our home in order even to resolve those very problems. Somehow in the middle of the chaos, in the middle of all the whole unfolding catastrophe, if we can find a place of peace like every deer and every chipmunk that I walk past on my morning walks, if we can just do what they do, we can actually start to manifest things that are wonderful in our immediate circle, in our immediate circumstances, but have the capacity to create something far, far bigger.

And that’s why I really, really want us to go to a state of peace this week, like before the next Gathering Room. Just keep—the coaches and I, we’re just tapping in, tapping in, tapping into a state of peace because I really want things to go well for them. And I know that if I go to a state of peace, that’s when things go well for me.

So too bad we can’t say, “Oh, thank God. All the problems in the world and all the problems in our lives will be totally resolved to our satisfaction in the upcoming week and forever after.” Gosh, it would be nice if that were true. Can’t you just feel how that would be nice if it were true? All right. So let yourself feel that nice feeling.

I call it a willing suspension of disbelief for one’s own life, right? The willing suspension of disbelief that says, “I know that things don’t go the way they do in the movies, but I’m going to sit and watch the movie and suspend my disbelief in the way this story plays out.” Turns out we’re always telling a story, even when we’re anxious about the future, and we might as well tell a story that involves a willing suspension of disbelief allowing us to go back to our home, which is peace, and just see if some of our stuff isn’t waiting there. I think it is. And the longer you stay, the more you get.

All right. So how do you go to a place of peace? Well, whenever we do The Gathering Room, we do a little meditation that takes me there most of the time, and I hope it takes a lot of you there. So let’s do it. The Space, Silence, and Stillness, meditation, you know how this goes.

Take a deep breath, shake the tension out of your body. Long exhale. Relax your body. Be present here. There’s nothing else you need to do for the next few minutes. No matter what’s going on in your life, we’re just going to breathe and ask ourselves some odd questions. The first question is, and don’t try to answer it: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? So repeat that. Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Now soften your gaze and ask yourself: Can I imagine the distance between me and the screen where I’m watching this? Can I imagine that distance? Can I fill that distance with my imagination? Can I imagine the space between the crown of my head and the base of my spine?

Can I imagine the space inside the atoms inside my own heart? There’s far more empty space in us than there is matter. Can I imagine the spaciousness inside the volume of my body? Can I imagine that the space inside my body is continuous with the space around me? Is continuous with the space that fills every other person who is hearing this now?

Can I feel the stillness in the universe within which everything is happening, every physical thing? Can I imagine the silence beneath every sound? Let’s listen for it now. Can I imagine that this silence and this stillness and this space are alive and conscious and aware of me and loving me?

Loving me as a separate individual, loving all of us as one connected being. I imagine that that love will never cease. That space and silence and stillness will always hold my consciousness in a space of love. Okay.

So now, thank you very much for that. I would love to do some questions. Okay.

First one: “Can you explain a bit more about time being an illusion and how we can use that understanding along with staying grounded in peace to manifest what we yearn for?”

Sure. We know Einstein proved that if one person is moving very rapidly compared to another person, the one person who seems to be moving more rapidly will experience time more slowly than the person who is not moving. So there are science fiction novels about identical twins where one of them is sent into space and because they’re traveling very fast, the twin that goes to space stays young. Not as much time passes for that twin as for the twin that stays on Earth.

That’s, of course—it’s science fiction, but it’s based on a literal truth. So when you get to the speed of light, which is, as far as anyone has been able to figure out, the fastest you can go, time ceases to exist. One way Einstein described it was if you’re on a photon that’s moving, it bounces off a clock and then moves toward you. But if you stay at the speed of that photon, the clock face you see will never move. It will always be the same. So that’s just a handy-dandy way to sort of visualize it, but it is actually a proven fact of physics. So that means that there is something of which we’re very much aware—light—that we interact with every day, for which no time is passing.

If that light is conscious—who knows if it is or isn’t—then no time is passing for it, which means it can be every place in the universe at once. So it achieves a kind of infinite mass.

So the way I like to use this is to believe that a part of our consciousness, that part that is connected with space, silence, and stillness, that it is somehow akin to light and that it does not experience time as we do. If you watch near-death-experience stories, they’ll always say, “When I was out of my body, I experienced years’ worth of things because there is no time there. There’s just no time and I can’t explain it, but it’s mind blowing.”

Yeah. And I think that a part of us exists outside the physical all the time, all of our time. So that means that the part of us that is existing that is similar to light and has no time passing in the way that we do here, may be able to sort of drop into our awareness a sort of pebble that expands in our awareness and gives us a hint of something that is coming in the future.

But here’s the thing, if you drop a pebble into white water or waterfall, you can’t hear it and you can’t see its ripples. If you get very still, if the water is very still, like the water at the bottom of a deep well and you drop a pebble in, you can hear it very clearly and you can see the impact of its force on the ripples going out from the place it connects with the water. It drops into the water. So when we get super still and ask for a sense of reassurance or peace or whatever it is to go back to peace because something out there knows that it’ll be okay.

There can be that pebble drop, but only if we’re really quiet. And that’s why meditation is so good. And why the tantrum state of “I won’t be at peace until you give me my future” just eradicates our ability to feel that. So for me, yes, when I’ve gone back to my place of peace, I’ve gotten everything I asked for and then 10 times, a thousand times more than I though I could ever ask for. But by the same token, if I get very still and say, “This is going to be all right,” I very often hear the pebble dropping from my future self that says, “Oh yeah, it’ll be fine. It’ll be okay.” Even when that future me knows I’m about to go through some things that I did not ask for and really didn’t want. Nevertheless, when I quiet myself, it says, “Oh, your life has changed its form, and you don’t see what it’s becoming yet, but you’re going to love it when you do see it.” So yeah, thank you for that question. It’s a little mind bending, but very powerful.

