 Hello and welcome to We Are Only One, with Jude Byrne, our host, remote via Skype. Take it away, Jude. Hi, everyone. We are only one. We're going to be exploring new thought and ancient wisdom principles, and very excited to have our guest today, David Friedman, who we'll be hearing about very shortly, and Bruce Wagner is co-hosting today. Okay, Bruce? Yeah, and I want to take a moment really quick to thank our sponsors. Today's show is brought to you by CarpeVM, that's C-A-R-P-E-V-M.com, CarpeVM video marketing. If you have a product or service to sell, especially online, you want to check these guys out. They're awesome. They're totally unity people, into new thought, ancient wisdom, all that. Ask for CarpeVM, C-A-R-P-E-V-M.com, video marketing. Seize your market. Say it with video, and Mezzy Grill, Mezzy Grill.com, here in New York City, near Columbus Circle. Authentic Mediterranean food meets modern flavor, one of our best, our favorite places to go, and tradehill.com. 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He's going to be here every Wednesday morning, 10 a.m. Eastern time, right here on only one TV, and this is his company, usgoldcoins.com. I couldn't recommend him more highly. He's very, very trusted and honest and full of expertise, so we thank our sponsors. And back to you, Jude. Thanks, Bruce. I'd like to welcome David officially to the show. He's the author of The Thought Exchange, overcoming our resistance to living a sensational life. Welcome, David. Thank you. It's nice to be here. It's wonderful to have you, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I found it extremely uplifting and very practical. And I'd like to ask you, from your perspective, there are so many books and healing modalities out there. How do you think your book differs? What differentiates it? Well, what happens is this. I find that we read all those healing books, and we go to unity churches, and we take workshops and stuff like that, and everybody has a method for new thought. And we all sort of understand that you take on a positive thought. I don't actually believe that thoughts are positive or negative. They're just thoughts. And our life changes, and we see it happen. And so we leave these things, or we read these books, and we go, okay, now I understand this. Isn't that fantastic? And we go out, and we find that within five minutes or one day or three days, we're not doing it. And so I began to explore, we're not stupid. We're not lazy. We care about this work. Why is it that we constantly seem to not be able to do this? So I began to look at what is the resistance, what is getting in our way. I mean, I started this work like most other work started this way. I thought I was going to control the world. I would find a way to think, and then the world would change the way I wanted it to. But I began to realize many things, one of which is that the challenge is to hold that new thought. And I began to see why don't we hold it? And what I came across was, which is the title, which is actually a double meaning, when you hold a thought, a thought generates sensations. And by sensations, I don't mean what we typically call feelings. I don't mean anger, sadness. I mean shaking hands, pounding heart, tight throat, et cetera, et cetera. Now the misconception is that when you take on a positive thought, like I can do it, that you'll feel good. Nothing could be further from the truth. Because what I discovered was that actually our discomfort is caused not by the thoughts I can't do it, et cetera, but by the thought I can. And the thought this will happen. And the thought I can have this success, whatever that is. So I began to think, why is that? And I realized that earlier in our lives, somehow those thoughts have been associated with painful frightening things. So for instance, if you were a little child and you said, I can do this. And someone slapped you across the face. Then any time you say, I can do this, you will feel a sensation that feels uncomfortable. Now as a child, you have no recourse, no place to go, no place to run. You are not independent. So what a child does is a child decides, well, the thought I can do this created a discomfort for me. So I will make sure to not think that thought. And so we take on what people often in other disciplines call thoughts that sabotage them, but I do not call them that. I say a protective thought. We protect ourselves from the thought I can do this that brought on the uncomfortable sensation. Well, the thought that will do that very well is, I can't do this. And so we take on that thought so that we don't feel the discomfort. Now people would say, why would you feel more comfortable with I can't do this than I can do this? Well, let's say you want to run the marathon. If you, the first thing you need to run the marathon is the thought, I can run the marathon. Before the shoes, before the training, before the whatever. Once you take on that thought, you begin to train, you begin to do the stuff. I don't care who you are, if you're the world's greatest marathon runner. At mile 20, you are going to have hurting legs and a pounding heart and you're going to be starving and you're going to be thirsty. If you cannot tolerate those sensations that come with the thought, I can run the marathon. It's very simple to get rid of them. You take on the thought, I can't run the marathon and you will stop and you will not feel them. But of course, you will not get to run the marathon. But the thought, the protective thought will manifest as the result, I can't run the marathon. But you've successfully avoided the sensations. But you think you've successfully avoided the sensations. In fact, the minute you don't run the marathon, you will remember that the thought you wanted to take on was I can run the marathon. And when you take that thought on, you will have those sensations again. And so the only way to be able to stay with the thought that we want to hold is to be willing to experience the sensations that go with it. So I'm a musician, but that's my original trade. I conduct a lot of Broadway shows, a lot of movies. If I want to go on the stage, I have a pounding heart and shaking hands. If I decide I can't tolerate that, I would never go on the stage. People often say, think of how you're going to feel during that Broadway opening. And I say, I've been at Broadway openings, I want to throw up. You know, that's how I feel. But I do it because I want to do that and I'm willing to take on the sensation. So that's the difference in this work is that a lot of people are looking for a magic pill where they just say, I have the thought and then everything miraculously changed. The fact is, you can have the thought and see, we'll get into even the physical world. There's not the real world. But for now, to say it simply, things will change when you hold a new thought. But you must be willing to experience the