Confidence Classic: Awaken Your Highest Self & Reclaim Your Mind with Michael Beckwith

26:17And we can actually think independent of a condition or a circumstance and make new choices. That's who we are. And so as our awareness expands and becomes more and more purified, then we have a different relationship to the universal presence and the universal law that's matching who we think we are. If I'm walking around saying, oh, I'm unworthy, I'm not good enough, no one likes me, then I'm identifying myself as someone who is less than. I can do all kinds of things in the world to become successful and liked and all of that. But if inwardly I'm thinking to myself, I'm unworthy, I'm not good enough, then the law matches that vibration and keeps feeding that back to you.

27:04And you can try really, really, really hard, but you can never outrun the content in your consciousness that you haven't transcended. So consciousness is primary. You have to shift your awareness, expand it into coming to an awareness that you are a light being. You're magnificent. What the universe has created is so beautiful. You know, going back to what you said earlier about this is all found in scripture, I mean, the teacher said, who by taking thought can add one cubit to their stature? You can't add anything to this perfect self. All you're doing is eliminating the false beliefs so that the perfect self that's already been created can begin to shine unencumbered, you see.

27:53So your mental attitude is important. The thoughts you're thinking are important. Your perception changes. Your intention is important. And all of this coupled with a little bit of meditation goes a long way. You mentioned vibration, and I know that you talk a lot about this. What are some of the things people can do to elevate their vibration when they are stuck in fear and upset and the hate and all these negative emotions? Right. Well, one of the key allies we have is our own breathing. You know, you can actually, when you're nervous, when you're scared or whatever the case may be, you can actually ask yourself, where am I feeling this?

28:33And you can place your attention right there and just begin to breathe into it. And you're observing it and breathing. So what's happening? Subatomic level, you're changing the energy based on observation. You're breathing. The energy is keeping it moving. And you have an intention to wake up from that intoxicated dream. You can do that immediately. And there's different kinds of pramayana, different kinds of ways to breathe to do that. Yesterday was just with Sue Mortar last night, Sue Mortar and Shawn Stevenson. We had a master class and Sue was reminding us about the power of that in her particular presentation.

29:10That's true. I mean, before I speak anywhere, I sit down and I do connected rapid breaths. Just connect it, clean out the psychic energy, go speak. The other way of doing that, you can actually ask a question. This is one of the things that I teach that came through me years ago. Behind every problem, there's a question trying to ask itself. Behind every question, answer trying to reveal itself. Behind every answer, there is an action trying to be taken. And behind every action, there's a way of life trying to be born. So if a person is stuck in a problem, that problem is inviting us to ask a different question.

29:49So say a person is having issues with money, finances. That's the problem. The universe is wanting you to ask a question like, what is the nature of prosperity? Sincerely, what is the nature of prosperity and abundance? You ask that question sincerely, an answer will start to come. The nature of prosperity is that you're surrounded by abundance. You have to find a way to give something and share something and to be of service, to get things circulating in your life so you don't have bad feng shui in your mind and in your heart. And as you begin to give, you know, opportunities open up because the hands of the givers are never empty.

30:27And then that puts you into, that's the answer, then it puts you into an action. You begin to ask, what can I give today? Not how can I get, what can I give? And then maybe you give a smile. Maybe you're going to help somebody if you don't have any money, but you're in the energy flow now of giving. And then that becomes a way of life. And then opportunities for prosperity show up. I'm just using prosperity as an example. Behind every problem, there's a question. Behind every question, there's an answer. Behind every answer, there's an action. Behind every action, there's a way of life trying to be born.

30:57So again, these are spiritual practices that when done sincerely, change your life. They literally change how you identify yourself. It doesn't mean you become all highfalutin and you're so spiritual, you're not earthly good. It just means you're becoming more yourself. You're more comfortable with yourself. You're more at ease with yourself because it's the real you. It's not the mask of trying to fit in or hope people like you or trying to manipulate people to give you what you think they should give you. No, it's none of that. You're not into that. you're being yourself and the universal law matches that blessings show up so how many people really live like that like the majority of people i just don't think based on what you're describing are living that magical type of life so where are people getting hung up you know i have a podcast called take back your mind because i'm reminding people that their mind has been hijacked it's been hijacked by the news media and that whole spinning out of negative narratives about the world.

32:01So individuals are living in this world that is not really real, but it's experienced. What do I mean by that? Just because you experience something doesn't mean it's real. And I'm going to break this down. When I was attending Morehouse College before I went to SC, we used to do a practical joke. I don't know why we called it a practical joke, but it was a joke. We would take a book of matches, strike a match, be hot, blow it out, and then we would touch a person with a cold match. They're thinking we're touching with a hot match, and they would create a heat blister on their hand. And they'd get mad, and we said, no, no, we touch you with a cold match.

