Should we get down to this? Let’s get down to it. Let’s have a Gathering Room. Okay. So those of you who are in the Wilder community, the online community that Ro and I host, it’s called Wilder. It is the Cahoot because all the things we do, we do in cahoots. And we have a monthly theme every month that we talk about during our activities when we gather online. And this month has been signs and symbols. It’s been so interesting because people have talked about things that happened to them in their lives that felt like turning points that were kind of a mysterious sign from the universe. People have talked about ways they access the mysterious signs. And it’s so interesting that what has come out for me has been the paradox of living in this way.

Because if you say, “Okay, I’m going to ask for a sign from the universe,” you’re obviously saying you believe there is something in the universe that could give you a sign. That in itself is a statement of faith because maybe all signs are coincidences, who knows? But those of us who look for them are sort of convinced that there’s something more in there. There’s an intelligence that’s guiding these signs and symbols and connecting them with our consciousness for a reason. Now, here’s the danger of that. And it’s the reason people shy away from it in so many aspects of modern culture. We don’t like the whole, “I saw a sign. I read the entrails of a crow on the road after it got hit by a car, and therefore I know what is to come in my life.” Some of these divination things, they started out as people interested in signs and symbols, and then they turned into people saying that they had evidence for their own agenda because of a sign or a symbol.

And quite rightly, people who are into science will say, “That’s not evidence. That’s you dreaming something up and putting undue importance on a coincidence.” I loved a show called It’s a Miracle. They would talk about all these improbable things and one of my friends called it, “It’s a Goddamn Coincidence.” I didn’t agree with him, but I also saw his point that every time we have a coincidence and call it a sign or a symbol and then say we have certainty, people who aren’t in the same belief system quite rightly say, “That does not sound like certainty to me.”

So on the other hand, once several months ago, I had on The Gathering Room a brilliant scientist by the name of Dr. Lisa Miller from Columbia University who has done this incredibly powerful social science work on people’s spiritual experiences. And basically Dr. Miller, Lisa, says, “You’ve got two choices based on the data: spirituality or depression.” Because people who don’t believe in any kind of sign, symbol, or coincidence in any kind of reality beyond the physical life of the body—we’re looking at a very sort of limited view of what our lives are about. And by midlife, when you look at your life and go, “Well, I’m more than halfway through and I know exactly how this will end,” if there’s not some deeper significance than just what we do in our lived bodies, if there’s not something bigger, that tends not to work for us very well.

So Dr. Miller believes in signs and symbols. She told us a story about how she tried to conceive a child for a very long time. She had a dream once that said, where she was asked—she was thinking about adopting and she was asked, “If you conceived a child at this point, would you still adopt?” And she was like, “No, absolutely not.” Woke up, didn’t think much of it, went years and years trying to get pregnant, and finally decided to adopt and with her husband, went through documents, and I don’t know how they do it, but they connected in some way with this little boy, I believe it was in Russia. And she fell in love with him, deeply in love with him, like this was her child and she just knew it. And that night she had the dream again, “If you knew you could get pregnant, or if you got pregnant, would you still adopt this child?” And her answer was, “Absolutely. That’s my son. I’m never giving him up.” And that night, she got pregnant. So she saw that as a not-at-all-coincidental, life-changing event.

So where do you go if you don’t want to be one of these “I get to tell you what to do because I once had a miracle happen in my life,” which is the way people try to treat me sometimes because I’ve had lots of wonderful, miraculous things happen to me, but it doesn’t mean I’m foolproof or that I’m the source of any wisdom or anything. I mean, if something sits well with you, then take it, but by no means do I claim, “I have done magical things, therefore you must obey me.” On the other hand, I don’t want you saying, “Yeah, your amazing magical things are just coincidence” because that doesn’t feel true to me either.

So I really love having lived in Asia and studied Asian languages and civilizations because in the West, if you say to someone, “I have found the truth of a religious belief and I am going to live in a Western religion. I’m going to commit myself completely to, say, Islam.” If you do that, then Christians and Jewish people and other people who are in a different faith will say, “You are not of our faith.” Okay, well, can I be Islamic and Christian? Not really. It doesn’t work well on the Christian side, doesn’t work well on the Islamic side. They’re sort of exclusive, mutually exclusive.

But in East Asia, when I said, “Yeah, I was raised in a Christian faith. Mormonism has a Christian component.” And they’d say, “Oh yeah, Jesus. We love him. He was a Buddhist for sure.” And there’s no ruling out of something. There’s no saying “This one way is certainty and there is no other way.” So the thing about those religions, those Asian religions that are very, very accommodating and inclusive—Pool-like if you read my Substack—is that they are not really into certainty of any kind, except for one thing, and that is: connection with the real.