sensations that you have when you do that. Yes, I appreciated that double meaning as I read the book to the sensational life. And I really like the bridge between not only the thought, but also the body wisdom and just sitting with it. And I like what you said about realizing you're not going to die. You're going to experience these sensations and they may be uncomfortable, but the only way out is through, or else you're going to perpetuate the cycle. Also, what we generally call feelings are actually thoughts about our sensations. And so sensations do not have any intrinsic meaning. So the story I always like to tell is if you came to me and you said, my heart is pounding, my blood is racing, my head is spinning, my heart is pounding, I feel like I'm going to pass out, I might say, oh, you're having an orgasm. Now, in that context, you'd be very happy to feel that way. If you were speaking in front of people and had the exact same symptoms, I would say, are you having a panic attack? So a few years ago, my partner and I, Sean is a unity minister. We both, for some reason, which I can't explain, were having the same buzzing sensation down the center of our body. We just, for days, we'd have this buzzing sensation. Sean assumed it was his chakras opening, and I assumed I was having an aortic aneurysm. So every day, he would go, ah, I'm buzzing. And I'd go, oh my God, I'm buzzing. It meant neither, and it went away, and neither of us knows what it meant. But we each had an interpretation based on our history. So in fact, if people could understand, could stop, this is the only way we experience our lives is in the invisible. I, frankly, do not know if I am talking to you people right now. I do not know if you are here. I know that I experience you. I know that I see you. That does not prove you're here. I only experience you in what I see in my thoughts and my sensations. If we understood that what's going on in what we call the real world, which is the physical world, is only what's going on in us experientially, then everything changes and spirituality gets understood. You know, if I can interject a little bit. I am very interested in what you're saying, in spite of the chat room thinks I'm very distracted and not interested. I am, one of the reasons I was so happy, well, when we heard you speak at Unity, when was that? New York, Memorial Day weekend. New York, Memorial Day weekend. I told Ed, you know, we've been involved in Unity for 16 years. And your talk was one of the best I'd ever heard, one of the most inspiring because the way you described the observer, is that the term? Yeah, I mean, I've heard different people call it different things. But I love the way you actually, can you elaborate on how you explain that, how you explain the difference between the observer and? Well, what happens is this, if you really look at where we actually live and what our lives are actually about. So what I just said in the last five minutes says you have to notice your thoughts and your sensations. So I do a meditation where I ask people to close their eyes and I say notice what sensations you're having. And they will notice that they're shaking or they have a tight throat or they have whatever. And then I'll say notice your thoughts and they will notice either that they're having trouble finding their thoughts or they'll notice that they have the thought that they wish this session was over or that in 12 years they're gonna go bankrupt or what their sensations mean, whatever thoughts. Then I say now go back to noticing your sensations, now go back to noticing your thoughts. And then I ask them, who's noticing this? And you realize that it is not, you are not even your sensations and thoughts, let alone what you see outside. You are noticing them from an invisible blank spot, which is just the noticer. It doesn't even have your name on it. We all have the same noticer. And you are seeing them and your noticer has no attachment to them. Now someone will say, oh no, my noticer got very upset. I say no, your noticer noticed a thought that you are very upset. Your noticer noticed the thought that this means something. The noticer is sitting there knowing that nothing matters, that it's perfectly safe, that nothing can affect it, that it has no need to change anything it notices because it just sees it. It sees everything. It knows that the universe is unlimited. And so in a way, that is exactly how new thought would describe God. And so the noticer, you are the noticer, noticing this personality. Now where that personality is, I have the faintest idea. It's probably inside the noticer, but you are the noticer and that's all you are. And so what you see just lets you know if you're seeing a problem that you think that there's something missing and the unlimited, but the noticer knows that not true. So you're safe all the time, you're neutral all the time, and you are connected to everybody else because everybody else is within your noticer. All the time, yeah, he does this, as he said, it does this sort of, what do you call it? Meditation, yes. And the thing is anybody can do this if you just, the way he described it, you close your eyes and you do this all the time anyway, but if you really think it through, it's so real. Yeah, of course, because you recognize that when you close your eyes and you think a thought, first of all, you close your eyes and you think your thoughts and you feel the chair around you and all those sensory things that you're hungry and this and that, all that stuff, those are just sensory things and thoughts that you're noticing you feeling and experiencing. Then the opposite, or another tangent is your imagination. If you can imagine any kind of picture flying around Mars, whatever, on a broomstick, you can imagine absolutely anything that you can think of you can imagine and that's your imagination, not real sensation, like real, going to quote sensation. But it is real, in fact, that is realer than anything out there. Yeah, yeah. And that's how we end up going to the moon. That's how we end up having, you know what I mean? People say things like, oh, well, that's impossible. That'll never happen. But maybe 500 years ago, someone said, okay, 100 years, we're all gonna have this little box. In 100 years, we're gonna be sitting here doing this. Yeah, right? You know, in 1850. Impossible. Going over this computer thing and talking here and going all around the world and no wires and no, and so anything is possible that we want. Hold on one second, we wanna swap out his mic because we've lost your mic. Okay, here. So what I was going to say is that both things are very real. What you can imagine is absolutely real because otherwise there would be no such thing as invention and innovation. What your imagination is absolutely real. But also your sensory feelings or what you look around and feel and touch and experience in life is also