Stoicism, Buddhism & Psychotherapy - Jules Evans

so yeah we're going to look at this this topic of science and spirituality I'm going to be looking at stoicism and Buddhism and modern psychotherapy those are my two books which you can get here and I want to start just as an icebreaker but I'd like you to turn to the person next to you if you if you came with someone you know already then turn to someone else maybe or whatever and I'll I just for five minutes to have a discussion about whether you think science and spirituality are opposed so just try that for five minutes to get to know the person next to you so you'll have plenty more time to talk to people around you so looking at Buddhism and Greek philosophy for Buddhists and Greek philosophers science and ethics you could say science and spirituality were one subject they weren't separate they were all one thing they call it philosophy or Dharma and really the idea was it was both a science and an ethics because it was both the Dharma and Greek philosophy were interested in how we could take the raw material of human nature and develop it to its fullest potential so they were both in this tradition called virtue ethics which is this idea that we you know human nature has certain hindrances or bad tendencies and then certain potentials or good tendencies and really philosophy is about developing the good tendencies to their greatest potential in Buddhism that fullest potential will be being awakened or enlightened or becoming a bodhisattva which is like a compassionate warrior totally dedicated to the liberation of other beings in greek philosophy if we called eudaimonia which literally means having a good relationship to your inner damon or your soul but it basically means kind of moral flourishing being you know the peak human the best human that you could possibly be so they thought of philosophy or Dharma is a kind of total way of life as a path you follow that informs all aspects of your life how you relate to other people how you relate to your society what you eat in order to transform your war nature into this kind of highest possible state and both Buddhism and Greek philosophy thought of themselves as therapies which promised to heal suffering and bring happiness so both the Buddha Socrates said I teach people how to take care of their souls which is where the word psychotherapy comes from Cicero the Roman philosopher said there is a medicine for the mind and it's named as philosophy the Buddha also talked to himself as if his is a physician healing minds and healing suffering they have very similar ideas and practices even similar metaphors so the Buddha talks about how you know the untrained mind is like a house for the leaky roof and rain gets in very easily where the trained mind is like a fortress and likewise the Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius says the well-trained mine is like a citadel so they used very similar even metaphors as well so there's a real similarity between these traditions and there's some debate as well about what you know whether there was actually contact because Alexander the Great and his army did go to India and conquer northern India and they brought along some philosophers with them who were very struck by by kind of Hindu philosophy I call them Jim no sophist which means naked philosophers I'm not going to go that far today concern but um so there was some kind of dialogue between these two traditions as well now both Buddhism and Greek philosophy particularly stoicism has been rediscovered by cognitive behavioral therapy which is the most evidence-based therapy for emotional disorders like depression and anxiety and so now we see CBT which as I'll discuss you know a lot to Greek philosophy and mindfulness which owes a lot to Buddhism you see it really throughout British society in the NHS the government's put billions of pounds into making CBT available through a program called I apt so if you have depression and anxiety you can get free CBT now on the NHS and there's also mindfulness now in schools and universities this was a government report called mindful nation UK so about 70 MPs now meditate regularly and they have the kind of the only little peaceful bit of Parliament is this Parliamentary Group about mindfulness so it's really you know it's Berkowitz become one was the kind of CBT and mind visit and almost an alternative secular religion in this country so there's there's you know this harmony at the moment between science and spirituality but I'm going to end with my talk by talking about how we need to be a little careful about what science is actually proven and I think that's an important thing to remember throughout this day because there's a risk of scientism which is just being overconfident about what science has proven particularly in the realm of ethics and values so what I'm going to do over the next two hours is I'm going to talk about three techniques or attitudes from Greek philosophy and Buddhism which you can go away and use immediately and whichever there's are quite a lot of good scientific evidence for that's you are not your thoughts that acceptance is an act of experience and that you are what you have Lee do so we're going to go through these three techniques or attitudes or ideas and then just in the fourth and final part of the talk I'll talk about the risk of being overconfident in what science can prove in this domain so first of all you are not your thoughts so to explore this idea I'm going to tell you a bit about how I got into ancient Greek philosophy and how it helped me in my 20s the story I often tell but it's useful because it's why I'm here so when I was a teenager my friends and I were kind of amateur neuroscientists we liked to experiment on our brain with different drugs every weekend and find out the results and we had some very interesting experiments I started off smoking marijuana I was about 13 my friend and I took LSD when we were 15 it started to take amphetamines and MDMA this was the mid 90s MDMA just become widely available it was a golden age of electronic music as far as I'm concerned so much better than modern EDM and we had we had really amazing times I mean really like I had like spiritual epiphanies on magic mushrooms in the fields of Gloucestershire I had a you know in Kirino watching orbital at tribal gathering in 96 I mean wonderful times but you know clearly we were bit too young for all this and we didn't really have guides or maps or any idea of the proper set or setting in which to do these things and I saw some friends of mine start to get problems from from from all these chemicals we were putting into ourselves so my best friend I took LSD with when I was 15 I had a psychotic episode when he was 16 and ended up being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia I don't know if it would have happened anyway you never know what these things but other of my drug buddies started to develop all kinds of emotional problems it was kind of really hit a lot of up my generation and then it didn't really affect me and I thought I was fine I'm just told I'm hard-headed like they just can't take their drugs until my first year at university so on when I left school I had kind of was really recklessly taking drugs and I was beginning to get a bit strung out and I had a couple of bad trips on LSD which were very traumatic and I dealt with them like a sensible Englishman and just didn't talk to anyone about it for years until I wrote articles about it I was the first my friends and family ever heard about it years later so I just I just kind of you know was quite traumatized by these experiences and I just buried it and then the kind of bruise came out the trauma came out in my first year at university so I started to get panic attacks no idea what a panic attack was I was like what the is going on now like why is my heart pounding and I'm like feeling like my life's in threat and you know I'm just at the pub or something like that so really kind of you know terrifying and I didn't know what was going on or what was going on with my emotions I started to get more less and less confident because I didn't really know who I'd be from one day to the next I'd have these mood swings where I'd either be very extrovert and confident like I've been for the first 18 years of my life or very neurotic and introvert and I was like who's this person I really don't want to be this person I really don't like this person so I became more and more socially anxious as well because I wasn't sure when I it was going to hit me and that went on all the way through University I was trying to figure out like how to heal myself what the hell is going on with my emotions I was studying English literature and none of you know I wasn't taught anything at university about how to control or understand my own emotions I mean Hamlet is fascinating but it's not much practical use in these kinds of situations so I end I kind of managed to get through University and I got a I got a first but then had a breakdown right afterwards and then I kind of hit rock bottom and became a financial journalist which is uh which is what happens if you mess around with drugs I'd wanted to be a poet or a novelist and then ended up writing about the German mortgage bond market and so my parents sent me to the Priory and this expensive therapist there diagnose me as suffering from depression and anxiety and post-traumatic stress he was paid per diagnosis so I got this bumper and he tried to cure me he said I can cure you of all these six years of trauma by just waving my fingers from left to right I thought this is incredible and it kind of actually worked for about a month I was like I'm free I'm free but then all it took was one panic attack and I was like oh god I'm not free and I'm just where I was so I also I remember I took a week's holiday from my job as a financial journalist and I went to the British Library to try and understand my emotions and I read I spent the whole week reading the works of Sigmund Freud because he was the only psychologist I'd heard of which was like the worst holiday ever by the way because I was like miserable at the start and suicidal by the end of that way but by that point the internet had been invented and I kind of I asked Jeeves well what-what could where was a good treatment for these disorders or these problems like social anxiety and so on and I probably there was this therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy which helped a lot of people particularly with social anxiety and I found a support group for people who suffer from social anxiety that met every Thursday evening in the World Festival Hall not on the stage but in one of the you know lots of those you know weird groups meeting the World Festival Hall by the way you can still go there and say I wonder what they're talking about so we were there we were the uptight nervous people right at the back and you know there was it was like about 10 people there they all you know all have social anxiety someone had really really bad social anxiety someone who never had a friend in their life and they were just totally crippled by it and we and there was no therapist there but someone had bootlegs a CBT audio course called overcoming social anxiety step by step by dr. Thomas Richards and we followed this course and we practice the exercises and encouraged each other on and I I think it helped it certainly helped me so I stopped having panic attacks after a few weeks and I began to understand my emotions and what I could do about them and how I could change them so I