Last time the sage faded into the forest because he stopped trying to win the universe. Yet here you sit weeping because you think you played the music wrong. My dear friend, you cannot waste your life any more than you can waste a song by dancing offbeat.
The universe doesn't have an eraser. Listen. Do you hear that?
That is the sound of the present moment. It is the only thing that has ever existed. But you are not listening to it.
You are listening to a ghost. There is a heavy feeling in the pit of your stomach, isn't there? Especially now as the shadows grow a little longer in the afternoon of your life.
It whispers to you that you have missed the boat. You look back at 40, 50, 60 years, a landscape of unfinished bridges and abandoned dreams, and you think, "I have squandered my time. I have arrived at the end with empty hands.
But I am here to tell you something that may sound completely absurd at first, yet it is the absolute bedrock of reality. It is physically and metaphysically impossible to waste your life. Why?
Because life is not a substance you carry in a bucket that can be spilled. Life is not a bank account that can be overdrawn. The problem is not what you did or didn't do.
The problem is the model of reality you were given when you were a tiny impressionable child. We inherited a view of existence that is linear. We think of life as a journey, a pilgrimage, a serious trek from point A to point B.
Think about how we were hoaxed. When you are a toddler, you are sent to nursery school. Why?
To get ready for kindergarten. And in kindergarten, everything is preparation for first grade. Then comes high school and they tell you, "Work hard, get the grades so you can get into college.
Then you are in college and the pressure mounts. Get the degree, get the skills so you can get a job, then you get the job. And now the real game begins.
You must meet the quotota, get the promotion, buy the house, pay the mortgage. " And all along there is this carrot dangling in front of your nose called success or retirement. You work your fingers to the bone, anticipating that great day when you can finally stop and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
And then one day you turn 65. You are given a gold watch or a pat on the back. You have arrived.
But by then you are tired. Your back aches and you look around at this destination you spent 40 years running toward and you realize something terrifying. Nothing has changed.
The sky is the same blue. The tea tastes the same. You feel a bit cheated.
You think, "Is this it? Is this what I rushed for? " This is the great cosmic joke.
We missed the point the whole time. We thought life was a journey with a serious purpose at the end, like a business trip. But the universe does not work that way.
The best analogy for life is not a journey. It is music. It is a dance.
Consider a symphony. When you go to listen to an orchestra play Beethoven, you do not go to hear the final chord. If the purpose of the symphony were to get to the end, then the best conductor would be the one who played the fastest.
He would race through the movement, scramble through the adajio, and crash into the finale in 2 minutes flat. The audience would clap and say, "Bravo, he finished it before anyone else. " But that is nonsense.
In music, the point is not the end. The point is the melody. The point is the rhythm, the rise and fall, the tension and the release happening right now.
When you dance, you do not aim to arrive at a particular spot on the floor. If you did, you would just walk there and sit down. No, you dance to dance.
So, here you are. You think you have wasted your life because you didn't reach the destination you imagined. You think you played the music wrong.
But there is no wrong way to play the universe. The stumbling, the falling, the long periods of silence, the wrong turns, those are just part of the jazz. Those are the improvisations.
You are judging your life by the rules of a game that doesn't exist. You are judging a dance by the rules of a race. You haven't wasted your life.
You have simply been playing it in a minor key for a while. And without the minor key, without the sorrow and the longing, the music would have no depth. So let us discard this heavy coat of wasted time.
Let us sit here, you and I, and listen to the music as it is playing right now. Because the past is nothing more than a trail of smoke from a ship that has already sailed. The only thing that is real, the only place where life exists is this very moment.
And in this moment, you are perfect. You are exactly where the music intends you to be. I know the feeling.
I know it very well. It usually comes in the middle of the night, doesn't it? The house is quiet.
The world is asleep, but you are wide awake, staring at the ceiling as if it were a cinema screen projecting a movie called The Life That Could Have Been. You lie there and you are visited by a ghost. It is a very specific kind of ghost.
It isn't a monster from a story book. It is far more terrifying than that. It is the ghost of the person you might have been.
This ghost stands by your bed wearing better clothes than you. It looks healthier than you. It smiles the smile of someone who took that risk you didn't take 20 years ago.
It is the you who moved to Paris to paint instead of staying in the accounting firm. It is the you who married the high school sweetheart instead of the sensible partner. It is the you who invested in that company, who wrote that book, who learned to fly.
And as you look at this ghost, you feel a hollowess in your chest that is almost physical. It is the ache of potential unfulfilled. We call this regret, but that is too small a word.