real. And the way, one of the things that, the way I think of it is sort of like the matrix that this is like one big grand video game. And the observer and the noticer is the player, is the real player. The real players are outside of this gigantic box. Yes, yes. And so we're controlling, it's a computer game. And with all that's happening sensory-wise and imagination-wise, it's all happening inside of this realm of what we call whatever our physical world is. And just as the game is not real, it's real, it's something, but it's not your real life. You don't go, oh my God, I got killed in the game, so now I'm dead. And so we are experiencing all this. And in fact, you see, there is no innovation. There is nothing new because everything that we discover is already here. So we are not making anything up. We didn't create how to fly a plane that was always here. We noticed it. I don't believe in the law of attraction, I believe in the law of noticing. We just noticed there's nothing to attract because it's all here already. And so to know that the experience of life becomes not about whether I get from here to there or whether I get this or the other thing, it's an experience of wholeness. I say it's like if you have a beautiful house and you have a television and you have a swimming pool and you have a hot tub and you have a kitchen and you have a comfortable bed, you're not using all of those at the same time, but you know that they are all always available to you. Yeah, and everything is at our disposal right now if we just go to the place where we can find it, which is in the invisible world. I love that. It's so much more true than the law of attraction. Like there are things out there that I have to attract to me. It's a deeper thought than that. And I also love the point that you made that I don't think I've ever heard anybody make. And I hadn't even occurred to me. Although I knew I'd been troubled with this. I mentally, I do these mental gymnastics and I'm always trying to solve things, little riddles. Like judgment is bad, what about juries and all those weird things. But one of them was the, and by the way I got it, I asked a unity minister, if judgment is bad, what about juries? And they're like, well, they're not there to judge. They're just there to discern the truth about what happened and so on. So anyway, that's another thing. But this was when you said there's no such thing as a positive thought or a negative thought. Because we're always talking about the power of positive thinking, think positive thoughts. And it's so true what you said. What do you say about that? Well, there's no such thing as a positive or negative thought, because one person's positive could be another person's negative. Every thought has a result. I mean, I always say, you know, I'm a gay man. If some hot guy hits on me, that's positive. Not if you're not a gay man. And so it's the same occurrence, but it's a different experience. If you're a masochist, you say, I went out on a date and it was horrible. He didn't beat me up. He didn't do anything like that. And so we just have interpretations of thoughts. But in fact, most of those thoughts, we always said that, you know, the thought exchange, the title thought exchange came about because it's, there's a store which we made up called the Thought Exchange. And it's open 24 hours a day and it has every thought in stock. And it's better than Nordstrom. It'll take back something that you've used, a thought you've worn out for 50 years and replace it, no questions asked. And so I have one actress who takes the Thought Exchange. We do workshops, Monday through Thursday, Wednesdays, we do workshops of this. And yeah, this is the book. He's showing it already, but yeah, I'm gonna take a look. Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, so, and you go into the Thought Exchange and you say, hello, I would like, they say, what thought would you like to exchange today? And you say, I would like to exchange, I am a piece of crap for I am good. And they say, all right, let me have that thought. And here's I am good. And we're gonna put I am a piece of crap right on our front table here because many of our customers come in for that thought a lot because it protects them from having to do all sorts of things that they're afraid of. And so what happens is every thought is just a thought and you take it on as you wish. Now, this is the, another, what I've looked for in this book is a lot of sort of, as you said, things you just don't understand, the fallacies that don't make sense. Like when people say, I am well and healthy. And I go, no, you're not, you have the flu. If you think the physical world is real, you do have the flu and you're not well and healthy. Nothing in spirituality makes sense if you think the physical world is real. Inside health exists. So the example I use is the example of the kitchen. If I go into the kitchen and I'm baking a cake, I do not pick up the pepper. But I don't have to say cancel, cancel, I will not look at the pepper, the pepper's not there, I have to put it. It's there. Yeah, I just don't pick it up. But the thought is there. So people often say, I can't seem to get this thought out of my mind. You don't have to. The fact is when you can hold the thought that you want to hold and you are capable of experiencing the sensations that are with that thought, you will automatically not reach for a protective thought. There is no reason to, there's no sensation you need to be protected from. So what it boils down to, which is why I have the subtitle of the book, all you have to do is experience your sensations in any given circumstance. When you have the thought, like I'm doing a show in Tampa, listen to my heart, which is the review of my music that we did off Broadway and we're doing it in Tampa and we're bringing it back in. And I just found out that an actor who I really wanted is not available. And my first response was this is terrible. He was the perfect actor. He was this. And then I immediately went sensation, experience. I'm only saying this is terrible. There's no one else in the world, et cetera, et cetera. Because I can't, I'm afraid of the sensation experience. I went to my sensation and immediately a pile of thoughts like this could be a good thing because the actress from out of town where you get someone local, there could be someone even better. We don't know what's happening here. There are many reasons perhaps I'll do this. Oh, I just thought of that present. Suddenly a world of thoughts open to me that are not open to me if I can't experience the sensation of I don't have the actor I wanted. And it's not that I don't want this actor. I'd love to have him. But all that is, it doesn't mean anything. I don't know if it's, as my partner Sean Monninger who's the minister of unity of Norwalk says, we don't know what anything is for. We don't know what anything means. We