was fascinated by this therapy and I wanted to find out more about it by that point I was no longer working for this crappy financial magazine I've become freelance they'd fired me and so I went to I was living as a freelance journalist in Russia and I discovered that the you know the guy who developed cognitive behavioral therapy was a guy called there we go it's got Albert Ellis he developed it in the 60s 50s and 60s along with someone else caught Aaron Beck working separately and I emailed him I said can I come an interview and ask you about CBT and I got an email back from his wife saying you you can you can interview Albert but you got to come this week because he's almost dead he's on his deathbed but you know he's easy sees in this kind of in this massive dispute with the Albert Ellis in because they'd kind of kicked him off his own Institute but come now and tell his story and stuff so I got on a plane the next day and went to New York and interviewed him and his lecture on is important in poor man was on his deathbed he was 92 and did the last ever interview before he died and I got to thank him for developing this therapy which had saved my life you know I would say or help me a lot and I said where did it come from where did you get the inspiration for it so he trained in psychoanalysis like like most psychologists in the in the 30s and 40s but he got frustrated with the fact his theory his patience didn't seem to get much better despite the fact he was sometimes seeing them every day for years so he looked around for other ways to understand the emotions and how we can heal ourselves and he was he was an autodidact he'd been a travelling pants salesman but hidden in the depression but he just he was very smart guy and he read incredibly widely and thought out of the books and he'd read Greek philosophy and he'd really thought the Greeks the Greeks they thought of themselves as therapists and he thought their ideas really sounded wise and he was particularly inspired by this quote by stoic philosopher called epictetus who said people are disturbed not by events but by their opinion about events so he's one of my heroes epictetus I don't know if anyone else thinks he looks like a Juris elbow is that just me maybe just me but so his quote inspired the ABC theory of the emotions which is you know one of the most credible theories of the emotions in this at the heart of cognitive therapy a stands for the activating event B stands for the beliefs opinions and values and C stands for the consequent emotion so we usually feel like our emotions just happen automatically and involuntarily and we don't have any real kind of control over them they're all kind of choice in them that's how it certainly how most emotions feel to me when I have them so let's say you walk into your office on Monday and you pass Jessica and Jessica is I don't know I always say Jessica I did a talk about this at Netflix and the boss there in the audience turned out to be called Jessica it was very awkward but so Jessica gives you a dirty look and you just immediately feel aggrieved and indignant and angry and if someone says why are you in such a foul mood you'd say because of Jessica it's like a to see it's just kind of automatic and you know yeah so and there's not much you feel like there's not much control or choice in the matter but what the Greeks would say and Buddhists as well is that actually you forgot the role of be your own thoughts your own perspective your own opinion how you interpreted that situation you thought about that situation I put it to you a certain way you thought jessica is judging me she doesn't like me she's looking down at me what a cow like what is what she's never liked me she's she's she's just mentioned like redheads or something like that some kind of thoughts like all interpretation like that went through your mind and that's what led you to feel aggrieved and offended and angry and you know how dare she think like that she shouldn't think like that when you think about the role of your beliefs and your interpretation on your emotions then you can think are there other possible ways I could interpret that stimulus that event are there other ways I could look at it what other ways might one look at that situation any ideas what non-attachment yeah you guys in who cares who cares about anything really okay yeah well I mean yeah it might not be it might not be to do with you it might be you know it might be personalizing it she might be something she this stuff might be going on in her own life yeah any others curiosity who said that so what do you mean by that yeah curiosity I see what you saying like you could explore find out what it is yeah I mean you might know that she really is judging you like it might it might be like she might really have an issue with you or she might have an issue with redheads or something but that doesn't mean you des still have to take her bad mood with you you know you can say well that's just her she that's you know I'm not gonna take her bad mood with me for the rest of the day so we have some because of the role of our in beliefs and opinions and interpretations or the story we tell ourselves on our emotions we have some choice in the matter over our emotions that be aspect gives us some ability to change and modulate our emotions so that's why Marcus Aurelius the Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher said life itself is but what you deem it because not just our emotions but our entire reality is shaped by our thoughts and our opinions and our values and the story that we tell ourselves and we have some control over that and that can be a very liberating thing to realize it was massively liberating for me to realize when I had social anxiety for all those years and I was terribly worried that it was out of my control and that I'd basically screwed up my sign apses or my neural chemistry and there's nothing I could do about it it was incredibly liberating to realize actually that my anxiety was connected to my own beliefs and that gave me some small bit of control over what I was feeling so you know everything really is shaped by our beliefs our opinions our stories our perspective like for one person two people might both see a dog in the street and for one person that's like man's best friend and for another thing that's a kind of terrifying thing which creates a cold panic so really informs how we how we react to the world and this is the hope that we can change how we feel by changing how we think by changing our beliefs our opinions our values now the problem is it's not always that straightforward because often our beliefs our opinion or the story we tell ourselves is quite automatic and very ingrained and quite unconscious and somatic as well it feels totally true in our bodies so we've been telling ourselves the same story about who we are and how the world is every day for years and if you're a Buddhist you might think for you know multiple lives so it can be very ingrained in us and so we don't really notice it it's like a pair of glasses that you've worn all you know your whole life and you don't realize that they're actually the wrong prescription sometimes and they're giving you a headache so this is I Darrin cognitive therapy called self-talk which is this idea that we have a kind of running inner monologue going through our head commenting all through the day and even in our sleep as well on how things are going on how other people are and how situations are and that really informs our reality that self-talk totally shapes our experience of reality now we don't really notice this inner monologue and we think it's really accurate and reliable and true we think it's like a kind of inner New York Times let's say that it has a kind of really relatively you know reliable source of information about ourselves and about the world when more actually it's more like an inner fox news showing my liberal bias here so what I mean by that it's quite prejudiced it doesn't really check its facts it jumps to conclusions quite kind of emotionally reasons you know and it's it's not always the most reliable guide to reality you can substitute your own a news organization there if you have a different bias to me so that's the problem really is that that automatic mind often often jumps to conclusions which are wrong so I didn't if any of you read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman he talks about how we have two systems in our mind the automatic kind of monkey mind and then this you know more reflective Socratic deliberative mind and cardamon thought that we use the automatic monkey mind about 95 percent of the time so 95 percent of time we're just on that because it's much quicker and more efficient to just jump to these snap conclusions rather than to sit and think is that definitely true so we're really you know often just led by that automatic mind and these automatic assumptions that we make now in CBT they talk about mind traps certain ways that our automatic mind can jump to conclusions and shape the messy complexity of reality into simple stories certain ways we can do that that can cause our suffering and they're often lead to things like depression and anxiety and it's quite useful to know some of these and to look out for them in your own self-talk and in your friends when they're spilling their guts out to you at 3 in the morning things like catastrophizing jumping to the worst possible conclusion I just saw someone yawn that means this is the most boring talk I've ever given so you jump from a little bit of evidence - to it the most bleak conclusion fortune tellers error because I'm unemployed now I'm always going to be unemployed it's always going to be this bad use extrapolate from a little bit of evidence to a total general conclusion that you very firmly believe the mind readers error jumping to conclusions about what someone else is thinking I know that Jessica hates me based on you know you might not have really explored it or check for evidence but you just you feel that it's true another one's called rating yourself against others assuming their life is perfect and yours is woeful easily done especially in the age of social media everyone else's life looks so wonderful negative confirmation bias we have a very negative story about yourself who you are what you can expect in life and the world and how it is and how it's going to treat you and you only really notice and hold on to the evidence that fits that negative story and if a good stuff happens to you kind of discount it and ignore it it's just a fluke or one-off or they you know they'll realize eventually what a loser you are and then what Albert Ellis called masturbating which is when you think things like I must be successful I must be liked by you I must always be in control and if I'm ever not popular or successful or in control or one of these things it's a total disaster so it's a very rigid form of thinking which can ease in perfectionism which can easily cause people a massive amount of suffering so what can we do about these biases what can we do if our automatic mind is is you know if our story our life philosophy is causing us suffering well we can use what is called the Socratic method that's what cognitive therapy uses it was Socrates were just he would walk around Athens engaging people in conversation and just getting to stop and think say hey where you going what are you doing with the day what's important to you are you going off to court to see your father so you definitely know what's right and wrong and there you know to get them to