It is really a form of grief. You are grieving the death of a thousand possibilities. You see, the tragedy of human consciousness is that we have the ability to imagine futures that never happened.
We can construct entire parallel universes in our heads. And in these universes, the grass is always greener, the sun is always shining, and we are always happy. You look at your current reality.
Perhaps a marriage that has grown stale and silent. A job that demands your time but ignores your soul. A body that is starting to creek and sag.
And you compare it to that fantasy. And the comparison is brutal. It tears you apart.
You think, "I should be further along by now. " That word should, it is the most violent word in the English language. I should have saved more money.
I should have been a better father. I should have been a more patient mother. I should have traveled when my knees were strong.
Especially now in the afternoon of your life. The shadows are getting longer. When you were 20, later was a vast infinite ocean.
You could always do it later. But now you are 40, 50, 60, 70. Later is shrinking.
The horizon is coming into view. And you panic. You feel you have squandered your one and only ticket to the carnival.
We are told that life is a matter of making the right choices. But every choice is a sacrifice. To say yes to one road is to say no to a million others.
And you are haunted by the no. You are haunted by the path not taken. You convince yourself that the other path was the path to salvation.
You tell yourself, "If I had just turned left instead of right, I would be happy. " This is the great torment of the modern age. We are drowning in freedom, drowning in choice, and therefore drowning in self-lame.
If you are unhappy, society tells you it is your fault. You didn't manifest enough. You didn't work hard enough.
You didn't optimize your life. So, you carry this luggage. It is a trunk full of whatifs and ifonies.
You drag it behind you everywhere you go. It colors your morning coffee with bitterness. It makes the sunset look gray.
It turns your children's laughter into a reminder of how time is slipping away. You feel like a fraud. You smile at your neighbors.
You nod at your colleagues. But inside you are screaming, "I missed it. I missed the whole point.
" You feel like you are standing on a train platform, watching the express train to happiness pull away, and you are left standing in the cold with a ticket for a train that already left. But listen to me closely. I want you to feel the weight of that luggage right now.
Feel the heaviness of it. Do not run from it. Acknowledge it.
Yes, I hurt. Yes, I am afraid I wasted it. It is okay to feel this.
It is human to feel this. But I want you to know that this ghost, this shiny, successful, perfect version of you is a liar. It is a phantom.
It has no substance. And the pain you feel is not because reality is wrong. The pain comes because you are pinching yourself with a dream.
You are suffering because you are comparing your messy, complex, real inside with everyone else's polished, curated outside. You are comparing your reality with a fantasy that never had to withstand the rain, the traffic jams, and the toothaches of real life. Let us sit with this pain for a moment longer.
Do not push it away. Let it be there. Because it is only by acknowledging this illusion that we can begin to wake up from it.
The heavy door of the prison cell is locked. Yes. But here is the surprise.
You have been holding the key in your pocket the entire time. Let us step outside of your mind for a moment. It is too crowded in there, too full of furniture and dusty old portraits.
Let us go for a walk. Imagine we are walking into a deep ancient forest. Can you smell it?
The scent of pine needles, damp earth, and rain. The air is cool and still. As we walk, we come across a massive tree that has fallen.
It is an old giant, perhaps an oak or a redwood, lying prone on the forest floor. Its bark is peeling off. The wood is soft and crumbling.
It is covered in a thick blanket of green moss. To the eyes of a lumberjack or a carpenter or a furniture maker, this tree is a tragedy. It is waste.
It is timber that can no longer be sold. It is useless. They might look at it and say, "What a shame.
That wood is rotting away. It serves no purpose. " But the forest does not see it that way.
The forest does not know the meaning of the word waste. Look closer. Kneel down in the dirt with me.
What do you see? That rotting log is not dead. It is more alive now than it ever was when it was standing tall and proud.
It has become a bustling metropolis. There are mushrooms sprouting from its side, digesting the wood and turning it into soil. There are beetles tunneling through it.
There are ferns taking root in its soft crevices. The death of the tree is the life of the forest. The rot is actually nutrition.
Without this decaying log, the soil would become thin and sterile. The new saplings standing nearby, the young bright green trees reaching for the sun. They are feeding directly on the wisdom of this fallen giant.
They are drinking the nutrients that the old tree spent centuries gathering from the sky and the earth. Now look at your own life. Look at those years you call wasted.
The decade you spent in a depression. The marriage that fell apart. The career that never took off.
the time you spent addicted or lost or simply drifting. You look at those years and you call them rot. You want to cut them out of your biography.