32:37Follow me. Then we go to the next person, light the match, blow it out, quickly change it with a cold match, touch the person, and they'd burn themselves. So they were experiencing something that wasn't real. What were they experiencing? their thoughts. So the world has taken a nightmare pill. Lack, limitation, fear, doubt, worry, scarcity, wars, rumors of wars, hate, bigotry, homophobia, racism, you know, anti-Semitism, you know, the world is experiencing something that's not real. So the average person is living in fear, anxiety, anxiousness, worry, doubt. And the average person has normalized those perceptions.

33:19and because they've normalized it, they experience it on some level and then they have to figure out a way to have a recess from it. So there's pharmaceutical drugs, there's other drugs, there's overindulging in whatever, name whatever it is, just to have a moment of not feeling these emotions but when in fact your mind has been hijacked. So we're inviting people to take their mind back through very simple spiritual practices, intentions, so that they begin to witness the world, but they're not participating in it. The same way that you can witness crazy thoughts in your mind, but you're just looking at them.

34:00That's an interesting thought. I don't believe that thought. That's an interesting thought. That's not me. Where did that thought come from? And so little by little, you're changing your inner world and you become a part of the energy, energetic field, that's changing the outer world. We are vibrational beings. We're more than flesh and blood. Everything is energy. Everything is energy condensed or speeded up. If it's speeded up really fast, you can't see it. If it's condensed, it looks like matter, but it's all energy. And so when enough people are vibrating at a higher level, it actually changes the world.

34:31Just as there's been many experiences about people like the transcendental meditation people have gone into places and meditated. The crime rate has gone down. Other people have done the past meditation. Same thing. people coming together in large groups and establishing, like Lynn McTaggart, good friend of mine, you know, does intention experiments where she gives large groups of people to establish an intention for a certain part of the world. Violence goes down. So these things today are now corroborated by science, whereas 40 years ago was woo-woo. You know what I mean? The stuff I was teaching 40 years ago, it was like, ooh, that's weird.

35:09Today, it's proven. Epigenetics, quantum physics, biofeedback, brain feedback, heart coherence. Now all the science is showing these very same things, but we need a little bit of intention and a little bit of practice. So you don't have to go into the mountains and sit there for 40 days and 40 nights. You can just wake up in the morning, establish an intention, or just be grateful for your life. Establish an intention to have a beautiful day and just sit for five minutes in the silence. Obviously that will grow because you start to love it more and you'll be six minutes and eight minutes and 10 minutes, but you just have a little bit of practice.

35:48It'll change the trajectory of your life. Instead of going down the path that fear, anxiety, and worry will take you, now you're going down a path where peace and love, and these aren't, these are the most powerful forces on the planet. Even though when you say those words, people think, oh, that's not it. That's just love. That's just peace. No. Peace is the dynamic of harmonizing good. It's a power. Love is a total givingness without any sense of withhold. That's a power. So when you desire to be peaceful or loving, you're having a desire to be so confident, not in your little self, but in the power that's around us, you become powerful.

36:32Mohandas K. Gandhi wasn't a weak guy. You know what I mean? He was powerful in his peacemaking. And so we all don't have to be that. But in our own individual lives, we can make a big difference. Meet a different guest each week.

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38:12You mentioned the power of the collective and you gave some great examples of some of these meditation groups. And when they fixate and have an intention on a certain area, they can have actual scientific results. If that is the case, and it is, you would think our world is so much more enlightened today as a result of teachers like yourself and the Internet and access to information. Why isn't the world such a better place today than it was 100 years ago? Well, it is getting better. We're just not reported. When a person is on the news, they are reporting from an old paradigm. You and your program and people who have podcasts like this, we are reporting from the emerging paradigm.

38:54So the things we see on television, that's an old paradigm. So things are getting better, but you're not going to see that on television. What are you going to see? The latest assassination, the latest bombing, the drought, the hurricane, the tsunamis, political backstabbing, people being arrested for all kinds of nefarious crimes. You're basically going to be inundated by the most negative, lowest common denominator of the human experience. And every now and then you get a little joy thing. Oh, here's a puppy. You know what I mean? Oh, so-and-so will rescue their cat. And who's that sweet? You know what I mean?

39:29But 99 % of it's going to be inundation of negativity. We're not seeing the remissions of cancer. We're not seeing the truces that are being made. We're not seeing people who are making amends. We're not seeing people who are growing and developing and unfolding and changing their lives. If we were to spot like that every single day, how many remissions did we have today of cancer? How many people spontaneously healed their diabetes? How many people actually fell in love with or did deep forgiveness and with their family members or friends or so-called enemies? If that was focused on, if the news was actually the news and not the olds, because it's actually the olds, same thing every day just happening to different people, the world would change rapidly.

