Well, I was thinking about how comforting it is to sing the Beatles song, “Let It Be.” And how, if you don’t know that song, if you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere, it’s whenever Paul McCartney apparently found himself in times of trouble, Mother Mary would come to him and whisper words of wisdom, which were always, “Let it be. ” And nothing else. She doesn’t go on in the chorus to say, “And by the way, here’s how you attain enlightenment.” Nope, just let it be. That’s all she says. And all over the world, people are going, “Oh my God, thank you. Let it be. That is a relief. I can live with that. “

And a lot of the enlightened ones tell us the same thing like Krishnamurti, the Indian teacher who was enlightened at age 15 or something, they said, and—I don’t know how they measure these things—but after he’d been teaching for 50 years about his constant state of bliss, he said, “I will tell you my secret.” And everybody crowded around because he’d never said this before. And he said, “Here’s my secret. I don’t mind what happens. I don’t care what’s happening. I’m okay with it.”

It’s not like he wasn’t standing up for peace and love and justice and truth, but in the moment, whatever was, he didn’t fight it. And there are so many people who give us the same message, right? And yet we also get messages from our upbringing, from our—I’m always raving about Western culture that says, “Don’t let it be. Be better, do things more, work harder, make it happen.”

After Ram Dass, who started out as Richard Alpert at Harvard and became an acolyte of spiritual masters, and everybody at Harvard said he’d gone crazy, and I would hear this at Harvard when I was there. And I thought, ugh. They called all the guys who did that, they called them cheese heads because they said their heads were full of holes like Swiss cheese. And I thought, “Oh, ho, the cheese heads.” They were much mocked. And now I think Ram Das and the people who hung out with him were much, much, much more intelligent in their choices than the people who were mocking them. Anyway, he had a massive stroke in 1997, and his friends and his loved ones gathered around and they said, “Don’t worry, Ram Dass. You’ll walk again. We’re going to help you. ” And he said—he had some speech problems and he said, “I think I’ll sit for a while.” And he didn’t ever walk fluidly again for the rest of his life. I think he lived 22 years after that. And he said things like, “I really enjoy just sitting and looking out the window and seeing how creation unfolds.”

This is—he called it “fierce grace” to be kind of forced into a meditation for 22 years of his life. And he was cheerful and he was loving, and he didn’t go through a massive depression that anyone could see because he’d already gotten used to sitting still and being okay with what is, not minding what is. People come back from near-death experiences—and I’m always reading their books, there are so many books because it happens to a lot of people and a lot of them write books. And they have different experiences, but one thing they all have in common is that they are connected with beings of perfect love and they have this massive epiphany that says love is all that matters. And then they come back and they tell people that and everybody says, “Really?”

And every single song on the radio is saying it and every single experience we have is saying it. Everything is trying to teach us nothing matters but love and love is what we are. And one person who wrote a near-death experience book said she was told on the other side, people can wake up after they’re dead much more easily than when they’re alive because they know they’re safe. If you don’t have the fear of death, and you don’t believe that this human life is the end-all, be-all of your existence, then there’s a degree of safety that allows you to see that everywhere around you is evidence saying love is all that needs to be and not minding what is is the path to experiencing that love in the present moment.

But she said people before they die were in this very vivid illusion. And she said—this is a woman who bled to death, she was unconscious when she died—and she said she had this abrupt return to consciousness and an audible pop. And she knew, her first thought was, “My heart has stopped. I’m dead. I’m dying.” And then she was like, “No, I’m dead.” And she was suddenly free from all the fear that she’d been experiencing on earth. And she said it’s completely obvious. It’s lying around everywhere, this lesson that love is everything and you can’t get it wrong, but we just don’t see it because of this fear of death. And she said, “It really is like waking up out of a nightmare. The reality you experience on the other side is so much more convincing, is so much more real.” Imagine how real it is when you wake up from a dream and realize, “Oh, that wasn’t real. This is.” This felt sense of reality.

My own experience and the experience of other people who’ve had similar mystical experiences is that when you pop out of this dream and into the next one, it is a thousand zillion times more real on that side. And on that side, people meet with beings of love who say to them, “Let’s review your life.” And so they sit and review their lives, and they see everything that they ever did, and they feel whatever they caused other people to feel. And they’re like, “Oh my God, I hurt someone. Now I understand how that person felt. This is terrible.” And, “Oh, I did something right. That’s virtuous.”