think about their automatic opinions and there are their automatic beliefs and values often for the first time because they've been sleepwalking through their life just grow of course I know what truth is of course I know what the good life is but they never actually thought about it they if you went to a bar this weekend you wouldn't and you saw a random pill on the floor you wouldn't pick it up and swallow it unless it was a really boring weekend but that when it comes to our life philosophy or our values that's often what we do we pick them up and swallow them without thinking from our childhood from our parents from our culture from our media and we don't really read the label so Socrates really for this kind of you know first time in in in human history at least in the West was saying think for yourself think for yourself about your values your beliefs your opinions your life philosophy question the story you're telling yourself the story your culture is telling itself don't assume that it's true ask yourself questions so it's really about stopping and thinking when the automatic mind we get so quickly absorbed into stories into judgments it's so quick I went to a Buddhist retreat kind of a day-long thing in the States recently with jack Kornfield teaching it and I just saw like someone was leaning against the wall and someone was sitting in a chair and their kid they just got into an argument so quickly about you know this woman said well can you sit somewhere else I'm leaning into the warrior seven even though you know I can't deal with these vibes and she walked off and I thought this is in the middle of a day of mindfulness and we we so quickly get absorbed in these stories so quickly it's so easy just like through and you're there you're in the story and you're really feeling it somatically so it's like how we learn to like stop and think before we jump onto that automatic judgment so this is a really important idea is wakefulness or mindfulness just being more aware of what's happening now where are you what's happening in your emotions where where's your mind so the Buddha says mindful among the mindless wide-awake among the sleepy the wise man advanced like a swift horse leaving behind a weak pony and likewise Epictetus said be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the oppression but say impression wait for me a little let me see what you are and what you represent let me try you so it's trying to train ourselves in that kind of you know suspicion of our automatic judgments and kind of own awareness of what's going on and the ability to question those strong automatic judgments that happen in psychology this is called cognitive reappraisal there's a whole literature testing out cognitive reappraisal and they say this comes from the Stoics and the Buddhists so you have your immediate strong initial judgment this feels terrible and then you kind of cognitively reappraise going is it definitely so this is kind of thing that Socrates might do if he was your therapist and its kind of thing that a cognitive therapist might do you go in and you say everyone at work hates me I you know and I just loser and you really feel it's true and you really want to persuade the therapist that it is actually the case and it's always going to be the case and Socrates or your therapist or your friend might say well what belief or opinion underlies this emotional reaction like I'm a loser say or no one know it no one likes me so you try to find the kind of core belief right at the heart of it all I realized in my social anxiety for example the core belief was I must be liked by other people by all people you know which was obviously a kind of crazy belief is that belief definitely true is it definitely wise is it definitely a big deal the thing that you were reacting to you know could you change your perspective on it what can you do about it now and what missed you except for the time being and can you change your perspective on it is there is there feasible way to change the way you look at it it's quite similar to the Buddha's reality check so I read this great book by Pema Chodron on the place of that scale best book I've read in the last 12 months and she learned from her teacher that emotions are basically a story plus a feeling and she tries to teach people to drop the story that they're totally absorbed in and just feel the feeling if you're feeling anxious or angry or afraid rather than racing through her head say oh this was because of what Adam said and then that thing and that's like what happened to me when I was 20 just kind of try to drop the story for a bit and just feel the emotion and just observe it and let it be and see and just explore it so similar kind of thing and of course in Buddhism unlike in Greek philosophy they had this whole amazing techniques for training your attention training on the breath training it all the mind in order to increase your wakefulness the the your possibility of not just being immediately sucked into an automatic story that kind of ability to go what's happening at the moment what's happening in my feelings why am I suddenly shouting at this person on the phone what's going on here so you can actually kind of train that I'll just be a couple minutes now I'll take the question yet and you know so much of what you get in these kind of spiritual wisdom traditions Buddhism stoicism also like Hindu philosophy also Taoism is about and in Christian wisdom and Jewish wisdom so much of what I come across and wisdom traditions is about one's perspective on things can I change my perspective on there's a technique of visualization technique they called called a view from above where you imagine yourself kind of your soul rising you looking down in your street and then your city and in your country and then you're looking down on the earth and it was a way for them to just kind of shift out perspective completely you know and just kind of not get so head up about the little and you know not sweating the small stuff and then they don't know ever watch kind of like Brian Cox or Carl Sagan or you know so it's kind of astronomy as a form of therapy as a form of calm you know huge scenes in nature as well can just make you know am I getting worked up about this or that so they're shifting their perspective another technique that both Buddhists and Greeks would use is you know the shift of view from time we're not here for very long everyone dies is it really worth getting so worked up about whatever it is you're getting worked up about are you live are you really living according to your you know what matters to you are you getting sucked up into someone else's game some unimportant story and not making the most of the time that's there to really live according to your higher values so that's another way of shifting perspective me too I mean some kind of fundamental way of shifting perspective is recognizing that other people have gone through something similar when I went to that support group for social anxiety I thought I was uniquely weird uniquely screwed up and it was a very very liberating to realize there were other people who'd suffered quite similar things and their thoughts and their thought patterns was so similar to mine in a way it was kind of humiliating because I thought I was so in true sting in my up nurse and I realized it was totally banal I mean just like totally common garden social anxiety and it was liberating as well because opened my heart to other people with a similar thing so rather than shut in my ego and my self-pity as that other people are suffering from this - maybe we can help each other so that's a kind of me - thing you know the me - movement now it's like other women have gone through this let's support each other let's stand by each other let's you know if you're a kind of Christian I mean the whole thing is kind of me - our Lord also suffered me - that helps you to kind of so there's actually a practice that Pema Chodron teach is called tonglen which is whenever you feel a good or bad emotion you give it away so if you're feeling are having a really great day you say may all beings feel as good as I'm feeling right now if you're having a really tough time you think other may all beings who are feeling this right now be helped now I want you to try I'll just take this so you want a question yeah yeah yeah yeah Andalusian yeah I mean look these are all practices that work and some some people in some situations so none of this is like foolproof medicine for everyone in all situations the Stoics would say yeah why why why even feel it but sometimes you do just feel it sometimes the emotion is already there and and and so in that situation one can just observe it because you know you might just be feeling hurt and vulnerable and then you can say okay so here I am I accept my my vulnerability rocks you know and we'll talk a bit later about how observing and accepting emotions can sometimes transform them but yeah it's a good point is like if everything yeah that that doesn't sound good for me I mean all these you know that the Buddhists would say these are just arguing they're like different medicines in the medication cabinet they don't work for everyone and you can misuse all of them it's the same with the Stoics they say these are just different practices which might work for you might not so none of this is like a panacea for everyone in all situations what I'd like you to try now is with the person next to you you can turn the other way if you want whatever I want one of you to talk about a situation recently which has led to a negative emotional reaction you something that got you riled up in some way and the other person is going to be Socrates and and try to see if they can help you to to heal to heal this situation in some way I try that five minutes and then you're going to swap if that someone doesn't have a partner put up their hand and we can come and do it with me very short term therapy I mean any thoughts on it any feedback yeah yeah ya know what cuz sometimes there might be a disjuncture between what you rationally know and what how you're feeling that's true definitely and that goes back to what we're talking about the fact that we have this deliberative little bit of us but then we have the rest of us which is very automatic and very somatic and very engrained so that's definitely true so we're gonna we'll look after the break at how do we actually make this ingrained so we really feel it and and and enact it as well but definitely you know you can say find a happy place serenity now it's not gonna be much good if you're just yeah I completely yeah yeah we're going to talk about that next as well about non-attachment exactly you're saying yeah yeah no yeah yeah yeah this is not about being happy all the time sometimes these techniques have been used for psychologies which which where the aim is to be happy all the time but this is more about what what's happening what's the situation and to what extent can I deal with it yeah yeah no it might be just this is what is let you know yeah totally I think that's true I think you know I mean you can take a hold of stoicism wrongly and say right and you know I'm going to not feel any emotions and this I shouldn't be feeling this emotion and you know rather than like this is just what's arising right now that's true I also think you can overemphasize us it this is just me and this is in my head because there might be situations where there is a genuinely a difficult situation or difficult person and you know you have to try and take steps to deal with it but well so I