40:11because where our attention goes is where our energy flows. So if we were all focused on all these great things that are happening, like right now on this planet, right this second, not in the future, we have everything necessary to handle every issue right now. It all exists. Now, technologically, we just don't have the will and the consciousness to bring it into expression. Those things are repressed so that the powers that be can continue to profit offer an old way of being on the planet. We have technology to clean up the water. There's no water shortage. We have technology to have free energy.

40:49There's no energy shortage. We have all these things already exist, but the powers that be don't let that emerge. So if we pay attention to a world that works for the highest and best within us all, we will create the vibrational condition for it to emerge. As Victor Hugo once said, You cannot stop an idea as time has come. So when this becomes, you know, saturated in our awareness, the new ways of being in the world, which are ageless, by the way, will emerge. And I see that. I've been carrying a vision and be carried by vision for years. So I stay joyfully optimistic. An optimistic is not a person that doesn't believe in problems or challenges.

41:33An optimist is simply a person that knows that there is a solution to every issue. And so I know that. So that's where I live. So how do you advise someone who is bombarded with the messages from media, from negative people around them, from haters in their own life on the internet, how do they shift their focus from that to look to the more optimistic messages when it seems overwhelming and consuming being pulled down by the negative ones? Right. You do a simple practice of finding one thing to be grateful for. You just wake up. Like when I wake up in the morning, I put my feet on the ground.

42:09I just say something along these lines. I'm so grateful for my life. I'm grateful that I exist. And what happens is if you come into a feeling of gratitude, your perception and your perceptual windows become clearer. And now you're able to see opportunities. If you don't believe in possibilities, the mind can't see opportunities. So when you open yourself up to gratitude, you start to see opportunities. You start to see things differently. then that develops momentum and you become a grateful person, a grateful being, which then you begin to see things you've never seen before. You know, I remember years ago, I was moved to become a vegetarian.

42:51So I'm driving down Crenshaw Boulevard. There's a store, I think it was Lindbergh store, a health food store back in the day. And I passed by, I said, oh wow, a health food store. I wonder how long it's been there because I've never seen it before. So I go in, It's been there over 20 years, but I never noticed it because my attention, that wasn't important to me, eating good food. I never noticed it. It's been there in my neighborhood all these years, but I've never seen it. So once our perceptual windows get clear based on gratitude and high intention, we start to see things we've never seen before.

43:25We start to see people we've never noticed before. There's an old statement that when the pickpocket sees the Buddha, all he sees is his pockets. He can't even notice that he's the Buddha, that he's carrying enlightenment because he's only interested in the pockets. So when we start to become grateful and look for something to be grateful for, we start to notice a different world that's hidden in plain sight. And yes, the news will still be going on, but after a while, we're able to look at it. And what I teach people what to do with that is if a friend of yours calls you and says, oh, my God, I have a backache.

44:03I have this bad diagnosis. Would you pray for me? You would say, yes, of course, I'll pray for you. And you're going to go inside and you're going to see the best about them and hold. So the news is a collective prayer from our society. It's a society saying we can't see clearly right now. We're in war. We're in hate. We're in scarcity. We're in lack. That's the diagnosis. So whenever I teach practitioners here at Agape that when you're watching the news, you're actually watching a societal prayer request. And just like you would pray for your friend if they had a diagnosis of some kind, negative, it's to call you into a deeper sense of gratitude and prayer.

44:48You're not caught up in it. You're doing something about it vibrationally. Does that make sense there? Yes, I love that. I absolutely love that. So I know that you're launching a new course tomorrow, actually. Can you talk to us a little bit about what the course involves and what people will get from that? It's called Awake and Activate. It's going to be shining right here from Agape International Spiritual Center. They can go to agapelive.com to register. I'm doing a five-week class, and the reason it's called Awake and Activate, because I'm going to teach these universal spiritual principles, but it's also going to carry some inner experiences to activate the knowledge that's within us.

45:33Because it's one thing to like read a book and to have an intellectual understanding of what you're reading. It's another thing for that information to become activated within you, to have some level of embodiment. So we're not just walking filing cabinets of information, but we actually have the feeling tone of the information. In the five weeks, I'm going to teach, but I'm also going to activate so that individuals at the end of those five weeks, they'll be able to see a noticeable difference in their own life, their own emotional life, their own mental life. So it's about transformation, not just academic learning about something, but actually being transformed.

46:16So that's at agape, agapelive.com, Awake and Activate. Just go on the website and register for it. It'll be Zoomed because people all over the world, like we had a master class the week before to prepare people for the class. It doesn't matter whether you got the master class or not, you can still take the class. But we had about 3 ,700 people on there holding this strong field for awakening and for activation. And many of them have already registered for the class. So it's going to be on Zoom. It's going to be powerful. You're going to be with people from all over the world that are tuning in.

