Mastering The Mind Week Recap

Peace Now Not Later

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Where does the time go? How did we get to Sunday? Can you believe it? You did it. We did it. Amazing. We are in slow down Sunday mode already. Here on the sweet spot. Where Sundays are for slowing down. Where Sundays are for catching up with ourselves. It's Slowdown Sunday. How are you doing? How was your week? All week long we've been in a wonderful series here in the sweet spot. We've been talking about this idea of mastering the mind. We've been talking about this idea that where the mind is the master, you are also the master of the mind. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet, and this is day seven, the final day of our series. The final day of this wonderful series we're doing here on the sweet spot. We started Monday in a garden. We moved through circumstances, through the body, through purpose, through finishing, through self-care on Saturday. And now we arrive here, Sunday, slow down Sunday. The one day the universe itself modeled rest. And we're going to slow all the way down today as we typically do. And I want to take you somewhere that we go almost every Sunday on the sweet spot. We go into the astrophysics. Not that we're astrophysicists. No, not that we are space travelers, not at all. Because we just marvel at how fearfully and wonderfully we've been made. And we learn from the universe, from the galaxies, from the stars. Absolutely. Every Sunday on The Sweet Spot, it's about us connecting the dots. So look, we've been doing a book all week long called As a Man Thinketh, written by James Allen. I invite you to go back and listen to some of the other episodes where we dissect this book, we unpack it, and we apply it to our thoughts, to our circumstances, to our behavior, to our character, and to the outcomes that we've been grappling with all week. So, look, James Allen puts it this way, and I want to read what he wrote to honor him. He wrote this in 1903, and it still applies today. Here's what he said. Keep your hand firmly. Firmly, he says, on the helm of thought. In the bank of your soul reclines a commanding master. He does but sleep. Wake him. Self-control is strength. Right thought is mastery. Calmness is power. Say unto your heart, peace.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

Peace be still.