And the beings around them go, “Okay, was it an experience?” And the newly dead person says, “Yeah, it was an experience.” And the beings of light or whatever they are go, “Yeah, that’s all we’re supposed to have. You were just supposed to have experiences. That’s what the whole thing was for, having experiences.” “Well, I never left my house. I was terrified of everything.” “Oh, was that an experience?” “Yes.” “You win! You can’t get this wrong.”

“I was bad to people.” “Okay, do you feel what you did?” “Yes, it was horrible.” “Was it an experience?” “Yes.” “Did it teach you that love is the answer?” “Yes.” “You score!” Like that, it still counts. And I know it’s very hard to say things like that when there are people doing evil, genuine evil in the world, and it’s horrifying and it has to be stopped. And if you want to go out and join picket lines or run for office or do whatever it takes to fight evil, I’m right there with you.

But when you pop out of this dream, you suddenly realize you were safe the whole time. And that makes you more likely to go out and join the forces of good and try to build something beautiful in the world and gently dissemble things that are bad. It actually gives you more energy to realize: I’m completely safe here. I’m only here to accumulate experiences. I can’t get this wrong. I’m not making mistakes, per se, because I’m always having experiences. And if I sit for just a little while and let it be, it’s blindingly obvious that love is the answer. Love is what I am. Love is what I need. I am meant to live in peace. I am meant to live in joy. How do I know this? Because it feels good. I am not meant to hurt other people. I am not meant to allow myself to be hurt by other people. Why not? Because it feels terrible.

Okay, you’ve got the meaning of life, and if you know you’re perfectly safe, you can sort of go out and allow yourself to take what looks like a risk to most people. So after I had my own little white-light experience in surgery, and it was so much, so much, so much more real than this world, I popped out of that and started having very vivid flashbacks of things that had happened to me. Long story short, I experienced abuse in childhood that I believe was connected to my religion. And I thought the religious system was oppressive and that it facilitated the abuse of children, especially girls. And I felt like I had to stand up and say that. And I did. And I’m always going on about this because it was like the central experience of my life. And that cost me almost every relationship I’d ever had.

But see, I’d seen—I had the “let it be” experience. I had this light—it wasn’t Mother Mary, it could have been, I don’t know, it didn’t identify itself. It showed up. It made it absolutely obvious to me that love is the answer and that every choice should be made out of love. And other choices that are not made out of love are made out of fear because we are made of love. And the only thing that keeps us moving forward in this life that keeps us moving away from love is fear.

It’s a fear that you see through once you’ve had a death experience—it just doesn’t scare you as much. So even though that experience was horribly painful for me, I was able to do it because I knew how much more real the setting for this life is. And I’m always comparing it to a video game. So here’s what I want to say to you. Whatever you’ve got in your life that you’re thinking, “Oh my God, I haven’t got to that! I haven’t done that yet!” Let it be, man. Like, “I haven’t ever run a marathon.” Maybe sit for a while. “Yeah, well, I haven’t achieved enough.” “Have you had experiences?” “Well, yeah, but they’re not good experiences. I was bored for six years.” “Was it an experience?” “Yes.” “Did it teach you anything?” “Yeah, I hated it.” “Okay, you scored! You’re perfect.You’re absolutely perfect.”

I know it seems weird, but what I say to my loved ones when they’re feeling bad and what I say to myself when I’m down on myself, which is a lot, I say, “Listen, you have literally never made a mistake. You’re perfect and you cannot make a mistake. You’ve been thrown into a game where you’re going to experience darkness and difficulty and do some things that you wish you hadn’t done. It’s all good. Let it be.”

So look at the projects around you that you haven’t finished, that you’re trying to push yourself to do. Let it be. Look at the things you regret. Acknowledge that you regret them. Okay, good. Let’s let that be for a while. You don’t have to go out and fix everything right now. Let’s look at the way the world is, which is deplorable and people are suffering. Okay. In this moment, let it be until you can feel that you are safe in this terrible world, paradoxically safe in this terrible world, and then see where love takes you next. And it will probably be to somehow serve those who are being harmed and try to gently disempower those who are doing evil, gently disempower them all the way.