you know well we're talking off the break as well about you know what's in our control and what isn't yeah yeah mm-hmm I don't know that but I would think that would make sense if it's a very early kind of childhood trauma and I suppose it'd be very somatic then wouldn't it and maybe language wouldn't help with that I'd yeah the lady said if is it gonna be would it be harder if something bad happened to you before you had language like when your child I mean they're lots of reasons why it would because it would be much longer term as well it would be you know story that's been there for longer but yeah I mean this is a very verbal way of healing the emotions and there are other ways of healing the emotions which are much more somatic but that can I don't think that necessarily means that one or other is right or wrong I think they can both be right our emotions are both verbal and somatic and unconscious and you can heal them through both ways so you can heal down through kinds of using training your attention or you know verbalizing it trying to put it down what you're feeling and asking if it are true and talking about it but you can also change your emotions from the bottom up through your body whether that's just going for a run or changing what you put into your body or dancing there are lots of those kinds of ways or yoga where you can also alter your motions through your body - okay so what we're gonna do now yeah a loss question yeah yeah it can be it depends I mean the idea of getting out to that completely wide perspective is if your goal is the liberation of the self and complete detachment and complete you know acceptance of what is then that's that's what you want to do that that is your goal that's that's the point of it I mean we'll talk after this about for the Stoics and Buddhists that they are actually trying to reach that goal of complete detachment we might not accept we might not want to become completely detached Buddha's or stoic sages but there still can be a use in that kind of modulating it when our emotions extremely painful and powerful and kind of overpowering us and incapacitating us that's when sometimes it can be useful to kind of get a bit more detachment about it like I would prefer this not to happen but it is right now kind of thing but anyway yes I think what you practically do about it is also important but sometimes a lot I do think a lot of our sufferings sometimes we're doing it to ourselves we're kind of beating ourselves up so I think you can take both these approaches that is my thinking making a situation worse but also what are the practical steps I can do about this situation yes that's treaty yeah that's absolutely tree happened to me yesterday I was suddenly feeling really happy and I thought am I is this getting getting manic today and I just by breathe it was feeling ungrounded my happiness I mean like yeah so I just breathe and calm down and that you know like you know but anyway look we've got to have a break so yeah I'm going to talk about two more ideas or attitudes or practices from these wisdom traditions particularly Greek philosophy and Buddhism and then we'll talk about what can science actually prove so this idea of acceptance is an active experience this idea of you know the wisdom of accepting what's beyond our control so I talked about how both Greek philosophy and for Buddhism there's an idea that physics biology and ethics were all the same kind of thing so part of their ethics of this their their path that they walk grew out of their physics by which I mean their sense of the nature of reality what is reality like what kind of rules does it obey so most of the great wisdom traditions like Taoism like Buddhism and stoicism and Christianity as well talks about the nature of reality is that it's impermanent and unstable and constantly changing and interdependent things are turning into other things nothing is really kind of staying the same long it's in constant flux so Heraclitus who was a fifth century BC Greek philosopher who really created this view of reality that the stoicism grew out of says that everything flows nothing stands still so the universe is in constant flux all in Buddhism where they say all is Anisha which means impermanence and that everything is empty which means that everything is connected to everything else nothing is really separate and exists on its own so yes things in constant state of becoming and then passing away becoming and then passing away every moment I think he's coming up again so all is in each yeah going on here it's an own I have done in purpose on a retreat ever do you remember how much where you got to repeat Anita so you'd be observing everything like observing your physical sensations and you see how they arise and they pass and thoughts arise and pass and bodies arise and pass peoples arise in past cities everything is impermanent everything is empty Heraclitus said you can't step into the same river twice he was full of these rather normal kind of utterances and what does that mean you can't step into the same river twice I think I mean something like you know that we say like this is the Thames like it's a thing a stable thing but actually it's a flowing kind of process really rather than a thing the water is always moving through it and that's true of everything we say this is a table but that's just a snapshot at one moment in time it was a earth and then it became a tree and then it became some planks and then it became a table and eventually will become ash and that's the same with us too we say I am jewels but I used to you know was called Julianne and then I had like I've different cells in my body and I've seen my characters completely different to what it was 20 years ago so you know and I'm made up by the situation that I'm in which is also constantly changing so there's not really the stable permanent thing called Jules everything is kind of flowing and impermanent and empty of its of an essence you know what is the essence of table what is the essence of Jules everything's just kind of flowing together here's here's a spelling again of Heraclitus and he said that um God is day and night winter and summer war and peace surfer tan hunger so there's this idea that reality is also made up of these opposites which are turning into each other like day and tonight like life into death and again which is a very similar idea you come across in in Taoism fullness turns into emptiness emptiness turns into fullness spring into summer and and so forth it's my microphone on okay and so loud sooo this is one of the first chapters I don't know I'm getting it a Taoism now I know it wasn't in a headline but let's do a bit of Taoism he says being and non-being create each other this is from the Tao Te Ching difficult and easy support each other long and short to find each other high and low depend on each other before and after follow each other so they're taking this kind of cosmic perspective of the you know nature and how it turns in it's constantly changing hi is turning into lo and so forth now the problem is that we can't handle that we can't handle that constantly impermanent changing flux see nature of reality because we want things to be a certain way our automatic minors canta saying I like this I don't like that I want this I don't want that that's the story we're telling ourselves I'm trying to get here I'm trying to get away from there we're attached to certain outcomes and we're averse to other outcomes and so we can't handle that reality constantly fluxing and flowing waves we want a stable you know permanent situation in which you know where we can be happy and secure and know exactly who we are in all situations and that's what causes us suffering a lot of the time so this is from a Zen monk in 600hz called sang san he said the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences when love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised may the smallest distinction however in heaven and earth is set infinitely apart he says if you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything to set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind this is why Facebook is making us miserable when the deep meaning of things is not understood the minds essential pieces to serve to no avail on so it's that chronic addiction to like and dislike even at that mindfulness seminar in America that woman says why you sitting next to me I can't handle you walks off likes and dislikes with constantly liking disliking things and as soon as we do that that's what makes up our ego it's our likes and dislikes this we have these thick walls of like and dislike and that makes us an enemy of nature because nature flows from life into death night into and today and back again but we want this outcome only and so we're an enemy of that flow and we resist it and become an enemy of reality so it's true also in stoicism stoicism says you know they make you they teach you how to flourish by having a good flow of life it's about becoming one with the flow of ever-changing nature so epictetus try to teach people how to accept to the limit of their control he thought that was the key to being both resilient and kind of peaceful and happy he was a slave in the Roman Empire by the way which was a situation where he controlled very little if you're a slave in the Roman Empire of course your master could beat you up or even kill you with impunity potentially incredibly traumatizing and just depressing and humiliating and yet Epictetus was a was not traumatized and was not broken by this and he became a kind of great philosopher of inner freedom and kind of defiance and inner strength and he said that the key to staying kind of resilient is to understand that some things are up to us and other things are not that's the first line of his handbook so he defined all of reality into Zone two and two to kind of spheres or categories I call them zone 2 and zone like a good Londoner so zone to other things in life which according to Epictetus we don't have complete control over for example any ideas what things in life would you say we don't have complete control over the weather yeah anything else yep other people yeah absolutely we can we have some influence over them but they don't always realize that I'll you know that we're you've got the wise way of doing things and anything anything else now this bus is yep buses so true bodies we have some control over our bodies we can try and take care of them be healthy but we're still going to get ill we're still going to get older and the mortality rate is still you know steady a hundred percent so we're gonna we're going to die so so much of life is beyond our control actually epictetus thought all external things are beyond our control they talked in in medieval philosophy about the wheel of fortune which is basically everything in the zone to is impermanent subject to change so all that flux see stuff just constantly changing never staying still I'm just going to press on for set so and he thought that suffering comes because because of this I hate this I like this because of our attachment and inversions we think that something in zone 2 must be a certain way when I had social anxiety for example you must like me which was kind of crazy everyone must like me I was taking my self-esteem and tying it to this impermanent unstable thing that constantly changed as in public opinion public approval it would be like you know pegging you the your currency to the Argentine peso or something that I mean it's a recipe for volatility and suffering I was just kind of