Transcriber: Denise RQ Reviewer: Ilze Garda
You made it. (Laughter)
I've been studying the human potential for about 25 years now,
and throughout that time, everything I've done
has been an attempt to answer a sort of a simple question:
why aren't we awesomer?
(Laughter)
Given everything that we know about psychology and the human mind,
given everything thousands of years of spiritual teachings,
and just life experience, and the advances in medicine,
and the deeper understanding of the brain
why is it that some days we can get up in the morning
and feel touched and inspired by the hand of God,
and other mornings,
we can't be inspired to take a shit?
(Laughter)
I kind of figured there wasn't going to be one answer to that question
(Laughter)
and over the first 18 years or so,
I found a lot of things that were really helpful.
About seven years ago, I stumbled across a very simple answer to that question;
and what made it simple is that it's just a misunderstanding
that we have culturally about how the mind works.
And that's what I want to talk to you about today.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said:
"A man will be imprisoned
in a room with a door that is unlocked and opens inwards
as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than to push."
It's that simple, but what is that door for us?
Well, in order to take you there, I want to take you back, it's 1986.
And I was not a happy kid, I was a depressed kid.
It didn't feel particularly that it was because I wasn't useful;
I was loved I was, you know, surrounded by friends.
I had no external reasons for being so unhappy,
but I was so unhappy that I had a thing I now know is called suicidal ideation,
which meant that I thought about killing myself a lot,
all day, every day, ongoing.
This wasn't as much of a problem as you might think, most of the time,
because I had stuff to do, I'd have classes to go to, I had friends.
But it was always going on in the background,
and when it would get quiet outside, it would get really noisy inside.
And this all came to a head in October of that month
when I had what I now know is called a psychotic break from reality.
If you want to get a sense of what that was like,
imagine being in my dorm room on the fourth floor,
and a giant vacuum cleaner appearing in the sky
and sucking your heart out of your body and out the window.
This was actually terrifying to me
because it really felt like it was happening.
I hung onto the wall of my dorm room, and there was a phone there.
I reached down, and I dialed the number for the suicide hotline, which I knew,
and I got a busy signal.
(Laughter)
Even then, being sucked out the window by a giant vacuum cleaner from hell,
I found that funny.
(Laughter)
I cannot imagine what anyone could have said to me
that would have done more good for me than that busy signal
because it just kind of popped it in my head,
and I just popped out of it for a minute,
and it didn't seem so compelling, it didn't seem so real.
I was able to reach down and phone a friend who lived on the first floor,
and she came and got me, and eventually I fell asleep.
I woke up the next morning,
and I realized something that was kind of profound:
I didn't want to kill myself, I didn't want to die.
In fact, I so didn't want to die that I used every ounce of strength I had
to stay in that room
when everything felt like it was pulling me out that window.
And that was the first time I realized
that just because you have a thought in your head
doesn't mean it's your thought, doesn't mean it's true,
doesn't mean it actually is what you think,
it just means there's a thought in your head.
I started to kind of think of it as the suicide thought,
and I started to notice - because I wasn't scared of it anymore -
it's kind of like Bob, the homeless guy, moved into my brain.
Every now and again he went off on one, and it was like, "Oh god, it's Bob again."
(Laughter)
Not that I had to do something about it, it was just the suicide thought,
and of course, because I wasn't scared of it,
It passed through quicker and quicker,
and I found a new level of freedom of mind,
and that got me really interested in how the mind worked.
In order to share how the mind works with you,
I'll take you through a series of little experiments,
so, we're going to begin with a picture a monster.
(Laughter)
I noticed none of you are running to the exits screaming (Laughter)
so this is good,
this means you're not having a psychotic break from reality right now,
you have a sufficient level of thought recognition
to see that this is in fact a drawing of a monster by my daughter Macy
and is not in fact, in any way, shape, or form, a real monster.
Here's the second one; this is also a representation of a monster.
This is a tarantula spider.
In 1997, I'd been doing this work for a while,
and I was invited onto a television show in the United Kingdom
called "Put it to the test".
It was a really cool show
because they took popular ideas and they put them to the test,
and the segment right before me was they wanted to see
if a car could really stop on a dime
(Laughter)
So they got this stunt driver in this car and put the dime out there;
he's going 60 miles an hour, and he did it, he stopped on a dime,
it was really cool, but that's not why I was there.
I was there to put the NLP phobia cure to the test.
I'd learned from doctor Richard Bandler a way of working with phobias
that usually, in 30 minutes or less,
somebody who had a lifelong phobia of something
could be with it without any fear at all.
And they took three people with diagnosed phobias
and a couple of doctors,
they hooked them up to EEG machines, EKG machines, so that you could see
what was going on inside them when they saw the spiders,
and sure enough during the show, I worked with them,
and then they came back,
and they would even hold the spiders in their hands
and almost nothing.