So that’s all for today. I just wanted to tell you to let it be. So let’s do the Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation. And now I like to throw in another double-S word, which is softness, because I do think that as the world shifts into a new consciousness—and it’s already happening from my perspective, not to everybody, but to a critical mass of us. As we move into that, we need to be more and more soft with ourselves. And we find that moving softly and doing soft work is power, power, power. The power of softness is just an unbelievable revelation to me. I’ve been experiencing it in the past few months. So I may add that in.

So let’s start by soft focusing our eyes, which changes our brains into … They’re much more likely to go into what’s called a synchronous alpha wave if we go into the rest-and-relaxed brain state by holding our eyes still. So hold your eyes still if you’re not driving or walking, moving. Look at the screen or look at whatever you’re looking at. Hold your eyes there and then widen the scope of your attention until you see everything in your visual field, 360-degree circle around the point that you’re looking at, right? And out to the periphery of your vision. Now make everything equal in your attention and make your eyes soft. I don’t know how that translates to people, but it does. We soften the muscles around our eyes when we hear that suggestion.

So now with soft eyes, soft, open gaze, ask yourself the question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between me and every object that I can see around me? Can I imagine the distance between the screen I’m watching and the center of my heart? Can I imagine the distance between the top of my right shoulder and the top of my left shoulder? Can I imagine the space inside the cells and atoms of my body? Can I imagine the space that occupies most of the distance between the base of my skull and the base of my spine? Can I listen to the silence that holds every sound I hear? Can I imagine that silence? And can I imagine the perfect stillness that holds everything I am, everything I think or do or say or feel that holds it with so much love, so much gentleness and just says to me, “Let it be sweetheart. Let it be.”

So come on back in. Oh, somebody asked a question about somebody who was very dear to me. His name was Michael Trotta, and he passed away this past week. I remember going to track in the desert around Sedona with Michael when we did a seminar together and how we discovered the tracks of a javelina, like a little pig running through the desert, and how he showed me a track and said, “I saw this track being made so I know what made it and I could not figure it out.”

And it was a little sort of sidewinding gecko of a lizard and you could see its tiny footprints in the sand. And I remember him making me laugh and I can remember him on the deck at our favorite place at Londolozi in South Africa. I had a hat. I had bought it at a store in Northern California. It was a bird-watching hat and I took it to South Africa and it was made in Canada and sold in California. I took it to South Africa. We were sitting on the deck of our friends, the Varties, and Michael picked up the hat and because he was a very curious man, he found a secret compartment inside the hat, and he pulled out what looked like a little playing card or maybe a credit card. I think you were supposed to keep your credit cards in there. And it had on it a picture of a man and an elephant. And it said, “This hat was invented by, I think it was Michael Herschenberger or something.” And he had this elephant that he befriended and saved from the wild that was injured and it lived in a zoo in Canada and it ate his hat three times and all three times the hat went all the way through the elephant and came out basically unharmed on the other side.

So Michael read this card and the Vartys who were there said, “Oh, Michael Hershenberger. Yeah, he’s a really good friend. His elephant came from here.” So think about the coincidence of this. The hat is made in Canada. It is sold in Northern California. I buy it there. I take it to the spot in South Africa where that elephant was, and I only know the thing is there because Michael finds a compartment in my hat and pulls it out and reads it out loud so the Vartys can hear it so that I know this incredible synchronicity has just happened that I’ve brought the hat back to the place where the elephant was born. Michael is a person who just—he was a trickster. He was a genius. He was magnificent. Michael, I will always love you. Thanks for asking, guys. He was a true wayfinder, y’all. He really was.

Okay: “Martha, how do you decide whether to sit or get moving? I’m pretty new to having a choice in the matter.”

It’s fairly simple. Do you want to sit, or do you want to move? If you think, “Well, of course I want to sit,” ask yourself this, “Am I sitting because I’m afraid of what will happen if I move, that it will be tiring, that will require effort, that I’ll have to go out into the world and fear what’s keeping me sitting down? Or do I just really love sitting here?” Sometimes you just really love sitting there. And I believe you always follow your true desires. I don’t give a crap what’s going on around you. It’s always inside you that you know whether to sit or get moving and where to get moving and how. And I know we all have cultural pressures and things making us move or stay static. But ultimately, if we get to know what in us is telling us how to react to those pressures, we’ll always be able to find more peace in every moment, to find more peace when we are still, and to find more peace when we are still and still moving. So yep, it’s all inside. It’s an inside job.