Now, everybody in science will tell you, “I’m connected to the real.” Everybody who’s a true believer of a Western religion will tell you, “I’m connected to the real.” But the way Buddhism and Taoism and Shintoism, all those Asian traditions worship, is to say, “There is no real but now. There is no moment but now that we are ever living. Therefore, come into this moment now.” So all the religious practices, they’re not about, “I’m going to memorize all the miracles that happened to so-and-so, and I’m going to follow them as a leader. I’m going to paint one belief system as heathen, and I’m going to push all of them out.” It’s just, “What is happening to me right now?” It’s very, very different. It pulls all our attention out of the past and out of the future and out of all absolutism and says, “What is happening now?”

So yesterday I was talking to Ro, or maybe it was this morning. We were talking about planning for life in this day and age, and how you can get up and make a brilliant plan, and something will happen in the world that completely right-angle-turns it. It absolutely—you have to change it. And as the pace of change continues to grow, more and more of those things will happen. So I was talking to her about the American football idea of “calling an audible.” 

So if those of you are not American football fans, here’s the deal. When an American football team goes out on the field, the leader—the quarterback—has an idea where they’ve all memorized these plans for different plays and they’re very elaborate. There are 11 people on each team, and if they say they’re going to do Play 153, they all have to know where to go. So the coach will give a plan and they’ll all go out on the field, and then the quarterback will look at the other team and see how they’re lined up and he gets a hunch. And then he has permission and authority on most teams to say, “I’m going to change the plan.” And so he’ll shout a code word. The famous one—Peyton Manning, a brilliant football player, would yell, “Omaha, Omaha.” And it became one of the most famous things to shout in America. And what it meant was: “Not the old plan, something new. Listen.” It didn’t give them the new thing. It got them out of the play they were going to carry out, and it made them listen to the quarterback.

So think of it this way. We’re going through life. We have a plan. We think it’s going to work. We get up in the morning to do our plan: “I’m going to go work at an insurance agency as I have for 20 years” or “I’m going to start my own company” or “I’m going to go into the woods and live off grid” or whatever it is. And you get up in the morning and you go out there and you’ve got your absolute plan. The absolutism will tank you in a time when unpredictability is the norm. If you’ve come into reality now and say, “I will allow everything to inform me. I will allow science to inform me. I will allow religion to inform me as much as it feels right to me. I will allow my own signs and symbols. I will allow the amazing coincidences that happened to me. I will allow them all, as part of what is happening to me right now. And I will live in the art of the audible.”

I just watched a long video called “The Art of the Audible”—more football than you can shake a stick at. But it was really beautiful, the idea of the quarterback—and that’s you in your own life—having to go out in every given moment on the field and look at the conditions and find a way to plan forward that is different from the other plan. To do that, we have to be in relation to the mystery. We have to be wide open with all our senses. We have to bring every bit of book learning and science that we know, and we have to be open to signs, symbols, and things that are being thrown at us in our dreams, in our strange coincidences, in our interactions with animals and strangers and this incredibly magical world we’re living in, where we tend to lock everything down because we already have a plan and we’re waiting for someone else to call the play.

And I really do believe that part of this deployment of our spirits in these bodies is, especially at this time in history, nobody gets to just wait for somebody else to call the play. Maybe you go to the coach if you’re having a belief in a higher power or your higher self or whatever and the coach helps you out. But basically you’re on the field pulling on everything you know and calling an audible every minute of every day, being willing to, because that can happen dozens of times in a game to a quarterback.

So some of you know that Byron Katie is one of my great heroes and role models. And one of my friends once asked her, “What is your plan for the day?” And she said, “Oh, it’s so interesting. I get up and I wash my face.” And he said, “So what happens next?” And she said, “Well, then I let the day unfold.” And I’ve been around her and I have seen her calling audibles. One day she said, “Let’s go for a walk.” We walked off a short distance, we were in South Africa, walked into the bush a short distance, and then she just turned around and said, “I’m going back.” And I could tell she’d called an audible. She was so sensitive to what was going on inside her, around her, through her, in every given moment that she was basically always feeling for the wisest path.

So this idea of making a plan, but always knowing you’re going to have to call an audible, it brings us to a place where we have to be so centered, so alert, so trusting—not in science, not in religion, not in the world remaining the way we want it to remain—but in our ability. There’s a reason somebody gets called as a quarterback and put on that field. If he’s in the pros, he has proven himself play after play after play after play. And he’s gotten slammed and smashed time after time after time after time, and he’s still able to go in there and have all his wits about him, feel his gut, rest on his experience and call that audible. And most of the time, he’ll do the right thing. Not all the time, but that’s where we’re living. We’re living in this rough-and-tumble game. I mean, this game of life is at least as brutal as American football, which is very brutal. And it’s very complicated and it takes a very long time to get the wits of a quarterback to be able to call the audibles on your own life.