giving away my self esteem to this very changeable thing or I must be young and good-looking you know you could attach yourself some external thing which is constantly changing you it's a recipe for disaster you're going to make yourself miserable so the more we are firmly attached to something in zone 2 or firmly averse to it the more we are kind of setting ourselves up to feel helpless angry and and miserable so the Stoics try to teach this kind of acceptance of external as this detachment from external they say all external are kind of indifferent the true meaning of the good life is to be true to your values it's within to try and do the right thing and think the right thing Marcus Aurelius who was the emperor of Rome who had complete supposedly complete political power over most of the Western world still constantly reminded himself about the limit of his control he told himself vex not yourself with the course of things they heed not your vexation that's how he didn't go crazy because a lot of previous Roman emperors thought they were gods and therefore they really did control the world so was it was his name no not Nero Caligula Caligula who was become maybe 100 200 years before declared war on the sea because he was pissed off with it for wrecking my name is he got his soldiers to attack the sea he thought we I'm a god I can I can take on Poseidon so you know a lot of them went crazy because they thought they were gods and that can happen with us too we can forget that we're just humans and we don't actually we can't I can't make them everyone like me that's crazy I'm not a you know so so you haven't can remind ourselves of the limit of our control and that can can be healing but epictetus said we also sometimes make another mistake which is we forget the area of our life over which we do have some control zone 1 what do you think he thought we do have control over yeah he thought we have a with some could actually thought if we exercise it we have complete control over our beliefs over our thoughts and the problem is that often humans either they say they want to be in complete control of something in zone 2 or they just they say they have no control over zone 1 over there in thoughts and beliefs they kind of give away control they use the external world as an alibi so someone might Lance strong says I had no choice but to cheat because everyone else was cheating so Epictetus was kind of quite tough love about this he said the robber of your free will does not exist so they're constantly insisting you have choice in that zone one if you choose to exercise it now and that can be quite harsh because what about if you grew up you know it's easy for someone you know say in a nice neighborhood to say I'm really living a good life and I'm really into my yoga and my meditation what about if you live in a terrible circumstances like and say you know and in a prison or in a in a you know concentration camp or something but there have been people in prisons and in concentration camps you've still said I still had some choice some kind of you know Viktor Frankl is a non red man in his search for meaning he says you know everything can be taken for a man but the last of human freedoms are freedom to decide our perspective on things so there's this idea that we can still kind of accept to the limit of our control of the outer world that's still focus our autonomy and power on our own attitudes and try to make that the kind of dissent that you know what our mission to try and develop our our kind of solar our moral virtue rather than to make a million pounds or something like that in the external world now but is that definitely true do you think the stoic idea that we can always control our thoughts and feelings let's try it out now please don't think of a polar bear for the next 30 seconds yeah did anyone not think of a polar bear well done but you did just now didn't so I mean just just try let's try for a minute just shut your eyes for a minute and observe what's going on in your in your mind have a quick look what's happening in there okay what was happening in there anyone not a lot that's not my fault it's your responsibility yeah experience yeah I don't know about you I mean I I try and you know meditate fairly regularly it's always a lot going on in there and it's just and when you when you sit and observe it it's kind of just a stream isn't it I mean then you kind of rethink oh I'm having I'm having this thought but I that's not my experience that it's just to kind of like a radio station it's just these thoughts happening all the time sometimes I tune and go and you know and then I might you know tune into a particular thought and then act on it and then go off somewhere or something but it's it's you know so and it's kind of the same with feelings as well like I wish I you know like feeling of sometimes just happened don't they you know like why am I feeling so sad you know and that's sometimes how it is so I think you can get over control freaky about your thoughts and feelings because they do something's just happened but the Buddhists would say and I think the Stoics would agree you can still kind of go okay what's what's happening on like radio Jules at the moment and just like I don't have to totally tune in on it and identify ummannaq with it so you can get a perspective on it this thought is happening now this feeling is happening now and sometimes I think that just observing what's happening with a kind attitude does sometimes transform what's happening so I'm told by advanced meditators that if you observe your mind and just kind of train your attention long enough eventually the kind of torrent of thoughts turns into after a few years a river of thoughts and then after like a few decades into a stream and then eventually you know it's there's moments of just kind of openness and clarity which aren't just filled with thoughts that's what I'm told but we can perhaps transform that kind of noise inside us by kind attention just what's happening kind of now just learning to kind of go what's going on in my thoughts look what's going on in my mind and and just observing it without necessarily identifying with the story and without push in a way or I or holding on to it so I think sometimes like attention equanimity and and and kind of kindness particularly to oneself can transform the kind of thoughts and feelings we're having now of course the stoic and Buddhist goal is complete detachment it's to become so that anything can happen to you in the external world and you're you're cool with it because you're you become enlightened so you're totally at one with the flow of the universe you've gone totally beyond conventional good or bad there's a saying the stoic philosopher is happy even on the rack so even when they're tortured they're going this is absolutely fine no big deal the Buddhist monk can set themselves a light and just you know sit there with complete equanimity equanimity hasn't kind of you know whatever happens to them it's fine we may not want to be like that in which case it is you know how useful is this for psychotherapy well I think you know we may not want to be a completely detached more externals but a bit of detachment can be useful so for example in my case I moved from everyone in the world must like me to I would prefer if people like me but if some people don't it's not a disaster that is a bit of detachment I haven't become totally detached from public approval but I've become a bit detached and that's helped me to be more you know happy and well and there's some scientific evidence as well that this study for example accepting negative emotional experiences predicts decreased negative effect and depressive symptoms this is what my wrists we were taught in when I was doing social anxiety CBT they would teach us acceptance is an active experience so when you're feeling super anxious you can just go this is what's happening I'm at the moment I'm feeling anxious and right now I just accept it and that will sometimes calm it down rather than going you know the worst thing is to double-down getting angry about being angry panicking about panicking then you go into a real spiral and it can really destroy you those kinds of thoughts spirals and instead you can just go okay this is what's happening right now I accept it and that can sometimes just settle it down rather than getting lost in that kind of scream of feedback which is what can happen with negative emotions yeah that's true so you can go from this is unbearable to just this is happening this is this is what it is right now and according you know both the Stoics and Buddhists have this idea that you cannot get develop an attitude where also external events are a teacher so Pema Chodron talks about this a lot you know life is constantly presenting you with situations to develop your kind of spiritual wisdom and not be known it's often the most annoying people you know it's those can be great teachers you know annoying difficult people and the stoic Stoics also say like Seneca says stoic sees all adversity as training so epictetus said difficulties are what show people's characters so if life matches you with a tough sparring partner he said then welcome it and that can be the case people can be spiritually awakened by terrible situations by the loss of loved ones by illnesses hard teachers can sometimes really develop us spiritually sometimes and this is an idea one comes across in sooo few wisdom as well people know this poem the guesthouse yeah it's always wheeled out at kind of spiritual things but it's pretty good so this human this being human is a guesthouse he says every morning a new arrival a joy a depression a meanness some momentary awareness comes in an unexpected visitor welcome and entertain them all even if they're a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty but Sir no sure treat each guest on early he may be clearing you out for some new delight be grateful for whatever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond maybe he has a wonderful line learn the alchemy that true human beings know the moment you accept what troubles have been sent you you've transformed something like that it's true it works it can work I found it work for me okay we are what we repeatedly do this is the third and final attitude or technique I want to teach you I'm gonna be going back to the gentleman's question about what about if you just say something up here but don't really feel it all the way down so as we said like the problem for this whole idea of trying to follow a path to transform yourself is that often our attitudes are habitual unconscious automatic and somatic and are deeply ingrained and the little Socrates in our prefrontal cortex isn't that powerful they're not really you know we don't listen to them that much we tend to follow our automatic monkey mind and our you know our physical emotions as well so that means that we need to if we're very much on autopilot most of the time if we sleepwalk through life and just follow our automatic habits then we need to train our habits and you know the good life and the path has to be very much about creating good habits and weakening bad habits and in Greek the word ethics I believe I'm not a scholar but it's connected to the word habit it kind of means the same thing Aristotle said this is paraphrasing but it's I like the further paraphrasing to what he actually said we are what we repeatedly do moral excellence is not an act but a habit so virtue ethics traditions in Christianity Buddhism Greek philosophy they're all about training up good habits