Geoff Thompson - Fear My Friend

Full transcript: Geoff Thompson on London Real

3:56 This is London Real. I’m Brian Rose. This is Nick Gabriel, and joining us today is Mr. Jeff Thompson, who is a writer, a teacher, and a self-defense instructor. He’s written several books on martial arts, fear control, as well as an autobiography, which is called Watch My Back, which he just gave me a copy of.

4:13 Very cool. He’s also won a BAFTA for Best Short Film and his screenplay for Brown Paper Bag. He’s got short films that Ray Winstone was in. I could go on and on, but Jeff, welcome. Thank you.

4:25 You’re welcome, Jeff. A great honor as well. have you on. You know, I didn’t know where to start with you, so I was wondering if you could give us a little cliff notes of your journey. I mean, you’ve been, you’ve done so many things.

4:35 Yeah. Well, working in factories until I was 32 suffered a lot from depression because I had this massive creative, this creative impulse, but no outlet for it because the kind of the area I was brought up in that just wasn’t acceptable. This creative outlet, you know, like a, like a, a floor sweeper wanting to write books just wasn’t acceptable. It was against the social moors. So every time I tried to find an outlet for my creativity, the society around me took a baseball bat to it.

5:05 I had one particularly bad depression where I just thought I’m tired of being bullied by these feelings. So I decided to draw a pyramid on a piece of paper and write down every fear I’ve got. Least fear at the bottom, worst fear at the top, and systematically confront my fears. That way, I would become fearless. That was my idea.

5:24 So the least fear was spiders, which doesn’t seem like it’s debilitating. But for me, where I was at the time, if there was one in the corner, I wouldn’t sleep. The worst fear was violent confrontation. So it was quite a pyramid to climb. I figured that I could get desensitization to fear and understand fear if I could confront it.

5:42 So I started to do that systematically. Most of the fears, the moment I turned towards them, these three-dimensional monsters became two-dimensional cartoons. And as I got closer, as I embraced them, they dissipated. So it was just about sitting in the fear, marinating the fear and developing a sovereignty over these feelings because I figured the feelings weren’t going to go away. I needed to do something with it. I ended up working as a nightclub bouncer because how absolutely you’re going to confront your fear of violence. You know you can’t confront it academically, you can’t do it from a book, you can’t do it from a dojo either because it lacks the kind of of the threat of death, if you like.

6:23 Because in a real situation, especially in Coventry, people were fighting an empty room. It’s a very violent city. The great thing I got from the door was that just by standing on the door, I expanded my conscious net. Because I’d never take yes for an answer, I’m there looking and desperately want what I do to fit in that environment and looking and thinking, I know it’s not going to fit. It needs to be adjusted.

6:46 What I’ve learned is a long-range martial art system and some close range stuff that won’t fit in this environment. This is conversation range, it’s volatile and the people are so unpredictable that even they don’t know what they’re going to do. That’s the most dangerous person you can ever meet. So the great thing I learned about that was two things. One, the essence of physical combat is ugly, it’s immediate and it’s very, very effective. It’s so effective that it sickens you and what I learned beyond that was that the bottom level of martial arts is the physical combat. We We need to tire that off.

7:17 We need to know what works. But the top end is budo. And budo is all about love. Not love as an emotion, but love as a frequency. And this is what’s really exciting.

7:27 You look at that and you think, has martial arts got anything to do with religion and faith? But then you start looking at the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh Bible, the Gita, you know, the Hindu Bible. You start looking at the Quran, the Daoudi Jing, you start looking at the Vedas, as as you were saying, the Srimad Bhagavatam, the Mahabharata, the Torah, the Christian Bible, they’re saying exactly the same. They’re saying that the highest level of living is to serve selflessly.

7:55 That’s what I learned from standing in a nightclub door. The bottom end of Buddha is what I teach people immediately. And you can teach it quite quickly. You can’t teach mindset quickly, but you can teach principles very quickly, is preemption and artifice. And the fact that we look at this, and this is ugly, It’s an expression, it’s a way of communicating, but it’s a very base, sedimental way of communicating.

8:18 Above and beyond that is lots of other levels in the Torah, you know, they’re talking the Torah about the seven days of creation. Really, from where I’m looking and from people like Swedenberg, they’re talking about the seven developments of man, the seven stages of man’s development from being a selfish clod, trying to serve himself, to being a God-serving man, in other words, serving from love. So selfless service is the key to the reciprocal universe. That’s the key.

