Know Yourself, Be Yourself

Introduction to Acting

0:00so the biggest obstacle to good acting is unfinished thinking so i figured that the most important thing to teach actors how to finish off their thinking so then they can just go on stage and be the character want what the character wants think the character's thoughts without their own egotistic purposes having to enter or their own self-doubt coming from their negative self-images

0:34having to interrupt the process constantly so that's really sort of the basis of this and this is why it's so important for actors to understand this is not only do you learn how the mind really works and how to organize it for a character but also how to remove whatever's getting in the way

Podcast Introduction

0:51of our creative process hello and welcome to the spiritual psychology of acting podcast we are back and today we are kicking off season four now if you're a long-term listener you'll know that one of the big themes of this podcast is how acting and life are completely intertwined the craft of acting isn't just about performance it's about understanding yourself other people

1:25and the world that we live in and that's exactly what this conversation is about in just a few weeks john will be running a brand new course and this isn't just another acting workshop it's something far richer giving you the practical tools to understand yourself on the deepest level so whether you're an artist looking to free yourself up creatively or someone who just wants to live with more clarity joy and purpose what we're talking about today is for you

Course Overview

1:57in the episode we unpack what the course is all about go through the three higher purposes of human life that form the spine of the course and how its lessons apply both on stage and screen and in everyday life so for the first time this season let's dive straight in

2:23so today we're going to be chatting about the new course you're about to run in about what four or five weeks time it's uh it's a course that i've done in in its initial form was it three years ago now three years ago i've run it once before i'm a perfect product of it i know how you know how good and life-changing it can be but yeah so as someone who has done the course before for me i think a good starting point would and it's something that i'd be interested in in knowing more about is what was the initial seed of this idea why did you why did you want to to put this course together what

2:56inspired you in the first place to to run this course well as you know you know in my time as a teacher of actors and training actors we would find that there would be certain things that would be getting in the actor's way psychological things very often subconscious things and then students would start hiring me and booking private sessions and this has gone on on for many years and developed

Principles of Human Psyche

3:23over many many years and essentially i take people through a process where the first thing we do is we analyze the patterns of thinking you know when i do a private session with someone what we do is i get them to give me some examples i set them a homework first on observations of their thoughts and then we do an analysis so we start to find out what the wiring under the board is what are the subconscious ideas and the purposes which are governing this situation and what are the patterns of thinking

3:56so the first thing is understanding there is analysis and then the next part of the process

Dissolving Obstacles

4:01is once we've done that and establish what's going on the second part is called dissolving so in the dissolving part and this is where my teachings very often differ from traditional psychotherapy is i've developed a way of actually dissolving the obstacles which stand in people's way i won't go too much into what the process is because i was finding that people were telling me that you know their normal situation of therapy and a lot of them were already sort of working with a therapist when they came to see me i i talk about my problems they do reflective listening and they nod and i talk and then uh the session

4:40runs out of time i might have a cry they might ask me to tell me about their mother and i have a little cry and they've got a tissue and then uh the the buzzer goes at the standard 50 minutes and it's like the same time next week yeah you know what i mean so i i saw this is kind of like uh forgive the analogy but it's a bit like playing with poo once you had a poo what do you do with it you don't pick it up and play with it you you flush it you have to have a way of flushing it so what i've

Reprogramming the Mind

5:14developed is a way of helping people to actually dissolve it and then the third part of the process is reprogramming so if this is how i've lived you know i've unconsciously lived all my life to uh please my dead father or you know whatever the thinking is that people discover or everything i do i'm just really doing it in competition with my older sister uh in a sibling rivalry situation or whatever they find out it's like well how would i would i like to live what do i what's really important to

5:46me and usually these are things like well i want to love and i want to enjoy my life and i want to find out and i want to have a fulfilled life so this is all right in words but then what's so amazing about the spiritual psychology of acting is we've got a system of programming this in mental pictures you know of actually programming the picture so the third part is creating the future and the course

Course Structure

6:09itself sort of runs very much in the same way in the first term we look at one of the laws of thinking so what's grown up alongside the development of the spiritual psychology of acting and partly what i inherited from my teacher sam were some some what i call the principles of the human psyche and these are essentially some 20 or so laws of the mind you know this is practical psychology and it's laws of the mind is how does the mind work you know i i always like to say with this to

6:42introduce this course is that did you know that the space behind your eyes and between your ears is the interface for the most sophisticated organic computer in the universe the only trouble is no one ever showed us how to use it properly in other words no one ever gave us the instruction manual when we left the maternity ward we've got this amazing piece of kit um that no one really has been shown how to use properly and of course not used properly it starts creating errors and mistakes

7:14so what this is really is what how does the mind actually work how does it organize itself and what are the principles of the mind and we share them now i share this as part of the actors course

Importance of Self-Awareness

7:26so part of the acting course is does look at these principles of the human psyche and so in the first term we go through all of those principles which are absolutely fascinating as you know and then at the end of that term we look at what is the process of finishing off thinking so what are the practical steps going from the question you know what's bothering me now to freedom and liberation it's the processes of observation and letting go to arrive back to that

8:00and it's a systematic step-by-step process that once you've learned it you've learned it and it starts to become second nature when when you put it into practice so that's a kind of overview that that's the first term and then in the second term the students are asked to bring in observations from their own lives so i set a homework where they look at visible thoughts and then they bring those thoughts to class and then using the tools that they've been been given we start as a group to analyze it so

8:31everybody gets lots of examples and then in the third term the third term is called creating the future and this is you know using everything that we've learned so far how do we really want to live and in this stage we look at well what's the person's individual purpose in life or uh in the sanskrit word for this is the word dharma and you know dharma is one of those big words it means the law but it also means one's path through through life and the theory is is that every individual has an

9:05individual dharma has a unique part to play in this great play of human life uh there are no extras on the divine set as it were and uh discover what is it that really what is their gift service or message to the world that they're here to deliver and then to find a practical means of delivering that so what's the project that you're going to put your attention into where you fulfill your dharma

Discovering Dharma

9:34so that's really the third term but i'm aware that you didn't ask that question did you you asked how did this originate well how did it originate it originated because the people were saying to me look this is amazing stuff that isn't just for actors anybody could benefit from that and also i was also had a lot of confirmation in the form of i've taught some therapists like uh recently i did a workshop in new york and whilst i was there one of my old students from when i used to teach there

