Train Your MIND For Love & Peace w/Gary Zukav EP 1126

“If any of your relationships are not intimate, look at why they are not.”Today's guest is Gary Zukav, who is the author of four consecutive New York Times bestsellers, including the #1 New York Times bestseller The Seat of the Soul. This book led the way to seeing the alignment of the personality and the soul as the fulfillment of life, and captured the imagination of millions. His books have sold six million copies and are published in thirty-two languages. Gary's written a new book called Universal Human, which is about the new era of human evolution and offers a vision of what a world based on love could be, and an invitation to begin bringing such a world into being now. In this episode Lewis and Gary discuss how to develop what Gary calls authentic power in your life, how to find peace and the positive when negative things are happening around you, how fear is controlling most of our lives and what we can do about it, why intentions are the most important factor for transforming your life, and so much more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1126Check out Gary's websites: www.universalhuman.com www.seatofthesoul.com Check out Gary's most recent book: Universal HumanThe Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,126 with number one New York Times bestselling author Gary Zukav. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:30Lewis Howes?

  Sadhguru said, "If you are constantly aware of your mortal nature, you will only do what truly matters." And Oprah said, "The thing you fear most has no power. Your fear of it is what has the power. Facing the truth really will set you free." My guest today is Gary Zukav, who is the author of four consecutive New York Times bestselling books, including the number one New York Times bestseller, The Seat of the Soul. This book led the way to seeing the alignment of the personality and the soul as the fulfillment of life and captured the imagination of millions. And his books have sold 6 million copies and are published in 32 languages. And Gary's written a new book called Universal Human, which is about the new era of human

• 1:13Lewis Howes?

  evolution and offers a vision of what a world based on love could be and an invitation to begin bringing such a world into being now. And this episode was inspiring. We discussed how to develop what Gary calls authentic power in your life, how to find peace in the positive when negative things are happening around you, how fear is controlling most of our lives and what we can do about it, why intentions are the most important factor for transforming your life, and so much more. If you're enjoying this at any moment, make sure to share this with someone that you think would be inspired by it as well. You can copy and paste the link, lewishouse.com/1126, or just use the link wherever you're listening to this episode and share it with a friend. Post it on social media and make sure to tag me and Gary as well.

• 1:56Lewis Howes?

  And if this is your first time here, please click the subscribe button over on Apple Podcasts or Spotify right now so you can stay up to date on the latest in greatness on the School of Greatness podcast. And in just a moment, I bring you the one and only Gary Zukav.

• 2:12Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness. I'm very excited about our guest. Gary Zukav is in the house. Good to see you Gary. How you doing?

• 2:19Gary Zukav?

  I'm fine, Louis. It's good to see you.

• 2:22Lewis Howes?

  I am so grateful that you're here. I'm so grateful for the mission that you've been on your entire life to serve humanity and you've impacted millions of people around the world with your book and your messages. And the first question I have for you is something I've been sensing in the world with a lot that's been happening is that people are starting to waking up in a lot of areas in their life and there it seems like there's been a lot of stress in relationships, specifically intimate relationships, business partnerships, family dynamics, friendship dynamics in the world, but specifically with intimate relationships. If people feel like they are stuck or in a rut in an intimate relationship and they're not sure of what the next steps they should take, what's your thoughts on how they should

• 3:05Lewis Howes?

  approach moving forward to see if that's the right relationship for them?

• 3:09Gary Zukav?

  If any of your relationships are not intimate, take a look at why they're not. Because when I talk about spiritual partnership, which is partnership between equals for the purpose of spiritual growth, we have that kind of partnership, I have that kind of partnership with my granddaughters, our granddaughters, Linda's and mine, I have that kind of partnership with the people who are working with us, or I like to think co-creating with us. You can have a spiritual partnership in class, you can have it on a ball team. So if your life and intimacy is not just physical intimacy, I used to be addicted to sex and I used to thought that was intimate. It is not. I want to say to everyone who's listening to us, it is not. And thank you for saying that my entire life has been dedicated to helping

• 3:53Gary Zukav?

  humanity. That's true in a way. The life that I have left in the Earth School is dedicated to helping people understand a major transformation in consciousness that is underway now and affects everything that we do, our relationships, the way we look at ourselves, the world, the universe. The way we understand power, the way we understand community, the way we understand everything. And that, since I began to realize that, that's when I committed myself to contributing what I could to this transformation of consciousness. But the transformation is creating us. We're not creating the transformation. It's happening.

• 4:33Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 4:33Gary Zukav?

  So, if I may, I'd like to start out by saying to everyone who's listening to us, I'm, I am not asking you to believe anything that I say. In fact, I suggest that you don't believe it just because I'm saying it. And in fact, I'd suggest that you don't believe anything that anyone says just because they have a pulpit, or a television show, or a microphone, or they've written a book, or you've known them for a long time, or someone else has. See what you resonate with as they speak. And if you resonate with anything that I say, take it into your heart, experiment with it. And if it produces results that you like, experiment some more. If it doesn't, throw it away.

• 5:12Lewis Howes?

  Let it go.

• 5:13Gary Zukav?

  Don't try to wear a shoe that pinches.

• 5:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. How long were you a sex addict for?

• 5:18Gary Zukav?

  I'd say, well, I'm trying to think, was it a third of my life, a half my life? Half my life is, half my life is closer to it. But for me, when I was addicted to sex, the women that I was drawn to were drawn to me, because we both wanted the same thing, to use one another. It was part of my process of moving past, of challenging that addiction, was when I first recognized that when I was addicted to sex, I thought I was cool. I thought I had it. I was living in San Francisco, and motorcycles were a big part of my life, drugs were a big part of my life, nothing major like heroin or opium. But outside of those, I experimented with a lot of them. And, and I was, when somebody is too frightened

• 6:03Gary Zukav?

  to even admit or acknowledge that they're frightened, the street name for that is macho. And I was macho. That's what led me to into the army, to be a Green Beret officer, to go to Vietnam. So, the addiction to sex, like an addiction to anything, in my experience, alcohol, drugs, shopping, masturbating, pornography, gambling, perfectionism, is an experience of fear. And every experience of fear is an experience of pain. And that's why anyone who has healed an addiction, to me, I'm, I'm, I'm in awe of that. That person because healing an addiction is one of the ultimate spiritual accomplishments.

• 6:39Lewis Howes?

  Why is it so hard to heal an addiction?

• 6:41Gary Zukav?

  Well, now we come to the heart of it. At the core experience of every human, whether it's multi-sensory, and we'll go into what that means if you like, and five sensory, which is self-explanatory, people whose perception is limited to the five senses. All of us have this core experience of feeling inadequate, and that's an understatement. Wanting to be loved and feeling unlovable, wanting to love and feeling that we're not capable. Feeling as though you don't want anyone to see you the way you see yourself inside because they wouldn't want anything to do with you. A feeling intrinsically flawed, inherently defective, and this is excruciating. It's needed.

• 7:19Lewis Howes?

  Why do we feel that way so much?

• 7:21Gary Zukav?

  I'm not a metaphysical person, although it sounds that way sometimes. I'm a practical person. And so what I know is this is so, and you can look inside yourself and see. And this experience is excruciating. Most people do everything they can to avoid it. And all of those avoidances you will recognize immediately as expressions of fear after we talk about fear. They become angry, vengeful, resentful, jealous. They feel superior and entitled. They feel inferior and need to please. They try to impress with more money, education, longer legs, in every way to manipulate and control others, to gain recognition, so they get education, money.

• 8:02Gary Zukav?

  All of this, all of these things that we all know so well, perhaps we didn't recognize so well as fear. And we can do that now because of this epic, unprecedented transformation in human consciousness that is underway right now. And it's touching hundreds of millions of people. And within a few generations, everyone will have this new consciousness. So if it's touching you, be aware that you're not losing your mind, you're gaining your sanity. There's something good, wholesome, healthy that's emerging in you. And if, for example, your perception, this new transformation of consciousness is not mystical or esoteric. It's the expansion of our awareness beyond the limitations of the five senses.

• 8:44Gary Zukav?

  Let me give you some examples. Have you ever sensed that you're more than a mind and a body?

• 8:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 8:51Gary Zukav?

  Hundreds of millions of us have that sense that maybe there is a part of you even that existed before you were born and that will exist after you die. And that's not just Buddhist or Hindu. It's a larger context beginning to appear in your awareness that you're part of a larger fabric and it's drawing you, you know it. Have you ever looked at the world and thought, maybe my experiences in the world are not just random. Maybe all the time I've spent trying to avoid bad luck and pray for good luck didn't be super or have been. Our being superseded by another perception in which everything that I experience serves me. Now, that's a big one to think about. If you get cancer, is that serving you? If your child has cancer, is that serving you? If you've been betrayed, is that serving you? And the answer is yes, yes it is.