Question: “How do you maintain trust in the destiny you’re working to manifest when you have yet to see or know the next steps to make it happen, and the people you love are wanting answers from you?”

First of all, you can handle the people you love by saying, “I don’t know. I don’t have a clue.” And if they’re not okay with that, you can perhaps say, “Maybe, perhaps, you can find within yourself what is the next step for you because the next step for me is never telling another person to do things so that I will be happy.” It’s always what I need to do to be happy under the current circumstances, including being with a person who does or does not do things. So maintaining trust in the destiny, I think this actually requires some time of sitting. When you sit still, one of the first things that happened to me was intense anxiety and it was mostly, I could meditate for 20 minutes or so and not feel it. But when I started meditating at least an hour at a time, man, at 40 minutes, I freaked out. My system was just geared to, “This is too much sitting still. This has got to be wrong.” It wasn’t a physical feeling. It was a fear based on my conditioning. It was murder to sit through that anxiety. And oh, it took months of sitting that length of time. But I am a really bad case, right? I was severely dysfunctional. I’m less dysfunctional now. I was severely dysfunctional. 

And what happens when you hold on to just being present through that anxiety, and you just decide, “I’m going to keep sitting. I’m going to keep sitting,” you start to notice after a while, nothing really horrible is happening because I sat for a whole hour instead of 20 minutes. Okay, nothing’s happening. And then after a while, you start to realize, “Oh, I’m getting access to this spring of clear water at the center of my being. This is the most important place I could ever go.” And so you go in, you go in, you go in, and because you always find that in the center of yourself, after you found it the first time, you have to find your way back a few times, but then you start to develop the brain wiring to go back directly, right? And when you’re there, that’s home. And all we ever want is to get home. All we ever want is to turn around and see someone lovingly saying, “It’s okay,” like a loving parental figure going, “I’m much bigger than you are. You’re absolutely safe. You can play around. I’m taking care of you. You’re home. You’re okay. You can lie down. You can stand up. You can run about. I’m just watching you. You’re perfectly safe. You can’t get it wrong. You’re home.”

And that’s trust. And then yes, empires are built out of such things. Empires grow out of such things. Krishnamurti never tried to make himself famous. He was like, all shiny, and people noticed. Byron Katie, one of my favorite spiritual teachers, never tried to make herself famous. Oh God, no. She just went off for walks in the desert, sometimes for weeks at a time. She couldn’t help it. She was just very shiny because she was home. After she had this enlightenment experience, she was home. So whatever your empire’s meant to be, it emerges from the state of coming home and letting it be. Doesn’t that sound almost too good to be true? It sounds too good to be true, so nobody ever tries it. We’re told not to try it. Try it. Just try it. Try it today. You don’t have to meditate for months at a time. Just today, let it be and do what you want. That’s so crazy. No one would ever do it. Just let it be and do what you want. Relax into the present moment. Expect miracles. Remember things. I hadn’t thought about that memory of Michael showing me the elephant card for years, but because someone asked me about it, I brought it back up and sitting here thinking that was crazy—if that was a coincidence, it was a massive one. And I kind of think it wasn’t a coincidence. I think that some beautiful trickster force in the universe was playing through Michael and through me and through the Vartys to make this little miracle happen on the deck at the Varty House at Londolozi.

And every time you sit still and remember the miracles—and you’ve all had them, I promise you have. You’ve conditioned your attention not to see them a lot of the time. But if you start to remember them, it’s home. It’s home. It takes you home. So you can sit in the present moment and let it be and be filled with the joy of miracles happening in a kind of timeless thing where your whole life is laid out as experience, experience, experience. Bad experience: Learn so much from it. Good experience: Learn so much from it. Trickster experience: Oh my God, learn so much from it. Can’t get it wrong. You are perfect and you’ve never made a mistake.

Next question: “Have you read any near-death experiences from children or young adults?”