10:04regularly who's now a therapist she's the head of um a treatment center she's like the chief therapist now and she tells me that the best training she had was the spiritual psychology of acting and and she uses it constantly in her work as a therapist over the traditional things that that she was taught so she got me to come in and do a talk to the therapists and that was really useful because you know these are trained professionals uh and um they found that extremely useful because i suppose what makes it

10:41different is that what i teach essentially you know to non-actors i would best describe it as being spiritually based practical psychology so the practical psychology means that it's different than the kind of psychology that you might go and learn if you do a degree in psychology uh i've got a niece who's got a master's degree in psychology and she tells me that it was all statistics you know what she was learning is really statistics and she was building on her you know

11:14she's a really good at math she was very good at math and she was building on that but it isn't the practical workings of the mind kind of practical psychology that could help anybody in everyday life and so it's not the full picture is it yeah it's not the full picture no and it also you know psychology comes from the point of view you know psychology being the science of mind and behavior it comes from the point of view essentially that the self is the mind that you are the mind and of course you'll know having studying with me that we're not the mind uh we're not the body we're the self which

11:50observes all of this that doesn't have a form you know the body has a form but the consciousness itself the being doesn't have a form and we come from the starting point that the self whose nature is as we know truth consciousness and bliss or it's also been said that the self is known as shudha buddha mukta shudha means awake buddha means wise and mukta means free

12:25so the self at birth and if you look into a baby's eyes providing they don't need their nappy change or they're hungry they are in bliss and this is sort of natural so it comes from the point of view that you're already whole complete and perfect but then as the life unfolds we accumulate some ideas and these ideas particularly the ideas we hold about ourselves they crystallize and as it were they they form an artificial cover over the natural essence and uh i think as we've

13:01discussed in the podcast in one of the previous seasons that uh modern psychiatry doesn't use the word ego anymore people would say oh it's your ego that's getting in the way they they've got a much better term the narrative self the narrative self is the story you know if you go if you went if you ever went on a first date and someone said to you you know tell me about yourself there's a story isn't there that you tell and essentially in acting this is what we're creating we're creating the character's story because that story what is it essentially it's a collection of mental pictures

13:33and impressions yeah you know one's own story is a collection of mental pictures and impressions so when we create a character in a play what we're creating their um narrative self is a story and also on the course we get to see what these real stories are in ourselves and in the other students you know it's it's all sort of shared uh and and uh it's fascinating but how it began was i'd always thought that and i was told that there's something here which is beneficial to

14:04everybody regardless of whether they're an actor or not and then um some years ago i was teaching a group of actors i had a regular group weekend group of actors a training course a live course and one of the students on the course came up to me at the end of one of the classes and said john this is absolutely amazing what i'm learning here i'm learning so much about myself as well as acting and then he shared with me that actually he works for a company

14:37who promote in the uk the teacher tony robbins oh yeah you know the guy i mean the tony robbins guy and he he teaches sort of some self-development courses and he said john this is better than that it is you know and i work for his company we put on his events he said have you ever thought of designing a course which is for non-actors because i think it would be really helpful and i'd really like to help you to set it up and i said well actually i do have a course that i've been thinking of

15:12which looks at the you know that the spiritually based practical psychology that i teach as part of the spiritual psychology of acting but for non-actors and he said what's it called and i already had an idea for the name of the course which is know yourself be yourself and i got that of course the know yourself that's the injunction written across the doorway at the oracle of delphi is know thyself and they're said to be the wisest words know thyself um i've always been fascinated

15:47what does that actually mean know thyself and i think there are two aspects to that there's one is know your individual self so understand your own patterns of thinking understand what motivates you understand understand your own psyche you know there's that part to it but then on a more deeper philosophical level know thyself is to know the consciousness the witness which is the same in all things you know and so the first part that know your yourself is really what we could call

16:21self-actualization so it's gained it's aimed at helping a person to fulfill the potentialities inherent within their being you know we're all born with different talents uh like i say there there are no extras on the divine set uh we all have a part to play and it's finding out what that part is and playing it nicely you know given that the the end of the day when when you really sit back and contemplate it the universe itself is a great play and where really as shakespeare said you know where

16:57all the world's a stage and we're all players on that stage yeah and so the second part is how do you uh understand the real self and we will call that self-realization so we've got self-actualization is the fulfillment of the potentials within the individual and self-realization is much deeper that's where you actually realize that you're at the unity between yourself and everything else yeah it's a bit like i guess with what we've always had a sense of putting on a front to other people

17:32you know like kind of putting our best self forward you know whenever we speak to people i think that obviously that's been exacerbated a lot in in more recent years because of social media that is very much you're curating a whole and you're kind of geared to that whole any of those platforms are always geared towards projecting your absolute best self you know this very polished curated version and then obviously you can it thrives on the competition of you know other people wanting that life that you've curated i think that's it's it's becoming more prevalent nowadays i think even more so

18:02because we're spending not only is social media massive now but it's also it's kind of taking over more face-to-face actual contact with people so i think if anything we've got this you know i think a lot of people put a lot of effort into showing or trying to prove how special and unique they are when really i think something i got from this course anyway was realizing that we're all unique and we're all special it's almost we want other people to think something of us which is really one step removed from the actual source of it isn't it that's it's kind of getting yourself out of the way

18:34in that way well like i say in the course you are a unique expression of the one consciousness of the absolute um so in that way yes you are special but then so is everybody else so uh yeah um the be yourself bit i forgot to say jordan that actually came from when i was teaching in new york regularly in the noughties there was a club night put on by a dj called danny tanaglia uh he's quite a famous sort of house and techno dj and he and the club and i never went i do know danny tanaglia's work you

19:10know as a as a dj but the the club night was called be yourself and i always thought what a great name for a club night you know and so it's kind of a mixture of the um know yourself the injunction at the delphic oracle and be yourself danny tanaglia's club night kind of yeah put together to know yourself be yourself yourself as one word that's the individual self and then be yourself separate word self means be your real self in the world show up in the world as your real self yeah it's