don't know. When my money goes to zero or something I say on my way to great wealth, this is what happened. And when you tell the story, it's always like that. So you just, if you can simply experience and the easiest way to it is, and I'm talking about an itchy nose, a tight throat, a bubbling in my stomach or shaking in my hands, just experience it. Immediately the need for the protective thought will disappear and you won't, the pepper could be sitting there but you won't pick it up. Right. Yeah. You have to experience it, know that it's there, be aware of it and put it in place. It's like anything that we call a negative thought, you have to, you can't avoid it. You can't deny that there's some condition exists. Like I'm getting evicted from my apartment on the 15th or something. You have to deal with it. But it's like anything, you deal with it, you look at it, you make a decision how am I going to deal with this? And then you file it away and you put it, you get it done and you put it away. You don't dwell on it. And Neil Donald Walsh was homeless and became one of the biggest people in New Thought. You don't know what any event will do. Now for instance, I conduct orchestras. I conducted a lot of the Disney films, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Hunchback. Every, and I'd have the New York Philharmonic stuff like that, every time I raise my hands to conduct I have the thought they're not gonna play. But I know that if I think the music they'll play so I register that thought as a sensation. So I never do this where I don't have a woo. But I just don't assume that that woo means they're not gonna play. I used to assume that. Now I just assume, instead of saying I'm nervous I say this is the sensation that I get when I do this. What I do, yeah, exactly. And it's just, that's the way it is, yeah. I think of it, I always remember Dio. If you can't remember anything else, I always go Dio, Dio, that it's in divine order. There's a divine timing, there's a divine place, a divine purpose, a divine person showing up or whatever, divine circumstance. But just Dio, it's all in divine order. Whatever seems a disaster is actually a blessing usually. That's how it always works out. But the challenge that people have is, do not think for a moment because of that that you are not going to feel something. It's like when they ask the Zen Buddhist monk, well you're so Zen, what do you do if somebody stabs you with a knife? And he goes, I go, ow! But I don't go, ow! Why did that happen? I can't believe that happened. That shouldn't have happened. I hate that, I'm gonna go get the person. Experience it as it's happening. So there is, people are all looking, when people say it's in divine order, so divine order includes a lot of sensation, a lot of what we would call pain, a lot of what we would call discomfort. So if you wait until you're comfortable, you probably will not do anything. It's like bodybuilding, right? No pain, no gain. I think you have to experience the pain. The pain you feel is the growth, the growth of your muscle. Absolutely, so when someone is working out, you have to go to muscle failure in order to gain any muscle. If you are not willing to experience the, you don't gain anything. And so this notion that I'm just, another thing, peace. To me, peace is being with what is, which could be that you're bleeding to death, that you're dying, that you hurt, that someone left you. Peace is not comfort. And so when people try to be peaceful like this, that's not what peace is. Do vipassana meditation where you just sit with your sensations, you're losing your mind. And our ability to be with our experience. You'd star, so do you think Barbara Streisand is less nervous than we are? I mean, she is willing to experience that level of sensation in order to go out and do that. She doesn't necessarily feel better. She just has a willingness to experience whatever it takes. And we all have that ability if we can sit there and experience it. It's not about not experiencing the pain or the difficulty or the discomfort where it's a matter of what you do about it and getting through it and living through it and what you end up doing, right? Yes, well, living with it, just being. You don't even have to worry about what you're gonna do. It'll do itself. But what it is, is to see another thing people say is release this. I don't release anything. I incorporate it, corpus body. You don't try to release your pain because that's resisting it. You take it to you, you experience it and that makes us so powerful. Well, people ask, sometimes people talk about if you could go back and be 17 again, but as soon as you ask somebody of a certain age, would you go back and be 17 again? The first thought, I'll bet you, the first thought they have is not if I couldn't take my wisdom with me because your wisdom is much more important than your youth. That's right. That's exactly what you're doing. You're embracing it and taking it with you. You're learning from that. And without that wisdom, I don't think I'd wanna be 17 again. There's a wonderful, it's a Saratisdale poem that I set to music once and it says, when I have ceased to break my wings against the faultiness of things and learned that compromises wait behind each hardly open gate, when I can look life in the eyes, grown calm and very coldly wise, life will have given me the truth and taken in exchange, my youth. And that's the way it is, is that, so I think even the fact that we, our bodies seem to deteriorate. The fact is, is what's happening is as we're aging, we live more on the inside. We live more in the world of experience. We come to understand that it is our experience alone that counts, so it doesn't matter. We're gradually let it go of our identification with this and I think, I just read a wonderful thing. Someone said, the definition of death, it's a death, a verb, the sudden cessation of sinning. Because you suddenly are not, and sinning being not mistaking, of going against the law, suddenly you're in it. And sin is, I'm sure you know, I've heard this many times in unity. The word sin, the origin of it is an archery term that means missing the mark. Yes, exactly. If you're making those little mistakes, just keep throwing those darts but keep missing the mark. Exactly. And the cessation of missing the mark. Yes, and the mark is invisible. The mark is in the unmanifested and so when we know this, gradually the physical falls away and becomes less important. If we're living our lives, learning the lessons we need to learn. Sort of like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. What do you think of all this, Jude? Thank you. I was just about to jump in. Yes, go ahead. I wanted to say with sin, I like what the unity minister, Paul Tanaglia says it's self-inflicted nonsense. So true. And what I was thinking, I'm following along right with you and something I thought might be