• 9:36Lewis Howes?

  Why is it so, why is it so hard for us to realize that or recognize that when we're in the moment of so much pain and overwhelm and stress and questions? Why did this person kill my child? Why did my partner have cancer and die? Why, you know, why these things that maybe don't make sense? How do we make sense of them?

• 9:54Gary Zukav?

  It's not making sense of them, although that happens, that happens. It's seeing, seeing how that serves you. Everything that you experience in the Earth School, let's call it that, which is a span between the day, your, your birthday and your death day. Everything that happens to you within that span, which is span of experience in a domain of time and space and matter and duality, serves you in bringing the consciousness of your soul into the awareness of your personality. And many of these experiences are experiences that the personality would not choose, would not choose. And the pain that comes from these parts of your, the parts of your personality that originated in fear, put it that way, is real, is real.

• 10:36Gary Zukav?

  Heartache is not poetical, it is real. And when someone close to you passes on, that sense of grief and loss and pain and despair and anger at the universe, those are difficult experiences. But when you have experiences like that. And everyone does know that each of those experiences are blessings. Now let me spell that out. Each of those experiences are communications, you might say, from your soul. And what they're communicating is this, you are now experiencing a part of yourself, an aspect of your personality that you need to experience fully and move beyond the control of in order to give the gifts that you were born to give.

• 11:16Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 11:16Gary Zukav?

  And probably you've all, we've all met people who've had cancer or they've lost a leg or an athlete that's been crippled and they can say later, I'm so grateful for that. They couldn't at the time, but they can now. Well, as you become multisensory, you can even say it at the time. That's creating authentic power. And everything that Linda and I, that's my spiritual partner, and by the way, I consider anyone who wants to have relationships of substance and depth, anyone who is looking inside themselves to change themselves for the better, rather than blame the world or credit the world for their pain or their joy. Those are potential spiritual partners, equals, who are together for the purpose of spiritual growth, which means creating authentic power.

• 11:59Lewis Howes?

  How can we, in a moment of pain and tragedy, worldly tragedy, find peace and grace and say, this is happening for me? And instead of, why did this happen to me?

• 12:10Gary Zukav?

  Sometimes grace comes and grace is a temporary experience, a gift from the universe that allows you to experience your life as it would be without fear. And the pain is gone and you see what's happening, but the pain is gone. And then grace leaves you and the pain rushes back in.

• 12:27Gary Zukav?

  Now, when you have an experience of grace, your responsibility, if you take it, is to make that experience permanent, is to create that as an ongoing stabilized life that you are living. Well, for example, I was adopted, Linda and I were adopted into the Lakota culture, culture about 30 years ago, because some work I was invited to do with Native American youth. And the more I become familiar with Aboriginal cultures, the more I sense how grounded they are. How wise they are. Now, these are the cultures. I'm not talking about all the people in them because so many of the people in them have grown up in generation of sexual abuse, alcoholism, poverty, squalor, but still the culture exists in many and there it's a treasure.

• 13:09Gary Zukav?

  So I'll get back to one thing I learned, which was about a vision quest. So I took one. I had experiences on this vision quest that were startled me and afterwards, everyone in Lakota who's in the culture, the real culture that's still alive knows that when you go on a vision quest, which is they call crying for a vision, umbele etiapi in Lakota, it means not weeping, it means just tell me, God, please, universe creator, why am I alive? Why am I here? What can I give? And when you, not everyone gets a vision, but when you do, then it's your responsibility to bring it into your life and make it real all the time. So that's the first answer to your question. What do we do when the pain knocks us to our knees?

• 13:52Gary Zukav?

  That doesn't happen to a lot of people, but it happens. So I wanted to, wanted to say that.

• 13:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:56Gary Zukav?

  If you're like me, I've had experiences of grace, but my growth has been more incremental. Instantaneous blessing from the universe. So what do you do when that pain comes? You experience it. And then some people say, oh, my God, Gary, come on, it can't get any, it can't hurt anymore. So tell me something helpful. I'm talking about emotional awareness in real terms, not I can't, I can't take it anymore. I can't live anymore. This is excruciating or I'm happy, I'm joyful. I feel bubbly, light. Those are just labels. To really get to know your emotional currents requires being able to experience and articulate them in terms of physical sensations in your body, physical sensations. So when you're feeling any emotion, so we're talking about painful emotions now,

• 14:41Gary Zukav?

  turn your attention inside yourself, in your body, put them into specific areas in your body. There's only seven of them. I'll, we'll talk about three for convenience. Your throat area, your chest area, your solar plexus area, and look for physical sensations. If you find painful physical sensations, then you know that fear is active in you. Now, a painful physical sensation, physical sensations are just that. They're not, I feel good, they feel bad, they feel light, they feel heavy. No, they sting, they stab, they throb, they ache. They churn, they burn. So find those in yourself.

• 15:16Lewis Howes?

  So when you feel the pain in your body, maybe you feel, and I've felt this many times, specifically in interactions and intimate relationships, where I've felt like strangled in my throat when no one was touching me, or like a weight on my chest, or something compressing my heart, or eczema flaring up, or something like that, when I have been afraid to say what I need to say, when I've lacked courage to stand up for myself, when I've constantly abandoned my inner child over and over and over again by trying to please someone else as opposed to do what I need to do for myself. So when we feel this pain, throbbing, burning, churning, all these things you said, how long are we supposed to experience this? You know, is this, do we experience this for months and

• 16:00Lewis Howes?

  years? Do we experience it for moments and then let it go? How do we get past and beyond it, back into mission, purpose, vision? You know, how do we go back to a greater sense of who we are as opposed to a painful sense of where we are?

• 16:14Gary Zukav?

  That's the second step in creating authentic power that you're asking for. The first step is emotional awareness. The answer to your question is, how long do we stay in it? That depends on you.

• 16:23Lewis Howes?

  So number one is being emotional, being aware of the feelings and the sensations within your body.

• 16:28Gary Zukav?

  Yeah. Emotional awareness is not emotional intelligence. This is emotional awareness somatically, in terms of your body. Your body will not lie to you. Once, a long time ago, I was at a coffee shop with someone and I didn't know, we were just talking. He said, oh, you're jealous. I'd said something and I said, no, not me. Come on, that's not me. He was right. I didn't know it. I didn't know. Of course, I knew I was angry. But so get to know yourself. And it's painful. It's painful. That's why creating authentic power requires commitment and courage and conscious communications and compassion. So when you're feeling any emotion and you look inside yourself and you have the courage to do that, that's the first step. It takes a lot. Then, the next step is to recognize that you are in a frightened

• 17:13Gary Zukav?

  part of your personality. That's shorthand for saying a part that originates in fear, like anger, jealousy, resentment, all the things that we mentioned before, addiction, compulsion, obsession. Then, in that moment, reach for the healthiest part of your personality that you can. Now, that would be, for example, a part of your, that's a part of your personality that's aligned with your soul. That's a part of your personality that you experience as gratitude, or appreciation, caring, or contentment, patience, awe of the universe. Reach for one of those parts of yourself. Reach for it. Access it the best that you can while you're experiencing the frightened part.

• 17:49Lewis Howes?

  What does that do for you when you are experiencing pain, or resentment, or anger, or frustration, betrayal, and you focus on gratitude and appreciation at the same time? What starts to happen?

• 17:59Gary Zukav?

  Well, it's always a good thing to do. But I wouldn't focus on labeling like, "She betrayed me. He embezzled from me." I expected more from him, all of those kind of things. Look, go underneath that and look at what you're feeling. That's emotional awareness. Leave the terms behind. After a while, you'll know these experiences with a new intimacy. You won't need to call it anger. You just say, "There it is." That's what you're challenging. That's what you're challenging, Lewis. Then, while you're feeling it, you will be feeling the full power, the magnetic attraction of a frightened part of your personality. They are powerfully magnetic and righteous. Every frightened part of your personality is fully justified in doing what it's doing, whether it's manslaughter,

• 18:41Gary Zukav?

  murder, whether it's getting back, getting even shouting, lashing out, showing who's on top. All of these things are painful and destructive experiences, destructive when you act on them. If you act in that energy, you will create consequences that will be painful for you to experience and destructive. You always create consequences when you act. But what creates the consequences is the intention with which you act. And in the Earth School, there's only two intentions: bedrock, that you can't get in farther, you can't get deeper, love and fear. And emotion, yeah.

• 19:16Lewis Howes?

  So there's only two intentions: making a decision and acting from love, or acting from fear?

• 19:20Gary Zukav?

  That's it. If, if, if you're not making a conscious decision, you're acting from fear. That's why it's a good idea to become conscious.

• 19:30Gary Zukav?

  Because acting from fear creates painful and destructive consequences. And acting with love creates the opposite, constructive, blissful consequences.

