Don't Believe Your Thoughts

0:00some schools of thought say our physical experience of life is a reflection of the ideas we have about life so if we think life is suffering life will be suffering if we think life is hard because our parents thought life is hard we're going to think life is hard and life will be hard so you could say in that count that worry is praying for what you don't want and making it

0:34happen yeah and making and bringing it on yeah so the mind just runs all the time on what what can go wrong now what can go wrong now what can go wrong now hello and welcome back to the spiritual psychology of acting podcast we hope you're doing well during this christmas period now this time of year can be great but also quite intense there are more expectations on us more emotions at play and

1:08more stories circling in our heads about family money the future and how we think we should think and feel about those things today's episode looks at a simple idea from the teachings of romana maharshi that cuts straight through all that noise that you are not your thoughts what's interesting about this century-old spiritual teaching is how it aligns with modern psychology today and points to the same wisdom stop wrestling with your thoughts and instead change your relationship to them we talk

1:41about how to do that in a world that seems so full of anxiety and fear and how to remain present when the mind is trying to run the show which let's face it around christmas time it usually is so without further ado let's get into it it's good to be back looking forward to this chat that we're going to be having how are you doing today john yeah me too always good to be back i really enjoyed doing this with you

2:15jordan uh yeah good things have been good i've just done a workshop in vienna oh nice film school vienna with a lovely bright group of actors there and then i'm going to be going back there in february and it was just nice spending time in vienna as well that you know i didn't i was teaching most of the time but we did on the sunday night get to go out for dinner afterwards and the christmas markets had just all started so they took me to the christmas market and that was lovely yeah it's a beautiful city vienna i'm looking forward to doing more work there um but other than that just uh carrying

2:49on with the actors lab and um that's on a tuesday evening we've been getting really good progress from the actors that are involved in that we've got a really good international group of actors and um getting ready for christmas yes the insane busy hectic schedule is yeah how about you good thanks yeah yeah looking forward to a bit of a break yeah looking forward to the mind getting a bit of a break yes for today's episode exactly the mind thoughts i i read them a fact that apparently

3:22scientists estimate that we have somewhere between 12 000 and 60 000 thoughts every single day it's the interesting thing about this topic today is the fact that we have this amazing brain that is you know the evolution's given us you know for most of human history we've needed that amount of bandwidth to keep us alive you know we've needed these 60 000 thoughts to keep us vigilant and and in survival mode but i think for modern times we definitely don't need 60 000 thoughts every single day for the daily

3:53commute or for shopping in tesco you know it's we've got all this extra bandwidth and so our mind goes to some pretty crazy and negative uh disturbing and anxious places doesn't it right yeah well that's it and apparently i've heard that 90 percent of those thoughts are really just a regurgitation of yesterday's thoughts they're they're just uh on a on a motor they're just complexes sort of going over and over the same old stuff over and over again yeah yeah so it's an apt that we're going to be

4:26talking about this today so we're talking about the mind and our relationship to the mind um this is all being inspired by this quotation that i came across from sri ramana mahashi yeah yeah so good maybe to get a bit of context before we dive straight into the actual piece of writing which we'll analyze you know line by line who was he and what was his story well he he was attributed to be a fully enlightened sage um he was from tamil nadu in southern india he was born 1879 he was born

5:04and at the age of 16 he had a major experience he called it a death experience uh where he became aware aware of a force that was passing through him which he understood to be the self and then as far i read his biography some years ago and uh they were saying in the biography that he one day he was he had detention at school and he was having to uh write lines you know when you write lines i will not be a

5:39naughty boy or whatever over and over and he was sitting in detention and he said that his pen just suddenly stopped and the words came to mind this is futile and he put that he put the pen down and that's probably what most people think isn't it when they're right i know it's like as if he was the first person to ever realize that this is completely futile i mean i think that's the point isn't it that's that's the punishment is do you have to do something futile um but anyway he realized it was futile and he this force made him get up leave the detention room go home go to his brother's bedroom

6:17steal some money from his brother's uh savings that was in his brother's bedroom in the drawer go to the train station and catch a train to now i've got to say this right it's arunchala mountain arunchala i believe that's how it's spelled anyway that's in southern india and he found out that he thought it was a mystical mythical mountain he realized it was such a place and he went there and he never left the mountain for the rest of his life he stayed there for the rest

6:51of his life and people started to gather uh to see him he was like an illuminated sage and they believed that he was an incarnation of the god shiva and um people would come from far and wide and hear his discourses on the nature of the self and they built a hall and he would sit in the hall and they'd come in and sometimes his sermon was silence so he'd literally just sit in the hall and you know rest in the self in consciousness and emanate the knowledge and everybody and without

7:30even speaking and everybody who sat there would experience this force the the force of the self um so that that's really how he began and there are there are a number of books on utterances and things that he said and uh i thought this was particularly interesting to us as actors um was what he'd said about the nature of mind and thought so perhaps it'd be best if i share what what we're what what we're going to be discussing today yeah great so if you if you take

8:04us through that whole piece of writing and then we can afterwards you can break it down you know line exactly so like like the topic or the title of this podcast the first line is an instruction don't believe your thoughts i am the body is a thought i am the mind is a thought i am the doer is a thought worry is only a thought fear is only a thought

8:40when all thoughts are stilled pure consciousness remains to bring about peace means to be free from thoughts and to abide as pure consciousness the thoughts change but not you let go of the passing thoughts and abide in the unchanging self there you go so he finishes with that instruction let go of passing thoughts and abide in the unchanging

9:15self so we thought that would be interesting to unpack didn't we yeah i think the thing that really struck me when we were researching this is the fact that this was probably written what over a century ago you know in terms of when it was written down but it it like beautifully aligns i think with everything that we know now today like in in modern times about neuroscience about the brain about you know psychology it's it's it all checks out i think you know all of this kind of is it's is seen

9:47as pure truth i guess because it coincides with everything we know now well it's also knowledge that people need given that i i was listening to radio four this morning as i'm as i'm prone to do and it was saying there that about um uh adhd and um bipolar and all these different disorders that one in four of the population of this country um god knows how many in the united states but in this country one in four are are have a diagnosis of one of these mental illnesses so i think this this knowledge is is

10:22really needed isn't it in this time because people are stuck in their minds they're stuck in their thoughts yeah absolutely and i think that's the thing isn't it is i guess the whole to summarize i guess this is all about the fact that thoughts aren't facts and that's the kind of the main takeaway from it isn't it people too readily believe that the thoughts are occurring inside their mind are true to you know whatever's going on in their situation absolutely and then then they're acted upon yeah okay yeah or they become it becomes truth yeah it becomes real right exactly well but it's

10:55really it's delusion because it's not in line with reality is it yeah yeah yeah so that's quite that's quite uh a way to start don't believe your thoughts thoughts are observable you know i often when people come to to my classes at the beginning i'll often ask them the question are you this pen and i'll hold up a pen and i say are you this pen and they'll go what hey no no and i say well why not how do you know you're not this pen and then we get to the conclusion that you can observe the pen

11:28so there's an object of observation the pen and then there's you the witness of the pen and therefore you understand that you cannot be that which you can observe it's a really important philosophical point i cannot be that which i can observe so then i say to them okay so what about the body then are you the body uh well i don't know i was doing this just yesterday i did i did a talk

