4 Spiritual Insights to Leave a Legacy | Lewis Howes EP 389

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

0:10I firmly believe that taking charge of your mindset allows you to be in the driver's seat of your life and unlock your potential. And that's why I'm thrilled to share that my new book is out right now. It's called The Greatness Mindset. In it, you'll learn how to build a plan for greatness through powerful exercises and toolkits designed to propel your life forward. This is the book that I wish I had 20 years ago. It's everything I've learned in the last decade with the research and the science to help you unlock your mind. Make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash 2023mindset to pick up your copy of my book, The Greatness Mindset, today.

0:50You can't write a sermon that you haven't lived. You've got to experience it first. You've got to experience it. For it to be authentic, right? Exactly. So if you haven't gone through pain, if you haven't gone through process and trial, then you should probably sit down somewhere. because people don't need to hear, I'm perfect. Why aren't you? I don't need that. I need to know that you were broken. Show me where you fail. Show me your scars. King David, he wasn't a king all his life. He was the eighth son of a man who didn't even see his value. When the prophet came to look for a king, he wasn't even invited in the house.

1:20Seven sons were invited. And the prophet said, none of these are the ones. Do you have any more kids? He was like, well, I got another one. He's out in the field. No way. And so Samuel calls for David and he comes in and he's anointed king as a teenager. And all of his brothers despised him. No one knew what he carried. He was invisible and hidden in plain sight. This is a long way around, but the greatest challenge of my life is reconciling the need for a father who's not coming. So how do you create that for yourself? I think that's where my faith came in. I think that's why my faith is so important to me.

1:55The idea of a heavenly father, that there's something eternal, that these few years that I have on this earth will not be the end of my impact. I have a son now, I have a daughter. So the microphone becomes a baton and one day I'll pass it to them and I'll sit down and they'll put me in the ground and hopefully I will have lived well enough that I left something better than what I had when I started. I had an amazing, still have an amazing mother, but I think the power of legacy is for a father to speak identity and to let his children know they have value and that they are protected at all times.

2:31And for me, I want my life to be defined by what I left in place for my kids and my grandkids. I really honestly believe that that hunger for a father will never leave. I don't think it'll ever be filled because that tender place gives me a heart for everybody else. I understand tears. I understand people's longing. We're all broken somewhere and we're all looking to be filled or fulfilled somewhere. We have learned a model in terms of medicine and healing where we understand you can't just trash your body, then experience the almost inevitable sickness, and then just try to allopathically eradicate or suppress the symptoms.

3:13You have to proactively cultivate health. Health is not the absence of sickness. Sickness is the absence of health. We have to now apply that same model to our psychological and emotional state. We can't just fight depression. We have to proactively cultivate happiness. Happiness is not the absence of depression. Depression is the absence of happiness. And the reason we're not happy is because we're not thinking happy thoughts. So some people say to me, oh, Marianne, you can't just think happy thoughts. They might not realize what I mean by happy thoughts. You can't think of yourself as a victim and be happy.

3:46You can't withhold forgiveness and be happy. You can't fail to take responsibility for your own circumstances and be happy. You can't fail to atone for your mistakes and make amends for them and try to be a better person and be happy. You can't disengage from the suffering of other human beings or other sentient beings, not address them, and be happy. There is a way in which our entire construct as a society is a setup for despair. And I talk about Buddha and Moses and Jesus and this sort of spiritual transmissions. All the great religious systems, all the great spiritual and religious systems have at their core the issue of human suffering.

4:18Buddha said life is suffering, and his realization of that was the beginning of his journey to enlightenment. God sent Moses to rescue these suffering Israelites who were slaves in Egypt. Jesus suffered on the cross. Suffering is what happens when you are living within the vortex of the ego mind, the racial consciousness of the human race that repudiates love. You can't be happy here. And then the journey, whether it's symbolized by the 40 years of the Israelites in the desert or the hours on the cross and the three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection is those painful times where we are experiencing the suffering, but learning the lessons so that we are then through the grace of God on the way to enlightenment, promised land, nirvana.

5:01So you're saying the only way to experience growth is through pain or suffering? No, I don't think that. The Course in Miracles says it is not up to you what you learn. It's only up to you whether you learn through joy or through pain. But we need to develop the mental musculature that cultivates happiness. I don't think we have to learn through pain. I think most of us have a lot of our lives. I know in my life, I don't want to learn through pain as much as I did. And that's why I've wanted to learn the lessons of painful situations so that next time I do that, I won't create suffering. After I finished the book, I realized that I was still pretty addicted to getting outside input.

5:40It was one more psychic reading. It was another intuitive something. It was like, well, maybe I need a more specific business coach for this specific issue. And so I have gone on an input fast, much fewer spiritual paraphernalia in my life. I'm just not referring to those tools as much. It's 50-50. If you listen to everybody else, your chances of pulling it off, still 50-50. If you listen to yourself, still 50-50. But listening to yourself, you save a lot of money. It's much more efficient and you really build that muscle. You know, intuition is a muscle and so much in the self-help space is like, you know, listen to that small inner voice.