19:46that's nice i guess well because it's the know yourself part is the the first step right the awareness is the really most important part but then to be yourself you've got to turn that into practical application the knowledge can't just stay stay as it is it has to kind of be manifest in some way right well exactly we do we we you know i encourage the students obviously not to to hide their candle under a bushel yeah you know and to put it up on the hill so everyone can see it you know is that shine your light on the world this this kind of thing but there's you know a lot of people and

20:18even actors that you think that would want to be discovered and seen they've also got this neurosis that they want to be undiscovered for the things they're not comfortable about themselves for so this is this this current internal cat and mouse game you know of covering up of wanting to be undiscovered for my brilliance but undiscovered for my you know for the obstacles for the things that my deficiencies yeah it reminds me of that quote the um i think it's often attributed to nelson mandela

20:52but i think it's the author marianne williamson it's the our deepest fears that were more powerful beyond measure it's our light not our darkness that that frightens us i remember that i had a tutorial at drama school with a tutor who who said that very thing that she was like you're stopping yourself from like being great from like being your your natural self and i think like you say that's the kind of almost neurosis of the actor isn't it that you you often find with a lot of actors they have this big ego but yet this crushing uh kind of sense of inadequacy and it's that kind of

21:23it fluctuates between the two that i know that adler is alfred adler is a inspiration and a lot of his work is about um superiority and inferiority complexes isn't it it's that kind of it's the flicking between the two that both are are equally as dangerous yes they are and of course you were saying about the social media is everybody that that's uh promoting their shiniest best self um that their best uh narrative self they're projecting onto the screen but of course you know

21:54and i've seen this because students that do this have shared this with me it also creates a shadow and we're seeing this more now you know the shadow that's created between the that which you aspire to be and you show the world compared to that which you really believe yourself to be there's a gap and that gap is the depth of the shadow there's a simple principle which which probably this is one of the actual principles of the human psyche which is part of the course and that's that whenever we go

22:27for a purpose that comes from let's call it a negative self-image so say for example i have a purpose i want to be superior and it's coming from a self-image i'm not good enough right simple generic uh self-rejection i'm not good enough and therefore to make up for that to compensate for that i want to be superior right and i i depict it on the course as a seesaw on one end of the seesaw the purpose i

22:59want to be special and on the other end of the seesaw uh i'm not good enough right and they flip between the two and when the person is fulfilling their purpose they're happy apparently and when they're not they're sad right they're watching obstacles to that purpose and of course i teach that you know to come to the fulcrum point the bit in the middle which is neither this nor that which is still and steady and that's the real self it has no it's not the pair of opposites but one of the principles is is that whenever we go for a purpose that's come from a negative self-image

23:33we unconsciously strengthen the self-image because it's only people who think they're not good enough who want to be superior yeah so you can't have one without the other and that you know obviously when people find that out the purpose to be superior becomes less and less attractive because really it's just an affirmation of my own inferiority the need of the purpose you know yeah yeah yeah so it would be good to then delve into the three higher purposes of human life

Solving Problems with Life

24:08which can form the backbone of the know yourself be yourself course and the first one is solving your problem with life can you talk about that one yes uh solving our problem with life so that's number one uh that's i call these the three higher purposes of human life or the three dharmas the three duties that we all have an opportunity to attend to during this lifetime uh if we want to evolve and the first one as you say is to solve our problem with life now have you

24:40ever met anyone who doesn't have a problem with life no if you think about if you look about all the people you've ever met all the people you've seen on the bus on the subway all the family relations or anyone you've ever got to know intimately they all seem to have one thing in common and they all have a problem with life now it seems to be part and parcel of the deal there's one philosophy that actually says and i think this is very useful it's certainly worth considering that the problem that

25:11we have with life is a mixture of the problem that our mother had with life and our father had with life so one of the things i ask the students to do is to ask themselves the question what's your father's problem with life or whoever the male caretaker was you know in early life it might not have been your actual biological father uh whoever that reference point was and what's your mother's problem with life which uh is uh and then to think of it in terms of well what have you inherited

25:44and in a way by us solving our problem with life this is human evolution you know each of us has an individual problem and if we solve that that's how as a as a as a race that we evolve by solving those problems with life so it seems to be inherent and what i found is and this is through just through direct experience and lots of it is that our problem with life comes down to our problem with our relationship with ourselves it's who we think we are um is and i say that uh very markedly who we

26:22think we are you know we need the point of reference to know who we really are in which the course you know every every lesson starts with meditation and some reflection on ancient wisdom and the words of the wise to bring us back and remember who we are you know before we start going into the mind um but it's it's finding out what is that problem with life and of course we do this in acting you know one of the questions i i get you to ask when you're working on a character is what is this character's problem with life yeah once you work there you've got the key to the character you've got the key do

26:56you know what i mean and also what is the situation that the character is creating in the play that is a recreation of a situation from early childhood or from the past let's say do you see what i mean is that and that when when you work that out and that the character is living in a certain pattern of thinking and then you create the original life situation that created it it brings extraordinary depth to the performance yeah you can see it in the back of their eyes when

27:32the actors create the character properly you can see it in in the character's face that's the thing isn't it i think with a lot of actor prep you can do all this backstory like what you know where did they grow up and all that kind of stuff i think a lot of actors don't realize what is it for like what is is it just useful to know or is it i guess it's how to practically turn that into the character's situation or even i guess you know when actors go on they go and shadow the the profession you know like you know like de niro did driving taxis for taxi driver and it's kind of that can often

28:04become self-indulgent just doing it for the sake of it or just doing it for any other purpose to kind of be special that you you you put in all this hard work and effort but really it's just understanding where this character is in this situation here what's in the back of their mind which is now starting to become manifest in in the scene yeah but you can write pages and pages as an actor of backstory yeah but uh unless it's in your head unless you pictures it's meaningless you know obviously in the in the process of just writing it down you do get some pictures but as you know what

28:35i teach is you need to actually get in there and create the pictures in active imagination come active yeah yeah yeah well i give an example actually that you know because i asked the question in if anyone's ever done my intro seminar which to the spiritual psychology of acting which if you hadn't i think you'd really enjoy it if you're an actor or even if you're not an actor i always say so what's the biggest obstacle to good acting and there are two things really the first obstacle to good acting is a lack of knowledge so there are you know there are different schools there are certain sort of