12:00on meditation last night um locally somewhere uh in a church hall locally and this came up um are you your body you know well it's my body and and all of this and so i explained to them that well you know that you know there isn't a particle in your body apart from in your teeth that was there seven years ago i mean if you go back just a year 99 of them have been rejuvenated so are you the body well and they come to the conclusion well what do we know about things you can observe i cannot be the body

12:31because i can observe it uh okay let's go more subtle then are you the mind and that's where it really starts to get interesting and it's like well what is the mind the mind is the totality of thoughts so all the thoughts collectively we could call the mind right so the mind is the totality of thoughts but it's also the manufacturer of new thoughts so from the complexes that we already have that creates new complexes in relation to the situations etc that that we meet but can you

13:07observe your thoughts so i asked them i asked them yesterday um who was the prime minister of the united kingdom during the pandemic he's been on the news recently and uh they all laugh and they say boris yeah boris and i said well you can see a picture now of boris now we're talking about this and i said what color suit is he wearing and the guy said blue and i was like we could all see boris wearing a blue suit is he wearing a tie no uh what's his hair like it's all ruffled up these are pictures these are thoughts yeah and now can you observe that you're having these thoughts yes so are you your

13:46thoughts no i can observe my thoughts but then of course it begs the big question you know so well then i also go a step further i said what about the emotions that seem to take place somewhere between the body and the mind well they come and go don't they they change and can you observe the emotions yes i can so i'm not i'm my emotions so who are you then what's that is the big question well it's the observer isn't it it's the witness of those things and it's said that you know the the highest faculty

14:18of someone who would be deemed to be wise is the ability to discriminate between what's true and what's not true what's real and what's not real and the finest or highest level of the discrimination is the discrimination between the transient which is everything we can observe and what we could call the eternal which is the witness of all that we observe and that's the finest level of discrimination and really the the way of um freedom or the way of what's known in

14:53sanskrit is we waker which is discrimination is simply remembering i am not this i remember you saying as well actually in class that there was one time you used a kind of metaphor of you know in terms of weather and thoughts are like the clouds the storms the fog all that kind of stuff and but we are the sky you know we're the open space that they move through i think that was when that really clicked into place because that's the kind of experience of meditation isn't it it's like it's letting the thoughts just pass yes i think the quote the quote that i was quoting was uh

15:26you are the sky the rest is just weather right yeah yeah i can't remember who that was but it's a beautiful quotation you are the sky the the rest is just weather the coming and going of stuff yeah um the shankracharya uses that analogy as well he says that the self is like the eye this the absolute the sun and if we can you know i don't i don't suggest looking directly at the sun but if you if you can if you can see the sun there's no clouds that's joy that's happiness but then the

15:58clouds come in the way and they block the sun the sun's still there it's always there but it gets blocked by the clouds now what are the clouds their thoughts their ideas their limits and he says that the thoughts themselves they can either be um these clouds that come over and cover the vision of reality uh they can either be removed through well through meditation because there's a kind of heat that builds up in meditation which dissolves the clouds you know like when the sun rises the clouds

16:31uh disperse or they can be um blown away by the winds of discipline and the winds of discipline is remembering simply i am not this so very often at the beginning of students actors studying the spiritual psychology of acting i give them this homework to as you love as you'll know to to just observe whatever there is just to remember i am not this and to separate the observed from the observer until the realization that i am none of this i'm the self uh it makes a huge difference

17:07yeah interesting i think in neuroscience they talk about there's the default mode network which is kind of just what's you know our operating system i guess and how most thoughts just come from this automatic brain activity that kind of explains that they're not they're not reliable representations of reality they are just like you know figments i guess but the the dmn that default mode network is sometimes described as a storyteller and that's a great way of looking at it because it's you know

17:38stories aren't real you know there's there are fabrications to help us get to you know another truth or but it's that that's what our brains are we're expert storytellers aren't we we create stories around events we we create kind of meaning around things and sometimes that meaning can be like wrong right it can be it can be on the on the wrong track well that's exactly what um i think i might have mentioned before that modern psychiatry doesn't use the word ego anymore they've got a much better term which is the narrative self yeah and what is the narrative self it's a story isn't it

18:12and what is the story actually it's a set of pictures so if you you know if you say for you went on a first date or something like that and someone asks you to you know uh tell me about yourself tell me your story well you'll tell them a story but you know that it's been selected edited and rearranged the story um partly deliberately but also due to cognitive dissonance yeah that the the the mind interprets

18:42income coming in for information to suit its own patterns and it processes the incoming information in accordance with its own point of reference so you know we see what we want to see we we see what what is compatible with our purposes we don't see what's really there yeah yeah going back to that don't believe your thoughts i really like they once asked um another realized person maharishi mahesh yogi they said to him someone in one of the meetings once said to him excuse me do you have thoughts

19:17and he said of course i do i just don't believe them which is a wise answer yeah the thoughts are there but he doesn't take them to be real yeah i was thinking about um an example of this is like say for example you have to go to college and you have to be on time you know remember when when you were at school or whatever you have to be on time you have to be on time for a rehearsal say and you are running slightly late

19:49and you run down the end of your road to where there's a bus stop and just as you turn the corner you see your bus pull away and you may run alongside it but the the um the bus driver's on a schedule so he's not going to stop or she's not going to stop and you're you're banging on it and now what happens internally you start seeing the pictures of arriving late when the directors told you please don't be late to my rehearsal and now you're imagining the awkward situation when you walk in

20:22are you going to get told off will the other actors be secretly gloating and you're running all these pictures in your head and you're beginning to have emotions you're having panic uh you're having some um and some fear and or maybe even despair and then all of a sudden another bus comes around the corner they often say that they they come in twos and threes especially in london and then you jump on the bus and then you turn up five minutes early you take your seat the rehearsal begins and none of this

20:56ever happened yet you still experienced all the emotions because you thought that you were going to be late and of course this is extremely important to understand in acting so if that's the case that we've actually our physiology has changed of a situation that is never never even happened or was ever going to happen we just thought it was there's that word again thought and yet we had this whole experience just based but none of it was in reality whatsoever so that's the wisdom of like don't

21:32believe your thoughts and and in acting of course our job is to believe the thoughts yeah i was going to say that is like almost the inverse of that is that's how you create believable uh truthful performances right is that is that you you know how the script is going to end you know if your character is going to get you know achieve its goal or not but you kind of need you need to go through the motions you need to go through these these processes of thinking you're not going to get the girl or thinking that you're going to die when you know you survive is you've got to go through those processes and i think for non-actors that's the thing that they don't quite understand oh they

22:06think is amazing is that actors can you know create this kind of psychology out of nowhere when it is it's it's believing the thoughts of the character it's believing the thoughts that they're thinking at that moment well that's it exactly are you know the talent of an actor you could say or an aspect of the talent of an actor is the ability to make that which is unimportant the character's life and thoughts important to you yeah but you can only do that by first making that which you think is important

22:39to you there's that word again your own purposes your own need to be liked your own need to be recognized by a casting director and given your next job uh your own need to you know win the sibling life competition or prove to your parents that you should have been an actor and not a lawyer or whatever the the thing is unimportant to you yeah do you see what i mean you can't make the life of the character important to you if your own thoughts are important to you you can't serve two masters as