So what I want to ask us to do today is let go of everything else. If you’ve been following someone slavishly because you think they’re magic, pull back from that. You are the quarterback. If you think there is no magic, but you’d like to believe it, pull back from that absolutism. If you want to believe it, why not? There is a lot of evidence that it’s real. If you’re thinking about the past and the future, pull back from that. Be here now. You can’t call an audible for a play that you’re not playing now. So right in this second—I am not kidding—pull back, assess your situation, and call an audible, right?

If you really know that your life right now needs you to sit on the couch and watch, for example, The Diplomat, which is an incredible series starring Keri Russell and other notaries that my family felt spiritually called upon to binge this last weekend. I’m actually being serious. Really, truly. There will be times when you do something that seems incredibly goofy, times when you do things that seem incredibly difficult and brave, times when you do things that look to other people like you’re backing off and they might accuse you of cowardice for not pushing forward. All of it, all of it, all of it comes down to this moment now. None of the rest of it makes any difference whatsoever.

So I’m going to do the Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation because that is a really good way to get into this moment now where you can call an audible for the rest of today—or tonight, wherever you are in the world, wherever you’re listening to this. So everybody take a really deep breath, pop in questions into the comments if you have any, and let’s meditate for just a few short minutes.

Deep in breath, long exhale. Relax your ribcage, relax your shoulders, relax your jaw. Let your jaw hang loose. Let your neck relax. See if you can drop some of what you’ve been carrying for the rest of, so far, this day that you’ve been planning to carry for the rest of the day. Maybe you won’t carry it after you’ve dropped in and seen how the day wants to unfold.

Sigh of relief. Then turn your gaze inward as if you’re looking at your own heart and repeat the question, not to get the answer, but to put the mind in the question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between the tip of my nose and the back of my head? Can I imagine the distance between the tip of my right shoulder and the tip of my left shoulder? Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of my chest?

There is so much more space than there is matter. Can I imagine the space inside my chest blending seamlessly with the space inside the bodies of everyone else on this call, from China to India, to Europe, to South America, all of us connected? Can we imagine the distance between the atoms in our bodies? Can we imagine that the space between us is alive? Can we imagine the stillness in which all the action of our lives takes place, complete and total calm, creating a benevolent stage for all the activity of human life? Can we imagine the silence beneath all sounds?

Can we imagine that in that silence, stillness, and space are all the instructions for what we are meant to do in this moment and every moment to come throughout our lives. Always in the space, the stillness, and the silence are the instructions we need to let the day unfold. And we imagine living in the mystery of that continuously changing now that is always listening, always feeling, always sensing the space and the silence and stillness that makes up our consciousness.

So come back. That series of questions was simply designed to put your brain in the state of what’s called synchronous alpha to allow you access to a way of being, a way of knowing that you may not have been using much in your everyday life to this point. But I swear, if you use it going forward from this moment now, all of you who are listening, your whole day will change.

Can I tell you a silly thing that it does for me? If I’ve lost an object, and I drop into stillness, silence, and space and say, “Please help me find the object,” literally I will be pushed, physically pushed to the place where the object is. I cannot tell you how many times I have found things. It’s so weird. It’s statistically very improbable. Maybe I’m just triggering a memory of where the thing was, but the reason I tell you that is that you’ll get strange confirmations when you use this kind of instrument. Meditation is an instrument. That little visualization is an instrument of dropping in. 

So we got a couple of questions. Please ask more if you’ve got them. Question: “I’m curious about Martha’s thoughts around working through grief as it relates to signs and symbols. I have lost my parent and keep looking for these to smack me in my dreams or while daydreaming.”

It’s funny, when we are very focused on getting signals and signs, either we interpret everything as a signal or a sign and it feels really weak and sort of “That’s not real,” or we’re so intense and we’re so focused that we won’t accept anything as a sign or a symbol. So a few weeks ago I talked about Laura Lynne Jackson, who is a very scientifically vetted medium, one of the most scientifically studied mediums in history. She’s going to be a guest on The Gathering Room soon. Anyway, I went to hear her speak and she said, “These signs and symbols are always coming to you, and you will always have two reactions. You will have doubt and you will have fear. There’ll be fear that they aren’t real. Or if you’re somebody who doesn’t want to believe in anything ‘woo-woo,’ there could be fear that they are real.” Either way, fear is your enemy because what you’re trying to get to is the peaceful heart. That’s the point of this.