• 19:37Lewis Howes?

  How does someone know when they're acting from love and not fake love?

• 19:41Gary Zukav?

  Fake love is fear. Everything is either love or it's fear. And by the way, I am not the originator of any of all or any of this. This comes from the universe and it's my joy to share it in a way that I hope will be helpful for you. And the only way you'll know is to try it. And the first step is in recognizing now that you resonate with some of it. You wouldn't still be listening to this if you weren't resonating with it.

• 20:03Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 20:03Gary Zukav?

  Because if you were five sensory, five sensory humans don't yet, don't have within their experience ways to attach onto these words we're saying. There's nothing in their experience that gives them validity or makes them real. And so it sounds like new age fluff or poof or someone trying to manipulate me. But when, as you become aware of your expanded perception, as you become multi-sensory, then these things have a sense of meaning. They call to you. Now, here's the thing, the first time you do this, you might not even be able to do it. For example, I was so angry for all of my life, most of it, not all.

• 20:40Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 20:40Gary Zukav?

  Yes.

• 20:41Lewis Howes?

  Until when did you stop becoming so angry?

• 20:43Gary Zukav?

  When I started to realize that the world isn't what I thought it was and that I'm creating everything that I'm experiencing in it. And if I don't want to create more of it, if I don't want to spend the rest of my life shaking my fist at the universe and raging at it, I better do something myself. Because it's not because the universe, it's not that the universe is ignoring me and my rage. It's continuing to allow, it's showing me that as long as I experience it, I have things to learn from it. This is the way the Earth School works. It doesn't reward you with a gift to heaven or to another domain of existence that's superior. It doesn't punish you in similar ways. The universe doesn't look in terms of good and bad, right, wrong, success, failure. It looks in terms of cause and effect.

• 21:28Gary Zukav?

  Every cause creates an effect and every effect has a cause. And if you participate in the cause, you participate in the effect. And I don't say will participate in it, you participate in it. They happen together. Your experience of the effect may take some time in the Earth School. It may take a few days, it may take a month, it may happen immediately because your partner gets angry and shouts. It may take centuries, but every cause has an effect. And in the Earth School, as we become multi-century, we begin to realize exactly what those causes are. They are intentions. Now, an intention is a quality of consciousness that infuses your deed and your word. And that's what you can choose.

• 22:11Gary Zukav?

  You can't choose what you're going to feel on the next moment, but you can choose what you're going to do about it when it comes. And what I'm suggesting is that you create authentic power. First, scan, apply emotional awareness that you've been developing. And you have to develop it. Then, if it's fear you're in, and it's very evident because you hurt a lot. In that moment, reach for the healthiest part of your personality that you can. Do what you can. For example, I was so angry at people, at the world, for such a long time. And if I was angry, I had no hesitation about lashing out. In fact, it was a part of my identity. I would say, yeah, I'm angry. I've always been angry, I'm always gonna be angry. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

• 22:54Gary Zukav?

  And I didn't realize, Louis, I didn't realize what I was doing. I didn't realize that I was pushing people away, and I had all that time. Because if you're doing that, people won't open themselves to you. They won't allow themselves to be vulnerable. They won't allow themselves to get close. And not only that, the only people that you're going to experience in your life are people that are like you. Because everyone in my life was like me. They were intellectual, superior, arrogant, angry.

• 23:19Lewis Howes?

  Competitive, yeah.

• 23:20Gary Zukav?

  Very, yeah.

• 23:21Lewis Howes?

  So, how, how, how old were you when you realized that anger was not the answer anymore? And actually started to integrate more peaceful responses opposed to holding on to anger?

• 23:31Gary Zukav?

  Yeah, more healthy responses for sure. It didn't happen to me like that. I didn't think, wow, this anger is no good, I've gotta do something about this.

• 23:43Gary Zukav?

  It didn't happen that way. It happened when I wrote a book on physics. I got invited to the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory when I was living in San Francisco for a Friday afternoon meeting of physicists. And I went because I wanted to see what they looked like. I mean, I never liked science. I couldn't, I can't do mathematics. But I was curious. And this group of ten or twelve physicists was discussing the question, are we creating the reality that we're experimenting with? They weren't discussing mathematics during that meeting. It was a qualitative, not a quantitative discussion. And I could not believe my ears. These, this was exactly the kind of question that I discussed with my friends in coffee shops in North Beach.

• 24:20Lewis Howes?

  What was the question again?

• 24:22Gary Zukav?

  Are we creating the reality that we're experimenting with? And I, I came home after that meeting so excited. I felt like I'd had two cups of cappuccino and they were all sparking off my fingertips. All of that energy and I, I could not explain what was exciting me. And I couldn't for weeks. All I knew is I, I couldn't sit still. I couldn't. It was so exciting and I knew I was on to something. But, and I knew what it was, but I couldn't explain it. I didn't know what it was because I couldn't explain it. But, so I asked them if, if they would let me come back. And they said, yes. The organizer of this meeting was my agent. Well, none of them were very much older. This was a long time ago. And, but you know, that's interesting. Time is interesting. When you look at your memories and you think, wow, that happened ten years ago.

• 25:06Gary Zukav?

  Not in your consciousness. It's still happening. It happened yesterday. That's how crisp and clear it is. But I'm diverted a little bit.

• 25:14Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 25:15Gary Zukav?

  I want to go back to the central question. What do you do when you wake up in your life and you develop emotional awareness? And you find yourself in fear? This is natural because when you become aware in your life, you become aware of everything. You don't just become aware of joy and happiness and gratitude and all the good things that are happening. You don't even judge. You become aware of everything.

• 25:34Lewis Howes?

  You start to see everything in a different light.

• 25:36Gary Zukav?

  You see what's there for the first time. And you see your experiences in a different light. While you're experiencing the pain of a fright on part of your personality, you reach for the healthiest part. And that's what I was saying when I first started doing this. If I were angry before, I had no hesitation in lashing out. Then, when I was challenged, my, challenging my anger, all I might be able to do is just stand with my jaw clenched, my fist clenched by my side and just not say anything. Just not talk and just do it. Just not talk. And I didn't realize what a big step that was. Because it put me in a different universe of people. Until then, I was in a universe of people who were angry and they lashed out whenever they felt wrong.

• 26:18Gary Zukav?

  Then I started drawing to me people who were angry like me, but determined not to be controlled by their anger. It's a different world. Then gradually, I could begin to relax a little bit when I was angry. Then unclench my teeth, then eventually start to listen. It was a process, a process of continually challenging this frightened part of my personality that we're calling anger. So when you're creating authentic power, it's not an event, it's a process. Or at least if you're like me, it's incremental. And the first time you create it, and the second and fourth and 10th, maybe not that much happens, but you know that you're doing something big. Because until that moment, this part has controlled you, this part of your personality has controlled you.

• 26:59Gary Zukav?

  Eventually, that part of you move beyond the control of that part of your personality. It still comes, you still feel it, you still think the thoughts, but it doesn't penetrate you the way it used to. It runs off your back like, it's more like water running off the feathers of a duck. And you begin, it loses its control over you. That's the creation of authentic power. Eventually, you move beyond the pain because you move into love and love is not painful. But the purpose of creating authentic power is not to escape from pain. The purpose of creating authentic power is to be able to move through your life with an empowered heart without attachment to the outcome. That's our evolutionary path now. That is where we are going.

• 27:41Lewis Howes?

  How do you create high engagement or high involvement and low attachment with everything you're doing? Where you're all in, present, giving, co-creating with what's happening in the moment, but unattached with the result? Or the person, or the vision of this relationship working out a certain way? And then it doesn't work out, or a business, or an idea, and then it falls short for some reason? How do you?

• 28:05Gary Zukav?

  It falls short of something, and the something is your expectations. And it falls short of your expectations because you weren't aware of having, of acting in fear when you were. In other words, intention is everything. Intention is primary, it's fundamental, it's essential. If you don't know what your intention is, you're still going to create consequences. But they're going to surprise you when you come. Because you weren't, you'll discover, you will discover that you did create what you intended, but you didn't. You weren't aware of what your intention was. That's where emotional awareness will always show you when you're in fear, or when you're in love. And when you're in fear, your intention is to pursue the old understanding of power as ability to manipulate and control. That's the five sensory understanding.

• 28:50Gary Zukav?

  And that now produces only violence and destruction. It used to be good medicine. It used to be the way we evolved. We used to evolve by surviving, and we survived by pursuing external power. Now, we are multisensory. We evolve by growing spiritually, and we grow spiritually by creating authentic power, by transforming ourselves with our own emotional awareness and volition. And the goal is to remove, to move beyond the control of within ourselves, every part of our personality that doesn't love, doesn't want to love, doesn't know love, doesn't understand love, that wants to manipulate, that intends to manipulate, that does to the best of its ability manipulate and control. And here is the answer to your

• 29:34Gary Zukav?

  question. When it fails, you experience more pain.