29:11schools or techniques that use a variety of different artificial means to to create the character and they often contradict one of them calls objective actions actions objectives they don't know what purposes are the terminology is all over the place and it comes down to at the end of the day what does the tutor or director like or dislike rather than is there an actual criteria of good acting so that's one of the things that obviously you know the spiritual psychology of acting brings to an end it gives you

29:45the clear knowledge of how to do your job properly but then i'll give an example of the the other biggest obstacle to great acting and i say well imagine i'm playing romeo uh in romeo and juliet and i'm gonna go on stage and if i was a really bad actor the question i would have asked myself is how shall i say these lines how shall i say these lines to sound impressive how shall i say these lines to show them how i don't know

30:19sexy i am or or what my great comic timing is or whatever and that the of course you know this is coming from the actor's ego that the actor wants to be admired or or the actor wants to impress etc then i say a slightly better actor would ask themselves the question in this scene as romeo what's my purpose what do i want what's the what type of happiness human happiness is driving me and then i might reflect i don't think ah i want to be loved right as romeo in this scene i want to be

30:54loved by juliet i go okay so then i write that down in my notepad and again just because it's in my notepad doesn't mean it's in my thinking yeah so how do i turn into my thinking when i have to create pictures so i imagine that i'm looking into juliet's eyes and when i look into her eyes it's like i could see right into her soul and it's like sometimes i feel that that when i look at juliet she's the only person who's ever really looked at me there's a connection and when we have this moment

31:29where we see as it were each other's souls we always smile and i know when i hold juliet in my arms her hair smells of coconut because she puts coconut oil in her hair and then when i'm about out and about and i smell coconut i always think of juliet in fact i think of juliet most of the time at the moment and then when i kiss juliet's lips they're so soft they're like two kissing cherries and then

32:05i say to them right what's happened to me now and they go oh you've changed i said was i acting like a lover and they go no you you were a lover you had because you had the thoughts was it easy to hold your attention yes it was compelling and i say to them look if you've got the pictures it's interesting if you don't have the pictures it's boring you know yeah and then i say okay so now i've got this and now i go to go on stage and now because in my subconscious the real reason why i'm going on

32:38stage and the unexamined reason why i'm going on stage is i want to be admired for example i was the lead part in my school play and i was given great adoration and homage and respect by my peers and i'm really unconsciously or consciously trying to recreate that situation as an actor right so the purpose is i want to be admired by the audience and so what's more important to me juliet loving me

33:09or the audience admiring me well i don't really care whether juliet loves me because i'll tell you the truth juliet i don't really like her the girl playing juliet she has hummus breath every night she eats hummus and when we go to kiss i get this horrible whiff of garlic and i've complained to the director about it and he says that i'm just jealous that she got a better review than me by the way everyone i'm just making all this up right and none of this is in reality she got a better review so actually the girl playing juliet is an obstacle to my purpose as an actor and unconsciously i want

33:45her to fail so i can be the winner of the acting competition or what about say for example my mother was a dancer none of this is true i'm just making this up but so my mother was a dancer and the first job she got after she finished dance school was in a touring company and the lead dancer of that company got her pregnant and said he was going to stay with her but then left her soon after the baby was born and now i am the spitting image of the man who ruined her life and she projects and transfers

34:18this relationship with that she had with my father onto me and she deprives me of love and i grow up with the thought that i'm unlovable now i try to program romeo's purpose i want to be loved and my brain just isn't wired you know that like how the synapses that we create uh synaptic connections the connections just haven't been able to be forged right this is what we call a mind erosion yeah the connections haven't been able to forge so i can't get the pictures now what do we call this one is is the

34:53actor's own egotistic purposes the other is the actor's self-rejection these two aspects combined we call unfinished thinking so the biggest obstacle to good acting is unfinished thinking so i figured that the most important thing to teach actors given that this is that well other than just showing them how to do their job properly finally is to how to finish off their thinking so then they can just

35:24go on stage and be the character want what the character wants think the character's thoughts without their own egotistic purposes having to enter or their own self-doubt coming from their negative self-images having to interrupt the process constantly so that's really sort of the basis of this and this is why it's so important for actors to understand this is not only do you learn how the mind really works and how to organize it for a character but also how to remove whatever's getting in the way of

35:55our creative process yeah so what would you say then is the or what are the most common problems with life you see time and time again what are the what are the ones that keep cropping up for people that you've you've uh you've worked with well it's interesting there's always a point well you'll notice there's always a point when i'm teaching where uh the student will come up to me after a few classes and go john i i i think i've worked out my self-image and i go oh that's really good what is it and i go

36:27is i'm not good enough right and i'll go well that that's good that's a good start my question is though which particular brand of not good enoughness do you consider yourself to be there are many brands right so let's get a bit more specific and this is one of the principles on the course is actually we have to find the name that the complex gave itself when it was first formed

36:57so it goes like this the actual principle goes like this is that invisible mental sensations unconscious thoughts can only be brought back into the chamber of visible thinking that's the mind's eye that's the visible thoughts by finding the name it gave itself when it was first formed so for example i had a student i was working with in new york when i was teaching there a lot and she did this and she she she was going you know it's i'm an idiot i'm not good enough she was coming up

37:32with all these kind of generic stuff and then one morning she came into the class and she went i've got it i've worked out here's myself and she announced it to the class i said well what is it she went it's i'm a doofy jerk first of all as an englishman i had no idea what she was talking about okay a jerk that's like a wanker a wanker is a self-indulgent person uh the american equivalent but i have no idea what a doofy is and they all laugh when yeah doofus and i don't know what a doofus is um but it seemed to work for her and once she understood this it clicked now when you when

38:09you name it it becomes an it rather than an i does that make sense rather than i am this it just becomes a thought that can be observed now of course the next question is always how did this thought get into my head in the first place this is what we call as you'll know the life situation so it's a moment of intense imprinting often you know for good and bad sometimes they're positive things sometimes they're traumatic things but where a moment was imprinted in the subconscious a

38:42situation which lay the printing the imprinting of who am i who are other people what is this life what am i doing here what do i need to be okay around here what do i need to do to be okay around here echoing what we learned from the transaction analysis yeah yeah podcasts and this creates a kind of imprint now once you understand how this works in yourself what are your own life situations where your own self images were formed and you do some work on discovering this then there's nothing