And I have found that pretending to believe something that is frankly a little not very convincing actually does not lead to a peaceful heart. It leads to constantly having to prove ourselves: “It is, it is, it is a sign.” And she said, “The other thing is doubt. Something will lock into your psyche. Something that happens outside the body will lock into the psyche inside this body and it will feel connected.” And in that moment, she said, “Allow it to be connected, knowing that in a couple of days you’re going to say, ‘Yeah, that was a good sign, but I really need two. That would really clinch it.’ Then you’ll get another one, and then you’ll decide, third time’s the charm, and you will go on and on and on just needing a sign or a symbol every single day for ages, forever.”

And she said, “Know that that dance of fear, doubt, and the joyful recognition of something is the life of a spiritual being in a physical body. Allow that to be your truth.” And it was so funny because when all these people were having very profound experiences in the audience—she would say something that was exactly square-on what their parent had told them earlier or whatever—and they would say, “Oh my God, you’re right,” and she would be as excited as they were. You may have seen this on other mediums, like Long Island Medium where she gets something right and she’s just like, “Ah! Really?” The mediums themselves act really astonished, which always confused me because I thought, “This seems easy for you.”

No, it is living in the mystery. It is never living in the certainty, y’all. We don’t actually get certainty. If we think we’re certain, we’re somehow lying to ourselves. Absolute certainty is not a possibility. So yeah, if you grab too hard at signs, if you back away from them too much, either one is going to put you in a difficult space. And if you say, “I will accept something even though I don’t know for sure it’s true,”—what I always say is, I don’t believe it, but I don’t not believe it—that’s where Asian religions have really taught me to live in the question of it, to live in the never quite sure. Because once you start living that way, you realize you’re never quite sure of anything. Certainty is basically a lie as long as we’re living in the flow of time.

So find the things that are significant, that are life-changing, that are life-orienting, and by their fruits, you shall know them. If they have a really, really good effect on you, it’s probably healthy to go ahead not disbelieving it, but also not grabbing it by the throat and choking it to death with absolute belief.

New question: “This is making me struggle with committing to retrain—a long road at the age of 50—when the reason I’m doing it is the end goal.”

Well, I don’t know what you’re retraining to do, but I think you’ve identified the problem: “when the reason I’m doing it is the end goal.” Because I will tell you, the end goal only exists in the moment that you achieve it, and then it’s gone. So you may have seen this documentary that Michael Phelps made about Olympians, champion Olympians in many cases, who were so depressed after they won a medal or whatever it was. And the reason is their whole lives were focused on that one moment of winning the Olympics, and then when they did, it was like there’s just not all that much there there.

So you do it for the training itself, whatever it is, whether it’s a sport, whether it’s spiritual practice, you do it for the moment of the training itself. And that is not always super pleasant, but it can always be meaningful. And if that’s the reason you’re training, then the training itself will be enough. As Camus said, “The struggle itself alone is enough to fill our hearts when we’re doing something we really believe in.”

Question: “I keep longing to hear from or see my mom, especially this week as her granddaughter gets married.”

Then open wide the doors of your belief system and invite it to come from anywhere. And then relax, relax, relax, relax into the current present moment. And in the moment that you are most present, maybe when you’re just bubbling over with joy to see your daughter get married, in those moments come the signs because in those moments of true presence and letting go of the need for certainty and allowing whatever joy is there to come in, that’s when whatever joy is there gets to come in. And the signs and symbols that really land, oh, they bring tremendous joy. So be present and enjoy.

So someone says: “Remind me of the name of that particular meditation, if you can. Love that way of getting into a different brain state.”

I just call it Space, Silence, and Stillness. I just made it up during The Gathering Room, and then people said, “Could you do that again every time?” So I do.

And someone else says: “This live gave me strange confirmations.”

Yes! Strange confirmations, that’s the title of this. Because yeah, when we relax, strange confirmations—and the strangeness of them is what makes us think, “I didn’t make that up. That was too strange.”

So final question: “How do we find the magic to find our people?”

You go to the delight of your body, your heart, and your soul. You go always toward the joy, the fascination, the wonder, the curiosity, and you stay in it for the moment. When I was watching that football video about what it really means to call an audible, I was just fascinated. And it’s in moments like that, that I was like, “This commentator on football, that guy is my person.” Never would’ve thought he was a person I’d be interested in. By the time I watched this, I was like, “He has insights into the deep aspects of the world. I love this man.”

So yeah, go toward the fascinations, see where the joy lies and let the day unfold. I have no idea what it’s going to bring, but I do know that if we can open ourselves to signs, symbols, and the mystery—and not clutch it too tightly—we’re on quite the joy ride. So thank you for being here. Hope to see you again when we come back to The Gathering Room. Love you. Bye.