8:46 And that’s what when we’re talking about the Gita and all these different Bhabhas, that’s what they all say. The top end of Buddhism is selfless service. The top end of Sikhism is selfless service. The top end of Hinduism is selfless service. You read the Srimad Bhagavatam, which is like 12 volumes, 18 books, 34,000 cantos.

9:08 And it’s repeating the same thing again and again, serve from Krishna consciousness. In other words, serve from a frequency of love. So at the bottom end, we’re getting people to develop the ability to, you know, understand physical combat by getting rid of systems and by just looking at it, honestly, what’s the essence of this? What’s the truth of this? Not what I want to be true, but what’s the truth of this?

9:32 The truth of this is this is all I need. That’s exciting because I can let go of that now, because I don’t want that. I don’t want a violent life. It’s not what I want in my life. There’s too many wonderful things for me to do. So then my development becomes about looking, well, what is the essence?

9:46 I mean, I can give you the essence of life in one word. I could write it on the back of a stamp. It’s love. But not in the way people think of love. Love is a frequency that we all need to attain. But it’s difficult to attain that frequency because we have so many shadows, so many sub-personalities, so many kind of false beliefs, so much conditioning.

10:10 What Gurdia talked a lot about conditioning the crowd, lots of personalities in there don’t agree with that. So to get this connection to the frequency of love, we have to continually work on self-defense, not about self-defense out there, but self-defense against the self or against the self. learned all this stuff working the door. That was the start of it yeah. But you must be the only man that could do that because there’s so much potentially nastiness and confrontation and egos involved whether it’s the door staff or the customers and you know impairments you know from drugs and alcohol. How did you come to this conclusion? Well the thing is when you look at it what it really is I learned to you know you learn to kill people. I know that that sounds gross and it sounds an exaggeration but that’s basically what you’re doing. If you do Brazilian digits or judo you learn to kill people very quickly because of strangulation. I guess you’re right. Yeah but that’s what you do when you strangle people you know sometimes within five or ten seconds they’re unconscious, 60 seconds brain death if it didn’t occur at birth with some of the people I’ve had to deal with you know and then after that the death is your choice not theirs and I don’t want to I don’t want to kind of minimalise that, but that’s the truth. The truth is you learn to kill people. When you learn to kill people, there’s something about humanity kicks in. You

11:33 Knock somebody unconscious, they fall to the floor and they hit the floor teeth first and you just see this pool of blood appear around their head and their girlfriend comes over and she’s screaming and their friends come round and there’s just this massive shock and you have this realisation that you’ve You’ve just knocked an unconscious somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, somebody’s uncle, somebody’s daddy. I would bump into people in the town I’d battered the night before and see them with their children. And it was horrifying, but it was good for me because it said, you think this is an enemy.

12:06 It’s not an enemy. The enemy, what Ganley said, the only real enemy is the enemy inside. There’s a great thing from Muhammad’s life story, which is just outside of the about his life story when all the Muslim warriors are coming back from war because they were real warriors and some of them are dismembered, some of them are dying, some of them will die, some of them have already died and they’ve you know they’re mortally wounded but quite proud of themselves for having been in this war and Muhammad’s clapping his hands saying well done well done on the small G had and they’re outraged what do you mean small G had you know some of us are dying some of us have died you know some of us are I dismembered. And he said, the big jihad is in here. It’s inside. It’s going in there.

12:52 That’s where the real war is. It’s where the only war is. Again, what Gandhi said, the only tyrant I recognize is the tyrant in me. So this becomes about looking and thinking, that’s not what I want to do with my life. I don’t want to be physical. I don’t want to be violent.

13:07 In fact, I recognize that the part of me that created the situations of violence wasn’t the real me it was a sub personality it was a 12 year old kid with a second hands worth of knowledge saying the world is terrible the world is bad because when I was 12 somebody sexually abused me and implicitly said nobody can be trusted not even knows your love especially those you love and it’s a martial arts structure which is like almost the worst thing it’s not like a neighbor it’s someone you’re interesting yeah I mean I’d like this guy I love this guy I’d like him but he places something on the hard drive you know, because it goes in without opposition because you trust them. He places something on the hard drive that says nobody can ever be trusted. So of course you project that onto every situation you go into.

