Is thought a distraction from reality? | Miranda Keeling, Steve Taylor and Andy West

I'd love to see more thoughts because that's what makes another existence possible [Music] sure free itself from the seduction of words and thought and I will let Steve Taylor start and I'm tough on time Steve so okay I'll bear that in mind uh good morning everybody um I'm on the side of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche it sounds a bit pretentious but but um yeah I I I disagree with descar um again that's something I think I thought I'd never say but I think the kind of self which is associated with thinking is a kind of superficial even illusory type of self I think a real authentic self or a more authentic self more essential self emerges when we stop thinking in moments when our mind is quiet and empty but it's important to bear in mind that I think you know you can broadly speak and you can differentiate between two different types of thinking there is what you could call rational conscious thoughts uh which which you use to evaluate things to critically analyze things we use it to plan to decide to organize and so forth and that's obviously a great tool it's a great you know it's one of the great advantages of being human that we can use this this conscious thought but unfortunately I don't think much of our thought is actually of that type I think probably 95 have thought well maybe I'm talking about my own mind here this is obviously the one I know best 95 of our thinking it tends to be kind of random associational involuntary chatter it's like the stream of Consciousness you could call it it tends to focus on the future the past uh Daydreams about alternate realities and it stops us being present and it creates a kind of filter that stands between us and reality like a fog of abstraction which stops US really experiencing the world around us it can stop us really communicating with one another because there's so much sort of random chatter in a mind that we don't really communicate fully or don't really we're not really present to other people so it would be great if we could increase the amount of rational conscious thought we have and decrease the amount of chatter that we have also this chapter tends to gravitate towards negative things tends to gravitate towards Warriors problems resentments it tends to inflate them so it can cause quite a lot of Discord in our lives and I think most of the the really happy moments you know the happiest moments in our lives arise when we stop thinking in Psychology there's a concept called flow that you've probably heard of which is when our minds are intensely absorbed in an activity and the stimulation activity and I mind's making very quiet there's a sense of energetic fullness within us a sense of energy a sense of well-being and also meditation you know meditation that the very aim of many types of meditation is to empty the mind to stop thinking and when we do that we feel this marvelous kind of Rich energy inside of this marvelous fullness of being so it would be great if um if thinking could be a tool that we sort of pick up when we need it and when we don't need it we can put it down again and enjoy a kind of uh a kind of a mental emptiness mental quietness which would give us a more authentic and essential sense of identity okay thank you very much in The Killing sorry I found myself kind of writing a script um but it's interesting what you just said about flow because that's what I'm going to start with and I'd I'd like to kind of second a lot of what you've said so as an artist I know really well the feeling of being in flow you know when that happens or thoughts kind of fall away and it's um it's an Indescribable feeling that it happens especially when I'm creating something so a story or some writing or a recording and I've experienced this feeling of being in flow not just when I'm creating something so so in terms of culture but also when I'm swimming or you know doing yoga or listening to music and on stage I've felt the flow of energy from an audience and I've thrown it back at them all before we've had a moment to even form a thought and it's a wonderful experience and some people call this flow God and some people call it something else and some people have no idea what it is right but when I meditate as you mentioned meditation I reach a similar place where I'm resting with the contents of my mind and I notice my thoughts but importantly I'm not pulled Along by them um I can sense the space kind of underneath my thoughts The Emptiness and I can rest there and it can feel blissful so there is an enormous amount of benefit in being without thought especially while creating art which is culture however there is still a place for thought I used to work in improvised theater I was in a company of four actors and we used to have to go all night every on stage every night and improvise two plays with an interval in between an hour long each and before each show the audience would vote on who we were and where we were so they might say your three bridesmaids and a bride in a kitchen and then the director would come back and tell us and we'd look through our costumes and put something relevant on and come out and improvise this play so the reason I tell you about this is that improvised theater isn't an extreme form of of present culture what happens every night is brand new it's happening right now and it can never be repeated but there were rules and some of you might be familiar with the rules of improvisation you know accept what's offered that kind of thing and those rules have been considered and devised over a long time and they work my background before acting was in