Question: “What if you’re surrounded by a culture determined to be combative, anxious, and skeptical—like higher education or pretty much anything else in our culture? When I share this tactic with anyone in the world, there is such skepticism. It is sad.”

Yes. I first started thinking this way when I had my second child, which was because he was diagnosed with Down syndrome, and I had to make some real adjustments to my future. But I was also getting my third Harvard degree and I’d been living at Harvard since I was 17. And when I wrote about that experience in a book called Expecting Adam, I talked about things like hearing that pebble drop in the future and feeling some kind of assurance that even though I didn’t want my child to have this extra chromosome, somehow it was going to work out all to the good.

So I had a lot of very metaphysical experiences. And I wrote about them in Expecting Adam. And one person wrote me a letter from Harvard that said, one person I knew there that said, “You really, really need psychological help. You should check yourself into a hospital. You’re crazy.” And I was like, “Oh, all right. Thank you.” That’s what I expected to get from everyone at Harvard, from everyone anywhere in this culture that really, really runs on anxiety and skepticism and pure materialism a lot of the time.

But you know, I got maybe 20 letters from people I’d known at Harvard who read that book, and 19 of them said, “I thought I was the only one there having experiences like this.” That was so powerful for me to have, to know that I’d been walking around this campus hiding all my weird optimism and my weird spiritual experiences and my conviction that I was not purely physical. And I thought I was the only one and I wasn’t.

I really think that most people have experiences that pull them outside the cultural paradigm, the cultural limits. Yep, they’re going to show you skepticism. And that’s because they’ve been programmed to do it, socialized to do it. And here’s what I recommend: “I respectfully do not care.” I love you to pieces, you skeptics out there. I totally get it. You could totally be right. Oh my God, of course. This could be complete nonsense. But I don’t not believe it. And I really want you to be with someone who can believe this stuff so calmly that you somehow get the courage to dare playing in these waters as well because it’s really nice in here. It’s much better than trying to wait until you know the future and you have it all nailed down because you never will. So jump in with me. That’s what I would—you have to go about in your own place of peace to the extent that people’s skepticism is met with compassion in you instead of fear.

Okay: “Regarding manifesting from that place of peace as a young gay, how do we ask for the romantic relationship I yearn for staying in peace while also having needs? Tips to trust?”

Well, heck, I was there. It was a little awkward because I did marry a man. But once I started to realize during my year of no lies when I was 29 years old, I started to realize, “Oh, I think I like women.” The interesting thing was because I didn’t want to be gay, I started to sort of toy with the idea, but I thought, “That’s not going to be what I do. I’m never going to do that. I’m in a normal straight marriage. I can think about it. I can even really hope for it, but I’m never actually going to want it for reals.” I was so closeted that I took off all the stress out of it. I was like, “Oh, that would be really interesting, really nice, but nah.” And I really think that’s why I manifested a relationship that still to this day works for me. I won’t even go into the other relationship I’m still in to this day that also works for me. But yeah, if you don’t know this already, I ended up with two partners I love to distraction. And we’ve all been together for 10 years, and we all love each other to distraction. Yeah. I never—talk about getting more than you thought you would.

So what I’d do if I were you is take the pressure off yourself by just letting go. Being relaxed with it. Knowing that you’ll be okay even if it doesn’t happen. That really is the moral of this whole Gathering Room: knowing you’ll be okay even if it doesn’t happen. Ironically, that’s what makes it happen. I know it’s a paradox. My coaches and I were like, “How do we help people with this?” You just have to keep hearing it, I think.

So two more questions: “Have you, Marty, an example when you have ignored something that was sent to your home address and still haven’t followed?”

Not that I know of because long ago I left any ground that people told me was sane and levelheaded and just started going toward what brought me joy. And the objects, relationships, finances, everything that makes me feel stable and connected in the world, that’s actually not what brings me the joy.

The joy is in following the thread of the belief system, taking down my belief system, taking it apart. Any belief that causes suffering, just take it apart, dismantle it, find what’s left when those painful thoughts are gone. And what’s left is your home address: peace. That’s what brings me the joy. Soon as I recognize something that I want to my home address, I will be going to my place of peace, I promise you.

Last question: “How to maintain that peace when you have to do annoying, necessary, productive tasks that take a very different energy than that peaceful state?”

Well, I studied martial arts for eight years, and I was preparing myself for a situation that is sort of maximum annoying, maximum necessary, which is fighting back if someone attacks you. And you could take that as a metaphor for every job you have to do, every person who comes into your life to annoy you verbally. And what I learned is that we fight best from a state of peace. That when we relax, we can handle whatever is coming at us. And my tendency to tense up and get rigid was the worst thing I could do in the most necessary productive physical task in the world. So I realized that any task that is difficult, annoying, or necessary is better achieved from that place of peace. I cannot think of a single task or situation that would not be improved by relaxing and being in peace.

High performance comes out of that. High finance comes out of that. High performance in all fields comes out of that relaxation. So again, just another reminder that the place of peace is accessible to us now.

So imagine that the space, stillness, and silence that are always with us together, they join to create what we call peace. And we’re always, always, always in it. We just have to notice that. And then everything we want comes to us. I believe that. I don’t not believe that.

And I love you all very much. Thank you for coming to The Gathering Room. I’ll see you all here again soon. Bye.