13:50 And those situations reflected back at you? They reflected back. Swedenberg called it the law of correspondence. If there’s a pilot light of emotion in you, it’s because it’s corresponding. So you look at somebody and you feel jealousy or anger or, you know, envy or vitriol. It’s because it reflects in you. Again, which is very exciting because that one concept says to you, everybody’s is a teacher, everybody can teach you, if you’re brave enough to look and say, yeah, I see that, but that’s in me, or yeah, I see that, but that’s in me, then I can work on that.

14:22 The world is a mirror, right? The world is definitely a mirror, and then when you don’t feel it, then we know it’s not there, so if it’s corresponding in us, but equally, you can stand in front of somebody that’s great, and somebody that’s achieved massive things, someone that has a massive consciousness and you feel that excitement or you feel that inspiration and that reflects in you as well. We look at our great leaders and we feel a great pride because we recognise that we can do that as well.

14:49 In fact, that’s what I realised from creating new realities for myself. I realised that I was more afraid of my potential. I was afraid of fear. My fear was of my success, not of my failure and they call that the Jonah complex and And Jonah was a character from the Old Testament who was asked to go and preach to the village by God. And he was like, I can’t believe it.

15:13 He’s asking me to preach. I’m so proud. And as he gets closer to the village, he’s thinking, no one’s going to listen to me. Who am I to preach for God? So Jonah runs away, and you’ve heard Jonah in the well.

15:25 He dives into the sea, and he gets swallowed by a whale. But when the whale realizes he’s running away from his potentiality, he spits him out. Most people don’t believe that there are success barriers, they stick out in front of them. I find that when I tell people that, they’re like, what are you talking about? One in ten people would admit that they might have a success complex.

15:42 But it makes sense because if you’re successful, it just brings more problems and issues into your life. You know, if… Responsibilities. Responsibilities. And I can understand that.

15:52 I’ve definitely seen that in my own life. Yeah, it’s just most people in the Western world assume that they can understand their own conscience. Yeah. They’re like, I would never do that. It’s not logical.

16:01 I see what you’re saying. Well, Leonardo da Vinci said, when a bird lands in a tree, the whole world changes because everything affects everything. And that’s so true. So, if I’m successful, the reason people are afraid of success is because success is the harbinger of change, and change is a constant, but it’s the one thing everyone’s afraid of. So, if I’m certainly successful, how’s that going to affect my relationship with my wife?

16:25 For me to change from a philosophy to a writer, I lost my first marriage, I lost my first wife. I lost most of the friends around me at that particular time because they couldn’t cope with the change in me. Because one minute I’m a floor sweeper standing on the night club doors, the next minute I’m a published author. And I’ve got radio stations and television people wanting to interview me. And they can’t cope with that change. So change in you affects everything. And that’s why people are afraid of it. There’s a responsibility as well because people want to know what your opinion is. So it’s just taken on that extra weight and I think that’s why most people are asleep. They don’t see what’s right in front of them. Like I can be in a room, when I do say my master class, I’ve got a room full of people all dressed the same. There’s one guy in the corner that thinks the world is very small and he can’t really make the rent and then I’ve got another guy in the other corner who runs a hundred million pound company. They’re both in the same room, in the same world. One has an expanded consciousness and he sees that he hires a thousand people, this particular guy. So he’s serving a lot of, he’s a caretaker for a massive amount of wealth and there’s another person that thinks it’s us and them and there are no opportunities.

17:41 But actually we are surrounded at all times by massive opportunity. In Islam there’s a word they use called Yaqim and they said that it means that the truth is undeniably right in front of you, it’s right there, the potential, it’s right in plain sight, but we don’t see it, we don’t see it because we’re asleep, but it’s there. Had this great experience when I did a meditation, and I asked God in my meditation to show me potential, and this is true, it happens to me a lot. Three birds landed in my garden, I’d just thrown bread at it, so the garden was literally full of bread, it was full of bread, three birds landed in my garden, two of them were babies, one of them was a mother, and the mother was feeding the babies and I watched. Suddenly the mother flew away and the babies were stood there in a garden full of bread going, where’s my mom? Where’s the bread? And I looked and watched the mother. She flew and landed on the roof opposite. So she was watching. So she was aware that, you know, she was leaving them to find the bread for themselves. But they were in a garden full of bread and they couldn’t see bread because they were so used to being fed. And that’s what happens with most people in society. They’re so used to getting information from all the usual sources, that they don’t go out and search for the information themselves. But for me, there are portals in universes of information all around