23:10it were like whatever if you especially if you're going on stage i mean it works for a film i guess as well that if you know if you've just had an argument with your spouse you know just before going on stage if that creeps into the character's thinking then all of a sudden then you're not you're not being the character right you're not you're not you're confusing two consonants together yeah absolutely well i remember the first play i ever directed was at battersea art center and it was the british premiere of a william mastramone play uh he was famous he wrote that he did extremities with farrah

23:43forcet majors and it's one of his others plays it was called cat's paw and one evening i came into the theater um you know we used to do a warm-up and things in the early part of the run and i'd come into the theater and one of the actresses was in tears and the other actors were all around her and they were all comforting her and and i said to her what what's the problem and she said i'm just having a terrible time with my boyfriend at the moment he's just accused me of stealing money and i said well did you no i didn't he's paranoid and it's just making the whole relationship very

24:18very difficult he thinks that people are out to get him and i'm out to get him and she was in despair and we were we were offering comforting words and then i realized hold on a minute half an hour we're on so i said come on everyone this is your half an hour call right so come on get on with it and she went backstage and i sat in the audience and when she came on she was just the character that we'd worked really hard to create the inner life of the character she was just the character and there was no sign of this actress who was suffering this personal problem and that was so

24:54overwhelming her had gone and i said to her afterwards i said that you know what happened because as soon as you went on stage she said well it was actually just a relief to go on and think kathy's thoughts you know and get away from my own thoughts and just become kathy for the evening um was a relief uh and i think that illustrates as well that they're just thoughts you know all of this the stories they're all just thoughts there's all a super imposition over what's really there

25:24you know like misery if you look out into the universe if you look out into creation you look at the night sky or you look at uh you know hills and fields one thing you notice is there's no misery there whatsoever the absolute creation is just full of bliss and consciousness so you think well where is the misery again it's a thought it's in people's minds yeah uh of course we should mention of course that the cause of the misery is attachment and what's that a thought yeah i guess it's the distinct

26:00i guess goes it goes from a thought into thinking right the thoughts are always there but then when the thought gets translated into thinking it's like it becomes that groove in the mind right where it keeps getting thought over and over again to the point where it becomes more and more real yes well as you'll know that's what we're all about in the spiritual psychology of acting is working out how these what we call mind erosions which is a term that sam kogan coined is that is the mind erosion or these patterns of thinking you know we live in these patterns of thinking and of course our own patterns of thinking

26:32are sometimes detrimental to the characters or they're the opposite of the characters thinking i'm thinking about an actress that i was once directing and the character's super purpose was i want to be loved and i started helping her to program the thoughts of i of the purpose i want to be loved and she just froze and i said are you okay and she started crying and she said i just i just don't entertain these thoughts anymore because i was so hurt in my divorce that she'd written off

27:05the purpose i want to be loved because love to her was just pain and now having to think the thoughts she really pitied herself that this was no longer part of her life well within a year of that she was married after finishing off her thinking you know because it was just a thought yeah we have a saying that we use in the spiritual psychology of acting you might remember that we sentence ourselves with a sentence yeah that's great yeah uh you know i am a stupid good for nothing idiot there you go well

27:41that's what you are you've sentenced yourself with that or i am no good at maths or oh here's a funny one i'm a doggy person i'm a dog person i'm not a cat person all right so therefore because i'm guilty of that occasionally oh come on yeah right but but that excludes all cats that therefore you cannot appreciate or love any cat ever because you're a dog person these are just ideas do you see what i mean but they're ideas that create a limit now in acting what we're really doing is we're creating

28:14that limit where you know as you if you've studied the active embodiment technique we know that we turn the pictures of the characters immediate circumstances into a sentence you know because i this i want this i want this so i do this and then it becomes a complex you know when you say it all together the principle is is that neurons that fire together wire together so when you go when you go over the character's thoughts and you program the pictures and you've without interruption they all stick together and you

28:47create a complex of the character's immediate psychology then our job is just to stay in that and then respond to the other actor other character within that context so it's really our job is creating the thoughts of the character i mean what else is there we can't do gene therapy we can't change our dna or our genetics we could maybe put on a few pounds or lose a few pounds or put on a prosthetic nose yeah but at the end of the day what do we create our minds we're creating it with our thoughts

29:20i remember somebody said something about philip semer hoffman that it seemed that from every performance he was able to change his molecular structure and that's because it was just so powerful because he was thinking the thoughts of the character so deeply it it did look like he'd completely changed as a person that physically he looked completely different well it does it changes your physiology yeah it i mean that's when you know that the character the complexes have set and you've become the character you feel like a different person the physiology actually changes it works the other way as well last night there was a

29:56guy in there and i said i'm coming to teach you a bit of meditation he went oh i've tried meditation i'm no good at meditation my mind just wanders all i mean i've heard it a million times but my mind just wanders all over the place when we go to meditate and i said well look we'll just let's give it a try and he became really still i was doing it he it was i did the exercise we do in class the meditation exercise and he became the mind became quiet and he opened his eyes and he

30:26literally looked like a different person and i told him and then the others acknowledge it i said you look completely different and they said you do and i said you look like yourself yeah and all this noise and self-doubt and neurotic self-rejection when all that was allowed to settle down there was the real man you know and it was beautiful yeah that's it also reminds me of i i like kind of falling into that trap there's that whole kind of confirmation bias part of our brain

31:00as well i remember seeing tony robbins was was speaking to someone and he he got the person to look around the room for anything that was brown and then to close their eyes and now describe everything in the room that was red and they couldn't they could only think about the things that were brown and then when he opened his eyes again to look at look at everything that's red and then obviously he could then spot things that were red but then he was saying about how the mind is always looking to try and kind of win little victories so it's all about when when you were looking for the brown things you were looking at something that was slightly beige and thinking oh that's kind of brown

31:31or you know you're looking at something that was burgundy that's that's kind of red you know our brains are always trying to kind of um attach itself to to things that are going to confirm the things that we believe right the things that are our mind erosions the things that are already set absolutely for example uh um astrology right yeah people looking you know into their stars as if you know you know you're a virgo so therefore well that means that um one in 12 of every human beings on this planet is the same uh prediction of

32:07your life and and then you you kind of try and go yeah there's something there and you try it's like it's like a mold you're trying to put it into the mold and trying to make it fit and then once you've got a reason it's like yes that's it that's a prediction and how do they know there's another phrase that comes to mind is that a broken clock is is right twice a day right you're gonna find the little bits that are correct and go ah yeah of course i see that's the proof yes yeah that's what our minds do as well right they they look for the proof and then they go ah there it is that's you

32:39know that's it that's that must be truth then well like you said don't believe your thoughts yeah hi i'm martin delaney and i'm here to tell you about the upcoming seminar for the spiritual psychology of acting i ended up studying the full course and it really helped me to develop as an actor and most recently to prepare for a major film role that i was involved in following on from the teachings and techniques of the great stanislavski and combined with the very best in modern psychology

33:10and ancient practical wisdom the spiritual psychology of acting will provide you with the right knowledge and a powerful toolbox of techniques to help you create any character to grow as an actor and to thrive within the industry the seminars last for two and a half hours each it's jam-packed with useful information and will give you a firm foundation in the main principles of the art and craft of great acting so if you love acting and if you're looking to up your game you can sign up via the spiritual psychology of acting website or click the link in the description and enjoy the

