WEBVTT

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You made it. (Laughter)

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I've been studying the human potential
for about 25 years now,

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and throughout that time,
everything I've done

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has been an attempt to answer
a sort of a simple question:

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why aren't we awesomer?

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(Laughter)

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Given everything that we know
about psychology and the human mind,

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given everything thousands
of years of spiritual teachings,

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and just life experience,
and the advances in medicine,

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and the deeper understanding of the brain

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why is it that some days
we can get up in the morning

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and feel touched and inspired
by the hand of God,

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and other mornings,

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we can't be inspired to take a shit?

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(Laughter)

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I kind of figured there wasn't going
to be one answer to that question

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(Laughter)

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and over the first 18 years or so,

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I found a lot of things
that were really helpful.

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About seven years ago, I stumbled across
a very simple answer to that question;

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and what made it simple
is that it's just a misunderstanding

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that we have culturally
about how the mind works.

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And that's what I want
to talk to you about today.

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The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said:

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"A man will be imprisoned

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in a room with a door
that is unlocked and opens inwards

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as long as it does not occur to him
to pull rather than to push."

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It's that simple,
but what is that door for us?

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Well, in order to take you there,
I want to take you back, it's 1986.

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And I was not a happy kid,
I was a depressed kid.

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It didn't feel particularly that it was
because I wasn't useful;

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I was loved I was, you know,
surrounded by friends.

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I had no external reasons
for being so unhappy,

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but I was so unhappy that I had a thing
I now know is called suicidal ideation,

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which meant that I thought
about killing myself a lot,

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all day, every day, ongoing.

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This wasn't as much of a problem
as you might think, most of the time,

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because I had stuff to do,
I'd have classes to go to, I had friends.

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But it was always going on
in the background,

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and when it would get quiet outside,
it would get really noisy inside.

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And this all came to a head
in October of that month

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when I had what I now know is called
a psychotic break from reality.

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If you want to get a sense
of what that was like,

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imagine being in my dorm room
on the fourth floor,

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and a giant vacuum cleaner
appearing in the sky

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and sucking your heart
out of your body and out the window.

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This was actually terrifying to me

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because it really felt
like it was happening.

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I hung onto the wall of my dorm room,
and there was a phone there.

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I reached down, and I dialed the number
for the suicide hotline, which I knew,

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and I got a busy signal.

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(Laughter)

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Even then, being sucked out the window
by a giant vacuum cleaner from hell,

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I found that funny.

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(Laughter)

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I cannot imagine what anyone
could have said to me

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that would have done more good
for me than that busy signal

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because it just kind
of popped it in my head,

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and I just popped out of it for a minute,

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and it didn't seem so compelling,
it didn't seem so real.

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I was able to reach down and phone
a friend who lived on the first floor,

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and she came and got me,
and eventually I fell asleep.

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I woke up the next morning,

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and I realized something
that was kind of profound:

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I didn't want to kill myself,
I didn't want to die.

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In fact, I so didn't want to die
that I used every ounce of strength I had

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to stay in that room

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when everything felt like
it was pulling me out that window.

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And that was the first time I realized

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that just because you have
a thought in your head

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doesn't mean it's your thought,
doesn't mean it's true,

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doesn't mean it actually is
what you think,

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it just means there's
a thought in your head.

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I started to kind of think of it
as the suicide thought,

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and I started to notice
- because I wasn't scared of it anymore -

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it's kind of like Bob, the homeless guy,
moved into my brain.

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Every now and again he went off on one,
and it was like, "Oh god, it's Bob again."

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(Laughter)

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Not that I had to do something about it,
it was just the suicide thought,

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and of course,
because I wasn't scared of it,

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It passed through quicker and quicker,

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and I found a new level
of freedom of mind,

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and that got me really interested
in how the mind worked.

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In order to share
how the mind works with you,

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I'll take you through a series
of little experiments,

NOTE Paragraph

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so, we're going to begin
with a picture a monster.

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(Laughter)

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I noticed none of you are running
to the exits screaming (Laughter)

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so this is good,

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this means you're not having
a psychotic break from reality right now,

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you have a sufficient level
of thought recognition

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to see that this is in fact a drawing
of a monster by my daughter Macy

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and is not in fact, in any way,
shape, or form, a real monster.

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Here's the second one; this is also
a representation of a monster.

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This is a tarantula spider.

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In 1997, I'd been doing
this work for a while,

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and I was invited onto a television show
in the United Kingdom

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called "Put it to the test".

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It was a really cool show

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because they took popular ideas
and they put them to the test,

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and the segment right before me
was they wanted to see

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if a car could really stop on a dime

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(Laughter)

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So they got this stunt driver in this car
and put the dime out there;

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he's going 60 miles an hour,
and he did it, he stopped on a dime,

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it was really cool,
but that's not why I was there.

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I was there to put
the NLP phobia cure to the test.

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I'd learned from doctor Richard Bandler
a way of working with phobias

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that usually, in 30 minutes or less,

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somebody who had
a lifelong phobia of something

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could be with it without any fear at all.

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And they took three people
with diagnosed phobias

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and a couple of doctors,

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they hooked them up to EEG machines,
EKG machines, so that you could see

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what was going on inside them
when they saw the spiders,

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and sure enough during the show,
I worked with them,

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and then they came back,

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and they would even hold
the spiders in their hands

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and almost nothing.