39:17better for as an actor to understand how this arranges itself in the character you know as you know i always say to students in the intro you are a walking laboratory for what it is to be a human character so the first character you can learn to analyze is your own well this is it we do it through this um the principles of the human psyche and the know yourself be yourself program yeah that's definitely something i got from the course it's something i really struggled with when i was a young actor was this kind of there's a disconnect there's always i was always trying to

39:50reach to another character trying to kind of get somewhere or you or had a real fascination with playing characters wildly different from myself and really mainly i think because i didn't really like myself i didn't think i had much kind of you know value or worth or thought it was boring and so there was a sense of either not liking who i was or just not you know what it really was was not knowing who i was that that was the main the main block right but i think you know once you do know yourself that's that's the whole point that you can then play any character i think that that was the

40:20the gift that the course brought brought for me was that once you connect to that that specially unique part of yourself that's the thing that lights up the screen that's the charisma right that's the thing that people flock to see or people are captured by is that part that is really you and it's i guess a little bit like one of the biggest acting kind of breakthroughs i guess with stanislavski's magic if or the what if you know like what if you were this character in this situation but the the only way that works is if you have the baseline of of you right like there has

40:50to be a something to then imagine what you're going to be what what that if or that what that magic if is going to turn into if you don't have the initial base of who you are that knowledge of yourself then you you can't play anybody truthfully i don't think well as you know we have a little equation on the course of what is a character it's i plus pictures right experiences stored as mental pictures equals character you know but who is jordan is the universal self i plus jordan pictures if you were playing hamlet it's the same universal i isn't it it's the same

41:26witness yes but with hamlet pictures yeah do you see what i mean i plus pictures equals character is that's the thing isn't it there's there's as many helmets as there are actors and why do you want to see a new helmet is because you want to see the actor's version you want to see what's different we already know what hamlet is but we want to see this this person as hamlet we want to see what their version is their universal truth you know bringing that well you know they always say you know gilgood's hamlet was the definitive hamlet for the lovies that like to go to the theater but

41:57but you know gilgood's hamlet was gilgood's hamlet yeah and of course you know the pictures that you make the character from are from things you've seen not necessarily just actual experiences from your own life but things we've seen on television films that we've watched adverts you know we're collecting these images is all the time so you know gilgood's would have created the character of hamlet from the materials of his own experience and um you would do it the same but what's to say that gilgood's is better than yours uh i doubt it would be actually maybe less stuffy maybe less stuffy yeah

42:32so the second higher purpose of human life is actualizing your unique gift or as you said earlier your dharma can you describe a bit more about what what your dharma is yes well the theory

43:04goes when i what i teach the students is that um we're all cells in the body of humanity so every individual and as we'll know that that uh the purpose of every cell is to serve the other cells this is true in in biology and when you get rogue cells that lose reference with the whole and begin attacking the neighboring cells well this is uh called cancer uh what is cancer in society it's when people have forgotten their part of the whole and then they start you know attacking their

43:36neighbor or stealing from their neighbor etc that's crime in society but the real purpose of every cell is to serve the other cells and then the body of humanity works as a single cohesive whole now there's no good a retina cell wishing that it was a toenail cell that's just silly or the or the other way around so the thing is to find out you know what is our unique part to play and how do we discover that well

44:06we ask ourselves the question if all my security and financial needs were taken care of how would i most love to serve the universe i used to say how what would i do and someone told me that they would just retire and go on holiday for the rest of their lives um so i thought i'd better rephrase the question there because we're talking about service you know dharma is a form of service so if all my security needs were taken care of how would i most love to serve the universe and the other question

44:37of course is what are my natural talents it talks about this in the bhagavad-gita it says it's um better to play your own part badly than it is to play the part of another well so in the bhagavad-gita krishna in there he talks about finding our dharma finding our path in life that in which we have a natural aptitude for and we'll often find that this is also the thing that we enjoyed the most that we really love so i start the students with kind of asking themselves those questions and then we define it

45:12so for example um my own dharma is to facilitate the raising of the level of consciousness in humanity through education theater cinema and the related arts because i know what my dharma is right it was already there i just defined it i just put it into words when i wake up on a monday morning i know what i ought to be doing do you see what i mean because i know what my life's purpose is i know what's important what isn't and i know what's irrelevant you know i know what things that come

45:46into my field that don't bother don't bother with that because it isn't conducive to my dharma so it kind of streamlines your life as well uh once you work out your dharma yeah and again that's the thing isn't it you're also people talk about like finding your purpose isn't it oh where is it you're looking for it but really it's it's in you right i think you know if you're going out for a walk or if you're on a train somewhere and you kind of realize that everything is kind of locked inside you right you're not having to go and search for something it's all kind of something's

46:17there and it's and it's been with you your whole time and i guess is finding your dharma more like uncovering it it's uncovering it from something that's deeply hidden lying there dormant yes it often is it's dormant and i also say that to people like no one can tell you what this is you it's for you to just yeah it's in your own heart and you have to look in there you know if someone is telling you what it is then it's then that's their desire for you you know what you what they think you ought to be doing you know your parents or your teacher whatever what you think but you have to find it

46:48authentically for yourself and and i also shared that you know it might be that it isn't a current profession like you know i didn't go to the job center or when i when i when i was uh when they put me in front of a careers advisor and then what do you want to be when you grow up i didn't say well you know i've noticed that the system of stanislavski wasn't really finished and it kept changing this is when i was 14 and i think what's needed is uh a deeper understanding of psychology to really

47:19make this work and of course you know stanislavski's starting point was with yoga but he kind of forgot that so we need to go back to the spiritual part and i think my my what would i like i'd like to have a job as a a teacher of the spiritual psychology of acting of course there was no such thing you know there was no such thing as that and and and it's arisen from my own natural abilities you know what i've been blessed with and finding a way to share that with the world and that's how the spiritual psychology of acting as has evolved but i couldn't go to the job center and see if

47:51there's a job there for a teacher of the spiritual psychology of acting i had to create it and what i'm saying is for the world you know as it's changing and it's changing dramatically at the moment the needs of the of our age will will change with it and so this will require different talents you know different things that may not be just your traditional um professions that we we've we've always had they they might be new things that we'd know that are inconceivable at the moment does your dharma then does it develop is it something that that can shift or change

