interview

WIE: How do you define "self-mastery"?

Anthony Robbins: Mastery of self comes down to the capacity of an individual to discover what it is that they truly want, what their path is, and then to eliminate the obstacles, which are always internal, that would keep them from being able to fulfill that path on an ongoing basis. There are natural obstacles that life offers us in order for us to grow and expand as individuals and discover more of who we are and to unfold more of our spiritual path. But I also think there are a great number of challenges that are self-induced. And we must develop the capacity to meet those, anticipate those as much as possible, and eliminate them by developing what I would consider to be emotional and/or spiritual muscles. Because the challenges will continue to show up in life, but if you have the inner strength—whether that be your faith, your determination or your incredible love for self, for God and for others—then I think you'll have the capacity to live a life that's extremely fulfilled. I think that's ultimately what self-mastery leads to—a life that's fulfilled. And that can only come, in my mind, not just from feeling good, but from contributing in meaningful ways to those around you, those you care about and ultimately to society as a whole.

WIE: What do you see as the relationship between self-mastery and enlightenment?

AR: I think the goal is the same. I think the language is different and the traditions are different. It depends on your model of the world, whether it's Eastern or Western. There are different points of view about how to approach this experience of ultimate ecstasy, as some people describe it, or ultimate nirvana or ultimate fulfillment. But to me the notion that spirituality is separate from the rest of life does not allow for a practical approach to living a life that has extraordinary quality. That extraordinary quality can be measured in so many areas, so I don't think it's a matter of picking one area and saying that's everything. I think spirituality is a part of everything. It doesn't need to be separated out from everything else. Nor does it need to be measured by a series of steps or traditions. I think every individual has to discover for themselves what spirituality looks like. I personally am against saying, "This is the way." I tell people there are certain needs that human beings clearly have. I mean, you don't have to be too bright to be able to see that there are patterns in human behavior—especially if you've been around, as I have, two million people during the last twenty-one years of my life. I've seen every kind of success, from the people who are supposedly the most successful in the world by cultural terms to those who've been the most successful in the world by spiritual terms, whether it's a Mother Teresa or a Christopher Reeve—who I perceive to be an extraordinary human being—or a Nelson Mandela or a top athlete or a top financial trader who made a half-billion dollars in a day. Each of these people has found aspects of fulfillment. Some of them have found ultimate fulfillment—what you would call "nirvana" in my mind—in that they have an incredibly fulfilled experience of life, themselves and God all at one time. How that is done, I think, is as unique and different as people are, and I think it's wonderful that there are so many different traditions that offer ways and paths to do it.

WIE: The attainment of self-mastery, as it's generally conceived, seems to include the winning of an extraordinary self-confidence, anchored in the discovery that one has the power to break through seeming limitations and do things one never imagined one could—the discovery of an overwhelming sense of "I Can." Those individuals who've attained enlightenment also seem to demonstrate an unusual confidence and a sense of being unbound by limitation, yet according to their descriptions, this confidence arises from the deep, mysterious and life-changing realization of their essential unity with the very source of all existence. What in your view are the similarities and differences between the discovery of one's personal power on one hand and this mystical or enlightened realization of a fundamental unity on the other?

AR: First of all, I don't believe that self-mastery is something that's "attainable." I don't look at it as a goal. I look at it as an ongoing process. To me, it's more like active mastery. It's an ongoing process every day that you're alive. There's the old saying, "The road to success is always under construction." I also don't believe that many people who supposedly are enlightened maintain that sense of enlightenment forever. I visited many spiritual masters in India and my experience of them did not confirm, for me at least, that they were living as the one Self that they were and that we all are.

Second, I want to say that self-mastery, believe it or not, is not the ultimate perspective that I have for a person. I think there's a difference between "I Can" and "I Am." And "I Am" is really the goal that I'm looking for, rather than "I Can." Everyone can. I think the experience of liberation comes from giving up an obsession with what it is that you think is controlling you. In so many spiritual traditions, there's this focus on all the hell you have to go through in order for you to finally be liberated and finally be free. And my personal belief is that the only thing keeping you from freedom is all the beliefs you have about what has to happen before you can be there. I think the reason for that is that we don't value things unless we make them very difficult because otherwise they're not as significant. We don't allow ourselves to have that ultimate "aha!"—that ultimate sense of connection. We live in a society where there's an obsession with who I am as who I was, or what happened to me years ago, and it's completely absurd. It's cultural hypnosis and it happens around the world, but especially in this culture, the Western culture, where the basis of that, the presupposition of that, is that we're all fragile and that what we have to be able to do is somehow work out what's happened in order for us to experience the gift that God has given us right here and now. What most of us do is that we actually reinforce the neurology, the psychology and the spiritual focus of limitation as opposed to one of transformation and freedom that is already within us and around us. Every great master says that. They all say it in different ways. My metaphor is: there's freedom when you let go of fear and you embrace love fully—the love for yourself, the love for God, the love for life, the love for people. What keeps people from doing that is just their fear.

