Transcript
A (0:00)
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. So, again, these are spiritual practices that, when done sincerely, change your life. They literally change how you identify yourself. Doesn't mean you become all highfalutin. 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.
B (0:30)
Come on this journey with me each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. Fasten your seatbelt. I'm ready for my close up. Tell me, have you been enjoying these new bonus confidence classics episodes we've been dropping on you every week? We've literally hundreds of episodes for you to listen to. So these bonuses are a great way to help you find the ones you.
C (0:55)
May have already missed.
B (0:56)
I hope you love this one as much as I do. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so glad you're back here with me this week. I cannot wait for you to meet our guests this week. It is so exciting. Okay, we've got Michael Beckwith. He's a member of Oprah's Super Soul 100 group. This man has been on Oprah. Come on, people. And the founder of the Agape Center. He's a trailblazing figure in the realm of spirituality, something that I'm so big into later in life, and I hope you are, too. As a number one bestselling author and influential spiritual voice. His original teachings and ideologies have not only guided and influenced many for millions. I mean, he's literally impacting millions of people. He's got the most unbelievable podcast, Take back your mind. He's got new courses and classes coming out. I mean, it has super foods. I mean, Michael, what have you not done? Thank you so much for being here and enlightening us this week, Heather.
A (1:44)
Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm just sitting here. Enjoy just being with you. Life is good.
B (1:50)
Oh, my gosh. You're the best. Okay. I love your backstory. And for anyone who lives under rock and doesn't know who you are, I was hoping you could kind of walk us through. How did you become enlightened? How did you become the rev? How did all of this.
A (2:04)
Well, you know, a good part of my backstory is I'm gonna keep it really brief. I could extend this, but I won't. While I was attending usc, I was a psychobiology major there, on a track to go to med school. And actually. And I was having a series of inner experiences that I labeled at the time pathological, because I was seeing visions, I was hearing voices, I was leaving my body and traveling. Now, at the time, I didn't have any spiritual practice, so I didn't know about astral travel and soul traveling and all of that. But it was happening to me spontaneously and to the point where I sometimes would leave and go see my mom. And I would come back to my body and call her and say, listen, do you have on a blue dress? She would say, yes. Are you cooking some chicken right now? Yes. So I knew what was going on was real, but I had no context for it. So the first thing I did at that time, I stopped smoking weed. I stopped smoking cannabis sativas because I thought that was contributing to this, whatever was going on within me. But the experience is intensified to the point where I had a lucid dream every single night. And in this dream, these three men were chasing me. And every night they got a little bit closer to the point where one night I could see the outline of their face. I looked to my right, and it was a small tent with thousands of people trying to fit into this small tent. I knew every single being in line. So I said to myself, they can't hurt me. I have all of my friends with me. And then one by one, everyone standing in line turned their back on me. Two of the men held me down and the other plunged a knife into my heart. A serrated knife. The pain was excruciating, physically and emotionally. And I died. And when I woke up, I could see differently. I could. I mean, even now, if I start talking about it, it becomes very spiritually emotional for me. I could see 360 degrees. The presence of God, love, the beauty was everywhere. The love that poured into my being was so profound. And I was just a part of everything. I would breathe in and out. The universe would just kind of move like that. I was one. And so when I came out of that, everything around me was glowing with luminosity. The lint on the rug was alive. Everything was alive. And I could never get back in that box again. Everything changed for me. And I began to go on a research to find out what had happened to me. And that's when I bumped into all of the mystical teachings of Gautama, the Buddha, Jesus the Christ, Zoroastri, Walter Russell, Emmanuel Swedenborg. There was a lot of beings that had similar experiences. That gave me an awareness that I wasn't crazy, that I actually was having some kind of an awakening. That was the beginning of me going deep into meditation. Now, this is years ago. I had no conscious desire to be, like, a public person to teach or anything like that. I was just so in love with his presence. At the time. I didn't call it God because I had come from a church. And the word God meant a man in the sky that was dictating rules and sending people to hell and heaven and all that stuff. So I knew that wasn't real. So the word that I used was love, beauty. Because the love that I was immersed in was beyond anything I'd ever experienced humanly. And the beauty was beyond anything I could describe. So my definition of the presence of God was love, beauty. And later on, it became love, beauty, intelligence. And then later on. Well, after that, I started using the word God again. But it has a different meaning. I call it the presence.