48:26yes it can it can develop and evolve as you as you change and you i mean that's the that's what we need to understand about purposes as well i don't know if you remember when i when i taught you an introduction to purposes one of the principles of a purpose is what is a purpose it's a perpetually self-adjusting complex of pictures and impressions meaning that we have a purpose and it's what's got you know rather like a carrot that a donkey follows up we follow our purpose but that purpose is continually evolving and changing based on the experiences so as we're living we're getting more

49:03experiences and we're creating where we're collecting more data out of which to create our future purpose so a purpose is a perpetually self-adjusting complex of pictures and impressions and it's the same with our life purpose you know it will evolve and grow yeah and that's the thing i guess isn't it that like you say that you're you're asked at the careers stage at school what you're going to do with the rest of your life and for many people that is that they have absolutely no idea because they're still learning and developing and growing and i think the beautiful

49:35thing i guess about the dharma as well or discovering your dharma you can discover it at any age even though it's your life purpose you can discover what that is when you're 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 right oh i see it all the time i've got so many students that i've got a couple that are in their 70s right yeah and they're so that they've because they finished off their thinking you know that some of them feel like you know they've wasted their life not going for it up until now but you know there's no time like the present and better late than never and they're getting on and actually like for the

50:07first time they're saying actually for the first time they're learning how to do you know they've been doing acting classes all their lives on and off but for the first time they're actually learning how to do their job properly and they picked it up in their 60s and 70s you know and that's and that's wonderful i had a friend who told me that his dad was in his 70s or 80s and had begun training as a dancer and he asked his dad why are you doing it and he said because i want to be a dancer in my next life so i thought i might as well start training now excellent so why do you why do you

50:42think that so many people struggle to recognize their their gift or you know that you know because like you say it's the dharma can be something that is inherently that person is what makes them that person what like you say it's connected to what they love why do you think so many people struggle to find that well there's a lovely thing that there's a lovely thing that the shankracharya said in the conversations with the shankracharya he said that the influences of the world are such as to make

51:12one feel weak feeble and fearful now that's interesting the influence of the world you think about you know you go down the the tube and you're going down to catch the tube on the escalator and what have you got you've got all those images that are flashing in front of you of people with perfect smiles and chiseled jaws and unconsciously you're comparing yourself and then what he says is that the influence of the world is such as to make one fee or weak fearful and feeble which then makes us

51:46feed on rubbish now this rubbish you know can be content it can be you know well i won't well i think people can work out what it is but they feed on rubbish things that you know um constantly scrolling comparing yourself with everybody else there's a number of things which are really feeding on rubbish right feeding the ego etc which only he says make people feel even more weak feeble and fearful right yeah yeah and then he says only good company can undo this

52:21now what is good company good company is the company of the self and that's why as you'll know with all my classes we always start with meditation and we remember who we are and in that remembering who we are you see this great power coming through the students they start to become you know and some people have asked me before well if everybody just realized their true self wouldn't everybody just be the same and it's like well no actually it's completely different the more people are more authentic to themselves the more genuinely unique they are you know what you have certain vogues of fashion where

52:56where people want to be special there's the latest special boots or the latest special haircut or whatever they that you're supposed to have and then everybody looks the same because they all want to be special yeah so being authentic you know you will be unique as we said before you are a unique expression of the one consciousness but so is everybody else it reminds me of something i remember learning on the course which was if you want to be important you have to sacrifice belonging and on the

53:28flip side of that if you want to belong you have to sacrifice being important belonging is such a integral part of i think good mental health and overall level of happiness which is why i think you that when superiority or i guess even you could flip that and say that that kind of inferiority complex when people hold on to that as well the belonging suffers and then you're not then with good company whether it is you realizing the true self or other people who have can that can then uh can then bring that level of consciousness up in you as well i think you know belonging so so integral yeah

54:00the company i mean the ultimate good company is the company of the self yeah but you know when we come together you know and remember the self that you will you saw it for yourself what strength it brings people back to their real self and let's not forget that the whole purpose of the spiritual work associated with the spiritual psychology of acting has one aim and the aim is to help the actor themselves become steady and still in knowledge and being

54:32it's funny when you just say that steady and still in knowledge and being you become steady and still in knowledge and being and the aim is is to create people of substance that know their real self they're not just caught up in in in the game of the ego that they got a real sense of themselves the chakracharya was also asked do we need new art forms for the current needs of the age and he said oh no

55:04the the art forms we have are perfectly good you know theater cinema painting opera etc they're all they're all perfectly good he said what's lacking is people of real substance and experience creating that art he said when a person of good being um expresses what they've seen they as a work of art that art goes straight to the hearts of the people because it's come from a real place like beethoven said from the heart it comes and so to the heart it must go he said of his own music he wasn't thinking

55:39about what pleased people he just knew if it came from the heart they would hear it you know it would be authentic it's the same with books as well i think you know that that's the magic of like reading a really good book is that the authors manage to take what they they see and and you know have the pictures in their head write it in a form that then transmits those pictures into the the reader's head right it's the same as what you know great acting does that you see the actors pictures you see what they're thinking there's the camera picks up on on what's being transmitted through the eyes

56:11yes yeah every artist creates pictures and then has a medium to convey them yeah as you're saying like for the writer it's words so how does you know the work of art for a writer they write a novel what is it it's a collection of pictures how do they transmute it into your consciousness through the words on the page uh the the actors medium by the way is actions is psychological actions how do you know what's the content of the character through their actions yeah yeah which i think there's you know they see a lot of acting that has no actions whatsoever which is why it's so boring isn't

56:45it yeah right all the actions are aimed at the audience they're all like the audience i should i impress rather than that the actions are directed towards the other characters as they should be it does seem to me as well that awareness really is the key but in both those instances you're saying i think you know i i think about times i go on for a walk and that if i come to some kind of realization or some kind of a level of stillness and peace like you're saying there it's it's when i'm not daydreaming i think you know daydreaming is when you're either in the past or in the future