helpful to our listeners is to go through a very brief process. You have that outlined on your book in page 103 and just let our audience kind of experience it. Well, experience it or should I explain the process? Cause experiencing it would involve me talking to the audience. But I can explain what the thought exchange process is. To talk I'd have to have you give me a problem and then I would work on it with you. Oh, I don't have any problem. But yes, but essentially we do workshops. The thought exchange originated at Unity of New York because I was asked to take over the artist support circle. And I went to see what they were doing and they were doing affirmations and they were saying things like, I am a great artist with millions of dollars and millions of fans. And I think, no, you're not. Why are you saying that? And I realized that what people thought was an affirmation was that they'd say something and if they said it strong enough and in the right way and with the exact right words, whoever's out there who listens to such things and gives them out would give them out. And I thought that can't be. So gradually we started to look at what is the truth? What is irrefutably true? And we came up with all these principles that we've talked about today that we live in the invisible world, that the world is one of the very important principles of thought exchanges, that the world is a mirror of your thoughts. Now, people misinterpret this. They think that means that if I think, I can be rich, I can be rich, I can be rich, they will be rich. You are not making anything happen in the world. This is one of the biggest misconceptions. You are seeing your thoughts in the world. So the example I gave and I will get to the list, I haven't forgotten your question. The example that I gave in my talk at Unity is, and this is a true example, I was at a dinner party and this woman was getting a divorce and she was really hating her husband and she said that expletive has left me destitute. He has taken everything except the apartment, I am destitute, I don't know how to live. And somebody asked how much you're selling the apartment for and she said $7,750,000. Which seems ridiculous because the poor thing is down to her last $7 million. But in fact, the poor thing, I don't call people a poor thing, but can look at $7 million and see destitution. $7 million intrinsically means nothing. It just anything and any mirror you look at is the same. So what we do in thought exchange workshops, I give one on Monday nights in Norwalk, I give one Wednesday nights in New York and you can go to my website, thethoughtexchange.com and find all this out. I do it for singers where we look at what you're thinking and what's coming out of your mouth as a singer. We sit in the circle and we do a meditation like the one I described where we realize that we live in the unmanifested and that our life is about invisible experience and that we are the observer. And then I ask whoever wants to speak, no one has to speak, to bring up some problem they're seeing. And in this area, as we were talking about with the pepper in the kitchen, you do not have to be unity language, PC. You do not say, I know all is in divine order, but I feel you say that horrible monster did that and I'd like to kill them because I wanna see what you're seeing. And when you describe your circumstance, we then say if you are looking in a mirror, an exact mirror of your thoughts, what must you be thinking? And at first people sort of grab for things like, oh, I'm thinking that I should be allowed to have this. I say, no, you're not because you don't have it. So obviously you're thinking. So if I'm saying, my partner is not treating me, is not respecting me, then what I'm seeing before me is lack of respect. So I must be thinking I cannot be respected in the way I want to. You just thought my fault is just my thought. I'm seeing it in the mirror. And so we name, we get to the thought that feels right to the person that this is what you're thinking. Then we ask what thought might you take on that would make the world appear different to you? World's not gonna change, but it's going to appear different to you. So if this woman was $7 million, suddenly might think, wow, I'm so wealthy, I have $7 million. The $7 million hasn't changed. And when we find that thought, like I can be respected, we take it on. Now this is where most methods stop and where we used to stop. But I find people came in the next week and it was gone. So now we say what sensation do you experience when you take on the thought I can be respected? And every time someone says, oh my God, I have a stomach ache or I have a tight throat or my heart is pounding 90 miles an hour. And we say, can you stay with that sensation? And when they can stay with that, they can stay with the thought. Stay with the sensation. Again, it's the no pain, no gain. You have to have that sensation and really validate it and feel it and experience it and embrace it. Well, you see, that is the healing because what's happening is as a child we had that sensation and we completely shied away from it and said, I'm never gonna go near that again. And we cut off huge worlds, huge areas of possibility for ourselves. The only way we can regain that is to experience those sensations. Now, if we were children and we experienced those sensations and we had an adult with us who said, oh my goodness, I see how upset you are. Yes, I can understand that, et cetera. We would be able to contextualize them. When we didn't, we are still functioning as children. We have to find our inner adult which really is the observer. That's why we're called children of God because everything about us, even adults, is coming from that child place who can hold the space and say, I can let you feel this and I understand what feeling this is and I know what feeling this is. And so one of the other truths is that no matter who you try to get this from, there is no one you can get this healing from other than yourself. You must allow yourself, hold yourself and have the experience of the sensations that you have. And by being able to once again have the sensations, you hold yourself in a different way and you once again open up the possibilities that were not available to you because you couldn't have the sensations. If I want an ice cream cone and I have to wait online, a child might not be able to tolerate the sensations of waiting online for five minutes and will not have the cone. I have to take my inner child by the hand and stand there and go, yes, of course, I see that you are feeling that, of course you're feeling that, I'm feeling that too. But you see, I can feel that and stand on a line and so can you. Most of us has taken our inner child and batted it out of the way and said, shut up, I'm trying to have a career and you're interfering with me. So the child screams louder and creates more circumstances