You Are Made Of Stars

The Universe Runs On Silence

Can You Bloom In Darkness

Solitude As Strength And Orbit

Final Reflections And Closing Blessing

SPEAKER_01 3:59

We talked about this yesterday. Not peace when the season ends, or not peace when the deal closes, not peace when your grief finally lifts. No. Not peace when you get a job, not peace if you get the things that you're looking for. Now, peace now. Peace in the middle of all the drama. Peace in the middle of all the stress. Peace in the middle of the anxiety, the worry, the fear. Peace. Speak. Peace. Be still over it. That's what the author was trying to communicate to us when he said, keep your hand firmly upon the helm of thought. And that in the back of your soul there is this commanding master. Wake him up and have self-control. And that calmness is power. And that you should say to your heart, peace be still. Not passivity. That is not passivity. That is the highest form of mastery a human being can reach. And today, sweet spotter, today we build it together. So, like I said before, we here at the Sweet Spot, we always go into a little bit of the astrophysics. The idea of the of the stars having a connection to our bodies, the idea that we're as the ancient wisdom has told us, that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. And as science begins to unpack this, the ancient wisdom's description of being fearfully, wonderfully made is amazing. Because look, we every single atom in your body and my body, the calcium holding our bones together, the iron carrying oxygen through your blood, the carbon that's woven in your DNA. Do you know where that was forged? Believe it or not, that was forged in a dying star billions of years ago. How crazy is that? Absolutely. That billions of years ago, a star explodes, and literally, in a very real physical sense, we are made, according to scientific studies, and this is real science. We are made from the material that originally formed in stars. So the Big Bang Theory supports the ancient wisdom. It's not against it. The universe contained mostly hydrogen and helium and a little bit of lithium in the very beginning. That's it. But none of the heavier elements that are in our body were existing yet. Those elements that are in our body now, through a process, they formed inside of stars. A kind of nuclear fusion, turning hydrogen into heavier elements. And so over millions, if not billions of years, sweet spotter, billions of years, stars were forging things like carbon, oxygen, silicone, and iron. And here's the thing: those elements that are inside of us started in stars and they stayed in those stars until those stars died. Yeah, when those massive stars exploded like a supernova, they blasted those new elements across space. And that debris became the raw material for new stars, for planets, for asteroids, and eventually, you know where they ended up? In our biology. So our solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago from one of those clouds enriched by earlier dead stars, right? So the atoms in our body came from these cosmic sources from billions of years ago. Exploded stars, the carbon in our cells, like I said, forged in ancient stars. Iron in our blood, like we just mentioned, created during a massive star explosion. The calcium in your bones produced in stellar fusion cycles. And the very oxygen that we're breathing, sweet spotter, built in stars before the sun even existed. Your body and my body is mostly just a few elements. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and iron, almost all of these were made inside stars even before the earth was formed. That's why when the ancient wisdom says you've been fearfully and wonderfully made, it wasn't joking. It wasn't playing around. Because even though we can explain it now from an astrophysics perspective, from astrophysical science and from things like uh, I guess what do we call nucleosynthesis, it still doesn't explain why and how. The why still remains the ancient wisdom's mystery, right? So yeah, there's a there's a mystical element here, even though there's a lot of science here. So yeah, when the when Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist, says we are made of star stuff, the deeper point is that yeah, we are made of this material that has been around for millions, if not billions of years, and we are now walking around with that inside of us. A star that burned for billions of years exploded across the cosmos, and eventually across imaginable time and distance, became you. And Carl Sagan spent his whole life trying to translate the universe into human language, and he put it poetically, he put it poetically. He matched the ancient wisdom in some ways. The cosmos, he said, is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. That's what Carl Sagan said. We are a way of the universe trying to understand itself. And Neil deGrasse Tyson, another astrophysicist, confirmed what Sagan was poetically declaring when he said, We are not figuratively, but literally made of stardust. This universe that's 13.8 billion years old and 93 billion light years across wide, it chose to know itself through you. Through your laughter, through your grief, through your wins, your losses, your failures, your injuries, your illnesses, through it all. The universe is understanding itself. Through this Sunday morning, you listening to me have this wild discussion that we never had all week long because we're in astrophysics world right now, so we're being spooky. But through every experience you've had, the universe gets to know itself. Another way of looking at it is we're like these divine beings having a human experience. Greater is that which is within you than what's in the world. Do you see how the ancient wisdom lines up with the science? Absolutely. Absolutely. And one of the things that we have to keep in mind is most people, most of us don't know about outer space. We don't have telescopes and this kind of stuff. We we depend on our astrophysicists and explorers to tell us. The universe, from what I understand, though, is interesting in that it shares something that meditators need to always tell us. The universe in all of this explosive galaxy forming star creating power stuff, you know, it operates entirely in silence. Did you know that? Sound cannot travel through a vacuum. So the most violent