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And in fact, it was so dramatic

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that the doctors asked
to recalibrate the machines

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because they thought
it couldn't have been real;

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same thing happened again.

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For me that wasn't the amazing part

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because I'd seen that happen
hundreds of times before,

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the amazing part was what happened
during the dress rehearsal,

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because during the dress rehearsal

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the same people were hooked up
to their machines,

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and the stage manager came in
with a clear, plastic empty box

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and said: "During the show,
there will be spiders in this box."

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All three of them started
going crazy on the machines,

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and I thought: "Holy crap,
there're no spiders here."

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As far as I know, there weren't
even any spiders in the building,

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and I suddenly realized we're not afraid
of what we think we're afraid of,

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we were afraid of what we think.

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We can't tell the difference

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between an imagined experience
in here, and what's going on out there;

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and that confusion creates
a lot of confusion,

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it creates a lot of problems.

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We'll take this one step more, alright?

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Some have seen this image before;
what I'd like you to do is

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- I asked them to bring
the lights up a bit

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because I want you 
to raise your right hand

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if you can see the young
woman in the picture.

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OK, fantastic.

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Now I want you to raise your left hand
if you can see the old woman.

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OK, and raise both hands
if you can only see one of them.

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And look around,
that's a large part of the room.

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Is this really a picture
of an old or a young woman?

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Well, both or neither,

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but in fact, that's how
we think of the mind,

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we think the mind is a camera,

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and it's recording
what's really going on out there,

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but depending on how we use it,
we have a different experience.

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So, if I photograph her
from this angle, she's really young,

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but if I do it from that angle,
she's really old.

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If I look at life this way,
it's an wonderful experience,

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if I look at it this way,
it's very depressing;

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that's the idea behind positive thinking.

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As we change our attitude,
we change the angle

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from which we hold the camera,
and we get a different experience of life.

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But here's the thing: this is not
a picture of an old woman,

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and it is not a picture of a young woman,

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it is a series of lines
on a piece of paper.

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(Laughter)

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We're the ones creating
both the old and the young woman.

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Let's take another one.

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This is an illusion called
the Kanizsa's Triangle.

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How many of you can see
the white triangle bold in the middle?

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Fantastic! You're all making it up,
there is no white triangle,

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(Laughter)

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it's an illusion, it's created by the mind

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to make sense of the negative space,

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it is not brighter or duller
than anything else.

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Isn't that interesting?

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We make up something
we can all see, and it's not there.

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I wonder if that might have implications
to how we live our lives.

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(Laughter)

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Let's take another look.

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I want you to raise

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- this is called the silhouette illusion
or the spinning woman -

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I want you to raise your right hand
if you can see her spinning clockwise.

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Now I want you to raise your left hand

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if you can see her spinning
counterclockwise.

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Look around.

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Now just for fun, just for fun, see
if you can get her to change directions.

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You can close your eyes
and look back. (Laughter)

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Now, which way is she actually spinning?

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Neither, she doesn't exist. (Laughter)

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This is why the physicist David Bohm said:

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"Thought creates our world,
and then says 'I didn't do it'."

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(Laughter)

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We live in a world of thought,

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but we think we live
in a world of external experience.

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The mind does not work like a camera,
the mind works like a projector.

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I first came across this
about seven years ago

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in the work of a man called Syd Banks;
he wasn't a physicist or a therapist,

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he was a welder from Scotland
living in Saltspring Island,

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and he had an enlightenment experience
when he was talking to a psychologist.

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He was telling him about all his problems,

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and the psychologist said:
"You don't have problems,

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you're not insecure Syd,
you just think you are."

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Well, Syd heard that

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to a little bit deeper level
than we all just did.

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For him, from that moment
thought stopped,

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and he could see
the projection of the mind,

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and he could see that all
that was ever happening

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was that mind was projecting
thought onto consciousness.

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Like in a movie, the projector of mind
takes the film of thought

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and projects it onto the screen
of consciousness,

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and it really looks like
it's happening out there.

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We experience it, and we hear it,

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and it's scarier, it's exciting,
it's awesomer, it's terrible,

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but none of it it's actually happening
outside of our own minds.

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How is this significant?

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Well, I was looking
for a way of illustrating this,

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and one my students showed me this.

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(Laughter)

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This explains every bad relationship
that you have ever had,

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(Laughter)

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and it explains why we struggle

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because we think the problem
is with the other dog.

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We think the problem is: "Well,
I need to just learn to love that dog."

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There's no dog! (Laughter)

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It's a creation of the mind,

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and when you start to see that,
the mind slows down,

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and when the mind slows down,
something else comes through.

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The mystic poet William Blake said:

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"If the doors of perception were cleansed,

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everything would appear
to man as it is, infinite.

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For man is closed himself up

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till he sees all things
through narrow chinks of his cavern."

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And that's us,

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we've learned to live
in the world of circumstance

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as if the only way for us to thrive
is to control that world;

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to make that world
the way we want it.

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Yet our experience is of a world
that doesn't even exist

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until the moment we create it,

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and ceases existing the moment
a new thought comes along.

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What that means is

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just because a thought is in your head
doesn't mean that it's true.

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What that means is we're not afraid
of what we think we're afraid of,

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we're afraid of what we think;

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and what that means is

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that no matter how long
you been stuck with something,

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no matter how real a problem looks,

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no matter how intractable
a difficulty seems,

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you're never more
than one thought away

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from a whole new experience
to being alive.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)