33:45many benefits the seminar will offer you and best of all it's completely free so that that whole don't believe your thoughts is like encapsulates everything that that follows in this piece of text but the next next part is i am the body as a thought yes well we kind of looked at that didn't we with you know what is the body i mean what is the body at the end of the day

34:16it's earth predominantly it's earth and what is and really how do we get it as earth it's it's food and what is food food is uh you know if you put a carrot seed in the ground and you leave it over the summer and then in in the harvest time you you pull it up now there's a whole carrot there where did the carrot get the matter from to create itself well it was from the surrounding soil from the light from the moisture and then you eat the so what's the carrot made of earth

34:48or the potato and then you eat the carrot or the potato and then what so and that's what the body that the tissues in the body and the fibers in the body are made of the same thing you are what you well you you are what you are are you a carrot i'm a lint chocolate advent calendar according to that one other advent calendars are available just not as delicious yeah okay yes i guess you know uh like body dysmorphia as well that's that's that's a kind of extreme

35:25example of of thinking that the that i am the body right is is again it's a thought right you think oh i'm i'm i'm too fat i'm too thin and it's it's a distortion right the mind is kind of warping how you really look it's an idea isn't it we all have a body image yeah you know we talk about self image life image people image and when we're creating a character well we also have a body image and that's that's the view we have of our body you know i'm always surprised whenever i see a photograph of myself i'm fatter than i think i am

35:57in my own mind i'm just this really slim adonis of a man i'm joking but you know i always have a surprise so i've got an image you know yeah i mean that that that works as well i think you look back at at photos of yourself from years ago like you say you know our our molecules are changing so much that we are literally a different person but you you'll look back at you know i'll look back at a photo from 10 years ago and think oh i look great but i remember like i was having like all this

36:28like mental trouble thinking oh i look awful today or it's you know it's it is it's so warped if only i could look like that now yeah and in 10 years from now you look back and oh if only i could look like that now yeah yeah it's all just yeah it's all warped vision isn't it yeah it's all just thoughts yeah oh there's a pattern here i think yeah yes so then the next one i am the mind is a thought and so this i guess is then tying into not just thoughts but feelings and memory i guess as well

37:04i mean i always think that you know that that remember that psychology would say that emotions are the biophysiological result of thoughts so we have the the emotions arise because of thought sometimes we have emotions we don't see the thoughts that have created them but that's just a question of awareness awareness is the ability to watch your own thoughts but you can't have an emotion without a thought the same in acting that's why we don't work on the character's emotions

37:36of course you have to feel it at the end of the day and you have to allow the emotions that's why you're creating the character's psychology so you can then feel actually feel the character's feelings and emotions um but uh that i think they they really they come they're part of the biophysiology aren't they emotions they they belong to the body i think they're halfway between the body and the mind sure yeah of course yeah they would be yeah that's right i heard a wonderful thing once jordan on a i went on a meditation retreat and the guy who was running the retreat said something

38:07that's always stuck with me he said it's quite possible to give up the private ownership of the mind whoa so rather than it being my mind it just becomes the mind and then it becomes universal do you see what i mean because each individual mind is really a part of universal mind and if you want access to universal mind the first step is to give up the private ownership of the mind

38:38so they just become thoughts rather than my thoughts my ideas it's the whole me and my that causes the problems the thoughts are there the body's there but it's when we become identified with it that's where the trouble starts yeah it's again it's also like you know i often think that people their inner voice that kind of inner critic can be so mean sometimes you can say that the the most vile things that you would never dare to say to anybody to any other person but that's how we describe

39:09ourselves sometimes and it's it's almost that like you say it's that kind of lose the ownership of that lose the ownership of seeing yourself that way because you would never dream of treating anybody like that or saying that that kind of thing and so why would you say that about yourself well it all stems from a self-image doesn't it you know as as i teach within spiritual psychology of acting the core of it is finding the character's self-image and what is that it's who they think they are not who they are who they are is consciousness absolute is you know is the universal self every

39:41character every human being every creature is really that yeah who do they think they are and that's the primary relationship of the mind it's whose mind is it anyway it's the it's the the false sense of eye that has this person with this story with these preferences this is this is me yeah which is why it's important yeah it's why it's important as an actor then i often find that when you're building the character you look at what other characters say about your character because that can often give you more

40:14a truthful account about who your character really is but then also the things that the character saying about themselves is often how they see themselves it's all it's important distinctions to make but also helps you kind of unlock the character i think you know how do other people see your character that that might be a more objective truth about that character that's right that's right and that's one of the places you can look for for finding out the character's identity also of course what makes the character happy and sad is how you find out the character's purpose yes you know in the beginning of act one the character's really upset because they've lost a

40:48pound then they probably have a purpose to be rich yeah do you know what i mean it's it's just logic really you know otherwise it wouldn't be important to them yeah or like you know i guess you know coming to christmas if you're playing scrooge you don't you don't play a miser you play somebody who's afraid of losing all their money right or somebody who's afraid of somebody going to take out take everything away from them that's that's how you someone who thinks that money is happiness who thinks that money is security yeah and therefore you but but to create such a character you'd have

41:22to create someone who'd become disillusioned with the human race as scrooge had yeah do you see what i mean for money to be of value because that's the only sense of empowerment he had because actually he'd felt disempowered and i guess that goes also into the whole idea of having to love your character or kind of not be judgmental of your character is is it's working out that state of mind isn't it working out what are those characters thoughts and then purely thinking those without the judgment of your own uh own thoughts getting in the way exactly well it is what our man stan

41:55slavsky said he said it doesn't matter what you think about the character all that matters is what the character thinks yeah you know your job is to truthfully create that character it's not it's nothing is not important what you think in fact that's a prejudice you know your job is just to truthfully create it and even if they are an evil or angry or aggressive person we know as van tangoff told us that there are no evil angry or aggressive people only unhappy ones yeah yeah so then we're creating the

42:27character's misery which of course is just thoughts so the character had to want something and then not get it and then suffer and that's what made them want others to suffer you see what i mean it's yeah it's pretty reasonable when you look at it yeah and it makes acting super simple that you realize it's great for your own life you realize that they're just thoughts and and we are creating those thoughts but that's exactly what you're doing as the character that's how you create the character you don't have to do these incredible feats of you know psychological manipulation it's literally just

43:00doing what we do on a daily basis which is creating thoughts yes well one one of the students one of the actors on tuesday in the actors lab i sort of had this revelation that we were creating the you know the character's psychology and we were all building it together and we were thinking the thoughts and seeing how the character suffered and and all of this and realizing the kind of the ignorance of the character of believing things to be true that aren't really true and i think once as an actor you've understood that about the character it's not too far away

43:34to realize that hold on maybe my complexes ideas and thoughts are just complexes ideas and thoughts that are unnecessary i think that's one of the beauties of acting because we we have to find out what is actually real because nothing on stage is real is it yeah of course yeah so that very that very act helps us to find like a deeper truth yeah about like not just about life but ourselves i guess yeah which yeah helps us in our daily life i think really for someone who was even if they weren't

44:06interested in acting if they're interested in self-discovery study the spiritual psychology of acting do you know what i mean it's just full of you know it just looks at practical psychology in a way that um a lot of modern psychology doesn't you know it's a lot of statistics and and all of this this is sort of practical nuts and bolts of how the mind works it's also experiential right i think that's that's one of the big keys if you experience it yourself that you can then understand something on a much deeper level i think the same thing with meditation people can say oh it's not for me or