6:21There's so much noise coming in. People can't hear that small inner voice, let alone trusting it, let alone acting on it. So you need to just stop with the input and create some space and then you can hear yourself. I think you have to have some kind of practice of stillness in your life. Whatever it is for you, if it's your morning run, if it's your time on the elliptical, if it's four minutes, if you're really going to give her and sit for, you know, 20 minutes to an hour, you must have that. You know, we clean our bodies, we clean our system. You know, that light that you encounter when you're in a meditative state, that is a cleaning of the mind and it needs to happen so that you don't get the fog, the confusion.

7:05At the most basic level, so many people can relate to just waking up in the morning and not knowing exactly what the priorities are. This can go on for years. Decades for people. Decades. And then they wake up and say, what's my purpose? What am I doing all this for? It adds up. You're on Prozac. You're in the wrong job. Smoking, drinking. You're in the wrong relationship. You don't feel the way you want to feel. I think there's a difference between meditation and contemplation and prayer. Ideally, you're using all of them. Meditation is formulaic. You're sitting. It's an actual process and you find the way of meditating that works for you.

7:43Contemplation, you're actually actively thinking. You're very much in your mind, thinking through things. You are being considerate about what's happening in your life. And then prayer is the conversation. Okay, let's say there's some infinite divine source of everything. If it was completely knowable, then it wouldn't be infinite. wouldn't be very big. If your mind could wrap itself around there, that's not really going to be capable of sustaining something this interesting. But if it was unknowable and elsewhere, then what about all the great art? What about all the moments of love when you're like, there's something infinite happening between us?

8:18So source would be both known and unknown. There would be a fundamental ambiguity that would sit side by side with the clarity. I know that when I serve and give beyond myself, something happens that I affirm that I can't quite fully comprehend, but is real. The worse off the conditions are, the more it costs. Somehow it pulls something out of me even more, which is transcendent, supernatural, divine, miraculous, whatever you want to say. That is both as real as it gets for you. And yet put that on a spreadsheet. You know what I mean? Take a photo of that on your iPad. If it is real, if there is some divine source, it's going to pull multiple things.

8:58So you can see then the dangers, the danger of a fundamentalism. This is like, this is how big God is. These are the seven steps. It's like, no, you haven't left enough room for mystery. But the, I don't know, man, we can't know anything. Yeah, but I know this guy Lewis Howes and when he serves, it makes the world better. So we can know that. So it would have this both universal and particular would have both this absolute and this ever evolving. And that is, I would argue the problem is people fall to either side and aren't willing because the modern mind loves the binary. Is it this or is it this?

9:31Are you a winner or are you a loser? Right. Success or failure. But the problem is in failure is where all this interesting stuff happens. Even to talk about God in a way that might actually not make you crazy. You have to move from this binary thinking to what some would call a non-dual awareness, where you begin to be able to hold two truths that appear to be opposing at the same time. years ago, the universe explodes out of an infinitely compressed point of nothingness, sometimes called a singularity. That's what scientists are saying right now, is that the universe is 13.8 billion years ago, and it came out of a point of infinity, and it's just been expanding ever since.

10:11And at first, it was just subatomic particles, and then about three minutes in, it formed atoms. Those atoms formed molecules. Somewhere around the 13 billion mark, those molecules began to form cells, and you had inorganic and then organic cellular life. And And then sometime in the 13 billion, that's about 9 billion, 13 billion years in, you have the earth with animals. And then you have these sentient, upright homo sapiens that can write poems and talk about this stuff. And people are like, there's no mystery. That just happened. My starting point, any discussion about God to me would simply be, we're here.

10:44And this thing has been expanding and unfolding. And if you're going to tell me, no, it's just molecules. It's just synapses. It's just cells. I would say, seriously, the most intellectually honest thing to me would be to leave space or something. Let's just start there. Then the question becomes, well, would you name that? It's interesting in the Bible, there's lots and lots of different names for God, because essentially when you use the word God, you're trying to name ultimate reality. And that's what actually started to happen to me when I was reciting the Bible is I was like, wait, there's a bunch of different names for God here.

11:15This person uses this name and this person talks about mystery. This person talks about revelation, the idea that there's some things you can know. So that's what happened to me is when you're like, well, how can you know which is which? This is what the writers of the Bible were wrestling with. You know what I mean? Or how can we know if God is on our side? Because we're slaves. Is God okay with this arrangement? Is the universe okay with this person owning us? So the Exodus story, this big, giant rescue of slaves and Moses, that was a story asking the question, is the universe okay with us being owned?

11:49And the story was about, no, it's not. God is actually the God of the oppressed. The forces are on the side of the underdog, the immigrant, the refugee, the single mom.

12:11Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description that will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

13:01Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

13:17Thank you.