and weakening bad habits so epictetus said there is nothing more malleable than the psyche they all have this idea that when you talk about the human personality it's really a bundle of habits and most of those habits are changeable we can train and change even very ingrained habits like addiction anxiety and so forth and there's now good evidence for this this idea that our brain patterns are changeable throughout life it's called neuroplasticity so there's a big emphasis both in Greek philosophy and in Buddhism and in many of these wisdom traditions Christian wisdom Jewish wisdom Muslim wisdom on training in Greek philosophy it's called ascesis which means training which is where we get the word asceticism to you know set ism is basically training yourself every day to create good habits and to weaken bad habits and I'll give you five ways that the Stoics and Buddhists created good habits and weaken bad habits one is Maxim's so both nowadays we think of philosophy we think of you go to Waterson to be massive books which you can never possibly memorize but Greek philosophy clicking stoicism also Buddhism also Christian wisdom it was designed to be easy to memorize so they give these Maxim's or like proverbs or catchphrases beautifully little crafted things which the trainee would find the ones that would really work for them and then repeat them and memorize them over and over so Epictetus said arm yourself with Maxim's so that when you know something difficult happens to you they just pop into your head likewise there's a whole tradition for the loads wrong tradition in Buddhism which says in all situations train with slogans and it hadn't these these slogans I think it's like sixty slogans that they would memorize and train over and over so if you look at both Buddhism and stoicism and say the book of Proverbs in the Bible all these traditions are filled with these just things like there's one of the Buddha's Maxim's hatred does not cease through hatred at any time hatred ceases to love this isn't an unalterable law and you're a trainee Buddhist you might repeat that over and over until it becomes ingrained into your self-talk so the idea is that you just kind of we're mainly that's our automatic story that's just going all the time but you can influence that by what you repeat and giving yourself reminders every day so a similar technique is is being used in cognitive behavioral therapy when I was doing this course for social anxiety I would listen to these talks on a Walkman it was way back then I think yeah it was a discman actually what a ridiculous thing discipline you have to carry it around like that but and I would listen to them every day for like half an hour until it kind of soaked in and I would also I would I would slow read for half an hour every evening these kind of you know these pages things like acceptance is an active experience or I choose not to let my automatic negative thinking bully me I repeat this over and over I even had certain kind of Maxim's from CBT from Buddhism from stoicism and I had a little handbook which I would take with me so that when I felt anxious I would read some of these Maxim's to myself I when I was like 21 I did work experience at Tattler magazine which is the worst place to work if you have social anxiety and I would feel very anxious and he's kind of pashmina mafia all around me and so I would go to the toilet like at least once a day and read out some of these statements some of these Maxim's and hope no one ever heard me but I mean it really worked it did it did I trained you know myself talk so of course negative thoughts was still pop in but I would also remember certain bits of wisdom that would be really helpful and I still do that today I've got all kinds of reminders all over my flat I've got a little mini shrine with some kind of teachers that I really admire pictures of them and that's a reminder I've got like you know maybe a useful quote on my wall and that's a reminder or a Buddhist tanker and that's a reminder so just every day when I'm sleepwalking around I have just little reminders of the wisdom I'm trying to embody now this might sound a bit like Maoist brainwashing you know if you remember the Cultural Revolution Chairman Mao had his little red book and his students had to repeat his sayings over and over and some people think of CBT a bit like that but like now with brainwashing but the point is in this situation you are choosing what you put into your little handbook you're in Caribbean as they were called you are choosing the Maxim's that you want to arm yourself with and you want to put into your story into that flow of your self-talk and you're already brainwashed already you've been already telling yourself a story over and over but probably a lot of that you didn't choose so you're repeating certain ideas over and over without having consciously chosen them so now you've almost got to kind of re brainwash yourself so Marcus Aurelius said our soul becomes dyed with the color of its habitual thoughts therefore he said soak your mind in these ideas I'm self tracking this particular storage thing I don't think there's so much in Buddhism but it's basically ideas to Seneca said at the end of each day find a quiet place and think what did I do well today and what did I do badly because we often just sleepwalk through the day and we don't really realize how do we actually do well be nice to people or not if we do we'd embody our philosophy or not really we're like a kind of marauding elephant so they try to go have techniques to keep track of yourself like a microchip in the ear of the elephant so you can see how did I actually do today keep track of did I actually strengthen the habits that I'm trying to strengthen did I did I do the practice I'm trying to do not just assuming you did because you might be wrong you might be being too harsh on yourself or you might be being too kind on yourself so Epictetus said you know any habit is strengthened by doing it if you have a bad temper count the number of days on which you manage not to lose your temper and if you get to 30 days then consider you're making progress so keeping track of your of your of your practice nowadays you can use a journal to do that I would use a journal just to kind of keep track of my habitual thoughts and also kind of try and rehearse good thoughts but nowadays you've there's so many apps you can there's this whole movement called the quantified self movement so you can have apps which track everything how many calories how many steps you walked how many people you slept with I mean it's all you can you can track at all how many how much alcohol you consume so that you know in the motto of this movement is self-knowledge through numbers I really like an app called insight timer which tells you how much you've meditated and you know you can see your progress and it says you've done three consecutive days and so on you feel good about that so that's a good method and of course it's a keeping track of your progress counting the days is a technique that's of course use everyone from Weight Watchers to Alcoholics Anonymous so it'd be quite an effective method or CrossFit as well for example quite an effective method of changing your habits field work now it's no good if you just kind of you know hear a talk and it sounds very wise you've got to actually go out and try it in real-life situations Epictetus said you may be fluent in the lecture-room but go out into the street and you're miserably shipwrecked so it wasn't enough for me when I had social anxiety to say I accept myself even if other people don't and repeat that to myself I also had to challenge my socially averse behavior which were very ingrained which meant making myself go to parties when my feelings were really telling me this is dangerous this is bad making myself start conversations when I felt like super awkward and like this was the most boring conversation ever so kind of challenging my behavior to some people think that's the most important bit of cognitive behavioural therapy it's changing one's behavior and actually it's that that changes what happens up here as well so it's got to be embodied to both the Stoics and the would say the true test of your philosophy is not how well you can write an article about the Dharma or about stoicism but does it actually change how you treat people and how you treat yourself does it make you kinder community of course is super important I mean particularly in Buddhism you know you say I bow to the Buddha I bow to the Dharma I bow to the Sangha which is their name for the community so originally it was you know mainly monastic this idea that if you're trying to change habits it really helps if you've got people around you who are also trying to change their habits so okay we obviously don't really have you know many of us aren't in a religious tradition anymore they were there obviously Buddhist places here in London but we can find alternatives to that this is the London philosophy Club for example I don't know if exactly like a church but you can find other people who are trying to change themselves in the same way as you like support groups as well it was very helpful to me that group of 10 people who were committed to trying to change ourselves in the same way staying with Alcoholics Anonymous the power of the group when you're trying to change yourself same with Weight Watchers same with CrossFit my church I would say now is a group of friends of mine there's a gun a guy who runs the Alpha course the woman who set up the Sunday assembly a platonic philosopher and we meet up when we check in with each other and support each other and encourage each other and say when things are going badly or well and that's like my church community that's what encourages me to kind of keep on trying to you know live my life and finally practicing love and gratitude the Buddhists in particularly have this thing you know that we can practice emotional attitudes and strengthen them we can you know with the practice of gratitude just you're going to catch yourself you know thinking what have I got to be grateful for today and if you do that repeatedly that will actually strengthen the emotion of gratitude and you can do that with love as well and kindness so I try to do this I do this at the end of every meditation session it's just a little loving-kindness meditation and you think may I be happy may I be free from suffering may I be filled with great joy may I be grounded within equanimity and then I bring to mind someone that I love and I have a very easy relationship with and I them happiness and freedom from suffering and so forth I try to bring them to mind and then I bring up someone and I'm neutral too you know just a neighbor maybe somebody works at the shop down the road and I also wish them happiness and freedom from suffering and then someone with whom you have difficulties and likewise you know wish them happiness freedom from suffering and then finally all beings that's one way of doing this meditation there are a few others as well and I honestly think it has made me a little bit softer hearted and a little bit kind of to myself and other people so you can there's good evidence as well that the repeated practice of loving-kindness meditation alters the brain and the evidence that alters the brain and kind of seems to expand the bit connected with the kind of compassion and altruism but we're going to talk about the limits of evidence I wanted to say just briefly a bit about ecstatic experiences I wrote my second book about this I'm really ecstatic experiences