44:37i've tried it or it's but it's like it's the more you do it the more you will be able to do it yeah it's like the experience of it i think that's for me a lot of the stuff that i learned in the spiritual psychology of acting was you know it was things i'd probably heard before but hadn't really properly experienced and then when you do experience it it just it drops in all of a sudden you kind of go okay i get it now it's like it's almost like you've just taken the cover off and going oh i see see it for what it is now yeah that's it i mean my job is to help actors be free

45:08and what's freedom it's uh absence of attachment so it's just to give up all of that and just enjoy creating the character that's that's all that remains and what does it mean to enjoy creating the character we're back to that word again to think the character's thoughts you know and all the spiritual psychology of acting is all the active embodiment technique is is a way of organizing those thoughts do you see what i mean it's how to organize them and choose which thoughts are important in any given part of the scene yeah so the next line is an interesting one i am the doer as

45:45i thought we're getting a bit more technical here so i guess the i am the doer is that then that's linked to the ego or linked to that kind of sense of duality well the first principle it says in the bhagavad-gita krishna says it is only the fool deluded by ego who believes himself to be the doer of actions now that's very interesting so who is the doer of actions so the actions the idea is is that

46:20the actions are just taking place as part of nature and only the consciousness is the actor if you see what i mean is when the individual ego says ah i am the doer well you see how that works in acting when you have an actor when they get up to do one of the exercises in class and they have the idea i am the doer they're riddled with thoughts about their performance yeah and they act you know they give it their ding you know they which is really just showing a perfectionism i guess as well isn't right

46:51it's it's that it's the external focus you're kind of overly concerned with what you're doing because i think that comes to it comes down to control as well isn't it it's like that i guess you could say that's like i am the doer is also like i am the one that you must control everything that happens yes it's just realizing that there's not actually that much as not as much agency as you think i guess well exactly in in the zen teaching that one of the principles there is um do less

47:23accomplish more do nothing accomplish everything and the secret of work and this includes acting is i do nothing and the zen aphorism says i do nothing but nothing is not done so what's that something happens shit goes down stuff happens but what's been removed is the sense of doership so you're just allowing the energies of nature in

47:59fact what it says in the gita is only the three guna carry out the action it's the tamas rajas and satwa the play of tara tamas rajas and satwa in fact you have never done anything and you never will right you've never done anything in fact if you and if you inspect this you sit back and you go really i just watch the self just watches all these things watches the mind body machine do all this stuff do you see what i mean it's like you're actually doing it the mind body machine is doing

48:31it you just observe but interestingly when you observe i just mean in the art of everyday living but when you stay with the observer then the actions become beautified they become efficient and expedient do you see what i mean all artificiality falls away and the and and just the action gets done it becomes kind of pure action yeah it's it's not taking away the responsibility like that that's that still remains you know for a person but it just it takes away the again the story that's attached

49:02around it right yes well how it works is that in acting what we're doing is we in rehearsals we're creating the complex is creating the character's thoughts that's rehearsal thinking the character's thoughts making complex between the lines you know we're finding out what what's the thoughts behind really the question of the actor is what thoughts are in my head when i say these lines do you see me that's how we analyze the play um but then that's the conscious technique right going back to the principle of stanislavski's through conscious technique we pave the way to subconscious creativity

49:36the conscious technique is all the rehearsal the prep and everything how does it switch into subconscious creativity well that's what i call the zen of acting as an actor you have to get out of the way and as you know jordan i love to say this is one of my catchphrases let go let flow yeah surrender to the moment you know trust that the character's thinking there put your attention on the other actor and allow what comes out to be spontaneous

50:06and that's zen do you see what i mean to get out to get out of the way and to stop trying to control your performance and to stop even thinking about your performance and how am i doing and what do they think about me and am i any good and all this stuff is really zen isn't it is letting go of that and just thinking the character's thoughts and i think of it that really acting is dancing the character's thoughts yeah that's why i often give actors a homework is like just go home put on some

50:38music you like close the curtains and just dance don't worry about whether you're a good dancer they're all ideas just allow the body to express the music immediately without without thinking do you see what i mean without that a little a doubt getting in there without a thought getting in there because when actors learn how to do that it's rather like the music is the character's thoughts and the acting is the dancing the character's thoughts do you see what i mean is in other words that the dance is the physical manifestation

51:12of the music in the same way is the acting what the actor's doing is the physical manifestation of the thoughts behind it yeah it's a similar thing in like sports with athletes i guess as well isn't it that you know they're not concerned with whether or not the ball's going to go into the net they can they're living on intuition right and kind of moment to moment and if they are thinking that that's usually where they they come unstuck right if the thoughts come in what if i don't get this next point what if i don't score this goal all those kind of things but it's it's the the moment to moment

51:46presence which makes them a great athlete they're living in the context of that game you know that match that that moment it's it's always living in the moment isn't it it's never like it's athletes don't think and that's where the again the same thing i guess it's conscious technique is training is they're doing their reps they're constantly doing their things their emotions and movements so that when when that moment comes that big moment in front of all those people comes they're not thinking about it they're just living in on pure uh pure well actually if you if you said to the athlete you know what were you doing after they've just won the race you know they might realize i didn't do

52:22anything yeah the body just ran like the clappers as i'd been training but the body just ran really fast and the same thing happens i say to actors you know those experiences that you've had where you've really gone on stage and you've had a great show it's really flowed and everything's working and you come off stage and someone says to you that was brilliant that was really good and then you think inwardly to yourself you think i didn't do anything it just happened do you know what i mean i

52:57i can't claim i was the duo it's like the magic got in there and i was rather than i was acting i was acted yeah i got out of the way yeah i got out of the way and it just happened as it should beautifully well that's the same if we understand that in acting we understand that in life if we understand that in life we understand that in acting that's why i think you know as much as i'm interested in the spiritual psychology of acting i'm interested in the spiritual psychology of human life yeah um as much as the zen of acting well what's the zen of everyday life it's doing it without

53:33being the doer and which is really means not being attached to the result yeah and also i think actors become intolerable when they do then lay claim to that right when they if they say oh yeah i did this thing because it was brilliant or i they're laying claim to the performance they're laying claim to the things they did which were just brilliant you know you do have to give up a certain amount of ego to say that you know i you know i was acted upon but then converse i think the flip side of that is that actually you don't get all this misery that comes with the doership you know which actually does

54:04cause the suffering you're you can you're becoming free of that but man i think many actors like to lay claim to that ego part and they like that oh i was i did it because i was brilliant i was brilliant yeah i was yeah it's well that's what it's all about isn't it i want to be the center of attention i want to be admired i want to be liked i want to be held in awe yeah it's maybe why method acting is so um you know this kind of mystical thing that people love to kind of lay claim to because it's things they did crazy things they did to get to the character i remember we we studied method acting in drama school

54:36and i got ripped to shreds for the tutors afterwards the performance one of the tutors did actually think in a way try to understand what we've been learning and saying what did you do that was method and i was like oh well you know i started working out because my character is a lot buffer than i am it's like well that's what something you did but how is that method i'm like oh yeah it's just something i did well i learned how to do this this certain skill that the character has it's like well that's just something you did it's like oh yeah it's like method acting doesn't really exist you can't properly live as the character the ego then attaches itself to that and said i did this thing which