I personally believe that love is always there. But I think that most people are playing a game in their head. Rather than going for a life of fulfillment—which would be an enlightened life where every experience of one's life is one of joy, where one appreciates everything life has to offer and feels a sense of connection with all that is—they instead try to do it by isolating themselves and walking through a set of practices in which they promise themselves that someday they're going to feel the way they could feel in this moment.

I do not believe personally that people need to put themselves through an immense amount of pain and struggle in order to really be fulfilled. I just don't believe that's true. I do not believe they have to heal all their old wounds and old traumas. And I actually don't believe that they have to destroy themselves or their identity of self. Because while most modern traditions talk about the destruction of the ego, I haven't met too many people who have done that, including the great saints (supposedly) who I have met as well. Because they have a sense of identity also. Their identity is "I am God," and that's still a sense of identity. I had a private darshan [audience with the guru] with Swami Muktananda in India three days before he died, and I thought he was a magnificent man, an incredibly loving man. But he had a sense of identity.

WIE: It's interesting that you bring up the notion of destroying the ego and the Eastern teachings of not having a self—

AR: Yes. It's probably my ego that's telling you this, by the way.

WIE: But I do think there is an important distinction to be made here, because it does seem that, on the one hand, in the pursuit of self-mastery one generally moves from a negative, limited sense of self to a deeply positive sense of self, which I definitely hear in your message. Yet the wisdom traditions, and specifically those that come to us from the East, speak about the ultimate human attainment, or enlightenment, as the discovery that our true nature—who we really are—is beyond any notion of self, positive or negative. And when they talk about the idea of no-self, the distilled message seems to be that we must give up our identity, our beliefs about who we are as a separate individual.

AR: Well, I personally believe that in order to get to where you want to be in life, no matter how successful or happy or fulfilled you are at this point, you have to be willing to understand that the same level of thinking that got you to where you are is not going to get you to where you want to be. And the only way to make that movement is to break your pattern. But I think that to have no sense of identity, if that were really true and if the ultimate test and the whole purpose of life was to destroy the uniqueness of you as an individual—well, I personally just don't buy it. It doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. My perception is that we should look at it from the perspective of seeing yourself as connected, seeing that you are everything, and at the same time seeing your own uniqueness and valuing both of those elements simultaneously, rather than saying one is right and one is wrong. The best metaphor I know of is the metaphor of "I am the river of life and I am also one of those little droplets in the river." So I am clearly the river. And when I'm a droplet I don't have the same power, but there are times when I need to be a droplet in order to serve life also. There are points where having that sense of individual identity is valuable, as long as I'm not constantly using that as a way to separate myself from the greater good.

But human beings have such difficulty with paradox. I think the quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty they can comfortably live with, but paradox does not provide certainty for people. What we'd rather know is, "I don't exist and I'm just everything and I don't have any sense of identity whatsoever."

WIE: You seem to be suggesting that the teachings of no-self are ultimately just another conceptual framework which can be held on to as a way of maintaining a sense of identity.

AR: Exactly. That's my point. So it's bullshit. And by the way, who's to say that isn't driven by ego in the first place?

WIE: Are you saying that you don't think it's possible to give up the need to identify with a separate sense of self, to let go of the personal identity?

AR: I don't say it's impossible. Anything's possible. But I don't know if that is the ultimate goal for heaven on earth, so to speak. I'm open to the possibility that the ultimate answer is that I should not have any sense of self, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me currently. If you really think that ultimately there's just this place where you have no identity, why not just die now and—if you believe in that process—get connected right now?

WIE: Well, if you speak with the sages of the great traditions, or you read how they've written about it, they don't tend to describe the attainment of no-self that we were speaking about as something that's negative or akin to physical death. It's usually described as—

AR: No, no. You're assuming something. I don't think death is something negative at all. I think death is being in another transformed state in which you're probably connected at a larger level.

WIE: Okay . . .