• 29:37Lewis Howes?

  And you experience more pain because you were coming from a place of fear, not love? Is that what I'm hearing you say?

• 29:42Gary Zukav?

  You experience pain when fear, the energy of fear and emotional energy that we're calling fear, is active in you. And it's always painful. That's why you experience pain. That's why you, and you can experience it consciously, only by setting the intention to. Now, of course, when someone dies and you feel that huge gap in your life and the grief and the loss, where someone betrays you or cheats on you, gosh, that hurts. But most people don't, aren't aware that that is not, that experience is not coming from the unchangeable ground of their being. It's coming from a part of their personality. And they have other parts of their personality that hold or perceive or experience these same circumstances differently. And they have

• 30:27Gary Zukav?

  the ability to learn how to cha, how to choose one of those grounded, healthy parts of their personality to look at and experience the same situation.

• 30:37Gary Zukav?

  Than the unhealthy, painful, destructive part through which they are currently experiencing it, and that's where the pain comes from.

• 30:44Lewis Howes?

  Can you give me an example of a scenario in your personal life, maybe recently or in recent years, where grief, pain, tragedy has struck, or you felt this emotional pain internally from whatever situation that's happened? And the process you took on how to tap back into the healthy personality within you to own that authentic power? Can you share an example that?

• 31:07Gary Zukav?

  We don't have enough, we don't have enough time. But I'll, I'll, I'm gonna give you one example.

• 31:13Lewis Howes?

  Give me one.

• 31:14Gary Zukav?

  Okay. I was at one time, um, got engaged to be married. I was still addicted to sex. But, and by the way, when I was addicted to sex and wasn't aware of anything, I was only drawn to women who I could seduce because they were addicted to me. I mean, they were addicted to sex. In, in, in other words, I used to think I was so manly and so many notches on my gun handle, because I'm on my pistol grip, because I was with so many women and I knew none of them meant anything to me. But when I discovered, Lewis, that I didn't mean anything more to them than it meant to me, that's the experience I had. That's it. That's when I realized, when I stopped smoking a long time ago, I remember looking down

• 31:56Gary Zukav?

  at my fingers, these two fingertips, I held the finger, and I saw they were yellow and I had that same feeling, ah, that's ugly. That's what I saw about sexual addiction. It's a mutual, I thought I was preying on the women, they were preying on me. It was mutual self, it was mutual prey, not P R E Y, mutual preying. And that was what helped me. And that's the example that I want to give you. With this woman that I was with, I got to a place in my life where I could begin to see qualities in some of the women I was with. I was still addicted to sex, their genitals were still the most important thing to me, the size of their breasts, the appearance of their face. If they didn't look like a Playboy model, which was the magazine in the day, they fell short. They're falling short again of my.

• 32:39Lewis Howes?

  Expectation.

• 32:40Gary Zukav?

  You should be my partner.

• 32:41Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 32:42Gary Zukav?

  So this woman was aware, and she said, you've got a problem. She said, I, the last person I was with was like you, and I'm not going to be with another person like you. So you've got a problem. And my first words were, no, I don't have a problem, I'm just a loving person. I'm a loving person. If I'm on a hot tub with a loving woman, we have sex. Isn't that the way everyone does it? When they become loving, that's not a problem, is it? And she said, yes. And you better keep looking at this. And I did. The next step was, well, okay, maybe I've got, maybe this is an issue. It's a little issue. Okay, it's a bigger issue. Okay, it's an issue all the way down to, oh my, I can't stop. I'm out of control. And that's when the work began. And there is a chapter in The Seat of the Soul on addiction, and it

• 33:26Gary Zukav?

  uses sexual addiction, but it applies to every addiction. I use that one because it was mine, and also because sexual addiction is the most common addiction in the human experience. But read that chapter in The Seat of the Soul. And I discovered it was a journey, and a difficult one, the most difficult I think I've ever made. It was into myself. It was into looking. I found, for example, well, I don't think I can do this. And I realized, I just, that's, that disempowers me when I say that. And then I would think, well, isn't it possible that I could get a, I could encounter a temptation that's, that's stronger than I can resist? And I realized, yes, I can create that. That's my way of unconsciously giving myself response,

• 34:08Gary Zukav?

  permission to behave irresponsibly. And finally, this led me to the place where it was the most frightening, I think, in my life, when I realized the power is in my hands. Everything else was gone. The universe wasn't going to reward me or say, nice going, or good boy, if I stopped abusing, if I stopped exploiting other people. And it wasn't going to say, oh, you got a long way to go, kid. This is a shape up. It wasn't going to do any of those things. The Earth's goal gives you the experiences that you need in a highly personal way. In every interaction, it gives every person involved what they need in exquisite perfection, given the wisdom of what each has chosen in the past. So in this moment, I realized, no one's gonna blame me,

• 34:52Gary Zukav?

  no one's gonna thank me, no one's gonna judge me, no one's gonna say, go ahead and stop, or go ahead, it's fun. In fact, it's more than fun. It's, it's my only desperate attempt to get relief from the pain of powerlessness for a moment. And at that moment, the choice was mine. And I knew, by the way, I knew I could continue to learn through this addiction or through this behavior indefinitely. It was all my choice. And that is the choice that every addict reaches eventually. That's why healing an addiction is a remarkable spiritual accomplishment. And I am in awe of everyone who's done it, whatever the addiction is, because an addiction is a frightened part of your personality, like every other frightened part of your personality, except it's stronger.

• 35:37Gary Zukav?

  It's the part that seems completely in the control of the earth school. It's the part that you can't seem to do something about, but it's the same. So you heal it the same way you move beyond the control of any frightened part of your personality. You develop emotional awareness and then you use it. And then you don't get stuck in it just saying, well, I hurt all the time. Now what? Okay, I hurt, I hurt, I hurt. I'm aware, I'm hurt. You can stay there for a long time, lifetimes if you want. The next step is responsible choice. And these are not sequential steps. You can, they're just what needs to happen in the order that's appropriate for you. As you create authentic power, you become the authority in your life. This experience that I'm describing, I never thought about it in those terms, but that's it. That was the moment. I didn't say, now I'm the authority

• 36:20Gary Zukav?

  of my life. I realized there isn't any other. If I'm going to stop this, I'm going to stop it. And if I'm not, I'm not. And that's all there is to it. Now, I want to be, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

• 36:30Lewis Howes?

  Go ahead, go ahead.

• 36:31Gary Zukav?

  No, you were thinking something. What was?

• 36:32Lewis Howes?

  My, my thought is if someone is addicted to something where they are out of control, they cannot stop the addiction. They don't have the power to stop the addiction in that moment.

• 36:41Gary Zukav?

  That's their experience in that moment.

• 36:42Lewis Howes?

  And then what is that saying about them?

• 36:45Gary Zukav?

  Please, go ahead. I'm sorry.

• 36:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. If there's an addiction, if someone is addicted to something, I mean, we're probably all addicted to something, you know, and there could be maybe a positive addiction or negative addiction, the positive one, like I'm addicted to being of service to people. I feel like if we're going to be addicted to something, it might as well be of contribution to others in a positive way. So for me, that's what I've channeled my energy and, and attention into is how can I serve? How can I serve? And also, how can I take care of myself so that I'm not, you know, exhausted in my service to other? People, but if someone is addicted to something that's harming them, that's hurting them, that's not supporting their growth, what is that saying about the person?

• 37:22Gary Zukav?

  Saying they're in pain and the frightened part of their personality is active. But I want to go back to something you said. First of all, I appreciate very much what you were saying and I feel I understand your heart and where you're coming from. So this is just a suggestion. If you're willing to look at the vocabulary or the way you're expressing it.

• 37:39Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 37:39Gary Zukav?

  From a new, from a new perspective, you said, I'm addicted to everything. So I might as well be addicted to something constructive, essentially, if I understood you, serving people. Well, you can't be addicted to love. Addiction is an experience of fear and I don't think that that's what you're feeling.

• 37:54Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 37:55Gary Zukav?

  But you can find out because if you found out that people, that you're not serving people and you felt pain about that, then you could see that there was a second agenda. There's a difference between caretaking and caregiving. It looks the same on the outside, a hospice worker, a doctor, a nurse, a parent with a kid. But caretaking is striving to make someone else feel better about themselves so that they'll feel better about themselves. And it's easy way to see if you're caretaking or caregiving. Suppose I give a gift to someone, I think this is from my heart. I'm gonna go over there and I say, here, I've just been really appreciating you. Here's, here's, here's a dozen roses. I really like these. And she says, oh my God, I thought you knew I was allergic to roses.

• 38:38Gary Zukav?