57:16whereas awareness like unlock something especially if you're going out for a walk or something that word there's there's no other thing required of you at that time awareness in the present moment can bring such like relief joy peace can help you future plan you know it's like everything kind of comes with with awareness i think oh and it's psychologically proven isn't it that that there is an uplift in consciousness and mental well-being through being in nature and connecting with nature and just going for a simple walk and connecting with the senses that's the beauty of it it's so

57:49simple you know how do you come out of these incessant daydreams you just practice putting your attention on what's in front of you yeah and that's a spiritual practice yeah i often hear people talk about the you know meditation isn't for them or you know they struggle with or they just can't get get to that stage where everything's settled and it's like well if you can put your awareness and your attention on what's in front of you which is you know a lot of the time that that is what it is in in in very simple terms it's just the pure awareness on on the sounds the sights the smells

58:19that is meditation isn't it you don't need to be necessarily a big spiritual person like we've said you know in the meditation episode it's all about yeah bringing your attention your awareness to the present moment well it's it's one the aim of meditation of course is yoga and yoga is union and uh batanjali in his yoga sutras said that the goal of meditation is yoga and yoga is the voluntary stopping of the mind so when the mind stops then you have an experience of your real self this

58:54awareness and then when that through practice becomes rather like when you go into the meditation you go you kind of dip into the stillness and you become still but then we want to come out of the the that connecting with the stillness and then carry on doing our work but remain in the stillness whilst carrying on our work this is what i call zen and the art of living which also we cover on the course but it is a daily thing isn't it that's that's that's like it's like you say it's we need

59:26to be we're as human beings we're constantly forgetting we need to we need to be re-centering ourselves daily which is why i guess a daily practice of meditation is the best way of doing that isn't it that you can it keeps the thread resetting exactly you know that the world is full of forgetting the influences of the world make us forget who we are and the problem of humanity is that most people it would seem have forgotten who they really are they've become identified with the mind and with these uh rubber clown suits that we inhabit my one's better than yours and all this

1:00:01kind of thing and they've forgotten the real self and so the know yourself be yourself course has been designed very carefully to help us overcome this because you know the ultimate aim of the course and of all the work of awakened state is to raise the level of consciousness um because you know we may have noticed that humanity has some problems and we cannot fix the world with the level of consciousness that created those problems in the first place so we need to move to a higher level of consciousness

1:00:34and the course is one small way of contributing to that you know there's lots of people working in all sorts of different ways at the moment with the same aim um but this is something that that i can provide and something awakened state can provide is is a course to to cut the bullshit and learn how to do it properly to really understand your own mind once and for all but of course people are afraid people are afraid of finishing off their thinking they're afraid of what they might find and this is what keeps them in there but once they make a start and they see it you know the big breakthrough is when you see

1:01:06your thinking and it makes you piss yourself laughing you know what i mean you see how the comedy yeah yeah like i told you sam used to say my teacher used to say we create complicated lives for ourselves for the benefit of other people who couldn't care less anyway there it is yeah yeah so that brings us on to

Realizing True Self

1:01:27the third higher purpose human life which is realizing your true self what what is this is the step then in the course when obviously there's the intellectual understanding that but what is the actual practical side of that that you say it's it's this course is is takes a practical look at how we can self-actualize what what does that look like well the self-actualize a bit is that is the um you know bringing our gift message service to the world that that's the self-actualize actualization

1:01:58self-realization as i mentioned is is is deeper than that this is um well if you remember on the course i taught you that the original shankracharya shankara the philosopher from the 11th century he said that the universe is maya it's a transient it has no permanent reality then he said the absolute is real wow the consciousness is real the universe is unreal i mean most people think it's the other

1:02:30way around yeah that you know the world is real and the absolute is some idea that people have when they go to church or something i don't know but it turns out to be the other way around that the absolute is real and permanent and the world is ever changing but then he said there is no separation between the individual and the absolute in sanskrit it's i am atma brahma this atman this consciousness this self is the brahma is the absolute there's no separation this is self-realization but do you see

1:03:08it there a great analogy that's given in the tradition is that the the ignorance is rather like a thorn in your foot right you've got a thorn there and you use another thorn the idea of self-realization to remove the original thorn but once you've removed the original thorn you can chuck both away you don't need them anymore once you've realized you realized you see what i mean as long as you keep up the some effort to remember and keep them the mind present it will stay there it's like learning to ride a bike

1:03:43once once the penny's dropped you know it it's there it's available for you yeah so so it's it the the vital part of practical application is in the actual realizing of it because you're then if you have actually realized it then you are practically applying it it's getting yourself out of the way right then you're free it's really overcoming who you think you are yeah the obstacle to realizing who you really are is who you think you are behind the door of who you you know if you think of who you

1:04:15think you are as a door once you go beyond that door you someone said to me once one student said well it's a bit like behind the door is the bat cave like the the self-image is like the door of the bat cave and then and i was like what are you talking about and what he meant was the bat cave was the most awesome exciting thing in the universe that's the self but it's but but his analogy was that just beyond the door of the bat cave the door of the back back cave is who you think you are that's your self-image an imagining of yourself it's the relationship you have with yourself which was often

1:04:50learned and is often a replication of a relationship someone else from your childhood had with you and who they told you that that they were and the course gives us the opportunity because it's you know we're running this it's three terms it's 10 lessons a term so we start on the first of october is the first one it's a wednesday and then it runs every week for 10 weeks and then the second term is again it's 10 10 sessions you know the second term then again and that's in the spring term and then in the

1:05:22summer term uh starting in may we do the third term so people have got time you know that we've got time every class starts with a meditation and every class comes with some very carefully chosen words of the wise to put us on track and every class a homework is given a reflective homework which could be either um observing our own thoughts or looking at what our own for example our own ego ideals or what

1:05:55you know the some of these terms that you'll be familiar with um but some of it is just to fall still or some of it is to remember the words steady and still in knowledge and being so these practices are going on during the week do you see what i mean there's practice given every class that the whole group is practicing that week and it's over the time you know it that's why it's a full year course you know which really in itself is a crash course in self-actualization and self-realization

1:06:26if there is such a thing as a crash course in those subjects well it's like i think as well you know you think like enlightenment as a kind of concept as well it seems like something so far removed far off like it's you know like you think well who are the enlightened people like buddha and jesus like maybe mother theresa or um like eckhart toll you could maybe say like you know in more modern terms but really i think something i got remember from the course is that like enlightenment what does it mean it's like it's an enlightenment it's an unburdening right that's all it is it's it's getting