You want to hide them. But my dear friend, that rot is your fertilizer. You could not be the person you are today without that decay.
The depth of your character, your capacity for empathy, your ability to understand pain. Where do you think that comes from? It comes from the rot.
It comes from the failures. People who have lived perfect straight line lives, lives without waste, without mistakes, without wandering. They are often very brittle.
They are like plastic flowers. They look perfect from a distance, but they have no scent, no roots. and no life.
They break easily under pressure because they have no soil. But you, you have soil. You have rich, dark, composted soil made of your mistakes and your regrets.
In the east, they speak of the lotus flower. It is a symbol of enlightenment. But do you know where the lotus grows?
It does not grow in clear distilled water. It grows in the mud. It grows in the muck and the slime at the bottom of the pond.
No mud, no lotus. Your wasted years are the mud. They are the muck.
And right now, whether you realize it or not, a stem is pushing its way up through that mud, reaching for the surface. You are preparing to bloom precisely because you have gone through the rot. Nature never rushes.
The season of winter looks like a waste, doesn't it? The trees are bare, the ground is hard, nothing is growing. It looks like the earth has given up.
But deep down under the frost, the roots are resting. They are gathering strength. If you tried to force the spring to come in January, you would destroy the harvest.
So stop judging the winter of your life. Stop judging the rotting log. You are an organic process, not a mechanical one.
A machine can be efficient or inefficient. A machine can be a waste of metal. But you are not a machine.
You are a cloud, a wave, a tree. And in the economy of nature, nothing is ever lost. Everything is transformed.
Your past is not a graveyard of potential. It is a garden of experience waiting for you to stop weeping over it and start planting in it. Now I want to ask you a question that might seem very simple, perhaps even a little silly, but I want you to answer it honestly.
Where is this past that you are so worried about? Can you show it to me? Can you point to it?
Can you reach into your pocket and pull out yesterday? Can you bring me the year 1,995 in a jar? You cannot because it does not exist.
The past is not a place. It is not a closet where you have stored things. The past is a trail of smoke.
It is the wake left behind by a ship. And this is the great illusion that causes you so much suffering. You believe that the wake drives the ship.
You believe that because you went that way 5 minutes ago or 5 years ago. You are condemned to go that way forever. You look at the wake which is nothing but foaming water fading into the distance.
And you say, "Oh dear, look at that messy wake. I have ruined the ocean. " But the wake does not push the ship.
The ship creates the wake. The present creates the past. You see, you are haunting yourself with a ghost called I.
You think that there is a solid, unchanging entity called me that has traveled through time. You think the you sitting here today is the same you who made those mistakes 20 years ago. But this is physiologically and psychologically false.
The molecules in your body are constantly changing. You are a flowing river, not a block of ice. The person who made those wrong choices, the person who wasted that time, that person is dead.
They are gone. Every cell in their body has been replaced. Their mind was different, their circumstances were different, their level of consciousness was different.
To blame yourself now for what that person did then is like beating a dog because a puppy peed on the rug 10 years ago. It is insanity. But the illusion goes deeper.
The ego, that voice in your head that says, "I am a failure," is nothing more than a thought. It is not a real thing. It is a mental construct.
It is a story you tell yourself to make sense of the chaos. You wake up in the morning and you reboot this story. Hi, I'm John.
I'm 50. I'm divorced. I'm a failed musician.
You load this program into your brain every single day. You retraumatize yourself. You are like a person carrying a bag of rocks, complaining about the weight, but refusing to put the bag down because you think the bag is who you are.
If you dropped the bag, if you dropped the story of your past, who would you be right now? You would be pure potential. You would be pure awareness.
The problem is that we live entirely in symbols. We eat the menu instead of the dinner. We look at the map instead of the territory.
You are looking at the map of your life, your memory, and seeing a lot of wrong turns. And you are so focused on the map that you are missing the beautiful scenery you are driving through right now. Let me tell you something that might make you dizzy.
There is no time. There is only the eternal now. The future has not happened.
The past is gone. There is only this heartbeat, this breath, this sensation. When you remember the past, you are doing it now.
When you anticipate the future, you are doing it now. So when you sit there and think, I wasted my life, that thought is happening now. You are using the precious energy of the present moment to resurrect a dead phantom.
You are taking the vibrant alive energy of the universe and freezing it into a statue of regret. Why do you do this? Because the ego loves problems.
The ego feeds on conflict. If you were perfectly happy and content in the present moment, the ego would disappear. It would have no job.