  And I don't like them anyway, because as soon as it gets warm, their petals fall off. So thanks for nothing. I really wanted to tell you that what you can really do for me is, and if you feel depleted or angry or, and what always comes from with that kind of experience is eventually resentment.

• 38:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:58Gary Zukav?

  Anger, distance, lack of, because of the lack of appreciation. That was actually the second agenda that you didn't recognize. Then you know fear was involved.

• 39:08Lewis Howes?

  So if we, there's a quote, and I just looked it up to make sure I don't butcher the quote, but someone said, I'm not sure if this is the true person who said this, but someone said, "The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit." As opposed to, "I'm gonna plant this so I can sit under it and, you know, because it now owes me something." But this is what this author, I think it's Nelson Henderson, is saying, "The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit."

• 39:33Gary Zukav?

  Yes, exactly. Another intention can be, "I'm gonna plant it, not because I'm gonna sit in it under the shade, but because even if I know I'm not gonna live that long, people are gonna admire me for planting this tree, knowing that I'm not gonna be able to sit under the shade."

• 39:46Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, I'm gonna have my name on the tree, so that they know that I was the one who planted the tree.

• 39:50Gary Zukav?

  Right. I hope someone will carve my initials into this tree, or at least if they can't do that, put a little plaque somewhere on it.

• 39:55Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm, right.

• 39:57Gary Zukav?

  I, I, I don't recognize the name of the person that said that, but he's right on. He's spot on. He's spot on. There's, this is everything behind the aboriginal wisdom of making all our considerations with the second, with the seventh generation in our hearts. It's, I, I, I heard a version of that same story where someone told, someone wrote, "I, I saw an old man, so old, he only had one tooth hanging out of his top gum, and he was planting a seed." And I said, "What are you planting?" He said, "A mango tree." He said, "Oh, are mangoes good?" He said, "Yeah, they're wonderful. And when this, and, and this ground's gonna be covered with mangoes." And then he said, "Well, are you gonna be able to eat them?" And the old man said, "No, but you are."

• 40:36Lewis Howes?

  What's the difference between living with that intention and also planting food for yourself? You know, I'm planting because I wanna, you know, provide for myself, my family, I wanna, you know, earn a living, I want my dreams to mature and manifest. What's the difference between those two different scenarios?

• 40:53Gary Zukav?

  Everything, everything.

• 40:54Lewis Howes?

  And is, is it, is it then bad to want and desire for yourself and wanna manifest things and attract things and build and create and be rewarded for certain things? Is that a, or is that only gonna hurt us, hold us back?

• 41:07Gary Zukav?

  It is not us. It's you that's holding yourself back or moving yourself in the direction that you want to go. And let's suggest that the direction that is most meaningful is the direction that your soul wants you to go.

• 41:18Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 41:19Gary Zukav?

  As you go in that direction, your life fills with meaning. As you go in the opposite direction, meaning empties from your life. That's the myth of Sisyphus, always pushing a boulder up a hill. You get almost to the top and it slips away from you and rolls all the way down. You gotta start again forever. So I feel a goodness in you, Lewis. And so I know in most of what you apply these questions to, you're going to find it leads you into meaning. You're doing what you're doing on your podcast because, not because you want to get a lot of listeners, not because you want to sell some product. If at first or whenever you needed to sell some product because that's what you needed to do the podcast, because that's why you were doing the podcast. That's love. If you're planting, if you're growing a garden and it just doesn't feel right to you,

• 42:02Gary Zukav?

  well, you're not a farmer and not supposed to be doing it. If it does feel right with you because you're frightened, it's the only way you can feed your family. Well, then do it for the love of your family, not because you're frightened that the universe isn't ever going to give you enough to eat. I so appreciate your questions because they are the most significant questions that a person can ask. Why am I here? What's the difference between love and between fear? How can I know? How can I align myself with the highest part of myself that I can possibly imagine or think of? These are questions that we have been asking ourselves since we were a species. Five sensory human, humans ask the same questions. Now we're multi-sensory and we can begin to experience the things that we used to believe have to believe on faith. Now we can begin to see for ourselves who is responsible for our lives.

• 42:47Gary Zukav?

  And I want to say that creating authentic power, the final step in creating authentic power is to give your power to a higher power.

• 42:54Lewis Howes?

  What does that look like?

• 42:55Gary Zukav?

  There is no higher power than love.

• 42:57Lewis Howes?

  So how does one give their power to love?

• 43:00Gary Zukav?

  You become it. It's not separate from you anymore. That's creating authentic power. That's everything that we've been discussing. As you challenge the fear-based parts of your personality, those are the ones that are painful, that strive to manipulate and control, that create destructive and painful consequences. You move beyond the control of them. And as you do, love enters your awareness. As you do, you develop a space. You create a space between the impulse and the action. And in that space, you can choose consciously. You become angry, rage flares in you. And you scan, you look inside yourself, you create that gap and you choose, you have the ability to choose consciously. Then, as you do that again and again, that becomes

• 43:43Gary Zukav?

  a lifelong meditation, a heartfulness meditation, because it's leading you to the heart, because the heart is involved in all of it. Because you cannot create authentic power without awareness of your emotions, and that requires the heart. And as you do that, love begins to move into your consciousness more and more fully. And, and you find that eventually there's no second agenda. And that's when your life and meaning are not separate. You don't want to find meaning, you are living it. You don't want to give yourself to love, you are love. You don't want to be hopeful. You can only be hopeful if you're frightened that what you're hopeful for isn't going to come. When you create authentic power, you don't have a need for hope, you don't have need for love. You are these things.

• 44:25Gary Zukav?

  This is why we're discussing the most powerful thing that has ever happened to humanity, the shift in the consciousness of humankind itself, and the new evolutionary requirement, modality, pathway to become the authority in your own life, to distinguish between love and fear in yourself, and choose love all the time, no matter what's happening inside you, such as rage, or outside of you, such as another nine eleven type event.

• 44:54Lewis Howes?

  This is, I'm loving this conversation. I feel like I'm, I want to talk to you for about 10 hours, because I could talk about these things forever. I'm curious about if we could give a practical, a tangible experience, example that my audience, I think, could relate to. And one that you've probably had many times. You've written many books. You've got a new book called Universal Human, which we'll talk more about here in a second. But for a lot of my audience is entrepreneurial minded. They're launching their careers, businesses, dreams, they've got side hustles, they've got ideas, they want to bring them to life. And I would say there's a number of them that have always had a book idea, and some of them are authors and they've written books. So let's give the example of, I'm an author, you're an author, the intention of, okay, I'm gonna write a book, and I want to get this book out there into the world.

• 45:38Lewis Howes?

  And I wanted to do well and I wanted to sell a lot of copies and I wanted to impact people and you know, have these expectations. How can we apply this to launching an idea or launching a book where we give something our full energy and intention based in love, but we also wanted to do well and have some type of expectation or we think of some expectation? And what happens if it doesn't do as well as we, as we want? How do we navigate this of like tangible, practical, okay, I'm launching this thing and there's responsibilities and a publisher and you know, team, all this, I gotta pay for these things. How do we manage that without allowing the overwhelm, the stress, the anxiety, the fear, insecurity, hold us back from our true intention of love?

• 46:23Gary Zukav?

  Intention is everything. Whatever you do, whenever you do it, in what circumstances, or with whom, or without whom you do it, intention is everything. At this moment, and the next, and the next, which are ultimately the same, intention is everything. That's why creating authentic power is a lifelong meditation. So, let's take your example. You, you, you have a dream, wanna write a book, you wanna start a business, want to create a podcast, and you're in, and you wanna do it to give, something constructive. Is there anything wrong with wanting to pay the rent, with needing to feed your family, with needing to pay your producers, with needing to pay the technicians? Is there anything wrong with

• 47:04Gary Zukav?

  being a doctor and charging for your services? Intention is everything. Intention creates your consequences. It's very clear what your intention is, Lewis, because I looked you up before I came here, and you have an enormous number of people who listen to the podcast that you produce. There are people who would love to have the audience that comes to listen to you. But if your intention were less than what it is, you wouldn't have that audience. That's a reflection of an intention of love. But are you attached to it? That might be another question you'll have to answer for yourself. What happened if everything turned sour? Would you still want to give? It's, I think in your case, I know you would still want to give and might have to take another channel, but I'm trying to, but I am, I'm also hopefully illustrating a point.

• 47:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Gary Zukav?

  And that is that, in whatever you do, be aware of your intention. Do the best you can to be aware of it. And if you think you know your intention, ask yourself, why am I doing that? For example, I want to get a better job. I want to get a different job. That's my intention. That's actually an out intention, you might say. Why do you want to get a better job? I want to make more money. Why do you want to make? These are questions you're asking yourself. Why do I want to make more money? I want to buy a Ferrari. Why do you want to buy a Ferrari? I want people to admire me more. Why do you want people to admire me more? I'll get more sex. Why do you want to get? And you keep going down and down and down until you get to an intention that is bedrock and you can't get any farther down. And that bedrock intention is going to be love or fear. If you're doing it for yourself, that's fear.