we've what we've looked at now are these kind of habitual ways to change habits day by day so to try and weaken bad habits and strength and good habits but there is also this approach to change and healing which is more about ecstasy which are moments of Epiphany where you suddenly step beyond your old habits and you kind of dissolve your old habits in a moment of intense absorption or altered state of consciousness and you can suddenly step into a different story so for example in ecstatic Christianity you'll have lots of accounts of people who are terrible alcoholics a and then they had a sudden encounter with the Holy Spirit and then they were collaborating form their alcoholism and this after this moment of ecstasy or you could look in psychedelic therapy you can have people who've had long-term depression or addiction and they'll have one moment of kind of ego dissolution they call it on magic mushrooms or ayahuasca and they can some suddenly step out of these deeply ingrained habits and this deeply ingrained story about themselves and choose a different story so there's again you know used to be just very much the idea of ecstasy was very much in the religious realm now there's a sign of ego dissolution particularly with psychedelic therapy it's being studied with neuroscience has been studied with therapy it's been found to be helpful with to help people overcome things like depression and anxiety and it's really kind of changing your ego narrative but at a more subconscious subliminal way so CBT can often help people with the conscious or the kind of semi-conscious but things like psychedelic therapy or surrendering to Jesus can shift habits and beliefs that are very subconscious and and help to bring them you know Jung said that these kind of things lower the threshold of consciousness so you might be carrying around a lot of unconscious guilt or self-loathing and through things like a religious experience or deep meditation or a psychedelic trip some of this unconscious baggage can come to consciousness and give you the choice to say I let that I let that go but I would say by the by that you can put far too much emphasis on an ecstatic experiences and longing for that ecstatic moment which will solve everything and when I was researching the book you know I kind of became a Christian for for two years in fact after an ecstatic experience in a church and was you know I was really hoping that Jesus would like totally heal me and and I think you know and then I tried ayahuasca and I was really trying hoping ayahuasca would like totally humor me and I think none of these things really do totally fix you because you can have moments of Epiphany which do help you to kind of step out of your habitual story but you then still in the weeks and months and years afterwards have to turn that into habits you have to turn the altered state into what they call altered traits and so you still come back to some of these practices from stoicism and Buddhism of kind of daily practice so I think the moment of ecstasy isn't enough you still have to do the daily training but they can work well together right I want to go really quickly because I want to give you time for questions so can science give us a new ethics so as we've seen for the ancient Greeks and for the Buddhists physics biology and ethics were all one subject it was all called philosophy Aristotle both the great moral philosopher also the greatest biologist of his day it's all connected and then what happened in the Middle Ages was Aristotelian philosophy became official Church Dogma official Church talking about the nature of the self the nature of the soul the nature of the universe and it turned out to be wrong that was Galileo being put on trial by the Vatican Church because it turned out that the Sun didn't revolve around the earth as Aristotle said and turned out the Bible wasn't literally true the earth wasn't six thousand years old we weren't descended from Adam and Eve and so at that time science and and and religion were very much clearly in conflict a materialism turned from the 17th century when it was a scientific method into a total dogma or worldview so it turned into a way of measuring reality through certain material measurements into this dogma which is everything is just matter and we don't really understand all consciousness is determined by matter and we're not even sure if there is such a thing as consciousness but basically you know materialism became this this philosophy that there is basically everything is matter and that led to a kind of religious crisis in the 19th century Nietzsche said we have killed gods is there really moral choice if everything is material then where does that leave moral choice or free will never mind the soul is there any room for conscious in that is everything permitted Dostoevsky said is if God is dead then everything is permitted so there's that kind of moral panic in the 19th century and a massive loss of moral authority of the church less than 2% of people in Britain now go to church on a weekly basis so we got left in this kind of moral crisis and what happens from around the Enlightenment was there's this big hope that science could provide moral guidance and consolation and that's still very much with us today so we see the medicalization of ethics when we ask ourselves moral questions like our video games bad we don't look to priests anymore we look to psychologists and scientists we know into scientific trials to give us moral guidance it's called the medicalization of ethics so this is an article from The Daily Mail it says S&M is good for you researchers say sadomasochism can lead to an altered state of consciousness and those who practice S&M feel less anxiety I mean we would boggle the minds of people in the Middle Ages maybe not actually they were probably into flagellation as well but you know that even the Daily Mail is looking to psychologists does this make me healthier this is maybe less anxious when we're asking these moral kind of questions now we've seen that there's good evidence base for CBT and for mindfulness and for positive psychology which kind of comes from CBT that it can improve our mood it can help people become less depressed less anxious less afraid this is the Beck Depression Inventory so through this you can measure to what extent a person's depressed by answering these questions and see if CBTs help them so there's some good scientific evidence that these old spiritual practices from 2,500 years ago improve people's mood and there's also evidence scientific evidence that ecstatic experiences can improve people's mood free people from depression addiction and so on so this has led to the hope that science can provide a new secular ethics that the science of mindfulness the science of stoicism can be this new foundation for our culture the Dalai Lama that's here there with Aaron Beck one of the founders of CBT the Dalai Lama said there's 1 billion non-believers in the world they won't listen to a monk talking about inner values but they might listen to scientists if they prove a connection to well-being so he's very much hoping that science can provide this new ethics for non-believers but we need to be careful about what science has actually proven so if one thing mindfulness is not Buddhism mindfulness is an instrumental technique Buddhism was a whole philosophy of life it was an ethical philosophy about the right way to live mindfulness doesn't talk anything about the right way to live really it's just a kind of technique they of course mindfulness isn't talk at all about the theory of the universe doesn't have a theory of reincarnation or of karma so all the evidence for mindfulness is just one little instrumental technique designed to improve mood likewise CBT is not the same as stoicism CBT is not a moral philosophy there's no ethics to CBT you could use CBT to overcome depression still be a really bad person you could be a highly rational bank robber say so and it dropped all the idea of the the universe as well so these are very little narrow instrumental techniques and we've got to remember there's no sign evidence that mindfulness or CBT makes people more virtuous stoicism was trying to not make people less depressed it was trying to make them morally free Buddhism was trying to make people enlightened we don't have any evidence for that yet how would you measure whether Buddhism or stoicism or these practices had really made some a better person it's quite hard to measure scientifically as the Dalai Lama said you'd have to spy on them for at least a year that's possible in a lie in a monastery but it's harder if you're kind in the university trying to get it past the Grants Commission I've got a press song I'm going I want to get to questions so there's that you know there's a limit of what we can measure and what we can know scientifically and when we're getting very excited about this new science of spirituality we also remember that psychology is in the middle of a replication crisis a lot of famous psychological studies are being replicated and found that they you know they like the marshmallow test for example a lot of you will know that psychological test wasn't replicated and you know a lot of people like testing out say CBT or mindfulness or psychedelic therapy a scientist deeply emotionally and spiritually committed to the you know that this can save the world so there's a big confirmation bias as well I'm not saying these practices aren't you know really helpful and maybe they're they're true but they're probably not true for everyone necessarily not everyone CBT doesn't work for everyone mindfulness doesn't work for everyone and we have to be careful about embracing findings too quickly likewise in the science of ecstatic experiences we have some tiny understanding of what happens in the brain and ecstatic experiences but we have no idea if when someone thinks they encounter mama ayahuasca whether they really are or not when someone thinks that they've you know had a glimpse of the soul that doesn't die on LSD we don't know if that's true or not we there's no way of really measuring that so I would end by just saying that the human condition is one of anxiety uncertainty and mystery and often we want science or religion to close that down and tell us definitely what is true what is definitely the good life but that's we can accept the nature of our condition as humans which is things are a bit uncertain and we have to try and make up our own minds and science and religion and philosophy can help us but that raishin marinas we've got to UM also think for ourselves and we can even learn to enjoy that thank you why don't you just shout it out turn it off yeah yeah yeah yeah well then why we'll just shout it out yeah well certainly yeah absolutely I mean so these are as I said just instrumental techniques not tied to any kind of ethics and you can't really control how people are going to use these techniques like I've been involved in like the promotion of Stoicism and the revival of stoicism in modern life but once these ideas are out in the open like you can't stop like there might be some highly nationalist Sri Lankan monks who kind of use Buddhism in accordance with kind of very military nationalism there are people angry white men alt-right men in America who are really into stoicism so you you know and they're definitely like lots of people teaching mindfulness for kept for investment bankers or whatever where I mean there's even there was a woman called Maria konnikova and then I come across her she's a great writer for New Yorker