Circus and magic and escapology and they all require you know dexterity and quick quick thinking quick reactions and they also require hours of practice and thought the magician Tommy Cooper I don't know if you know Tommy Cooper but he's he had this signature kind of Comedy magic act and he put huge amounts of thought into producing what looked like a chaotic off-the-cuff character so there is a freedom away from the seduction of thought and when you dip your paintbrush into paint and you Splash it against the canvas you know that's that's a relinquishing of control and artistically it's really valuable but thought enables us to communicate and to create collectively and to learn from our mistakes and successes and to plan our next piece of work thought is often what enables those producing culture to enjoy the thoughtlessness of being in flow thank you and Andy what do you have um so should culture avoid the seduction of words and thought um I I think we should make words and thought more seductive than they are at the moment um there's a there's an experience I had earlier this year in February which has really stuck with me I was in a woman's prison uh where I'd been teaching for a while and I had a relatively new class and um I was filling up my whiteboard with the uh theory of moral consequentialism this idea that an action is good or bad depending on the outcomes that it has rather than depending on a a religious framework or whether whether because of some system of reason and ideas I was explaining the story of consequentialism and and one of the women in the class just had this huge grin on her face and I was kind of I was kind of aware of it I was a bit distracted by it but I was kind of carried on anyway and Earnest kind of explaining this Theory and um and then she just started laughing and I said what's up and it was Arie um and I I said what's up and she said so people actually sit down and write out all this kind of stuff about what makes something good or bad and I'm like yeah that's that's kind of what philosophers do that's that's the study of philosophy that's the practice of philosophy and she just laughed again and said but so you're telling me they actually do that like as a thing and she said isn't it just like childhood though that kind of makes you who you are and like where you're born and then that's kind of just how you turn out to be and I found it I found it really moving actually uh that kind of um almost like naked uh confession of like fatalism and determinism and obviously that had been um perhaps part of her life the fact that she'd ended up in prison um it also kind of made sense uh given the kind of uh layer of society she was in uh prisons are not a world that are touched by Good Sense most of the time I think we all know uh most of society know most politicians no most policy makers know what would make that world better what would improve it they know which ideas work they know which ideas don't work but the actual public will or political courage to actually make those improvements just don't happen so it's not a surprise that in that setting Big Ideas becomes quite literally laughable um but you know uh I sort of carried on in Earnest with Ari and we had a great uh three months together and uh I think she really enjoyed the class um I I suppose my feeling with the student like that is it doesn't it doesn't have to be this way uh and you know there is there is a history uh in the working class of like um of education and ideas and thought and intellectual enrichment uh what got called the the mutual Improvement societies that you'd have where uh Mill workers or factory workers uh would uh gather together and pull resources to build libraries and uh teach each other bits they learned from politics literature art ethics um you know uh what's what was called bettering yourself I think those movements were the things that that gave rise to the labor movement that they were part of a sort of organized working class they didn't come out of philanthropy that that those libraries weren't uh given from above uh um they weren't state-funded um and and so uh what I want is more of that that those kind of movements couldn't really exist today in the age of the zero hours contract and in the age of the Uber driver and in the age where certain companies make it illegal for you to join unions but I suppose when I think of this question of culture should culture avoid the seduction of thought you know we talk what do we mean by culture are we talking Capital C culture or are we talking Society in general and and I think in society in general I'd love to see more thoughts because because that's what makes another existence possible that's what makes if if you can think if you can imagine another possible existence for yourself then that's that's what can free you one of the things that can free you from the kind of fatalism that Ari had to continue watching this video click the link in the top left or in the description below or visit iai.tv for more debates and talks from the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

Views: 5,741

Keywords: learning, education, debate, lecture, IAItv, institute of art and ideas, IAI, philosophy, miranda keeling, miranda keeling the year i stopped to notice, the year i stopped to notice, andy west, andy west philosophy, andy west philosophy in prison, philosophy in prison, steve taylor, psychology, spirituality, mindfulness, benefits of mindfulness, steve taylor the leap, steve taylor the calm center, steve taylor spiritual science, descartes, rational thought, plato, soctrates, flow state, improv

Id: y_S41_BQuAc

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2023