to make itself seen. Yeah, it's one of those things. The other thing is the idea of, it's kind of almost like the truth hurts, in a way. We're talking about the truth, the truth hurts. There's a, okay, there's Jude coming back on, we lost her, she's coming back. Yes, we lost her. Are you there, Jude? Yes, I am. Good. Bring her over to us. Thank you. So you're back. You didn't miss a whole lot. But I was just saying, it's kind of like the, like I just thought of this expression that kind of really is fitting is the truth hurts and not only, you know, no pain, no gain, all that and feeling that, but also the truth about the truth hurts that to say to someone that, you know, if you wanna, if I wanna know what your thoughts are, all I have to do is look at your life. Basically it's kind of like taking responsibility for your own circumstances and that's kind of harsh. People feel like, oh, you're blaming me for my circumstances. But you're not, but that's the thing, you see, you're not, it would be like blaming me for the way I look in the mirror. See, people think, oh, I caused this. There's nothing to cause. So all, it's not even responsive. It's like if you were sitting there now and I said to you, oh, you have a, you have a smudge on your face. You wouldn't say to me, how dare you tell me that? You'd say, thank you. Thank you, right. Because I didn't realize that had a smudge on it. So any circumstance we see, it's not that we caused it. It's that it is showing us some place where we are editing out a part of what's possible. And so you don't say you caused that or brought it on yourself. You are getting a mirror in front of you. So if I look at my hair, I don't say, oh, I caused that mirror to look terrible. I say, oh, thank you, mirror. Cause I didn't realize that I needed to comb my hair. Now I comb it. But there's no blame. And it's a lot about brilliance too. You know, everybody knows this. I think everybody can experience this when you have a friend who doesn't think highly of themselves, but you see their brilliance. Everybody has many areas of brilliance, but you're a fantastic singer. You're a beautiful voice. You're so talented at speaking or writing or whatever it may be, but they don't feel it themselves. And so many people are plagued with that, I guess, where they are brilliant and they have these areas of brilliance, but they're not using it to their fullest potential. As a sensation comes with that brilliance, they're afraid to feel. So it's not that they're being ridiculous or just snap out of it. It's that the sensation arises. And what we know from this also is that achievement does not bring, is not the point, does not bring peace, does not bring happiness. I always say in my relationship, I am very happy with my partner, Sean, but Sean does not make me happy. Sean is the reflection in the mirror of my happiness or my misery on a given day. And so I cannot look to anything. I'm just sitting here with everything reflecting me. It's so key. Not that you complete me thing, it's so, in a sense. No, nor, oh, I want an Oscar. Now I'm so fabulous. It doesn't mean anything. I find for some reason, I don't know why, but when I win awards, I feel discomfort. I just feel like, yeah, let's go out to dinner. You know, I don't know why, but I just, that's what I feel like when I win an award. I'm happy to win an award, but the award itself does not generate happiness. That's why we have so many big stars who kill themselves or are on drugs or stuff like that, because when you achieve what you think is your dream, you discover that you are still you inside it. And even that huge dream, you're still seeing yourself in that mirror. So you're still thinking, I'm nothing even while the world is screaming, unless you can go inside and use, the whole world is here for us to see that we're in. Can you imagine that can be devastating? If your whole life was focused on this one, one dream and you get that package and you open it and it's not what's inside is not what you thought. It's the same you that's inside. That's right. If you're doing it to get away from your sensations, you can't. I love that. So instead of saying you complete me, it's you reflect me. That's right. So really that in your relationships, you reflect me. What I see coming out of you is actually a mirror. Right, I mean, I had, Sean and I had a very challenging first few years. It was just very complex and challenging. And one day we were sitting at dinner. We happened to be in Paris at the moment. And I said to him, I'm really unhappy with you. I don't feel you're treating me right. I don't feel you're supporting me. I'm handling all the financial burden. You're so busy with the church I'm handling the renovation of the house. And he looked at me and he said, David, when you are ready to have those things, you will have them. And I said, you know, I know that, but it might not be with you. And he said, let's cross that bridge when we come to it. You just get ready to have them. And from that point on, I ceased to care whether I was with Sean or not. Every time I'd noticed something I didn't like, I'd say, oh, I must be thinking I can't have that. It's possible for me to have that. And Sean transformed and became the person I wanted. If he hadn't, he would have disappeared from my life because whoever it was who reflected that would now be in my life. And so- Did he change or did- Well, we're not sure. Does everybody have their own reality? We'd, yes. How's that work? Sean said, I don't know, he said in certain ways I just sort of felt compelled to, suddenly I felt able to give you things that I wasn't and that's probably because you were in no uncertain terms telling me not to by your thought. Sounds like voodoo magic, doesn't it, June? Yeah, it is, but it is magical in a way, but it's because, I don't know, some things I see. I mean, there are certain things about Sean that someone else might find problematic that I used to find problematic that I now smile at. So it's a complex thing, but again, my experience is that I'm in a relationship that makes me very happy, but it's not making me happy. I have chosen certain thoughts and have been willing to be with the sensations that those thoughts have. So I can experience something different. I always say my father has so tremendously changed based on how I have thought of him. I don't know if he's changed, but I think of his differently. Isn't that weird? That's one of the mental gymnastics that I haven't leaped of this. Because Ed used to always say, what's the line he always say? Oh, this is my reality. What are you supposed to say to that? Well, this is my reality. Well, also my reality is different than your reality. Well, it's what you're thinking is what it means. This is what I'm thinking. This is what I'm making up. See, that's the thing about reality is, like, for instance, the word romance, if you look it up in the