Transcript: Michael Neill on Why Aren’t We Awesomer? at TEDxBend

It didn’t feel particularly that it was because I wasn’t useful; I was loved I was, you know, surrounded by friends. I had no external reasons for being so unhappy. But I was so unhappy that I had a thing I now know is called suicidal ideation, which meant that I thought about killing myself a lot, all day, every day, ongoing.

Now this wasn’t as much of a problem as you might think, most of the time, because I had stuff to do, I’d have classes to go to, I had friends. But it was always going on in the background, and when it would get quiet outside, it would get really noisy inside. And this all came to a head in October of that month when I had what I now know is called a psychotic break from reality.

Now if you want to get a sense of what that was like, imagine being in my dorm room on the fourth floor, and a giant vacuum cleaner appearing in the sky and sucking your heart out of your body and out the window. This was actually terrifying to me because it really felt like it was happening. And I hung onto the wall of my dorm room, and there was a phone there. And I reached down, and I dialed the number for the suicide hotline, which I knew, and I got a busy signal.

Now even then, being sucked out the window by a giant vacuum cleaner from hell, I found that funny. Like I cannot imagine what anyone could have said to me that would have done more good for me than that busy signal because it just kind of popped it in my head, and I just popped out of it for a minute. And it didn’t seem so compelling, it didn’t seem so real. And I was able to reach down and phone a friend who lived on the first floor, and she came and got me, and eventually I fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning, and I realized something that was kind of profound: I didn’t want to kill myself, I didn’t want to die. In fact, I so didn’t want to die that I used every ounce of strength I had to stay in that room when everything felt like it was pulling me out that window. And that was the first time I realized that just because you have a thought in your head doesn’t mean it’s your thought, doesn’t mean it’s true, doesn’t mean it’s actually what you think, it just means there’s a thought in your head.

And I started to kind of think of it as the suicide thought, and I started to notice, because I wasn’t scared of it anymore, it’s kind of like Bob, the homeless guy, moved into my brain. Every now and again he went off on one, and it was like, “Oh god, it’s Bob again.” It wasn’t so much I had to do something about it, it was just the suicide thought. And of course, because I wasn’t scared of it, it passed through quicker and quicker. And I found a new level of freedom of mind, and that got me really interested in how the mind worked.

Now in order to kind of share how the mind works with you, I am going to take you through a series of little experiments. So, we’re going to begin with a picture of a monster. Now I noticed none of you are running to the exits screaming, so this is good, this means you’re not having a psychotic break from reality right now. You have a sufficient level of thought recognition to see that this is in fact a drawing of a monster by my daughter Macy and is not in fact, in any way, shape, or form, a real monster.

Now here’s the second one; this is also a representation of a monster. This is a tarantula spider. In 1997, I’d been doing this work for a while, and I was invited onto a television show in the United Kingdom called “Put it to the test”. It was a really cool show because they took popular ideas and they put them to the test, and the one right before me, the segment right before me was they wanted to see if a car could really stop on a dime. So they got this stunt driver in this car and they put the dime out there; he’s going 60 miles an hour, and he did it, he stopped on a dime, it was really cool, but that’s not why I was there.

I was there to put the NLP phobia cure to the test. See, I’d learned this from Dr. Richard Bandler a way of working with phobias that usually, in 30 minutes or less, somebody who had a lifelong phobia of something could be with it without any fear at all. And they took three people with diagnosed phobias and a couple of doctors, they hooked them up to EEG machines, EKG machines, so that you could see what was going on inside them when they saw the spiders. And sure enough during the show, I worked with them, and then they came back, and they would even hold the spiders in their hands and almost nothing.

And in fact, it was so dramatic that the doctors asked to recalibrate the machines because they thought it couldn’t have been real; same thing happened again. For me that wasn’t the amazing part because I’d seen that happen hundreds of times before. The amazing part was what happened during the dress rehearsal, because during the dress rehearsal the same people were hooked up to their machines, and the stage manager came in with a clear, plastic empty box and said: “During the show, there will be spiders in this box.” And all three of them started going crazy on the machines, and I thought: “Holy crap, there’re no spiders here.” As far as I know, there weren’t even any spiders in the building, and I suddenly realized we’re not afraid of what we think we’re afraid of, we were afraid of what we think. We can’t tell the difference between an imagined experience in here, and what’s going on out there; and that confusion creates a lot of confusion, it creates a lot of problems.