So, it creates a problem called my wasted past to keep itself employed. It keeps you small. It keeps you guilty because a guilty person is easy to control.
But you can step out of the trap. You can realize that you are not the character in the story. You are the storyteller.
Or better yet, you are the page upon which the story is written. The page does not care if the story is a tragedy or a comedy. The page remains white and pure.
Your consciousness, your true self, has never been stained by your mistakes. It is as clear today as it was the day you were born. The you that feels wasted is an idea.
The you that is listening to me is the universe itself. And the universe cannot be wasted. Does the ocean waste a wave?
Does the sun waste a ray of light? Even if the ray of light hits a garbage can, it is still light. It is still pure energy.
You are that light. You have simply forgotten your source. You have become so entangled in the drama of your little avatar that you forgot you are the one playing the game.
Wake up. The nightmare of the wasted life is just a shadow on the wall. Turn around.
Look at the light. So you are standing in the wreckage of your plans. You are looking at the years that have slipped through your fingers like water.
The natural instinct, the instinct we are drilled with by society is to panic. It is to thrash. It is to say, "I must fix this.
I must make up for lost time. I must run twice as fast to catch up. " But I am going to invite you to do the exact opposite.
I want you to stop swimming. Imagine you have fallen into a rushing river. The current is strong.
The water is cold. The river is your life. And the current is the force of events, the consequences of your past actions.
If you try to swim upstream, if you try to fight the current to go back to where you fell in to undo the fall, what happens? You get exhausted. You swallow water and eventually you drown.
This is what regret is. Regret is trying to swim upstream. It is a violent rejection of where you are in favor of where you think you should be.
But there is another way. It is the way of the water course in the east. Specifically in tauism they call it woouei.
It is often translated as non-action which sounds like laziness to the western ear but it is not laziness. It is the supreme intelligence of going with the grain of things. It is the difference between rowing and sailing.
When you row you are using your own limited muscular energy to push against the water. It is hard work. It is exhausting.
But when you sail, you use the wind, the very power of the universe to move you. You adjust your sails to the wind. You don't try to command the wind.
Your wasted years, they are the wind. This is the great shift. You stop looking at your past as an enemy that defeated you and you start seeing it as the unique current that brought you to this precise moment of awareness.
You see, you could not have arrived at this wisdom any other way. You needed to be broken. You needed to fail.
You needed to waste time. If you had succeeded at everything you touched 20 years ago, you would be insufferable today. You would be filled with pride and vanity.
You would be asleep in the illusion of your own greatness. But because you failed, because you wandered, you have been humbled. And humility is the beginning of all true vision.
The crack in the cup is where the light gets in. So how do we practice wooi? Now you start by saying yes.
Not yes, I like this, but yes, this is what is. You look at your bank account, your relationship status, your gray hair, and you say, "So be it. " You accept the present moment completely without the butt.
I am here. This is the starting point. When you stop fighting the reality of your life, a tremendous amount of energy is released.
All the energy you were using to suppress your regret, to hide your shame, to pretend you were someone else, all that energy comes rushing back to you. And suddenly you have the power to move. But you do not move with the frantic energy of someone trying to escape.
You move with the grace of someone who is dancing. Think of an archer. If the archer tries too hard, if he grips the bow until his knuckles are white, if he strains his eyes, if he is terrified of missing, he will miss.
His tension ruins the shot. But if he relaxes, if he breathes, if he lets the arrow shoot itself, thwack bullseye. You have been gripping the bow of your life too tightly.
You have been so afraid of wasting it that you strangled it. Let go. Let go of the need to be successful.
Let go of the need to have a legacy. These are just words. They are heavy stones.
Drp them. Instead, just play. If you want to paint, paint.
Not to become a famous artist. Not to make up for the years you didn't paint, but just to enjoy the feeling of the brush on the canvas today. If you want to love, love.
Not to find the perfect partner who will fix your loneliness but just to give warmth to another human being today. When you act without the anxiety of the result, you are in wow way. You are flowing.
And paradoxically, this is when you become most effective. This is when the magic happens. You are not behind.
You are not early. You are exactly where the universe is. And since the universe is the only thing that is real, you cannot be anywhere else.
Stop trying to become something. You already are everything. You are the universe experiencing itself as a human being who thinks they wasted time.
And that in itself is a fascinating experience. Enjoy even that. Smile at your own silliness.
And in that smile, the shift happens. The heavy lead of regret turns into the gold of presence. Now I want you to take a deep breath.