AR: By the way, anything I'm telling you I believe, I'm just telling you what I believe. I'm not saying I'm right, by any stretch. Five years from now, ten years from now, you might ask me and I'll say, "Boy, was I full of crap back then!" My own point of view about that is that I think most honest people will tell you that sometime in their lives they believed something with their heart and soul and ten years later, they look back on it and say, "What a joke! What an idiot I was! Back then, I'd have died for that belief. Now I'm sane." I'm only telling you what I believe, and I don't believe I have the right answers in this area. I don't lecture on this.

But I do believe that by pursuing ultimate enlightenment we're constantly pursuing something that's causing us to forget what we have. As long as we're trying to chase something, we're not going to feel that it's already here. I think it's wonderful to practice these practices of all sorts but what I believe is that while you're here, you should use all the resources you have and not hide in one place—not hide in one place called "spirituality," a separate little thing that you go off to do by yourself by doing your certain form of meditation. Do that while you are living your work, your dharma in the world. You should make sure your spirituality is reflected in everything you do—the work you do, the way you connect, the way you think, the way you feel. And that process is a lot more doable than most of us make it.

I loved your magazine's interview with Dr. Laura Schlessinger—especially her simplification of the Jewish tradition's view that we're all in cahoots with God to make the world a better place, and when a critical mass of us do that, then you've got heaven on earth. That would be much more consistent with my own point of view. To me, that's a practical spirituality, not a place of escape. And I think a lot of people use spirituality as an escape, so they can put all of their focus there and not be held to any form of standard in life in terms of making a real contribution, and I think that's selfish.

WIE: In your book Unlimited Power, you outline the essence of your approach to transformation, which you call "neuro-associative conditioning," which, from what I understand, is a powerful technique for reconditioning ourselves to free us from limiting patterns of behavior.

AR: Yes. It's a set of tools to deal with the blocks—that we've all created—to simply being who we really are.

WIE: And you've stated in your book that this approach can lead to a greater degree of personal freedom. In contrast, the path of enlightenment is traditionally seen as a form of deconditioning or going beyond all conditioning. In fact, it's traditionally taught in the enlightenment traditions that until we've transcended conditioning altogether, we'll never be truly free.

AR: And what is the path those traditions almost inevitably use? The conditioning path! Say this mantra over and over again, right? Breathe in this particular pattern. Sit in this particular pose. What is that? It's pure conditioning.

WIE: Perhaps. But I think the teachers in those traditions would argue that they are only using conditioning as a vehicle to go beyond conditioning. What I want to ask you is: Do you believe there is a dimension of freedom that lies beyond the freedom that we can experience by reconditioning ourselves?

AR: Oh, absolutely. I think ultimate transformation is the connection with one's Creator. And that is not a conditioning process. That's a connection process. But often, to get ourselves to the place where we allow ourselves to feel that connection, we have to break through the barriers that we have conditioned within ourselves because we don't feel we're worthy. That's the deepest fear of most people. They don't think they're worthy of connection. They don't believe that they'll really have lasting love. And so in order to get through those things, there are a variety of practices that can assist you. But ultimate transformation is when some body creates that connection, and what I try to do is create environments where that connection is easily attainable—environments where there is so much love and so much possibility and where people feel deeply connected to themselves and deeply connected to others. At my Mastery University, we have people from seventy countries. We've got six languages translated simultaneously and we're going from 8:30 in the morning to 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, full blast. There are unbelievable expectations in people's minds. They're here to transform their bodies, their minds, their emotions, their spirits, their souls—everything—simultaneously. And there is a rigorous approach to how to do that, but the primary thing that makes those transformations possible is that you put people back in the reality of themselves. You put them in an environment where the best of them shows up and they begin to remember the truth. Socrates said learning is remembering. And that's all it is. And so some of this conditioning is trying to dehypnotize people from the hypnosis that the culture has created. I certainly agree with that.

We learn so many limiting ideas from our culture. Like the idea that because you were raped at X age or because you were abused or because this or because that, you turn out in a certain way—and it's absurd because you can look around and see so many exceptions. People who were given everything—love, joy, happiness, a great education, money, support, everything imaginable—they turn out to be a drug addict. Or you see someone who is physically, mentally, emotionally and sexually abused, given no support, no background, and they become Oprah Winfrey. Or there's someone who, in spite of being in prison for twenty-seven years, doesn't go out and kill people but goes out and helps to try and turn around their country, a Nelson Mandela.