We’re going to take this one step more, all right? Now some of you have seen this image before; what I’d like you to do is — I asked them to bring the lights up a bit because I want you to raise your right hand if you can see the young woman in the picture. OK, fantastic. Now I want you to raise your left hand if you can see the old woman in the picture. OK, and raise both hands if you can only see one of them. And look around, that’s a large part of the room.

Now, is this really a picture of an old woman or a young woman? Well, both or neither, but in fact, that’s how we think of the mind, we think the mind is a camera, and it’s recording what’s really going on out there, but depending on how we use it, we have a different experience. So, if I photograph her from this angle, she’s really young, but if I do it from that angle, she’s really old. If I look at life this way, it’s a wonderful experience, if I look at it this way, it’s very depressing; and that’s the idea behind positive thinking. As we change our attitude, we change the angle from which we hold the camera, and we get a different experience of life.

But here’s the thing: this is not a picture of an old woman, and it is not a picture of a young woman, it is a series of lines on a piece of paper. We’re the ones creating both the old and the young woman.

Let’s take another one. This is an illusion called the Kanizsa’s Triangle. How many of you can see the white triangle bold in the middle? Fantastic! You’re all making it up, there is no white triangle, bold in the middle. It’s an illusion, it’s created by the mind to make sense of the negative space, it is not brighter or duller than anything else.

Now, isn’t that interesting? We make up something we can all see it, and it’s not there. I wonder if that might have implications on how we live our lives.

Let’s take another look. Now I want you to raise — this is called the silhouette illusion or the spinning woman — I want you to raise your right hand if you can see her spinning clockwise. Now I want you to raise your left hand if you can see her spinning counterclockwise. Look around.

Now just for fun, just for fun, see if you can get her to change directions. You can close your eyes and look back. Now, which way is she actually spinning? Neither, she doesn’t exist. And this is why the physicist David Bohm said: “Thought creates our world, and then says ‘I didn’t do it’.” We live in a world of thought, but we think we live in a world of external experience.

The mind does not work like a camera, the mind works like a projector. Now I first came across this about 7 years ago in the work of a man called Syd Banks; he wasn’t a physicist, he wasn’t a therapist, he was a welder from Scotland living in Saltspring Island, and he had an enlightenment experience when he was talking to a psychologist. He was telling him about all his problems, and the psychologist said: “You don’t have problems, you’re not insecure Syd, you just think you are.”

Well, Syd heard that to a little bit deeper level than we all just did. And for him, from that moment thought stopped, and he could see the projection of the mind, and he could see that all that was ever happening was that mind was projecting thought onto consciousness. Like in a movie, the projector of mind takes the film of thought and projects it onto the screen of consciousness, and it really looks like it’s happening out there. We experience it, and we hear it, and it’s scarier, it’s exciting, it’s awesomer, it’s terrible, but none of it’s actually happening outside of our own minds.

How is this significant? Well, I was looking for a way of illustrating this, and one my students showed me this. This explains every bad relationship that you have ever had, and it explains why we struggle because we think the problem is with the other dog. We think the problem is: “Well, I need to just learn to love that dog.” There’s no dog. It’s a creation of the mind, and when you start to see that, the mind slows down, and when the mind slows down, something else comes through. The mystic poet William Blake said: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man is closed himself up till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.” And that’s us, we’ve learned to live in the world of circumstance as if the only way for us to thrive is to control that world; to make that world the way we want it. Yet our experience is of a world that doesn’t even exist until the moment we create it, and ceases existing the moment a new thought comes along.

And what that means is just because a thought is in your head doesn’t mean that it’s true. What that means is we’re not afraid of what we think we’re afraid of, we’re afraid of what we think. And what that means is that no matter how long you’ve been stuck with something, no matter how real a problem looks, no matter how intractable a difficulty seems, you’re never more than one thought away from a whole new experience to being alive.

Thank you.

 

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