Hold it for a moment and let it go. Let us suppose the worst is true. Let us just admit it.
Let's say you have wasted your life. Let's say you have accomplished nothing. Let's say you are by all the standards of the world a total failure.
Do you know what that makes you? It makes you the most free person on earth. Think about the successful man.
Think about the man who has the perfect career, the perfect reputation, the perfect assets. He is terrified. He is in a constant state of anxiety.
He has to defend his castle. He has to keep up appearances. He has to worry about losing what he has gathered.
He is a slave to his own success. He carries a heavy shield everywhere he goes. But you, you have already lost.
The worst has already happened. You have dropped the shield. And in that state of having nothing to lose, you become invincible.
You become transparent. You become like the wind. You can go anywhere.
You can be anyone. You have no image to protect anymore. You don't have to pretend to be smart or rich or holy.
You can just be. This is the secret that the mystics have been trying to tell us for thousands of years. Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are the empty. When you realize that you have messed up your life, you are finally in a position to actually live it because you are no longer trying to get something out of it. You are no longer treating life as a business transaction where you put in effort and expect a return of happiness.
You are just here for the sheer fun of it. This is what we call satori. This is awakening.
It is not a flash of lightning. It is not seeing angels. It is simply the sudden hilarious realization that you were never in control to begin with and therefore you could never have made a mistake.
You thought you were the driver of the bus, sweating and panicking because you took a wrong turn. But suddenly you wake up and realize you were never driving. You were always a passenger.
The bus is being driven by the tower. It is being driven by the immense intelligence of the cosmos that beats your heart and grows your hair without you having to think about it. Did you decide to grow your fingernails this morning?
Did you command your stomach to digest your breakfast? No, it happened. It happened of itself.
Your life happened of itself. Even your so-called bad decisions were part of the happening. They were necessary twists in the river to get you around the mountain.
And when you see this, when you really feel it in your bones, a great laughter bubbles up inside you. It is a cosmic laughter. You laugh at the seriousness with which you took your little drama.
You laugh at the idea that you, a tiny, wonderful speck of dust, could possibly ruin the universe. You are the universe experiencing a human life. You are the godhead playing a game of hideand seek with itself.
You hid yourself in the role of a failure just to see what it felt like. And now you are finding yourself again. You are not a stranger in this world.
You are not a mistake. You belong here just as much as the stars belong in the sky. You have exactly as much right to be here as the greatest king or the holiest saint.
The feeling of awakening is not heaviness. It is lightness. It is the feeling of floating.
The burden of the past drops off your shoulders because you realize the past was just a story you were telling yourself. You are new right now in this second. You are completely new.
The person who made those mistakes is dead. You are the resurrection. So stand up.
Look around you. Look at the colors of the room. Listen to the hum of the world.
It is all for you. It is all you. You haven't wasted a thing.
You have just finished the prologue. Now, finally, the real story can begin. So, here we are.
We have traveled a long way together in these few minutes. We have gone from the heavy suffocating feeling of regret to the light airy freedom of the eternal. Now, and you might be asking, what do I do next, Alan?
Do I quit my job? Do I move to the mountains? Do I renounce the world?
No, you don't have to do anything of the sort. Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen is just peeling potatoes.
When this video ends, I want you to do something very simple. I want you to stand up and pour yourself a glass of water or look out the window at a cloud passing by or just look at your own hands. And I want you to really look at them.
Don't name them. Don't judge them. Just see the miracle of the patterns on your skin.
If you can do that, if you can inhabit this moment completely, then the heavy bag of rocks called my wasted life dissolves like mist in the morning sun. You can leave it here by the side of the digital road. You don't need to carry it anymore.
But a word of warning. The mind is a tricky creature. Tomorrow morning when the alarm rings, that old ghost might try to creep back in.
It will try to whisper that yesterday was real and that you are still chained to it. It will try to tell you that time is a straight line and you are running out of it. This is the final and perhaps the most dangerous trap of all.
You see, we have dealt with your regret today. But we have not yet dealt with the clock. We have not yet dismantled the illusion that makes regret possible in the first place.
You still believe that the past is a place you can go back to. You still believe that time is real. But what if I told you that the past does not exist?
What if I told you that memory is a lie? What if I could show you that there is no before and there is no after but only a single expanding now. That is the rabbit hole we must go down next.
It is the only way to be truly free. So, wash your bowl, drink your tea, and when you are ready to shatter the clock and step out of history altogether, I will see you in the next video. It is time to wake up from the dream of time.