• 48:33Gary Zukav?

  If you're doing it because your heart is guiding you, because you're hearing, because you're following meaning. We've spoken in those terms, because you're following meaning. That's coming from love. So if, for example, now let's take the example you gave. In my life, I wrote this book, A Universal Human. What's my intention? The same as it is and has been for every intent, every book that I've written to share. And, and you know, I, this is a moment of grace in my life. When I got invited to that meeting of physicists at LBO, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, I, I got so excited about their conversation. I knew that I wanted to share it. I knew that I wasn't going to be involved in physics indefinitely. And I wanted to give, I wanted to give as a gift to all the people like me,

• 49:15Gary Zukav?

  liberal arts majors, people who don't like science, who didn't, didn't like that science, who can't do mathematics and are not interested in mathematics. I want to present it to them as a gift on a platter. And I did. Now, what I realized was, as I was writing it and afterwards, that was my first gift to life. Everything until that moment was for me, me, me, me. Riding the motorcycles, my image, the women, sex for me, the drugs enhance my experiences for me. My life was one continual. And then I started to write the book. Oh, it was amazing. I would, I made chapters for each, outlines for each chapter, but then I threw them away because the energy went somewhere else. And after six months, I had six chapters and I couldn't help but see they fit together like I had.

• 50:00Gary Zukav?

  Planned it, but who planned it? I threw the outlines away and I went where the energy was. That's when I realized, that's when I experienced, I'm not alone. And that's when I realized, it's not possible to be alone. And it's not possible to create alone. Every creation is a co-creation. The ancient Greeks knew that, they called them the muses. Now we have a more accurate term. We can say these are non-physical guides and teachers. Or we have sort of a pseudo-psychological term, intuition. It's not pseudo anymore, it's real. It's a big part of multisensory perception. It's the voice of the non-physical world. And I experienced some of that, never had before. I even told a friend who was a Jungian analyst, what was happening? And she said, "Oh Gary, don't, don't go there. You don't know what you might be getting yourself into." She was frightened.

• 50:44Gary Zukav?

  I knew what I was getting myself into and I knew I wanted more of it. And I did. I, I, I set the intention then to, to live my life as this book was being written. Spontaneously, intelligently, joyfully. And I've made some progress in that direction. But I had the intention to give this gift. And not only that, it became clearer to me as I wrote it, that I was not going to put one ounces way too big a measurement, nanoparticle of fear into this book. It was precious to be able to spend that much time with a reader, up close, intimate, sharing things that are worthy and exciting. I'm not going to contaminate it in any way with the fear that permeated my life elsewhere. And I'd ride for seven, six or seven days and then all of that would leave

• 51:28Gary Zukav?

  and it would be back to worrying about the monthly miracle of the rent, getting more sex, riding the bike. And then the energy would return, it back to riding again. And I'd wake up thinking about the book. The Dancing Ruling Masters was the name of that book, an overview of the new physics. And I'd go to sleep thinking about the book. And my friends noticed this, of course, because I'd never written a book and I never cared for science. And they, they'd, they'd comment on it. And I, I thought, here's a way to explain it to them. Suppose That you discovered an island, beautiful. And on this island was someone that you loved going back and being with. Not romantic, not sexual, just good presence. And then after six months, your friends tell, your friends say, Gary, take a break. Every time we see you, you're rolling out to that island. Well, that's what a life of joy and meaning and purpose is.

• 52:14Gary Zukav?

  So it was the grace that gave me that experience of giving a gift. Because I wasn't on track to give it. I was on track to be a withered old man looking for sex from girls that are younger than my granddaughters. And there are a lot of them around. Old people who are not satisfied with who they are. But I've got some good, some good thoughts for them. You can start now. Doesn't matter if you're a hundred and three. You start now. There's going to be a caretaker coming into your room in a few minutes. How are you going to look at her? How are you going to look at him? How are you going to look at yourself? Is someone stuck here being serviced by a minimum wage person who'd rather be working somewhere else doing something else? Or are you going to look at your life in a way that allows you to see everything differently? Including the opportunity of this moment and every moment you have left in the art school.

• 52:57Gary Zukav?

  But our listeners now are in various stages of their lives and various experiences. So ask yourself, here is a foolproof, fail-safe way of consulting intuition, of consulting a non-physical teacher. Before you speak or act, ask yourself, what is my intention? And then listen, it may not come at once. You may have to relax yourself. You may have to take a walk into town. You may have to walk by a stream. You have to maybe go see a movie, not to distract yourself. No, no, not to distract yourself. The answer will come. Imagine that as soon as you ask the question, the answer is pouring into you. The answer will come. Now, what are you going to do? So I had, in the days when I was writing The Dancing Bullion Masters, I had a friend who was a professor at a college in physics.

• 53:40Gary Zukav?

  And he knew, before we had talks, I couldn't have talks like this then. I didn't know any of this. But he knew that he didn't want to be a professor anymore. He wanted to do something else. And his wife did not like the idea. In fact, it destroyed the life that he had. She didn't like the idea of not being the wife of a professor. She didn't like the idea of not having. The social security, she didn't like not having a faculty club. She didn't like the prestige, but he knew he had to do something else and they divorced.

• 54:06Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 54:07Gary Zukav?

  So whatever it is you're doing, look and ask, look inside and ask yourself, what is my intention? Now, it may be that you are so excited about something, you got a startup and this is something the Silicon Valley has never even dreamed of. This baby is gonna fly. Still, ask yourself, what is my intention? Do I wanna emulate someone who's the richest person in the world? Is this really what I wanna do? And it may be a part of you that says, yeah. Well, ask yourself, is it coming from love or is it coming from fear? And if you say, yeah, I'm coming from love, get out of the way. I'm on the road. Do it because whatever you choose in the earth school, you will learn from. You cannot make a wrong choice in the earth school. All roads lead to home. Some are longer and more difficult. Others are more direct and joyful.

• 54:51Gary Zukav?

  Don't worry about making a wrong choice. Don't worry about anything. Just be aware. Look at what your intention is to the best of your ability and know that if you're acting in fear, it's not going to bring you to the fulfillment and the gratitude that you want. It may bring you to an estate that covers 50 acres. It may bring you prestige for people who would like to emulate what you do, but will you be satisfied? When you, by the way, death is not what we think it is as five sensory humans and as multi-sensory humans, we know it's something very different. I, I, I heard a wise channeled entity once say to the question, tell me, tell me about death and the entity said, it's entirely safe. That's what we see. That's what we see. So do your best.

• 55:35Gary Zukav?

  If you have an idea and it's gripped you and you wanna bring it into being, do it, but be aware of your intention.

• 55:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. And what do you think is more dangerous for us, holding on to an attachment that we have or holding on to an identity?

• 55:49Gary Zukav?

  They're the same. You hold on to anything, it's fear. The purpose of creating authentic power, like we discussed, is to go through life, be able to with an empowered heart without attachment to the outcome. And if you look at your heroes, the way I look at mine, Gandhi, Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., they knew how to do this. Gandhi set an intention and he held it with firmness and conviction to the moment the first of those three bullets entered his body. And when they did, the first thing he said was the name of God. He said, Rahm. That intention was his life. Was he attached to it? I don't think so. I think he was attached to doing what he, I think attached again is the wrong word. I'm following and committed, committed, completely committed, undoubtedly committed,

• 56:32Gary Zukav?

  unquestionably committed. Martin Luther King Jr., the same thing. The favorite story I remember about Gandhi is in the later days, when the fruit was beginning to fall from the tree, the viceroy called him into his palace, his mansion, on instructions from London. And Gandhi was in a British prison at that time. And Gandhi came into the mansion wearing dirty prison clothes. And the first thing he said in this palatial setting was, Your Excellency, I understand that I have done many things that must have been inerrant to you, but I hope that will not stand between us as men. He never lost his connection with hive. He never blamed anyone. The viceroy was the one who signed the orders that brutalized, exploited, and killed Indians. But Gandhi's issue was not with the viceroy. It was with

• 57:16Gary Zukav?

  the policy that exploited hundreds of millions of Indians. Can you do that in your life? Can I do that in my life? That's what I ask myself all the time, and I strive for it. That book that you held up, Universal Humans, I worked on that for thirty-three years.

• 57:29Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 57:30Gary Zukav?