I’ve heard of them. There’s one book that’s all kids’ experiences, but I started reading it and it felt very filtered through adult filters. It had a very, very particular religious flavor. And I was like, “Eh, I think they’re manipulating the kids’ experience.” I’m very cynical and critical about these things. I don’t like the bad ones. There are a lot of them that to me just come across as fakery. You can tell a real one because it goes [hums] when you read it. And they all say the same thing, but each person sees it in a different way, a different flavor of the human experience, of the living experience, of the dying experience, and every single one is fascinated. Consciousness is fascinated by every single one of us. By your life today, the great consciousness of the universe is going, “Oh yes, do more.” “What should I do?” “More.” “Okay, but I’m just sitting here.” “Okay, do more of that. That’s amazing. Sitting there is incredible.” “Okay, but I’m eating nachos by the bucket full.” “Oh, do that. You’re going to be really sick. It’s a great experience. Keep going.” Like, nothing is wrong. And you can feel that when you get into the real-death experience, near-death experiences by people who actually are sticking pretty close to just their experience.

“Isn’t that a little spiritually bypass-y?” says someone.

Absolutely. It absolutely can be, but I’ll tell you something. It’s when I am rendered hopeless and helpless by the misery of this world that I absolutely need to let it be. Paul McCartney said it: “When I find myself in times of trouble, that’s when Mother Mary says, ‘Let it be.'” Not, “when I find myself in a time of absolute perfection and I’ve fixed everything and everything is right, then I can let it be.” No. Setting things right starts with letting it be. So I’m not looking at horrors and saying, “Oh, they’ll be fine. We’re all going to die and there’s no mistakes.” I am saying that from the perspective of our spiritual being, but when we get that and we know we’re safe and we can’t make a mistake and we are constantly in the present moment, something really interesting happens. Consciousness picks us up and starts to function through us. And it always functions to maximize love. Always.

So when we let it be, when we relax into the moment, when we let ourselves just sit like Ram Dass and allow ourselves to watch what’s happening without resistance, love moves through us and it moves with great power. That’s why I mentioned Byron Katie and Krishnamurti. They changed the world. They changed individual lives. They healed innumerable—watch Byron Katie. She does free things on, I think Wednesdays and Tuesdays or something. And you see just her presence healing the brokenhearted and the sorrowing. And she’s going right dead into the center of trauma and crime and all these things with her absolute contentment in letting it be. So it’s not a spiritual bypass. It’s a spiritual right-into-the-core-of-things drive. It’s just not the way we’re taught to function.

Okay. A couple more: “If you let it be, how do you make sure you don’t just let go of something because it’s hard?”

You won’t feel good. You will notice that you’re doing it out of fear: fear of getting it wrong, fear of having to work too hard or whatever. And that when you’re working on it, even though it’s hard, it’s joyful. So you choose what brings you joy.

So last question—I’m sorry I can’t answer them all—”Thoughts on sacrifices, giving up what I want for the comfort and love of another who is suffering.”

Well, if you’re sitting with that and you let it be and you think, “I now have less of what I want, but my loved one is suffering less,” feel the balance of it in your heart. You will probably find ways that even with the sacrifice you’ve made, another door opens to you through the heart center, through the knowledge of what would make you happy and what would be love, so that you bring new things into your life that make you feel even more loved than before as a result of having given something up to help someone else that you love. This is something that in The Way of Integrity after reading 19 translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy, he talks in there about the mathematics of the spirit versus the mathematics of material reality. In material reality, if you give something to someone, you have less. But in spiritual reality, if you give something to someone, it multiplies everyone’s joy. So there’s no deficit. So if a family loves each other and they bring in a puppy and everybody loves the puppy, it doesn’t mean they have to love each other less. It means that they love the puppy and they love each other more as they’re playing with the puppy and the puppy loves them. And in spiritual reality, all gifts of love become multiplicative and increase the entire pool of joy available to everyone, everyone, everyone.

Everything you do that brings more joy and love into the world influences the entire thing in infinitesimal ways, but in very real ways. So no, it’s not a spiritual bypass. Today, if there’s something you’ve been bugging yourself and hurting yourself over, put it down, let it be. Sit for a while or get up and be still and still moving for a while and let it be. You are perfect. You’ve never got it wrong.

You can never make a mistake. All is well. Let it be. I love you. And now I’m zipping over to do a meditation in our Wilder community. So Wilder people out there, please don’t forget to show up. We’re going to have such a nice time doing absolutely nothing together. Thanks for coming to The Gathering Room. I love you all. See you soon.