19:01 Us. If you take one quote, say if you took a quote, lift the self by the self, never let the self droop down. The self is the self’s only enemy, the self is the self’s only friend. It’s just a quote, but it’s how I like to live my life. That’s from Lord Krishna, talking to Arjuna, the Battle of Guru, etc. You follow that quote, then you might get a pamphlet from a Hare Krishna guy and you read that and you think, oh this is exciting, this is all about self-sovereignty and it’s exciting. So you open up a little portal, so a quote is led up to a portal and you think, where does this come from? You read, oh it comes from the Bhagavad Gita, I’ll get the Bhagavad Gita. So you get the Bhagavad Gita and it’s a tone and you’re thinking, oh that’s a challenge. But you’re You’re also aware that this is a vast amount of information written five thousand years ago.

19:49 Is it home? A lot of pages. Yeah, a lot of pages, yeah. So you read this and you think, oh, I did really well. I’ve got through the bag of a Gita and my conscious net has expanded.

19:58 I understand a bit more because it’s all about there are no enemies out there. There are no friends. The only enemies and friends are in your own perception. So you’ve got the bag of a Gita and you think, um, that’s really good. I’ve done well to read that.

20:10 And then you speak to someone, say, well, the bag of a Gita comes from the Mahabharata, It’s just one chapter in the Mahabharata, and the Mahabharata is about the Karava brothers and the Pandava brothers. The Karava brothers are corrupt, and the Pandava brothers are very righteous, and the Karava steal their kingdom. And the whole book is about these people coming to this place at Guruk Tetrach to go into war to win back their kingdom. So you think, oh, I’ll read the Mahabharata.

20:36 So you get the Mahabharata, and it is a proper big book, you know, and it’s, again, fruits from the Vedas. You read the Mahabharata, and you’re talking to one of your Hindu friends, and he says, oh, the Mahabharata comes from the Srimad Bhagavatam. What? The Srimad Bhagavatam. It’s like 12 tones.

20:54 So there’s too much information out there, is what you’re saying? Well, not really. I’m just saying there’s as much as you want. How much do you want? People say there’s no information.

21:01 I think there’s too much information these days. I mean, with the web and everything, it’s just constantly being barraged. I mean, you just dropped about 50 different sources here. But the exciting thing for me is that people think there’s not potential, but there are books there that will say, we will lead you. If you turn towards expansion, just turn towards it, we will race towards you. There is an energy in the universe that wants to express itself through us. So it only tells you, all of the Bibles that I’ve read, and all of them have helped me to expand my conscious net, all of them have said the same thing, it’s in you. So the three levels of Yakeem, first is the intellectual level we need to read, the second is the visionary level, we need to be able to actually physically see ourselves doing the things we want to do. We have to believe it’s possible. The third level is to actually do it. So that’s why the knowledge is important. And I get your point, one of the big mistakes with knowledge is that people collect knowledge and knowledge just becomes masturbation, it’s just like look at how much I know. But it It doesn’t, knowledge on its own doesn’t do anything, it’s just one of the things that expands the second self or the core beliefs.

22:11 So we’ve got core beliefs that says, this is how the world is, this is how the world works. We can expand those core beliefs through intellectual endeavour. But at some point, like for instance, as an example for me, intellectually, cognitively, I didn’t believe it was possible for a kid like me to be a published author. So I read books that showed me lots of different people like me who were published. So cognitively I’d expanded my consciousness to say it’s possible, of course it’s possible, but I still couldn’t see myself doing it.

22:46 So I started to work on visualisation and I started to visualise myself three dimensionally emotionally in that place. And of course I did all the work in the meantime, massive amounts of work, and then suddenly I tipped and I got a book published. Then the truth was undeniably right in front of me. So that’s the third level of your key. Nobody can tell me that it’s not possible to be published.

23:11 Because I understood it at a level of actually doing it, I was able then to publish 40 books on the back of that. And I was able to make, I don’t know, 10 films. I was able to do thousands of articles. I wrote for The Times. One of our films was long listed for the Oscars.

23:26 We won a BAFTA. Do you still get excited about writing? Yeah, I love writing. I mean you’ve written 40 books, how do you get excited for the next book? Because I’m continually getting new information, and for me to keep growing I need to keep imparting the information.