1:07:01yourself out of the way it's the shedding of things which you know things we've accumulated in our daily life you know over the years the course of our daily lives that we just don't need anymore it's it's taken us away from the source and then actually enlightenment is isn't something only for the you know the most spiritual the highest uh teachers it is something that is available to everyone isn't it the road to enlightenment isn't unburdening it's it's and it's available now you know and enlightenment is disenburdenment yes that's it or disendarkenment

1:07:33and what's the burden what's the darkness is ignorance and ignorance is forgetting the reality that what is mental illness mental illness is really delusion do you see what i mean that in other words one's in a picture of the world and the world don't match so they're out of sync and the more people create this individual fairy worlds of their within their own mind the more deluded they become and therefore the more mentally ill they become we work in the opposite direction we want

1:08:05to come back to reality we want to come back to what's real you know and that might mean facing some things in ourselves but um this work tends to have the capacity to turn mountains into molehills you know once you realize who you are those that you become larger and actually the molehills the mountains turn into molehills because you become larger and in perspective they get smaller so you can easily step over them yeah it's a perspective isn't it i guess it's realized in those mountains

1:08:39are molehills it's easy to to jump over yeah we've made we've made them so large in our lives but it's the perspective so what would you say then is the because obviously this is the spiritual psychology of acting podcast and this obviously does help actors but really this is a course for life it's a course for anybody i guess we've touched on it a bit before but what is the practical application for actors and and i guess then on the flip side of that why is it important for for non-actors as well well the most important or the first quality of a great actor is awareness

1:09:12the ability to watch your own thoughts so this is a course first of all in awareness in in the ability to watch your own thoughts and as for an actor that's crucial because first of all you need to be able to see what's getting in the way when you're acting there's something bothering you there's doubt creeping in or there's invasive thoughts coming in and what what the awareness does is you is it creates the space and light to see what's going on so you can do something about it when you're just caught in

1:09:44the mind you can't do anything about it and secondarily the awareness gives us examples as i've as i've said many times the duty of an actor as far as my course is concerned is to observe human nature now why is that important for an actor without judgment right that's the other part that's the difficult bit is doing it without judgment but the why do we need that because our job is to create the life of a human spirit as stanislavski said how are we going to do that if we haven't observed

1:10:16what's around us and and what people find is when they understand their own psychology they understand their own how their self-images create their purposes how those purposes create objectives and visible thoughts the relationship between their visible and invisible thoughts once that's clicked in themselves it becomes really obvious in everybody else you can see it in everybody else yeah and then as an actor you're constantly gathering real observations to create your

1:10:49characters from which means you don't have to resort to cliche yeah so there's a huge huge but i mean this is was developed first of all for actors but then it was pointed out that you know this is this is could be for everybody everybody could everybody needs this john people you know everybody needs some uh understanding of their own mind so that's what i've endeavored to do is create a course that delivers that yeah great and so the actual course itself like you said it's it's over the course of a

1:11:19year three different terms but there are some intro seminars that people if they want to have a bit more information before before the course when are those uh intro seminars i'm running one on the 17th of september wednesday that's from 6 30 to 8 30 london time so la it would be 10 30 in the morning new york it would be 1 30 in the afternoon for two hours and there we're going to go over sort of some

1:11:52of the main principles of the course as an introduction to the to the whole program and from there people can book the course to join me which starts on the 1st of october uh so it's it's three terms of 10 classes a term two and a half hours each class uh so what's that it's a total of 75 hours the whole training and then you're given little homeworks and things during the week and it's not nothing none of the homeworks as you know there's not strenuous they're really enjoyable practices to do to

1:12:24work and then we come back together and feed back on what we've learned and we all learn from each other this is the wonderful thing about working with a group is you just learn so much you know if people share you just you just learn so much so that's how it works so there's another one on the 24th i've got two so one on wednesday the 17th of september and one on wednesday the 24th we'll share the link in the description for the podcast and you just go on the page it's got all the information about the course and you can also sign up to the free online intro seminar and if

1:12:56if anyone can't make the free online intro seminar sign up for it and then send me a note saying you can't actually make it and i'll um arrange for a recording to be sent so you could see the recording of the session yeah and for there are payment plans as well isn't there for people who can't pay in one go or there's there's there's ways of of paying monthly as well as that is that right for the absolutely i mean you know it's really important to me the pricing is i want to obviously you know we have to make a living and we have to pay our bills but i've deliberately make these courses as

1:13:30affordable as possible and they become even more affordable because you can pay with a monthly installment plan which doesn't add up to a lot per month you know it's it works out over the year of something like a price of a cup of coffee a day or something you know it's like could you sacrifice your cappuccino from starbucks or cafe nero you know to for self-realization and self-actualization did you trade that off yeah is it a fair trade yes so yeah it's very it's really important to me that

1:14:04it's really affordable that it's this uh open to everybody so it's suitable for um obviously actors anyone interested in self-development all artists therapists leaders you know i've trained quite a few ceos if you'll see on my website there's some few uh um testimonials from some quite prominent sort of business leaders that i've trained as well that they find it very very useful anyone who's engaged in the field of life you know where anyone who has a mind is really this is um

1:14:39suitable for and wants to understand themselves better and has an innate sense that they haven't yet fulfilled their potential and they'd like to work with with a group under guidance to to fulfill their potential so i'm really excited about it and uh i i can't wait to start i mean as you know we did it before we had a fantastic year working on this and obviously the course has evolved since then i've you know done three years more of teaching studying and researching since then so the course has got a lot

1:15:12richer and uh i can't wait to share it you've been listening to the spiritual psychology of acting podcast if you'd like to find out more want to sign up for one of the intro seminars or if you're ready to enroll all the links you'll need are in the description of this week's episode so go and check

1:15:43those out and if you want a little taste of what's to come later this season have a listen to our season four trailer that went up earlier this week and it'll give you a feel for the kinds of conversations we've got lined up as always thank you so much for listening look after each other and we'll see you next time on the spiritual psychology of acting podcast you

1:16:24you you you

1:17:02you you