Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxKR6gtkSYs
hello freak [ __ ] 30 the last time I sat a I was exactly 30 the last time I sat a 3month retreat um but you just got you you're unplugging from your life you're saying goodbye to everyone you know you know for all you know someone's going to die while you're on Retreat and so you there's this real discontinuity with every project and every aspiration everything you have going on um and and also most of the people in your life can't believe you're doing this there's not much support you know people just it's just totally inscrutable to people that you would decide to do this and then you essentially lock yourself in a closet I mean you essentially lock yourself in a room as big as you know these two tables and um then you're just left with your thoughts and the the problem is is that just thinking itself even thinking happy thoughts is stressful and when when you actually when you really start paying attention to it the just the sheer automaticity of it to just just to be just to not be able to stop the conversation and you just can't stop talking to yourself for a second and that now you eventually you can eventually you become concentrated on in this case the practice I was doing is is called vapas which is mindfulness meditation and the practice there is just to become very keenly aware of uh you start with the breath as as an object of meditation but but once you get a little concentration you open it up to everything so sounds and Sensations and even thoughts themselves become objects of meditation where you're just noticing whatever arises in Consciousness and but the difference between noticing a thought arise and pass away and being lost in thought is is huge it's the all important difference and it takes some real concentration to act to see a thought arise and pass away because without the concentration all of a sudden the thought's just you it just comes up from behind in a way and you are just you just you feel identical in a strange way you feel identical to this sentence in your head you feel there I mean thoughts are just sentences and images when you actually look at what a thought is it's it's very hard to see how you could how it could ever Define your subjectivity in the first place it's just like I your
thoughts are no more substantial than the sound of my voice I me you're just hearing the sound of my voice is a kind of appearance in Consciousness right now and it's not it's not defining you it's not you don't feel identical to it it doesn't have a real implication so much for how you feel um you're you're not uh it's just it it's easy to see or in this case he that it is a an just an appearance in Consciousness it it comes and it goes it starts and it stops and it's all sort of in plain view but with your own Thoughts with the own with with your own voice it it sneaks up on you in a way that is and even to used the word you in this case is a little misleading because but it it it colors Consciousness and trims it down in such a way that it just feels like you it doesn't it doesn't feel it does it's it's you feel I mean the feeling of being a self the feeling that we call I the feeling of being an ego in the head is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking it's the it's the feeling of this next thought capturing Consciousness So when you say that thoughts you are identical to thought so if you're thinking something really [ __ ] up like uh I'm fat I'm a loser I'm always going to be a loser like that is identical to who you are because you are sort of framing yourself in this thought that these thoughts that are you're carrying around your mind they are what's occupying your Consciousness and if those thoughts are in the Forefront of your Consciousness that they identify you you are that you are those thoughts and you are identical to that idea yeah and they're and they're driving behavior and they're driving emotion and they're driving each subsequent train of thought so it's it's determining the the the future expressions of your Consciousness and your body as well so you're you're and again I'm not I'm not separating the Mind from the body here I mean all of this is we could talk about this in terms of events in the brain as well but it's much easier to talk about it in terms of our first person experience as thoughts and moods and and emotions Etc but um you know for the for the purpose of this argument you know there's no doubt that the brain is is doing this
it's just we're not you know that side of the story there's much less to say about that side of the story at the moment the brain is doing it but your your whatever it is your personality your Consciousness your your Center is sort of what guides the brain one way or another like it is possible to while in the middle of having these thoughts to say you know what I'm not going to entertain these anymore and I'm going to think about something positive but it's very difficult surprisingly difficult even to someone like myself who spent a lot of times a lot of time meditating especially a lot of time in isolation Tanks i i it's still difficult every now and then if something's bothering you to just get it out of your head like especially for me um one of my main issues is my work um like uh like standup comedy for instance like if I have a show and uh I [ __ ] a bit up if it goes wrong like if I have two shows in a night and I [ __ ] a bit up on the first show I'm okay if I could redo it on the second show we're good but if I [ __ ] it up on the second show God damn it now I have to think about that thing all night and I'll try to let it go I'll try to get it out of my head but I rationalize it by saying the only reason why I've gotten so good is because of this crazy Obsession that I have with getting it correct and that when things go arai or when I go down a bad path it doesn't quite pan out and then I have to sort of restart the whole conversation on stage that that uncomfortable moment and then the subsequent uncomfortable recollection of that moment is the very motivation that's led me to be a good standup in the first place so I kind of rationalize it but [ __ ] man when I'm eating dinner after a show and I just flub one word that [ __ ] up a joke I'll be in the middle of eating pancakes going [ __ ] like I can't get it out of my head it doesn't matter I have a wonderful wife and a beautiful family and great friends and a fantastic job and a Wonder just a a dream life doesn't matter I fled a word you [ __ ] idiot you know like why I'm cutting into my food yeah well that that that's an interesting moment because um so there's a moment before the thought has arisen right where you have not yet remembered the flop line so you're just cutting into your dinner and