55:09makes me better or you know i'd put in the hours and it's really just something you did oh and and it's usually that i suffered in some way isn't it i mean i'm not going to mention names but we know who we're talking about the actors that do this in interviews it's really how much i suffered for the for the part there's another one that that's come up that um that i find is really funny is there's there's something that came up on social media and it's something that anthony hopkins or someone has said is that all they do to prepare is they read the script 200 times

55:39all right right okay so it takes you like how long does it take to read the script that's two hours maybe to read the whole screenplay is going to be two hours and you read it 200 times wow that's a lot of reading why don't you just learn the bloody active embodiment technique and learn to cut to the chase and actually work out what you need for the character rather than just think i have to read it 200 times i mean it's just a it's a waste of time if you know what you're

56:11doing i think yeah maybe that maybe where that comes into is that the reading is is letting it drop in i guess isn't it it's it's become so second nature i think that's maybe another way of saying it but yeah actors do like to go on about how much they've suffered for their art yeah but but what it shows me is that they've got no real process it's just read it and hopefully that you know if you've read it 200 times whatever's necessary will stick but if you know how to do your job probably you know how to choose what's useful and how to program that and then that's what will stick and then you've got time to create affinities rather than you're just reading this screenplay

56:46200 times yeah but so so like doership that is obviously laying claim to things you do does it also work then as well like believing outside forces like luck and fate play a huge part is it also like the doership of the universe or doership of other other people yeah well that's often that's a projection as well isn't it yeah is that and and in a way that's got something you know as part of the human predicament is that we want to give up responsibility right yeah we want that you know it's uh it was god's will yeah you know and i hear this

57:20quite a lot um uh it was god's will inshallah uh if god wills and it's like well what so god willed the air crash and so they have more for it but also it was god's will that that guy survived it it's all god's will yeah i think you start to go down that route too much then god all of a sudden becomes pretty narcissistic and evil it picks and chooses and it's kind of becomes very like oh dear like it's like what time is this that i'm worshiping that brings down plane loads of people

57:54as part of his will that we will never understand because it's yeah well it's just thoughts jordan it's all just thoughts the whole thing isn't it and what is religion is a whole load of thoughts they're just ideas yeah worry is only a thought big one for actors right well big one for everybody yeah i mean what is worry so worry is seeing pictures of what you don't want to happen yeah isn't it it's seeing pictures of the obstacles to purposes so what you want to happen is your

58:31purpose and worrying is trying to navigate the internal obstacles that have come as a result of your purpose right every purpose comes with obstacles some more than others and the egotistic purposes come with more obstacles because of course the purpose of an ego purpose is you want certain people to think certain things and it's a bug of that because you can't control what other people think so no wonder people are with egotistic purposes become so burdened and miserable yeah yeah yeah so worry is is really if you understand creative visualization and the relationship between the physical universe and

59:08your ideas about it you know some schools of thought say our physical experience of life is a reflection of the ideas we have about life so if we think life is suffering life will be suffering if we think life is hard because our parents thought life is hard we're going to think life is hard and life will be hard yeah you see what i mean so you could say in that count that worry is praying for what you don't want yeah and making it happen yeah and making bringing it on yeah okay that's the thing

59:39isn't it our minds are constantly making predictions because it needs to to protect itself but those predictions are often inaccurate and and yet we put so much emphasis on them being accurate i think that's that's where worry starts to kind of overtake is our brain is simulating possible outcomes and yet we're constantly choosing again it probably comes back down to that confirmation bias we're looking for the things that are possibly going to go wrong well i remember this there was a guy in my philosophy group some years ago i don't know what happened to him but i remember him giving an example that he

1:00:12would he likes to worry so much right he's so gripped by worry it's his favorite occupation he was realizing within the class that he just spends a lot of time doing this and he said the other day he noticed himself worrying that he'd forgotten what he should be worrying about but sneaking his own tail yeah because because because what's happened is is the mind is once this is mind erosion isn't it is using a frequent pattern of thinking the worry and that and taking

1:00:47every event and creating worry for it every future event and and creating a worry becomes a habit of mind you train the mind you train the mind to literally bring up all the obstacles to every thought that you ever had i remember one student gave me an example of her life and she said that when i go on an aeroplane she said yeah everybody else is settling down and you know reading the on-flight magazine and you know uh uh taking their seat and preparing for the flight she said she's literally thinking right when

1:01:18this mother goes down i need to i need to grab one kid under this arm the other kid under the other that woman there is going to get in my way so i'm going to have to elbow her in the face if i want to be the first down the emergency slide and she said this is what's going on in her head whilst everybody else is is is getting prepared for the flight everyone else is blissful anyway but it's a preoccupation i mean we know because we understand shadow purposes that what's happened

1:01:50is she started with the purpose i want to feel secure and i want to survive the mechanism has got out of hand through frequent repetition and now she has a purpose i want to have a frightening life yeah because she's living in a constant state of fear seeing obstacles to every thought that she ever has this is and only sees like worrying and frightening situations right it's predicting all the worrying and frightening things are going to happen yeah well it all went back to when she was a child so obviously we i helped to analyze this and when she was a child she was coming home from school

1:02:22and she was uh um waiting for a train and a man threw himself in front of the train right in front of her so she got that life is vulnerable and dangerous and that's where the that trauma of that that she just hadn't managed to process it just translated itself into a massive existential insecurity and therefore a massive desire to be secure so the mind just runs all the time on what what can go wrong

1:02:57now what can go wrong now what can go wrong now yeah i think a good metaphor for this is like a really over enthusiastic security guard but also probably one that's quite inept like you know paul blart mall cop there's no real threat but like the mind starts inventing all this like suspicious activity and it's setting off false alarms you know like that all that might that noise might be an intruder in the house or i think even like more commonly that that text or that email that's come through that oh it's disaster that means something's wrong that means that person's upset with me or you

1:03:29know or that this person obviously doesn't like me because of the way they've looked at me you know kind of analyzing every little tiny little thing to see something that could possibly go wrong yeah it's helpful you know sometimes but like we say when we've got potentially 60 000 thoughts going through our our mind we've got this bandwidth which is taken up with what could go wrong now you know what what could go wrong now what could go wrong now yeah well it's interesting you put it like that because also it becomes a kind of preoccupation and um going back to the episodes we did on the

1:04:03games people play yeah it certainly serves to uh fill up the time between birth and death having a good worry yeah and yeah i often find myself as well thinking back to to a time that nothing much was going on in my life but i had worries why because i had the free time to to invent worries you know i had a bit of spare time so therefore what what must be going wrong in my life now it must be this it must be that your brain's not taken up with that activity like say it goes into some other kind of default oh well it must be this then so yes don't worry about

1:04:36but there is a slight payoff because if you're always worried and you're seeing obstacles you must be continually stimulating the adrenal system right yeah so there's a little high that you're getting from from continually doing that it's addictive worry is addictive and but it can be stopped with awareness it's like those i guess helicopter parents isn't it or they say it can drive people insane looking for the tiniest thing that could possibly go wrong and it affects other people's