23:45 I’ve tried to resist that at times. What do you prefer, a book or a screenplay? I think I’m better at drama, my dramas have won global awards and plays have been acclaimed, So I’m better at drama, but I like both of them really, but I like, if you do something, say something like The Elephant and The Twig, it’s a great entry-level book for people. Like The Secret, it’s a really good entry-level. I mean, the words in The Secret go right back to the Vedas.

24:16 So the words are very profound, although the book is quite highly ridiculed by lots of people. This is The Secret, the idea of if you visualize something, it will come to you. Yeah, but The Secret is an entry-level book. It’s just trying to get people in to excite them about their potential. It’s saying to them, you have a kingdom, it’s your kingdom, but it’s being blocked by conditioning.

24:37 And that conditioning is being, it’s being underlined all the time by everything around you. Every time you try to break that conditioning, people around you will attack you and criticize you. So I know, I don’t think we can change the human condition, but I think we can change human conditioning. We can definitely change that because I have. I’ve gone from sweeping floors in factories to sitting at the BAFTAs with Johnny Depp sat there, you know, and me having to move my wife’s chair so she can’t see him.

25:06 Is he extremely good looking? He’s extremely good looking and until we met him, my wife thought I was extremely good looking so it isn’t all good. So the knowledge on its own is nothing. It means nothing because it’s just intellectual folly. At some point you’ve got to be able to see yourself doing what you want to do and And at some point, you’ve got to actually do it.

25:27 And to do that, we have to overcome some of these very large fears. Well, there are times when you weren’t able to do that. You look back a few years ago, or 10 years ago, or the times where you were like, I got off track. Oh, loads of times. I’ve been on my knees, believe me.

25:43 People think if you’re teaching, if you’re a guru, if you go out and teach this stuff that you don’t suffer. But actually, the only reason you can teach is because you do fall. You do go off track. do suffer. My whole thing has been about getting my connection between the self and the soul solid, but between the self and the soul are massive personalities built up from years of conditioning and some of that conditioning has come through in my genes. Some of it’s in me, you know, when I was born.

26:14 You need to drink ayahuasca, man. There’s a guy like this having ayahuasca. Well, I’ve not even, what is ayahuasca? I’ll let you take this one. Oh, no, I’ve heard you talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a well, it’s a psychedelic plant medicine That’s about expanding the conscious net, isn’t it? Have you taken any psychedelic stuff? No, but I haven’t acted because I’ve expanded my conscious net through meditation I think you can do it directly through TM You talked about self and what you said between the self and the soul but between the self and the soul Yeah is what Freud would call the internal parent or the suit this the superego or in psychology They call it cognitive these kind of core beliefs Yudhisthira, who is the head brother in the Mahabharata, he calls it the Second South.

26:57 And the Reishi said to him, the question him, how do you expand, how do you connect to God? He said, you connect to God by expanding the Second South. How do you expand the Second South? You expand the Second South by studying the Vedas. And the Vedas to you might be the Koran, it might be the Torah, the Christian Bible, the New Testament, the Old Testament.

27:18 You might be able to go and stand in front of a tree. They used to call the oaks like a tree of doors. You can access other realities through that. I don’t think it matters so much how you do it. You find your own cultural way of doing it.

27:32 And having studied lots of the different faiths, they all, at one point, they all say the same thing, service from love. Well, I thought he was just gonna come in and talk to us about hitting people. Yeah. You know, it’s weird, because you say that the enemy is within, And I’ve said this on the show that I think that we all have to get out of our own way is probably our biggest challenge in life. But I also look at the guys that’s going to say, wait a second, this guy’s going to come beat me up, or the Russians are going to invade, and it used to you teach self-defense.

28:01 So at some point, you do have to be able to fight, do you not? It’s a level. It’s definitely a level. It’s a level of consciousness. So at the bottom level, you’re teaching about fundamental, physical self-defense.

28:15 And there’s not a massive amount to that. At the top end, it’s self-defense against self, where you are at a point, and I can only talk from my own life, where you’re at a point where you recognize that you’re the one that creates the violence because of your mindset. If you’re in a lower frequency, you create violence from that place. So when I had this kind of insecure person at the front of my consciousness, I was so afraid of the world that I literally, with my strong imagination, created nightclubs, pubs, fights at christenings, fights at weddings.

28:47 I couldn’t leave the house without being in a fight. I was literally in hundreds of fights. And I know people will think that’s an exaggeration, but I was working in a city where I was one of the least experienced. I was working with guys that were in thousands of fights. Four of my friends were murdered.