then it's it's an image or part image part sentence something there's some expression of thought that arises in Consciousness and and you are you you do not you do not witness it arise it's not like it's a difference between seeing watching a movie and being totally lost in the movie forgetting that you're sitting in a room with a bunch of other people looking at light on a wall you're just you're totally captured by the movie It's difference between that and actually just seeing the screen the light on the wall hearing the sound of the projector seeing seeing the seeing the artifice and uh it's possible to see thoughts just as has essentially like a play of light on the wall you just you you see it before it captures you and the difference is total and it is kind of like it's almost like playing a video game where you can now not get killed in the same spot over and over again it's like it's like you know not losing in the same boss fight over and over again yet we we lose in that same fight a thousand times a day but when you can actually see thoughts for what they are so the next time you flub a line and the ne and and the next time you recall it it's it's possible with again it takes a certain degree of concentration to be able to do this but concentration becomes kind of a native capacity a certain point it's like Jiu-Jitsu or anything else I you have certain skills and you don't really lose them um then you can just see it and it just comes and it goes and it doesn't have and and it's going in it's going it's really gone it's it's and it doesn't have the same emotional necessity it doesn't trigger the same mental state and now that's not to say that these negative mental States haven't had the the benefit that you ascribe to them so yeah it could be that you're as good as you are because you were motivated to not embarrass yourself ever again because it felt so terrible right so you hated this experience of flubbing a line you hated the memory of of of and the reliving of it the next day you hated what it did to your your time with your family and and so you thought I'm you the next tour I'm going to get this I'm going to I'm going to get up earlier I'm going to work harder Etc so yeah that that that's all part of the the Clockwork that's that's causing you to
to hone your Craft um but I would argue that a little mental suffering goes a long way I think we nine times out of 10 or 99 times out of 100 we suffer unnecessarily and there's no no good comes from it it's just it's it's not actually making us better people it's making us more neurotic people we're more worried we're worse husbands we're worse fathers and and it's time to to break that spell and and and then you can you can selectively be as as uptight and neurotic as you want but you it gives you a kind of freedom to pick your your um your priorities in a way rather than be captured by just whatever the next thought happens to be I've also found that for me personally that discipline and diligence are the uh the best mitigating factors for dealing with neurotic thoughts like if I have an issue um one of the big issues if I've ever had anything U go wrong was that I didn't work hard enough so if I know for a fact that I worked as hard as I could like back when I was competing that was a huge issue and it also uh mitigated nervousness cuz look whenever you're involved in a competition as terrifying as a full contact Martial Arts Tournament where concussions are not just likely but it's someone in there's 100 people fighting in this tournament someone's going to sleep someone's going to get knocked out is it going to be you someone's going to get their nose broken someone's going to get hit um a lot of people are probably if I if I trained really hard if like I know I did everything that I could I ate right I slept right I put in all the practice I worked on all my weaknesses I I you know I didn't neglect my strengths I was much less nervous much less nervous and much better at dealing with losses whereas losses uh I think losses for martial artists can be insanely devastating like uh I was listening to this interview with Travis Brown do you know who he is no UFC heavyweight one of the top top five guys in the world great fighter lost recently to Fabricio verdom in a title elimination fight So fabricio's Gone on and he'll be fighting Cain Velasquez for the heavyweight title now in October in Mexico in a huge October or November November believe it's November what one of those um he's fighting uh Cain Velasquez for the title huge fight it could have been Travis
Brown Travis Brown lost the fight by decision and and you know was a it was he lost without a doubt but you know wasn't embarrassing it wasn't uh he didn't get knocked out in the first round he didn't get submitted really quickly but he did lose the fight and it was apparently devastating to him I mean he's talked in great depth about lying in bed in the fetal position crying I mean he's just [ __ ] 20 50 lb Gladiator and he's curled up in the fetal position crying I mean well the truth is the ego is always curled up in the fetal position crying I that's we all have that uh part of ourselves and it's um yeah I mean that's what is so excruciating about the self the self really is the center of the center of our problem you know and and when things are really going well we are consoled by how well they're going we know it's it's vulnerable to change I me you're only as good as your last appearance in some sense I mean I could do something incredibly embarrassing