And in fact, it was so dramatic
that the doctors asked to recalibrate the machines
because they thought it couldn't have been real;
same thing happened again.
For me that wasn't the amazing part
because I'd seen that happen hundreds of times before,
the amazing part was what happened during the dress rehearsal,
because during the dress rehearsal
the same people were hooked up to their machines,
and the stage manager came in with a clear, plastic empty box
and said: "During the show, there will be spiders in this box."
All three of them started going crazy on the machines,
and I thought: "Holy crap, there're no spiders here."
As far as I know, there weren't even any spiders in the building,
and I suddenly realized we're not afraid of what we think we're afraid of,
we were afraid of what we think.
We can't tell the difference
between an imagined experience in here, and what's going on out there;
and that confusion creates a lot of confusion,
it creates a lot of problems.
We'll take this one step more, alright?
Some have seen this image before; what I'd like you to do is
- I asked them to bring the lights up a bit
because I want you to raise your right hand
if you can see the young woman in the picture.
OK, fantastic.
Now I want you to raise your left hand if you can see the old woman.
OK, and raise both hands if you can only see one of them.
And look around, that's a large part of the room.
Is this really a picture of an old or a young woman?
Well, both or neither,
but in fact, that's how we think of the mind,
we think the mind is a camera,
and it's recording what's really going on out there,
but depending on how we use it, we have a different experience.
So, if I photograph her from this angle, she's really young,
but if I do it from that angle, she's really old.
If I look at life this way, it's an wonderful experience,
if I look at it this way, it's very depressing;
that's the idea behind positive thinking.
As we change our attitude, we change the angle
from which we hold the camera, and we get a different experience of life.
But here's the thing: this is not a picture of an old woman,
and it is not a picture of a young woman,
it is a series of lines on a piece of paper.
(Laughter)
We're the ones creating both the old and the young woman.
Let's take another one.
This is an illusion called the Kanizsa's Triangle.
How many of you can see the white triangle bold in the middle?
Fantastic! You're all making it up, there is no white triangle,
(Laughter)
it's an illusion, it's created by the mind
to make sense of the negative space,
it is not brighter or duller than anything else.
Isn't that interesting?
We make up something we can all see, and it's not there.
I wonder if that might have implications to how we live our lives.
(Laughter)
Let's take another look.
I want you to raise
- this is called the silhouette illusion or the spinning woman -
I want you to raise your right hand if you can see her spinning clockwise.
Now I want you to raise your left hand
if you can see her spinning counterclockwise.
Look around.
Now just for fun, just for fun, see if you can get her to change directions.
You can close your eyes and look back. (Laughter)
Now, which way is she actually spinning?
Neither, she doesn't exist. (Laughter)
This is why the physicist David Bohm said:
"Thought creates our world, and then says 'I didn't do it'."
(Laughter)
We live in a world of thought,
but we think we live in a world of external experience.
The mind does not work like a camera, the mind works like a projector.
I first came across this about seven years ago
in the work of a man called Syd Banks; he wasn't a physicist or a therapist,
he was a welder from Scotland living in Saltspring Island,
and he had an enlightenment experience when he was talking to a psychologist.
He was telling him about all his problems,
and the psychologist said: "You don't have problems,
you're not insecure Syd, you just think you are."
Well, Syd heard that
to a little bit deeper level than we all just did.
For him, from that moment thought stopped,
and he could see the projection of the mind,
and he could see that all that was ever happening
was that mind was projecting thought onto consciousness.
Like in a movie, the projector of mind takes the film of thought
and projects it onto the screen of consciousness,
and it really looks like it's happening out there.
We experience it, and we hear it,
and it's scarier, it's exciting, it's awesomer, it's terrible,
but none of it it's actually happening outside of our own minds.
How is this significant?
Well, I was looking for a way of illustrating this,
and one my students showed me this.
(Laughter)
This explains every bad relationship that you have ever had,
(Laughter)
and it explains why we struggle
because we think the problem is with the other dog.
We think the problem is: "Well, I need to just learn to love that dog."
There's no dog! (Laughter)
It's a creation of the mind,
and when you start to see that, the mind slows down,
and when the mind slows down, something else comes through.
The mystic poet William Blake said:
"If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man is closed himself up
till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."
And that's us,
we've learned to live in the world of circumstance
as if the only way for us to thrive is to control that world;
to make that world the way we want it.
Yet our experience is of a world that doesn't even exist
until the moment we create it,
and ceases existing the moment a new thought comes along.
What that means is
just because a thought is in your head doesn't mean that it's true.
What that means is we're not afraid of what we think we're afraid of,
we're afraid of what we think;
and what that means is
that no matter how long you been stuck with something,
no matter how real a problem looks,
no matter how intractable a difficulty seems,
you're never more than one thought away
from a whole new experience to being alive.
Thank you.
(Applause)