1:05:07lives i guess doesn't it then that kind of level of micromanagement well here's a thought sod's law do you know what sod's law is is it anything that could go wrong will go wrong yeah if something if something could go wrong it will go wrong i mean that's a thought in itself isn't it yeah yeah and i think what's apparent from this conversation jordan is everything is just a thought even what what's propelling me to say these words now is just a thought you had to have the thought when you read this oh this would make a good podcast episode it is all thoughts like i mean as you know from

1:05:39the course is when we look at attention we often when we come to the understanding that we can look at life or what is life really it's a series of objects of attention you know it starts in the morning with your first thought and then the chain of objects of attention go right there up until sleep that is life it's a continual chain of objects of attention and and as an actor that's what you're doing you're you as you know i call this the score of the part it's like the choreography of what am i

1:06:10thinking now what am i thinking now what am i thinking now until you know i i give the analogy of dominoes right yeah i love that analogy yeah that every thought is you're setting them up in rehearsal you've got a two and a six followed by a double six followed by a one and a one followed by that and you're building these objects of attention and then when you go on stage you knock the first one and yeah i love that and actually because that very fact the process of you know prepping and doing all that kind of stuff but all it takes is that one activation and then it all lights up all

1:06:41it follows you can go through that whole shoot of the film or the whole night on stage and it all just follows naturally because you've prepped because you've put all those dominoes in all it needs is that one little bit to activate it exactly because you know what you're doing you know and you and you act because you did the work in rehearsal so you don't have to worry when you turn up on set because if you've turned up on set and you haven't done the work in rehearsals you've just learned the lines and thought about how you're going to say them then you're going to have fear yeah it's just realizing that you don't know what you're doing it's that stage fright yeah if you knew what you

1:07:14were doing you wouldn't be afraid if you if you had nothing to prove you wouldn't be afraid talking about fear that is the next line and then it gets kind of a slightly kind of upper level in terms of the energy fear is only a thought it gets quite quite similar but i guess probably more problematic because obviously we've talked about this in the emotions episode like fear is you know a response that's necessary for us like fear is helps us to avoid danger you know in neuroscience it's like the amygdala lights up and it comes into process that's all it is right so it's the body's

1:07:49alarm but it's not necessarily a prophecy of something that's going to unfold it's it helps you engage you for potential threats but fear is a thought layered on top of bodily reactions is another way of saying that isn't it it's it alerts us to the threat but it's it's it's always something that might happen and and our body doesn't really know the difference recently i heard ethan hawk was was talking about when he was shooting training day and there's that scene where he's taken by the the gang in the house and he's beaten up and handcuffed and thrown in the bath and a shotgun's put in his

1:08:22face and he's facing you know death but he talked about how when he shot that scene it was obviously quite early on in his career but on the way home driving home from that he said he felt like he'd faced death that he was about he was still feeling like he was about to die and he hadn't quite learned to kind of shed that as an actor that his his amygdala and his whole fear system was properly kind of going like the clappers because he'd made that situation real he'd really thought i'm gonna die i've got you know this is this is it for an actor you're gonna have to be able to like we've said to

1:08:53kind of take off the character at the end of the day and not let it affect your day-to-day life right well the talent of an actor is the ability to make that which is unimportant important but you can only do that by making that which appears to be important your own life unimportant yeah that's it that's freedom yeah i mean the psychology of fear is that we're really we're anticipating the obstacle to a purpose right the first precondition of fear is desire you have to want something and then the

1:09:25mind will create that you worry about the fear is that of the opposite right and there's a useful function in that to review you know what are the potential obstacles ahead but again as we were saying with the worry the mechanism kind of gets stuck and we're creating these fears and really what we're doing is rehearsing in case that's the outcome yeah you know what i mean and rather like nightmares you know that there was a scientist who did a study devoted his life to studying nightmares and the

1:09:59question like are they natural and the conclusion he came to was yes he said that prehistoric man would have uh feared and had dreams about being attacked by a saber-toothed tiger because there was a genuine risk that he would be attacked by a saber-toothed tiger so why was he having a dream about it well to have a rehearsal in case he gets that the his brain understood that this is a threat to his survival so by having the nightmare he's really having a rehearsal of what to do in the event of being

1:10:33attacked by a saber-toothed tiger so then if it actually happens he's actually more prepared you see it's just nature giving us tools to survive with yeah where that goes wrong i think you know things like the algorithm and you know social media they play on our fears don't they they crank up that and they can lean into those things that we're afraid of where you get things recently like protests against immigration because it's always like these are dangerous men that are going to you know kill you and your family and if you think like that then you're going to have this fear response which then

1:11:05triggers this kind of mass panic triggers this kind of level of violence and um rage against people that aren't don't look like you that's kind of how yeah and so all those people with all their self rejection and unfinished thinking can project it onto the migrants sure yeah i mean that's what jung that's what what jung said that's what nazi germany was all about was because of the aryan perfectionism and this idea of an air perfect aryan race of course human beings aren't perfect they fall short of

1:11:35perfection and this creates a psychological shadow in the national psyche what are they going to do with it finish off their thinking and admit their own shortcomings no let's let's collectively project it onto this shadow onto someone else and we're seeing so much of that today because humans are pretty predictable in that sense the other the brain can be hacked in in that way crank up the fear fear nodule on on that yeah kind of let's pump pump them full of this you know dangerous way of looking at it i i came across a metaphor so that was really nice for for fear and worry seeing it as a bad movie

1:12:10director it's it's like a director who only makes disaster movies and the budget is endless the plots are ridiculous and your mind thinks it deserves an oscar for best worst case scenario it shows you this whole kind of the insanity of all isn't it the kind of the stupidity of it it's just a thought like you say yes well fear f-e-a-r false evidence appearing real or f-e-a-r forget everything and run okay now the biggie death is only a thought well this is this is probably the place where people

1:12:51go hold on what do you mean by as if they've followed on before yeah i saw my granddad in his coffin and he was dead what do you mean yeah it's a pretty radical claim yeah yeah well if you you think about it again there's that word think um you don't know what death is except you have a concept of death you have some thoughts about death i mean some people avoid thinking about death at every cost because they're so afraid of it but really you don't know anything about death do you

1:13:24see what i mean it's not it's just the only thing you know about death is a concept of your own death death now the shankacharya says you didn't remember your birth and you won't remember your death but then he goes on to say that for the simple reason that there is no such thing as birth or death now what he means by that is that the the life and death they're really it's just an appearance that really there's just the causal realm of pure consciousness the absolute and then arising from

1:14:02that a being for a temporary and then it disappears back into the absolute and then another being it disappears back into the absolute it's this appearance and disappearance within within the within the uh within the physical world but actually the the consciousness which you know is the same consciousness that's allowing you to hear these words now and look through your eyes now um doesn't have a beginning and doesn't have an end it's uh in sanskrit it's called anuntum it means unending

1:14:36uh it's unlimited and so once you begin to understand the causal realm you understand that really there is that for the self for the consciousness there is no birth and death the birth and death is only of the body so it's and of course and that's the laws of nature and the only way to escape death is to escape being born in the first place and uh neither us nor any of our listeners have obviously managed to achieve that um but from the perspective of now death is just a concept

1:15:11yeah i guess that's the whole point isn't it like psychologically reframing it in that way can only help reduce the anxiety of it all and help make life more meaningful in the present right that's i guess that's the point that it's recognizing the self as this like ever present thing that suddenly removes that existential terror because obviously as human beings we're trying to to find certainty but if you're looking for certainty in something that is uncertain and and unknowable in that sense that's