dictionary, it means not true made up. When you're romantic, you make up something about, isn't this romantic? You have to make up romance. You can't expect romance to hit you. You make it up. It's true, but it's imagining. Yeah, well, I said to Sean the other day, I said, I have decided that the expression, oh God, means I love you. So I'll say, Sean, could you get this to me? And I go, ah, and I go, thank you, and we love you. Thank you. Exactly. I'm making that up because all, oh God, is I have a sensation, which then I decide means, oh, he's terrible and I can never this and he and then I'm gonna fight with you to try and change you because I don't want that to say, I just have the sensation and choose a new thought about it. And but I couldn't choose that new thought if I didn't have the sensation. You hear that, Ed? Are you listening? He's listening. He's got thumbs up. We're taking notes. I hope somebody's getting this on tape. Let me take one real quick second and thank our sponsors again because we wouldn't be here if it weren't for them. And I'm just gonna mention them real quick. CarpeVM, c-a-r-p-e-v-m dot com. Video marketing, seizure market, say it with video. And Mezzy Grill, m-e-z-e grill dot com. Mezzy Grill, authentic Mediterranean food, meets modern flavor here in Midtown Manhattan. Tradehill.com, the easiest way to buy and sell bitcoins online. If you don't know what bitcoins are, you're missing out. Use Google, tradehill.com. And number four is U.S. Gold Coins, our trusted advisor for excellent investments in U.S. rare gold and silver coins, usgoldcoins.com. So you have a video, tell us about that. Well, I brought music because I am a musician really by trade. And it's an interesting transition. People say, how did you end up doing this? And I, because most of my career is still music. But I wrote, I write a lot of songs that could be considered new thought songs, could be considered helping people and getting information from the unmanifested, usually information that I myself don't have. It's like, the song we're gonna hear is Help Is On The Way. I don't think Help Is On The Way. It's flowing through you. I need to know that Help Is On The Way. So that message comes to me. Did you say you need to know that? Yes, and then I pass it on to other people. So I found when I sort of got into this work just accidentally and you know, that my real mission in life has always been healing. That's what my music is about. That's what my songs are about. That's what my shows are about. And so that's the way they go together. Now, there's an artist, there was an artist named Nancy Lamont who died 15 years ago. And I think she was the greatest singer of American populist standards who ever lived. And she was 43 when she died and I had the honor of producing all her CDs and DVDs and stuff like that. And we've kept her memory going and she was probably the greatest exponent of my music. And we have for you today a song that pertains to this very much, it's a video and she sang it at the Easter Bonnet Competition 15 years ago and it became the theme song for equity. If I'd say it's Broadway Cares Easter Bonnet Competition and it's called Help Is On The Way and it's Nancy Lamont. Great. Okay, let's take a look. She was pretty amazing. What can I say? Amazing. That is so beautiful. I mean, you're obviously so multi-talented and brilliant. I mean, I had never met you until, you know, what was it Memorial Day when you spoke. I had heard your name all the time but I don't think I'd ever actually met you. But I knew that you were the talented guy who taught the singer and composer and all that. But I didn't realize that you'd composed all this music for Disney and then when I heard you speak I didn't even know you were a speaker and author. So it's not really fair that you have all this brilliance in one person. I mean, weren't you hogging up some of that? I'm very tired. Yeah. Are you very tired? It's very tiring. But again, tiredness is merely a sensation. Merely a sensation. People say that sometimes. You know, this week I suddenly had to be in the Today Show five times and so I had to get home at midnight and I'd get picked up in the car at 4.45 and people would say, how are you doing this? And I said, I'm very tired. Five days in a row? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, there was a little bit. I'm on once a month doing a thing called Everyone Has a Story where I write a song for the Today Show. People send in their stories and we go on and we write a song for them. We bring a Broadway star on, we fly them in and we do it. It's a very heartwarming thing to do. But they had an emergency thing they were doing and they called me at the last minute and I came in and so I got very little sleep but it's just really, I enjoy my life a lot now because I just go, what does it feel like to be tired? So I have a band around my eyes. I have a sinking feeling but it doesn't matter. It doesn't affect you if you can experience it and I feel so strong when I can say, really the strongest thing is when you can be with your own experience and so many of us spend our life running from our own experience and it's right here and it's here to serve us, every ache, every pain, every thing that we would call a disaster. I actually even enjoy now, in Unity Stories they're always, oh and then I did this and then it all came true and I got, I even enjoy when it doesn't all come true. I kind of go, that was cool. I absolutely didn't get what I wanted and I'm fine. Yeah, but I learned I can live through it. Yeah, and I'll live through it but I just got the news that this cast member isn't coming and I'm really disappointed and now I'm starting to think, ooh, I could do this and I could do that and I could do this and it goes, things process very quickly when you do this. You go to the sensation, you feel it for, something you've been avoiding for your whole life. You only need to feel it for 15 seconds and then you're comfortable with it. It's turning. Yeah, you have to dwell in it but experience the, experience the, it's just a sensation. It's just a sensation, embrace the sensation. Yes. And you reflect me. That's right. Life is sensational. You reflect me. Whatever's going on. That's right. Whatever's going wrong. You're self. You're reflecting my thoughts. If you just think of that I'm looking at you and I'm seeing, see if I'm looking at you and I'm seeing that I'm being very pleasantly interviewed that you're understanding me and that you're smiling at me, I am quite aware that I am thinking that. I am quite aware that I, and if I were getting something different, I could still be thinking that and notice that I would be contextualizing you in that. So consequently, my life tends to turn out the way I'm thinking, even though there are many things I'm disappointed about and that I don't have and stuff like that, but I go, oh, like with this book, I was trying to get this book published and I just could not get it published. So I suddenly stopped and said, well, Mr. Thought Exchange, you must be thinking that you can't get a book published. And if you're thinking that, it doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter how you push, how you show, favor. So I stopped trying and I woke up every morning and I said, is it possible that I could get a book published? Of course it is. Okay, fine. And a publisher called me. So on those days, everybody has, I'm sorry, Jude, we're not letting you get a word in edge-wise. We're really gonna have to have David come back. When you're in town. Yeah. I'll come back when you're in town. That 10-second delay is just enough. I hope it's you and the great unmanifested. That's right. You're right there. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'll kill it. We're just not letting you get a word in. I have to say, I found it so liberating, though, too. I started noticing more about what I was noticing with my thoughts and the fact that we can go back and exchange it for another thought. Yes. Then go with the, sit with the sensations, but often the thoughts themselves are unconsciously thinking some thoughts we're not that aware of that can create our obstacles. Absolutely, and this is what I say when people say, well, how do I know? You're looking at it. Look in the mirror. It's like if you're saying unconsciously, my hair is not neat. Well, look in the mirror. So that's a very good point is you always have a key, a doorway to your unconscious. If you're willing to believe, there's that wonderful quote, the mad woman of Shio who says, I never look in the mirror. That old woman is in there. Exactly. Well, I have a quick question. I gotta get it. So on those days when everything's going wrong, right? You have those days when everything's going wrong and then just like, nothing is right. And you just, you feel so scattered. So what it is, it's reflecting that my thoughts, that I'm thinking that that's the way it's got to be. Well, and also what happens is things are coming into you and you're resisting them. You're fighting them. So what happens is whenever you, when people say turn to God, what you can turn to is your observer. You step into the observer and notice that all this is going on. So it is not that I am all over the place. It's that I'm noticing that there's something all over the place going on. And immediately you are encompassing it. You're not dealing with each little problem and how do I do this? Because in the observer, there's nothing that has to be done because nothing has to be gotten rid of. Nothing has to be changed. It's just, this is the way I'm experiencing it right now. So you can always, when people say go to God, you're never gonna see God because God is not physical. God is not going to speak because God can't speak. God is not going to give you anything because there's nothing to give in the unmanifested. But our experience of God is always immediately available to us by just going to the observer and there we are in God. So that's the secret when, that's the secret going to the observer really is going to God. But it's not going to some outside source and calling up some hotline to God. It's actually not out there. It's actually going to the observer within yourself. That's why that observer, which is God, the oneness that we all are, we are only one. That's why I love the title of the show. It's exactly that. And so when people say I want to see this with God's eyes, God's eyes, God doesn't say, it's not that with God's eyes, this is gonna really be a success. With God's eyes, this is just seen. It's just experienced. It's nothing. It doesn't affect anything. It doesn't take anything. It is not possible to take away possibility. Is it like playing a video game where you get to choose your own avatars? You get to choose your own scene and setting and body and everything about you. It's just one big video game and you get to select whatever you want. And all the other ones are still there and you could select them and you never lose the ability to select another one. You can just change it anytime you want. Yeah, and so you see, in this model, people say, yeah, but what's the point of life? The point of life is to know that you have everything at all times. The point of life is to know that everything's fine. The point of life is to have experience, to experience life itself. There is nowhere to get. There is nothing to achieve. There is nothing to accomplish. There is no one to conquer. There is, and it's a big shift because people think, oh, well, then I'll just sit there. But if you were sitting in a house with a television and a jacuzzi and a pool and a kitchen, you wouldn't just sit there. You'd do what you wanna do. You'd enjoy this. You'd enjoy that. You'd make up a project. You'd pretend that it mattered. If it succeeded or failed, you know, the Super Bowl, the whole country's crazy for the Super Bowl, then it ends. And it's like, oh, now, what's gonna happen next year? It doesn't matter. It's over. That's done. And there's no winners. There's no losers. There's nothing. It's all illusion. The only truth is that we have everything. So I have generated this lovely experience for myself. I generated it, no matter what it is, I generate it. It's so true. The more often and the better able I am to remember that, the more everything just falls into place like magic. Yeah, and it does feel like magic because it's just, there's nothing to do. Life is simple, but it's, you have to be willing to experience it. And it can be pretty challenging. And allow it to be simple. Yeah, yeah. So we're almost out of time. Yep, we've got one minute. All right, so I guess you wanna close us out, Jude? Hull up the book. Yeah, we've been showing the book for sure. It's a great book and I do wanna say too that David deals with a lot of different spiritual disciplines and how to work with this system, which is extremely helpful, I think, from body worker, to Buddhism, to New Thought, to traditional Christianity. It's just a fabulous practical guide and I enjoyed it very much. Thank you. I look forward to being there in person next time. I will be delighted to come back and the best way to get this is either on Amazon.com or at thethoughtexchange.com. And also check out the website because there's a lot of interactive things. We're working on a game. We're working on, I have blogs on there and all sorts of stuff. And yes, you can, for those of you who are asking, you can buy it with Bitcoin. Either Amazon.com through Trade Hill or you can just buy it through Bitcoin from us. Just call us up and we'll sell it to you through Bitcoin. Those who wanna do that. All right, well, thanks everybody. We'll see you next week. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. Thanks. Thank you. That was fun. You guys were great. Thank you.