  It worked on me for thirty-three years. Neither one of us are finished, but I'm giving you in this moment, the best that I've got, and that book will also. So, commitment, yes, that's one of the requirements for creating authentic power. It's the first requirement, commitment. By the way, you can go to our website, theaterthesoul.com, and download the Authentic Power Guidelines. Each of these guidelines has specific guidelines within them, but the major guidelines are, the categories are commitment, courage, compassion, conscious communication and action. Whenever you're attached, you're experiencing fear. And if you don't get what you're attached to, if the frightened part of your personality does not get what it's attached to, you will experience pain again. This is not bad. To

• 58:13Gary Zukav?

  anyone listening or watching us, this is not bad. This is not good. This is your life. And the only way to change it is to change your life. And what we've been discussing, Lewis and I and all of us here, is how to do that. Now, there's countless ways to challenge and frighten a part of your personality. You can meditate, you can chant, you can read a song, you can sing a song, you can teach a child. It's boundless. Your creativity is boundless. But what's operational is love, the choice of love. That's what changes you. Everything I've described about creating authentic power, you will see others explaining in their own way, in their own time, the same bare-bones structure. In order to transform yourself, you need to become aware of what it is in yourself that you want to transform. Number two, you need to have the will.

• 58:56Gary Zukav?

  You need to use your free will to do it, to change it. And as your multisensory, you have ability to access your intuition for how to do that the best. But no matter what framework of transformation people will present that resonates with you, if it really works for you, if it resonates, if it works for anyone, you'll see this structure. It's got to be awareness. Not all of the suggestions that people give have these things. That's why I suggest that you experiment. And I suggest you be skeptical. Cynicism is not, I don't suggest that. But skepticism is good. Asking questions like we talked about, can that be? Oh, come on, can that really happen? Let me see, let's look at that more. I'm going to try that out myself. Because when I talk about authentic power,

• 59:38Gary Zukav?

  I'm suggesting it to you, not in the way of saying, this is the answer to your life. I'm saying, experiment with it. See if you can twist it, bend it, jump up and down on it. See if you can break it. You can't, you can't. Because the people that Lynda and I have been blessed to be with, who come to our events, who read the books, who listen to events, they come to a place where they realize, oh my God, this is not, this is not a new, this is not a new technique. This is not an idea, this is not a philosophy. This is my life, this is my life that I'm experimenting with. And they begin to go far beyond that. And we can talk about this at other times. But for example, you begin to realize that what you're engaged in is far more than self-improvement and self-transformation. Everything you do is not only self-changing, it's world-changing.

• 1:00:24Gary Zukav?

  The world is not going to change until you change. Now, this is something that will light red lights by the hundreds of thousands of any of our listeners who are still using their intellect as their main guidance vehicle through life. The intellect is designed to work closely with the five senses. It analyzes, compares, deduces, and reports the most effective ways to pursue external power, manipulating control. And like I say, this used to be good medicine. It's now toxic. As we become multisensory, the intellect cannot follow. It's not designed to move into multisensory perception. I mean, five-sensory perception in a way it can't grasp, it can't compute. And to communicate and articulate multisensory perception requires the higher order of logic

• 1:01:07Gary Zukav?

  and reasoning or understanding of the heart. So there are many things that you'll, you'll see and be able to articulate as you begin to use your multisensory perception, which is a gift. It's a gift. You don't have to develop it, although we will, like we develop cognition. But all you have to do is unwrap it and use it. Look at, look at your experiences. Sometimes you know things about people that your five senses didn't tell you. You just know that's a multisensory perception. And you can use all of these things, and you will. And I suggest that you do. And you use all of what we've talked about to answer the big questions that you've just brought up, Lewis. And the, and the last one was very practical. So yes, for a practical example from my life and...

• 1:01:47Lewis Howes?

  And let me, and let me, I'm going to ask another question while you answer that, because I think this might cue it up. And I think a lot of my audience loves this conversation around the law of attraction. And I'm curious, what is your thoughts on attachment versus the law of attraction? And using the intention of love to create something and attract into your life without being attached to the result? What's your thoughts on that?

• 1:02:10Gary Zukav?

  The law of attraction is is as simple as you as you described it, or I think as you were describing it. Energy attracts like energy. That's the law of attraction. Remember I told you when I was in the coffee shop talking about whether we create the reality that we're discussing and experimenting with? And that I was with people like me, they were intellectual, arrogant, superior, judgmental. I didn't notice it at the time. I thought they were good guys. If if if your experience is that life is a brutal, doggy, dog world, that's the world you're gonna you're living in. If you are loving, that's the world you're going to live in. That's the law of attraction. And it's accurate. If if you think I'm gonna use the law of attraction because I'm gonna get more money, recognition, love, sex, fixes, whatever it is,

• 1:02:53Gary Zukav?

  you're gonna draw more people with exactly that energy. That's the law of attraction. Now, as you can see, it's one of the great non-physical dynamics that affect the Earth school. The other is the law of cause and effect, which in East is, the East is called karma. Karma is a is a message delivery system. Whenever you act with an intention, that intention creates consequences. And those consequences will affect other people. And when other people experience those consequences, you will experience what they experience. Now, let me give you a concrete example. Suppose you betray someone. Like, some people have told me of someone not showing up at a wedding. Others have told us, I did that, or I wish I had. I was walking down the aisle and I knew I shouldn't be doing this. I knew it, but I did anyway.

• 1:03:35Gary Zukav?

  And now thirty years later, we're getting divorced and I paid the price of not listening to my intuition. And other people have never forgiven someone who didn't show up at the wedding. So these are examples of betrayal. You, if you do that, you will experience betrayal. But it may not come in the same terms, in the same package that you're expecting. For example, a platoon leader may abandon you in combat. Someone you've gotten to know, your bookkeeper, embezzles from you. You may not recognize the wrapping, but when it comes, you'll recognize what's in the package. The same experience that your choices of intention created in someone else. So that's why we can look at the universal law of cause and effect. As a message delivery system, whenever you choose an intention of love or fear and you act on it, you send a message.

• 1:04:18Gary Zukav?

  And on that message, the address on that message is return to sender. And it always comes back to you with precision. It doesn't matter if you move. It doesn't matter if you die. It doesn't matter. You will get the message. The universal law of cause and effect is the universal impersonal teacher of responsibility. And that the companies stand side by side with the law of attraction. People who are five sensory say, I'll believe it when I see it. People who are multi-sensory know, I'll see it when I believe it. Let me get, can I give you a story that

• 1:04:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:49Gary Zukav?

  illustrates the law of attraction?

• 1:04:50Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:04:51Gary Zukav?

  Alright, so it's a couple, young couple is driving through Vermont in foliage and it's gorgeous. And they see an old man rocking on his porch. So they decide they want to interact. And I stopped the car and I walk up to him and I said, what are people like who live here? And the old man said, well, what do they like? Where you come from? And then the couple thought and they said, well, they're not very forgiving. They're pretty hard people. They're, they all want what they can get. And the old man said, yeah, well, people are, they're pretty much like that here too. Shortly after, another couple drove by the same house, talked to the same old man and they said, asked the same question. What do the people like who live here? The old man asked them the same question. What do they like? Where you come from? And they said, ah, they're forgiving, they're loving, they're good neighbors, they care about one another. And the old man said, people here are much like that too.

• 1:05:36Gary Zukav?

  That's the law of attraction. But once you know the law of attraction, you know that your energy is continually attracting people to you that reflect your energy. They're not commenting on it, they're not judging it. It's like the law of cause and effect doesn't comment on your messages. It doesn't discuss them, it just delivers them. And the law of attraction doesn't show you what's better or what's worse, it shows you you. And as we become multi-sensory, we begin to experience these things directly and to experiment with.

• 1:06:01Lewis Howes?

  Gary, I would love to do another interview or multiple interviews in the future if you're down, but I want to ask the final couple of questions and wrap things up here in a few minutes. And before I ask the final few questions, I want to let everyone know that they got to get this book, Universal Human, Creating Authentic Power and the New Consciousness. And if you want to learn about authentic power and how to master that for yourself and how to navigate and explore and test things out and see what works for you, then I highly recommend you get a few copies of this book, one for yourself and one for a few friends. You can get the Seat of the Soul as well, which is, I think, sold 6 million copies, number one New York Times bestseller for many, many months, and all the other books that you have. But this book-

• 1:06:40Gary Zukav?

  Three years.

• 1:06:41Lewis Howes?

  Three years on New York Times list.

• 1:06:42Gary Zukav?

  Yes, 31, but only when 31 weeks is number one.

• 1:06:45Lewis Howes?

  Okay, only 31, you know, yeah, it's okay.

• 1:06:49Gary Zukav?

  Thank you for this generosity. It's, I want to tell people, to get Universal Human, you can go to universalhuman.com. It's a preorder page, and I think they're shipping now. The book is released soon, but you'll get a glimpse of what our website's going to look like shortly.

• 1:07:05Lewis Howes?