stellar-like explosions in the cosmic world and cosmic history, they happened, according to what I've read and understand, in absolute total quiet. And yet they shaped everything we know. So, what does that mean for you and me? That so much power can come out of complete silence. That's why they always say the silent ones, you gotta be careful with them because they're more powerful than you know. It makes sense. The universe is like that too. Rumi, one of the greatest mystic poets of the 13th century, said silence is the language of God. Everything else is a poor translation. So there's something about astrophysics, the universe, and the power of silence that we can take a lesson from. So much comes out of it. When was the last time you gave yourself real silence? Not silence of exhaustion, not the pause between scrolling, I speak to myself. The silence of like intention, like being really silent, being really quiet, where you put everything down, you put down the phone, you put down the worry, you turn off the TV, you plant your feet on the ground, you take a nice deep breath, you put down the mask, everything else, and simply listened to your breathing, to your heartbeat, to the sounds around you, to that ancient rhythm keeping time since before you even had a name. When was the last time you did that? Remember yesterday we talked about the idea that being still and knowing and finding divine purpose are all connected. All connected. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Kendrick Lamar, I I love it. Kendrick Lamar had a really cool quote that I wanted you to hear today about the complexity of this idea of solitude and silence and all of that. He said, if I told you that a flower bloomed in a dark room, would you trust it? That's Kendrick Lamar in Poetic Justice. If I told you that a flower bloomed in a dark room, would you trust it? Yeah. Can something beautiful come out of the silence, out of the dark place? That is a question worth sitting with this Sunday. And before we say no, think about a fetus inside a mom's or mother's womb. It's in darkness. Before birth happens, it sat in the darkness. It sits in total silence. So, yes, darkness can be scary, but it doesn't have to be. It could be a place where your development and your meditation grow. You can still bloom even through the dark time. That's the message of the universe ultimately. Did the darkness distort me or did it develop me? In photography, there's such a thing as a dark room. And it develops things. You get the picture. Yeah, sometimes you're an athlete, you come up through hard times, you know, you're you're an artist, you create a beauty out of pain, you work really super hard, you grind, and you get a good result. Listen, sometimes you're in the middle of grief and you're rebuilding, and you're wondering, am I actually healing or am I just getting better at coping? What's going on with me? Going through the dark, hard time. Sometimes you're the student who made it against every odd, every challenge. Darkness, silence, solitude. They can produce extraordinary resilience. Something to keep in mind, this slowdown Sunday. Lessons from the universe. This is not a Sunday downer. This is one of the most liberating things that you can actually grapple with. Because once you stop pretending the dark room didn't affect you, and once you stop assuming it only damaged you, you can finally see yourself clearly. You can get the full flower, you can get the picture. And you can understand what James Allen, this author, wrote, that a person's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild. That's James Allen from A Man as a Man Thinketh. The darkroom is part of your and my story. We have to own the whole story and trust the flower that you and I actually are, not just the one we wished we had become or how we wished it had turned out. That's the Sunday work that the universe is giving us, and it's giving us a clue that we can rise out of darkness into light. And the solitude is your orbit. It's where you remember who you are, where you strip away what everyone else is thinking about you, and you spend time with yourself in meditation, in prayer, in quiet, in reflection. It's not lost time. It is the most productive investment you can make in everything that's about you. The calm person, says this author, having learned to govern themselves, knows how to adapt themselves to others. You cannot adapt, serve, love, lead, or perform at your highest level if you never go inward, if you never find your silence, your surrender, your solitude. Yeah. That place that may even look a little dark, but gives birth in the end. So I leave you with that this slow down Sunday. Remembering that the more tranquil you become, the greater your chance for success. The calmer you become, the better for you. Absolutely. Don't be afraid. There's nothing to be afraid of other than the fear itself. Jay-Z said, I'm not afraid of dying. I am afraid of not trying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jay's J. Cole puts it this way: love yourselves. Don't grind harder, don't post more, don't, don't just love yourself today. Just love yourself. In the ancient wisdom, and we'll close with this the psalmist marvels at the heavens. The psalmist marvels at the universe. In psalm eight, the psalmist says. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them? What breathless wonder that is. The God who made the Milky Way, who set two hundred billion stars in this galaxy alone is mindful of you, thinks about you, cares for you on a Sunday. Wow. Wow. Wow. Thank you, James Allen. Thank you for writing in the quiet of a small English cottage. Thank you for rising up before dawn every day to sit in the dark before the sun came up to write this book as a man thinketh. I have nothing but respect for you as I attempt to write my book Sleep as Performance Medicine. I get what it takes. He who is fixed to a star doesn't falter. She who is fixed to a star doesn't easily change her mind. Let's fix ourselves today to the star. What is your star? What is your star? Remember, the dark room did not define the flower the star does. For science, for soul, and for success, you have been on the starship. You have been in the sweet spot. I'll see you tomorrow when we get back to reality and we hit the ground running for making moves Monday.

unknown 24:12

Peace.