29:03 Two of them were assassinated. It was a hugely violent time. But I’m aware that I created that. I had weapons in every room of my house. My body was, I’m full of tattoos, I’ve got the body armour, I took away the prettiness, don’t want to be touched, don’t want to be abused, built up this massive armour and these skills, and I went out into the world and I created violence.

29:25 I created, I was a millionaire with as far as violence is concerned. The exciting turning point for me was when I realised that it was me that was creating it. Because I said to my wife, everywhere I go, everywhere I go, it’s fuckless violence, it’s such a violent world. he said, you know, what you need to look at is the fact that it’s everywhere you go. There was a UFC fighter called War Machine who had to go to prison for a year and he came out recently and he said the same thing. He said, I used to go out with my friends and violence would find me. I was like, what’s happening? What’s happening? But he’s like, ultimately, it came to me because he’s like, I think I kind of brought it on myself, this whole mindset. He was always worried about getting into a fight and getting into problems and then you know. But of course you end up you end up in a violent environment and then you because I was kind of at the top end of that and then you you suddenly start to realize that there’s always someone that’s prepared to come you know team-handed someone’s prepared to bring weapons and if you bring a knife they’ll bring a gun you bring a gun they’ll bring a team with a gun you know there’s always somebody prepared to take it a step further and you start realizing that you may you may feel as though you’re strong but you’re strong in a very low frequency, and you realize how intelligent that is.

30:37 So violence is part of the hierarchy. We are an evolving species, and that is part of the involvement, and if you look around the world, there are lots of people at lots of different stages, but having been in that stage of the violent kind of frequency, I realize that even well-intentioned violence always rebounded on itself, because it is a reciprocal universe. we give out returns, you know, and what we give out prolifically returns prolifically. When I realised this, I got rid of every weapon in my house, I got rid of all the weapons, I got rid of all the violent books, and this happened over a period of time. I stopped teaching violence, I stopped talking violence, I stopped writing violence. I realised that I was creating, you know when people say this, when you want to create something you have to fully immerse yourself. I created a violent world because I fully immersed myself in the belief that I needed violence. I literally created monsters, so I just dissolved that and then I started to fill my house with positive thinking books and the Bibles and I started to go inside and dissolve all these parts of me that believed that was true. I went to the very heart of the dragon because the dragon in me was very big but when I went to the heart of it it was just a very small core belief that was injected in me when I was 12 that said, the world is dangerous, nobody can be trusted, build yourself an armory,

32:02 Become violent. Was it that one event? Or do you think it was a series of events? I would say there’s other things around that because there was the violence, there was the assault. And then after that, I told a couple of people who suggested maybe I led this guy on.

32:16 And I’m like, but I was 12, what does that mean? You said even the memory in your own mind you think changed over the years. Yeah, it expands, it becomes something it wasn’t. I wrote out yourself. Well, of course you think it’s your fault because people have suggested it’s your fault.

32:32 But ultimately, this thing, you’re 12 years old, this thing hits you at 12 and sends your life on a right angle. So suddenly you’re living at a right angle to your true path. And then I’m over here at a right angle trying to solve problems that don’t exist here. They exist down here. So I wrote a play called Fragile, which was basically all about this situation.

32:54 And it enabled me, I call it closure writing. It’s a technique that I’ve invented, so it’s got my copyright on it. So I called it closure writing. So I basically just wrote this situation with everything that’s ever blackmailed me, everything I’ve ever thought of. And when I went down to the very, very core of it, and this play was on the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, come to the very core of it, you know, the very truth of it, because there’s a lot of story around it, when you come to the very core of it, one person sexually abused me, and one person, one person suggested that I’d led them on.

33:30 That was the truth. That’s all I got to deal with. So that’s the heart of, I don’t know if you’ve seen Beowulf, but Beowulf’s ultimate battle is with the dragon. And he doesn’t have to kind of take on the dragon’s might. He just has to find the weak point and there’s a weak point here and he climbs inside with his hand and pulls the heart out.

33:48 So the heart of this situation, the truth of the situation was that was all that happened. And then a 40 year story builds outside that. So I don’t have to deal with the story, I just have to deal with the truth. But to do that, you’ve got to go through several layers of consciousness, you’ve got to go through this kind of archetype that you’ve built that wants to protect you against the world. He’s got lots of dans and he can have a fight, he wants to protect you.