46:53You know, there are many people that keep taking it. I teach it a little bit different every time because I'm different every time. But there are people who take it a lot, who just keep taking. And there are other classes in our university as well that people can sign up for. One of the things that you just mentioned and explained was this feeling, this sense of feeling. And when I heard you say that, it reminded me so much of going down this path of accessing information, as you said, like being a walking file cabinet, having all this information in my head, but not really feeling the way that is resonating with the messages.

47:26I'm grateful, I'm joyful, but then feeling, you know, like life is hard. Is that some of what you're activating in people so that they can actually vibrate and feel that way? Absolutely. The feeling provides the healing and the feeling provides the revealing of the truth that's within us. I used to have a teacher that used to say, it don't mean a thing if we don't have that feeling. It's a feeling universe. You can have all kinds of words that's important, but it's the feeling and the energy behind the word that's really, really matters. So yeah, I'm going to have exercises that actually coax people into the feeling tone.

48:08I'm going to have them being coaxed into the feeling tone of what does abundance feel like? What does prosperity feel like? You see, what does joy feel like? And then we'll learn to stabilize that. So you're living in that. And then you start to see demonstrations of that in your life by law. It's not accidental. It's repeatable results based on your inner feeling. So it's good to have the knowledge, but you have to have the knowledge with the feeling that produces more viable results. Oh my gosh, that was a huge missing part for me for a long time. I've deferred to you on this, but don't you think there's something about a collective of people to 3 ,700 people setting that intention together that will help people elevate themselves to a level they haven't reached before?

48:55Absolutely. And that's why I was prompted to start a community, Agape International, because what I teach is an authentic spiritual community grants you immunity from the lower frequencies of life. So when you're with a group of people celebrating and praying and chanting and listening to a message and having good music, that creates a field all to itself that neutralizes negative energy for thousands and thousands of people that aren't even in the assembly of people. Because a field can't be contained by a wall. It's everywhere. And so absolutely, when you're in a community or taking a class with a group of people, what happens is you start to vibrate at the highest level of whatever insight anyone has had.

49:45So that if someone's having an insight and there's an aha about something and they're starting to feel it, it affects the whole class. The whole class starts to vibrate at that level. The highest vibration wins. And so taking a class with a group of people, being an authentic spiritual community that's dogma free, You know, it's not about dogma. You know, it's not about capitulating to some man-made rules, but it's about actually having a direct encounter with the presence of God, of love and beauty within you. You're in that kind of a community of celebration, celebrating what's already being given.

50:20Yeah, it goes a long way. I mean, solitude and silence and being alone is important. and community and being with people like the 3 ,700 plus people that were in this masterclass, that's important. It's important. You know, can you imagine if we were to take these Super Bowls and all of these great concerts that people have with thousands of people, 18 ,000 people, 60 ,000 people showing up to see a person kick a field goal? You know, it's sweet. It's wonderful. I don't put any of that down, but it's, you know, they're pulling for their team and, you know, away. Yeah. Well, you know, we get all of these people, you know, like next year, we're going to have a big moment of pulling all the spiritual teachers together to have a moment of silence and conviction and a dynamic sense of world peace for the world.

51:07But we bring that many people to really focus on what's possible for the planet. It makes a big difference. So beautiful. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing. You're so incredible. And I can feel, I love that you just explained you vibrate at the highest level there, our highest level wins. Well, thank you for bringing my vibe up today. Thank you for bringing everyone's vibe up. Where can everyone sign up for the class? Where can everyone get your podcast and get ahold of you? They can go to agapelive.com, A-G-A-P-E-L-I-V-E.com. That's the Agape website. And then within the Agape website is the Agape University, and that's where the class is being given from.

51:44So you just sign up for the class there. You can also see me speaking every single Sunday. If you're not in the LA area, you can just watch it on our YouTube channel, my personal YouTube channel or Agape's YouTube channel or Agape's Facebook page or my Facebook page, or straight from the agapelive.com website. You can watch me speak every Sunday. I do a way of meditation service at 6.45 a.m. I do another service at 9 a.m. and then another service at 1130 AM. So people all over the world are waking up at different time zones and tuning into different services based on when they're waking up, but it's also archived.

52:27So if you miss it, you can just go to agapilive.com and just watch the service because it's right there. Take Back Your Mind is the name of my podcast and that's on all the platforms. It's new. So we just hit like 3 million downloads because I have a guest every week. And then sometimes I do solo shows, just teaching. So that's a wonderful thing. I love being of service that way. We are so grateful for you. Thank you for empowering us. Thank you for teaching us. And thank you for leading the way. It is my joy. I can so see that. All right, guys, check out the podcast, sign up for the class. I will provide all the links in the show notes below.

53:02And until next week, keep creating your confidence. You know, I will be.

53:13for what you're gonna hear, start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it. I'm on this journey with me.