and she tore herself stoic techniques to become a world champion in poker was completely different you know the things so you can't control how people will use these ideas and practices in terms of your own life you can engage with the original sources and see that it was originally tied to a kind of quite radical countercultural you know moral philosophy the Stoics and the buddhists put a big emphasis on taking care of your own mind and of accepting the limit of your control over the universe but that doesn't mean they were quietest or totally passive the Stoics for example were very active politically there was something in the Roman Empire called the stoic composition who kind of a lot of Stoics were constantly being exiled and they were being imprisoned and they would give their lives to cry and resist imperial tyranny they were like Republicans not in the American sense and so that you know they said but they the way they combined political activism with stoicism was like all I can do is try and do the right thing and stand for what I believe in and because I am detached I'm willing to die for it as well but yeah so so that didn't stop them from doing the right thing also meant trying to do the right thing politically as well and I think that's that's the same with with Buddhism but I would say if you look at Western Buddhism now they are trying to balance this kind of acceptance of what is that it's all kind of at some level okay with more of a kind of historically judeo-christian thing of like reality is also broken and we need to try and fix it which is the kind of Christian idea of things we need to try and build the kingdom of heaven so that's why I see in Western Buddhists now is they're trying to tell those two things you know together on the one hand everything's okay and just breathe and accept what is on the other hand how can we group together to help you know fix a situation that's quite broken does that make some sense yeah [Music] [Music] yeah so how do we get how do we help sociopaths and Psychopaths what you mean like people at the top of society and so forth what do you mean like the CEOs yeah well you're assuming that you are trying to do the right thing which is being with you're saying like I we're we're great it's just the horrible people at the top well first of all the horrible people to talk with voted there by us we might not be as great as we think we are it's I'm terrible so so I mean like I think it's it's an easy story to say we're great like us we're fine it's them like I think the kind of the you know evil goes through all of us like darkness is in all of us I mean I've just come from California I can tell you that either the kind of CEOs and the ultra-rich they're really into this stuff they don't you know they're very they're into like spiritual techniques and training and things but they're not they're not always you know anyway look I think I don't know how I didn't even I've never met a psychopath so I wouldn't know but I would say like me personally I think you know I've tried I try to take care of myself and spread the ideas that I find I mean like tripe watch myself and trying to take spread the ideas that I find helpful I don't know I just I've never met a psychopath yeah I mean it's a big it's a big it's a big thing now that there are these people called Psychopaths out there it's really in our kind of discourse and I just don't know I would like to if there's a psychopath Club I'll go and meet some of them but I have no idea I don't know I think it's just I think it might be a just a thing in you know one of these trends in in in medicine and in the media so I don't know and I I'm not sure I'm not convinced about it I guess I have some faith that people you know are reachable through ideas but you're never going to fix the world like you know anyone who could so easiest way to sell a book say if we just got this idea out there you know the you know the world would be completely better and no one would suffer there's always going to be selfish bad people and we are also gonna you know these are these are just these are practices that might make some difference to some people that's all yeah yeah yeah what do you think about what well I mean I mean it's it's true yeah it's true mmm I think that is possibly a trend towards quietism now and detachment and like well what can we do about it I mean you know it's in some ways like in some ways Buddhism for example it's just talk about Buddhism it's about trying to train yourself to recognize your connection to other people and should be open hearted and in the Mahayana tradition you know it's the idea is to become a dedicate yourself to the liberation of all beings so it's very much an in this world kind of thing you're trying to become a compassionate warrior able to you know to engage with people without angry reactivity and you're also gonna you know you have this ideal may all beings be enlightened may all being suffer less so that's you know an active thing but they they might also think that even if you're just meditating on that they're still helping people then that's that's their view of consciousness so I don't know I think again all these things so that same with any spiritual tradition you can be a way to turn a turn away or or you can use it to it to engage in society I think we're all like post-christian even if you you know we're in a post-christian society so we're much more Christian than we realize that going back to what I said before we're very much have this idea this all you know this Christian idea of trying to remake the world and help people and change the world and even when we get into different spiritual traditions like Buddhism we bring that that kind of Christian heritage with us so Westerners can't we just accept reality like it is that's a more of an Eastern idea you know it's all this is all just illusion anyway that's a kind of Eastern wisdom whilst we're like we've got to fix it and if we don't it's selfish and so that's how that's how that's how a lot of Western Buddhists alike they're like let's let's you know what are we doing to help Society yeah yeah well so that's just that was what they're gonna view from above they're seeing things from a kind of cosmic perspective yeah so like I said all of these are just tools they're just you know particular practices you can use if if your problem is you get very stressed about little things it can be useful to kind of zoom out a bit in your perspective and modulate if you're prone to you know serious anxiety but if you'll find you don't really care about anything or anyone that might not be the best practice for you you your your different practice might be to kind of really try and you know think about suffering of other beings or something and try to engage more so these these things that there's there's no one-size-fits-all for all people you have and you have to be responsible for your own journey you know you have to be the sister I said you have to be the doctor to yourself what is good what is the appropriate method for me at this moment in my life personally I found stoicism really helpful for me when I when I had bad anxiety when my life was kind of in crisis as I got older my life improved a bit I found some of those toke practices were overly defensive and I was more interested in kind of ecstatic practices and some physical practices so we've got to be our own doctors your absolute of these ideas can be misused or used harmfully you can totally kind of you know I remember it in the film the third man you know they didn't if you've seen it wonderful old film and they go into this Ferris wheel and the guy goes up for the top of the ferris wheel he says look down there look at all those little dots moving around would it really matter if one of them stopped moving so that was kind of zooming out in a really pathological way so any of these ideas can be you know likewise if you just add vitamin C for a month you'd be ill so all of these things you have to about the appropriate use of it and and and and check in with yourself like every let every now and then is this making me kind as this working is this effective for me if not am i doing it right or should I just I do something different that suits my particular situation and my particular personality better okay yeah yes so there are there are ways to measure mood people just used intend to use a kind of 10 points questionnaire so I said that did you see the Beck Depression Inventory and we have a questionnaire like I nothing nothing matters you know I I hate my life and you say I to what extend you agreeing you might say five or six or seven well I regularly think about killing myself so you can ask people that kind of thing and then you add them all up and you give them a score and then you can see changes over time so that's so I think there's fairly reliable science of that and that helps you to measure things like anxiety and depression and also happiness you can also you can measure addiction as well in terms of behavior are they do they still think of themselves addicted are they able to like not drink say so those kind of things there's quite a good you know ways of measuring where it's harder is measuring say things like more subjective and ethical things like meaning like the value of someone's life like whether they're living a good life people have tried to develop questionnaires like there's a humility questionnaire which is kind of a paradox if you think about it so I Donald Trump said I'm very humble I think I'm more humble than you to understand so he would score very high on a humility scale you know like 35% of British people if you ask them how worthwhile their life is at a scale of one to ten they say ten so they think their life couldn't be more worthwhile I think that's a lack of imagination really like so you could subjectively feel your life is very worthwhile or very meaningful main very good but you you know it's you can't objectively measure that do you see what I mean and then there's things you know whether someone's enlightened I mean they're they've you know in then they they'd set you a CO an a kind of strange mystical thing and if you came to the right answer to it and look at that he's a you know they're enlightened but I mean we've seen all kinds of gurus who were supposedly enlightened who turned out to be terrible people actually when the doors closed they don't have to be sex pests so it's it's again it's uncertain we can measure mood to something we can measure that these kinds of practices do seem to change people but we can't scientifically measure if they you know if they make people a better person I mean I think I think they often can and do but probably not all the time I'm sure there's you know loads of people who have kind of really committed Buddhists or Christians or Stoics and a horrible people I'm sure that happens all the time yeah okay that's it I will send it I'll give the Nile the slides I know I went through it really quickly thank you so much for your time and I really hope the rest of the day is great I know the next speaker and he's brilliant and if you want me to sign any books they're both available outside even in different languages as well okay thank you [Applause]

Channel: The Weekend University

Views: 18,833

Rating: 4.8763795 out of 5

Keywords: the weekend university, psychology lectures, Stoicism, Stoic Philosophy, Buddhism, Psychotherapy, CBT, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius

Id: qbwOjZcT4R0

Length: 100min 8sec (6008 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 16 2019