1:15:43going to cause terror that's going to cause fear that's going to cause anxiety whereas this idea of death comes it becomes a taboo subject isn't because people just don't know what's going on they just don't know what's going on no but it's only a thought we only have a concept of it it's just a thought so why have fear of it yeah yeah that all it does is make us more attached to life and all the the attachment to life does is make us fear death even more right a vicious cycle yeah yeah i like to call the present moment the fearless desireless present when we come into the present

1:16:20and we're really here there's no more clamoring after any desire there's nothing to prove and fear's gone there's no fear we become free yeah is it you can often feel see that as well don't you in people who do either have a near-death experience or you know some kind of illness which is going to lead to their death the death of their body that there comes a point near the end when fear starts to subside and it becomes beautiful you know you get this really kind of quite kind of profound moments

1:16:54during the last moments right is it's because it's the fear and the desire is all kind of just falling away as you get closer to that point right yes well you you know that um what who's the guy who's apple oh steve jobs yes yeah yeah so steve jobs finally when he died apparently he sat up in his last moment he sat up and said wow at what he was seeing and then the body but the very last thing he said wow there's a saying isn't there in the in the islamic tradition

1:17:30they say when the angel of death is approaching it's terrifying but when he arrives it's bliss and i saw this and i saw i mean if i shared with you before but i was there when my dad died and at the moment where he died he opened his eyes and he looked right into me and it was like the absolute just looking right into me and it was like the man my dad and all my ideas suddenly fell away and all that was there was the absolute was just the self pure consciousness

1:18:04it was an amazing experience actually it changed my life obviously something like that does change your life it really put me on my path um and in that moment there was a sense of being looked at you know look right into me you know looking right into my eyes he did and the silent thing was do you know who i am yes do you know who you are yes wink like ah and and so my experience when my dad died

1:18:40it was bliss it was like i lost my physical father but gained my as it were heavenly father realized you know that the absolute at the same time it's like wow this is this birth and death thing is just like a piss in the ocean you know it's just wow it's so vast the absolute and it was all there in his eyes in that moment and it was like oh my god i thought that you were gwillam my dad that was his name gwillam he was welsh and oh my god you were the absolute all along and i said it to one of my

1:19:17to my philosophy tutor i told him what had happened and what my experience was and she said what you saw in your father's eyes was real right now if you can see what you saw in your father's eyes in the eyes of everyone you meet you're going to have a very good life as i like to say the secret of human relationships is just remember that everyone you meet is just yourself in another form yeah it's the same consciousness you know i'm looking at your eyes

1:19:51now and your eyes are lit you know there's light in your eyes but it's the same light that's in my cat maizey's eyes yeah yeah do you know what i mean it's the same light and it's that once you understand the consciousness the light that's what's real you know the thoughts come and go bodies come and go time comes and goes yeah but the self remains there and i can see the satwa in your eyes yeah can you feel it feel it totally feel it yeah it's that uplift in it it's the clouds you know

1:20:25the humdrum everyday life we get down to it's really important yeah and it's like i kind of our systems are like regulated it feels just kind of everything's kind of like settled yeah it's like totally yeah you're not consumed by desire yeah and no there's no fear that's the state of self-realization there's a word in sanskrit aprabda the word aprabda means fearless so probda is fear and aprabda is fearlessness and the state of self-realization is the state of fearlessness

1:21:03that's how you know where you've reached there because in self-realization there's no other for you to have fear there has to be something other you know there's i me and the rest but when you understand that there's only one self there is no other so there's no fear fear goes with it but that's the mark of self-realization is fearlessness and that brings us on to the end of this statement or towards the end when all thoughts are stilled pure consciousness remains i mean that's yoga isn't it

1:21:43yoga is the voluntary stopping of the mind that's what meditation is for the goal of meditation is yoga to stop the mind yoga is the voluntary stopping of the mind so when all thoughts are stilled what remains is pure consciousness then he says to bring about peace means to be free from thoughts and to abide as pure consciousness isn't that lovely the thoughts change but not you

1:22:17it's the same self isn't it it's the same self that's been there you know i often say in my intro seminars as a child did you ever used to look in the mirror when you were like five years old and look into your own eyes and say there's a being in there there's someone in there behind the eyes there's someone looking out through the windows of the soul here yeah and i say to them well if in the break you go and have a look in the bathroom mirror is it the same eye is it the same being that was there when you were

1:22:47five and they realized yes it was it's remained constant the body's changed as we know the mind is changed and probably accumulated some ideas some useful probably some not so useful but this essential self always remains the same and to know that is freedom to know that is you know that the the the world kind of shrinks in that knowledge the mountain of the world becomes a molehill

1:23:17in the knowledge that only the self is real yeah i think that's all i guess another way of saying that as well is that the thoughts are just they're coming and going all the time but the part of them part of us that notices them that's the thing that doesn't change that thing that doesn't go yes ever present thing yeah i do i do really remember that as well i remember that feeling as a kid of like yeah like you see looking in the mirror and that kind of weird explosion of this kind of like clarity of being like whoa this is something that's more real than i've ever experienced before it's because it's like

1:23:51you've you're living your story you're living the kind of the humdrum of existence i guess and then something like that just like snaps you out of it like you say they had that moment with your father it's like something something that just all of a sudden the world just seems so much bigger you kind of the whole universe like shows itself to you and you kind of yeah it can be quite kind of overwhelming yeah well it's there's an expansion yeah it's actually not an expansion if we want to be really accurate about it it's a delimiting you know people talk about the expansion of consciousness

1:24:23but but but but consciousness is absolute and unending is unlimited so how can you have an expansion of that which is unlimited it's impossible what we're really talking about are different levels of impediment yes yeah so the expansion of consciousness is really the delimiting of consciousness and of course what is it that limits the consciousness thoughts again we're back to the same thing okay now he gives us an instruction at the end do you want to read that the last one

1:24:57let go of the passing thoughts and abide in the unchanging self isn't that simple yeah let go of the passing thoughts that's all you got to do yeah and then abide in the self it's the you know underlying all this experience even now all the time is the feeling of being

1:25:32itself all of these experiences that we're having all this change is built upon the foundation of the feeling of being the substance of being you know when the mind falls quiet all that remains is just pure being that's the self at the end of the day the self is the field of stillness and silence to know the field of stillness and silence is to know the self

1:26:03thank you for listening to the spiritual psychology of acting podcast as we finish up for the year and as everything starts to wind down we'll leave you with this reminder not every thought you have in your head is the truth especially the ones about getting it

1:26:38right keeping everybody happy or worrying about what's coming next and not believing your thoughts isn't about avoiding life but meeting it more honestly it doesn't remove responsibility or care just loosens the grip of the mind so you can respond to events not react to them so over these next few weeks notice when the stories start up and see if you can just step back even briefly and rest in that unchanging part of yourself that's simply observing

1:27:10that small shift alone can bring about a surprising amount of peace that is it for now we'll be releasing another new episode in the first week of the new year a great chat we had with actor elise arsenal so do look out for that when it drops in january and whether you celebrate christmas or not we hope you have a calm holiday season take good care of each other and we'll see you next time

1:27:52thank you you you you you you you