in the middle of this podcast and that will be the thing I'm thinking about tonight and I'll be I'm thinking you know God I can't believe I [ __ ] that up so bad with in Joe's podcast um and that it's you're always vulnerable to that for the for as long as you as long as you're in the center of this thing vulnerable to what other other people think about you and um uh captive of your really crazy rehearsal of experience when when something like this happens to you just think of how many times you repeat it to yourself it's like you tell yourself the same story 15 times a minute for hours and it doesn't strike you as insane but it it actually is insane it's like if your if your thoughts could be broadcast on a monitor for other people to hear and they could hear you repeat yourself over and over over and over again it would seem starkly crazy it just and yet it seems normal it's it's kind of like like the dream state where you go to sleep and you're in your bed and you you know you're everything's obeying the laws of physics and then in the next conscious moment you are you know at a party somewhere talking to someone who you know is dead and saying oh I can't believe you're you're alive now and and and then you know there's a gorilla in the room and and and none of this strikes you as is crazy I mean what the
crazi things about dreams is that the the mind seems to just accept them accept these changes one after the other without any sense that there should be continuity and this is due there's no question that this is due to the diminished activity of the frontal loes during REM sleep I we just our Our Truth our reality testing Hardware has come largely offline during dreams but there's something analogous happening when we're just thinking in the wake State because thoughts are thoughts don't make much sense because the the repetition is we don't notice how crazy the repetition is and we would notice it if we were talking to each other if I was telling you the same thing 15 times in a row without you know without honoring your expectation that I might move on to another topic you know you would you would notice and I would notice right um and uh yeah and the other thing that's crazy about thoughts is that much of our thinking certainly our linguistic thoughts are it's structured as though it were a conversation and we play both sides of the conversation so I you know I I'll sit down here and um you know I S I came in I sat down and and uh I I brought you a book and I wanted to sign the book and I see this pen over here and and I I think oh good there's a pen over there right now I can see that there's a pen over there so who am I why do I have to say there's a pen over there right who am I telling is there something in me who can't see that there's a pen over there right so there's a conversation that start like and I'm both sides of it that doesn't make any sense right and yet we are our subjectivity is continually uh just it is it is discursive in that way and there're just voices talking to each other and there's not only not only are there not two of us in there there's not even one of us in there there's not that the Thinker isn't there but we seem to have two of them it's like we're constantly talking to Mom and daddy uh and we in fact that could be the way this conversation gets internalized cuz you know I can see it in my kids now where they sometime I leave you I'll listen to my daughter playing by herself and she's talking to herself out
loud in the way that that you know you'd have to be sort of crazy to do as an adult but as a kid you're just you know you're just talking out loud um and eventually we all learn to internalize that conversation but um and when you don't when people who can't inter internalize it well they're The Crazy Ones you the the person who's walking down the street just saying oh good there's a pen over there what God we're late and uh God you know Joe Joe's going to really be pissed um I can't believe I I should have checked the traffic before I left so these are the kinds of thoughts I could think silently in in in the space of my mind but um and it wouldn't be starkly crazy but to verbalize them then you're a madman and that that difference between letting them out and just knowing to keep your mouth shut is C captures a large part of the difference between being you know a proper lunatic uh and a normal person but what I argue in this book is that it's normal isn't good enough you know normal the normal uh State of Consciousness wherein you are just chased out of bed every morning by your thoughts and you think think think think think every waking moment until you fall helplessly asleep at night um that's not NE necessarily a happy place to be and it's not the only alternative and and so um and again and thought it's not that you're the goal is not to have a mind without thoughts I we need thoughts and and you can't you know everything we do as human beings for the most part to requires thought to get off the ground so our relationships are based on thoughts and our every public institution and science it's all it's this conversation we have with ourselves and with others is based on on language uh almost and uh and Concepts that are mediated by language and uh so you need thought but the difference is the difference is between thinking and knowing that you're thinking in really knowing that you're thinking in the moment of thoughts arising or being lost in thought and then when you're lost in thought it doesn't really matter what the the content is you're still confused about who and what you are I mean you could be thinking about the you could be thinking about the most profound things in science or in in
ethics or whatever it is but if you're just thinking without knowing that you're thinking there is a kind of delusion there it is analogous to to the dream state in a way where you're just you're not it's not clear to you what's going on you you you think you're the thinker of the thoughts you think you're authoring your thoughts in a way that you're you're not I mean because thoughts just arise we we don't actually author them [Applause] [Music] [Applause]