  Awesome. And you also have, if you go to seatofthesoul.com, you do virtual experiences and workshops where people can be a part of these as well, and so they can learn about that.

• 1:07:15Gary Zukav?

  Yes, indeed. I'm so glad you reminded me of that. We have one of the last workshops of this type we're going to give, and we're going to give it in July, mid-July. It's called the Journey to the Soul Retreat. It's a five-day format, and this will probably be the last time we'll give it in that format. This is going to be a virtual, a virtual event in this five-day format. And I know there's a lot of you that have been to our events, and they're all different, by the way. There's never an event that's been the same.

• 1:07:41Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:07:42Gary Zukav?

  So if you want to come to this journey to the soul in its five-day format, but specially, specially, I say it the third time, designed for not remote interactions, but intimate reactions that will amaze you, amaze you at how intimate they can be online. And I want to tell you why they'll amaze you, partly because we do a lot of prethought to how we can create an intimate experience out of an online experience or into. And that's number one, but that's not the important one. The important one is this, the internet itself expresses connectivity. Five sensory individuals think the internet brings us together, that it connects us. Multisensory humans know that the appearance of the internet into the earth school is a

• 1:08:27Gary Zukav?

  reflection of our growing awareness of how much we are connected. And this means that the potential for intimacy is enormous. So don't think that it isn't, don't think that you're getting sick. If someone just tries to transfer something from live in person to live online, might not work, but if they really have the heart and they design it and here intend, again, intention is everything. And I'm not talking anyway, we've talked about intention, but the internet and our electronic communications capability are reflections in the earth school of our expanding consciousness. You're not going to be able to meet all the soul. By the way, we're all soulmates, so don't think a soulmate is one person you're going to go home and live with for the rest of your life.

• 1:09:08Gary Zukav?

  I hope that that person for you and for her or him is a spiritual partner because then you're in for quite an experience.

• 1:09:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, so seedofthe soul dot com where they can learn more about that and learn about the workshops and books and everything else.

• 1:09:22Gary Zukav?

  And your, your, your podcast, Lewis, and however you're going to use this, I, I, I want to say it clearly, is an expression of how it, it points in the direction of how intimate our wide, our scaled use of electronic communications can be. It's not a limitation. It doesn't always have to be just functional. In fact, everything that's just functional has an intention behind it. And we are entering wonderful territory as multisensory humans.

• 1:09:50Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely, absolutely. This is a question I ask everyone at the end of the show. It's called the three truths question. So I'd like you to imagine a hypothetical scenario that it is your last day on earth many, many years away from now. And you, uh, you live the rest of your life doing exactly what you want, accomplishing, living. Being, experiencing how you want to experience it. But for whatever reason, Gary, you, in this hypothetical scenario, you've got to take all of your written, audio and video work with you to the next place. So no one has access to your books anymore, your content, this interview. It all goes with you to the next place. But you have a piece of paper and a pen and you get to leave behind three lessons to the world or three things you know to be true that you would want to share with the world. I call it the three truths.

• 1:10:35Lewis Howes?

  What would you say are your three truths?

• 1:10:37Gary Zukav?

  I would put the paper and pen down. It's not going to help.

• 1:10:42Gary Zukav?

  None of the things that I'm writing or suggesting, although some of them, all of them at heart are timeless. They're, they're all time stamped, you might say. It's a, when my granddaughters, our granddaughters, uh, read the seed of the soul or universal human, they'll probably appreciate it. But when their granddaughters read it, I know what they're going to say. They're going to say, well, I thought grandpa was supposed to be a visionary. There's nothing visionary in this. What did he say that isn't evident? That's what's going to be their experience. That's going to be their potential. I don't know what will be their experience because no one knows, not even your non-physical teachers, what you're going to create in your tomorrows with your choices. So what you will do, the only thing you can do, if you reach that place where you are aware when your soul is going home, because death is not the catastrophic thing.

• 1:11:27Gary Zukav?

  It's simply the decision of your soul to return home to non-physical reality at a time of its choosing, accommodating circumstances that are occurring in the earth school. If by then you are creating authentic power, that's my goal. It is doable. I know it is, uh, because I'm creating it more often than I ever have before. I've seen my life and my world and myself transform from someone who was addicted to sex, exploiting people, needing, needing, needing, needing, needing, into more and more enjoying giving, thinking about other people. So in answer to your question, at that point, if you create authentic power, you'll model it. That's all you can do. Because in that is the appearance within your awareness of appropriateness of how to

• 1:12:10Gary Zukav?

  interact with the world, with the person who's in front of you. I will say this, if the person who's in front of you at that moment does not command your respect, you're not creating authentic power. If you're not reverent, that's different from respect too. If your reverence doesn't extend to that person, and if it extends to one person, it'll extend to everyone, then what you say, what you do in that moment will be appropriate for that person and for you. And you can start doing that now. That's called creating authentic power.

• 1:12:38Lewis Howes?

  It's beautiful. Gary, I want to acknowledge you. I've got one final question, but before I ask it.

• 1:12:43Gary Zukav?

  You just said it. You just said it two questions ago.

• 1:12:46Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. And I have one final question. And I want to acknowledge you for constantly showing up and being a humble servant and showing up for the world and creating works like this book that can support us and help us gain more clarity on our direction in our life. And so I really acknowledge you for being a great leader in the world and showing up in an authentically powerful, loving way. And my final question is, what is your definition of greatness?

• 1:13:13Gary Zukav?

  Oh, we've been talking about it again and again. Five sensory humans think that the greatest things are those that affect the most people. Multi-sensory humans know that the greatest things are the smallest. It's the decision that you make in a moment of tenderness to remain tender instead of harden up again. It's the decision you make when you're angry, not to express yourself in anger. It's the decision you make when you act to give something that you don't want to give without second agenda. That's a big decision. This is a life of greatness and creating authentic power brings you into it. You don't know where that life will take you. I do not believe in my heart of hearts that Gandhi ever.

• 1:13:55Gary Zukav?

  Held or even held at the end of his life, the desire to be appreciated or approved, even though an entire nation called him Bapu, beloved, the beloved Mahatma, great soul. Or it may take you into having a family. It may take you, as it's doing now, into using the ephemeral tools of electronic communication and connection in a way that satisfies you deeply and also informs you. It helps you to grow because look at the conversations you're having, hundreds, thousands of conversations, and all of them in which I feel that you are offering to your guests the potential of going as deep, as deeply as they feel is appropriate and offering the depth of the gifts that they have and are able to give.

• 1:14:36Gary Zukav?

  And if they're not doing that, then my guess is that you treat them reverently or at least respectfully and listen to them and allow them to express themselves and express your differences with integrity. My seal uncle told me once, he said, "Donska, nephew, always listen to whatever anyone is telling you, even if you think they're crazy." Because, and I've never forgotten that. And Carl Jung said, the great Swiss psychologist, contemporary of Sigmund Freud, he said, "If someone can explain to me what they're experiencing and why they're saying and what they're saying and doing, that person is not crazy." In other words, that person is worth listening to. Gandhi didn't believe the Viceroy. I don't believe, I don't share the same beliefs as many people in the Earth School, but we're all students in the Earth School, Lewis, and no one's path through the Earth

• 1:15:19Gary Zukav?

  School is less complex or challenging or painful or difficult or pregnant with potential as your own or our own. And I feel that's what your podcast and you've been drawn to, the School of Greatness. That is a good way to describe the Earth School. Not that everyone in it is great in the five sensory perception, but that everyone in it, as they become multi-sensory and they find the joy and fulfillment of meaning, they move themselves toward greatness, but they don't think in terms of greatness anymore.

• 1:15:48Lewis Howes?

  Gary, this has been an inspiration. I'm so grateful for your time today. Thank you for being here. I hope we can have you come back on sometime in the future and talk more about all these expansive ideas and make sure people, you guys get Universal Human. It's going to inspire you, it's going to help you a lot, so make sure you check it out. Gary, thank you again so much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. For me, it was so inspired by his wisdom, by all the lessons and really just opening up about the different addictions he's gone through and the challenges he's had in his past and all the things he did to hurt himself and others as well. I thought that was really real and inspiring to see how he's come out of that. Again, if this is your first time here, click the subscribe button right now if you enjoyed this episode to stay up to date over on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this podcast and leave us a rating and review over on Apple

• 1:16:33Lewis Howes?

  Podcasts so we can continue to improve and want to get a feedback on what you enjoyed most out of this episode. Also, those ratings and reviews really help us spread the message to more people over on Apple platform. So leave a rating and review and let us know what you enjoyed the most about this episode. And I want to leave you with this quote from Rhonda Byrne, who said, "There is a truth deep down inside of you that has been waiting for you to discover it, and that truth is you deserve all good things life has to offer." Yes, you do, my friend. And if no one has told you lately, I'm going to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.