34:11 You’ve got to go beyond him, you’ve got to go right to the core of it and say that’s the core of it. And it was really interesting because once I did the play, I just had this release of overwhelming, unconditional love for people that I’d held the grudge against for a long time because I quietly blame them. You kind of removed the linchpin. Yeah, took it away. Lots of cards fell down.

34:29 Took massive courage because you don’t just get sexually abused and that’s it. Sexual abuse leads to false information on the hard drive and false information creates sons and daughters of itself. So certainly I’ve got a massive amount of beliefs and a massive amount of karma that I personally, you know, I beat up a lot of people. I was violent with a lot of people. So I have to atone for that.

34:52 Even though I thought I did it for the right reasons, I’ve still got to atone for that. That’s still in the pipes, it’s still there. It’s still recorded. Even my skin is a testimony against me, I can’t deny it. So I’ve still got to atone all that.

35:07 So that’s the journey, the internal journey. It’s easy for me to go corrupt politicians, fundamental religion, violent fundamentalists and greedy bankers and the rich and the poor It’s easy for me to project out, it’s easy for me to look at this guy and say, this guy ruined my life, it’s easy for me to say, you know, these people, you know, held me back. But none of that’s actually true. I have free will. So common.

35:37 Well, it’s a victim mentality that’s just so common. You love it, don’t you, Brian? But even without thinking of it as a victim mentality, it’s almost a natural Western thing. This is the reason that’s bad. You said once that forgiveness is the only revenge.

35:52 And that’s a very powerful statement. I was just wondering if you could expand on it and just talk about it. When somebody offends you or somebody abuses you, it’s like a mini possession. So when the guy abused me when I was 12, say just that one incident, it’s like a form of possession. So like 20 years later, I’m self-abusing, I’m sexually self-abusing, I’m violent as a displacement protection because of that one thing.

36:18 Possession like a devil possessing you? Yeah, absolutely. That part of that person is possessing you. So, you know, 20 years or 30 years, some people go the whole life, that person is still inside them. So you mention that person or that situation, pilot light, and they become filled with fear and aggression and rage and blame. So for me, what I recognised was that when you hold a grudge against somebody or when something happens to you, part of them stays with you, they possess you. So got two things you can do with that. You can either, through a form of alchemy, you can turn that into gold, which is what I learned to do later on.

36:58 Or you can build- Use that as drive. Yeah. Well, actually, just the base material itself is massive. It’s a reservoir of energy. I’ve created an empire for myself from all my rage and from all my anger. I’ve just brought it and contained it into this tabernacle, into this vessel, and I’ve brought it through the heart-chacker and created lots of books, lots of films, created a great work.

37:22 It comes down to the transmutation of negative emotions into positive emotions. Absolutely, the transmutation, or if you keep that person inside you as a grudge, which is quite delicious, it’s quite delicious for us to live in our kind of our blames and our projections, if we do that then 20, 30, 40 years on, that guy is still inside you running you like a puppet. So for me, the ultimate revenge, which is what happened to me with this particular guy, I met him, I think I must have been 40, and I was starting to think about not being violent, and you know, the universe placed him in a restaurant next to me, and I looked over and I was 12 again. I was literally shaking, a mixture of fear and rage, and I just wanted to get up and run away. And I thought, no, this is my my chance so I went over to him and he’s a big guy but I was a big guy I was about 16 down at the time so I went over to him and I said to him you don’t remember me I said but when I was 12 he sexually abused me and he went to stand up I said sit back down sit down I said you sexually abused me when I was 12 I said am I allowed to swear yeah go for it encourage it I said you fucked my life you fucked my life I said you damaged me I said but I want you to know that I forgive you I forgive you and I went to walk away and he stood up and his hand was trembling put his hand out like that and what he was saying to me wanted to check my hand what he was saying to me is do you forgive me or do you

38:56 Really forgive me so I shook his hand and I let the I let him go and a few years later we found out that he’d committed suicide because all this lots of situations from the 70s caught him up but I freed myself from the hate and the anger because it doesn’t matter where the hate or the anger comes from it’s still in you it doesn’t matter whether whether you think it’s you know you know it’s just defile but like you’re angry but it’s still in you it’s damaging you all that anger triggering all those adrenals and all that cortisol racing around the archery scratching the archery is damaging neurotransmitters attacking the soft muscle tissue you know lots of lots of our illnesses come from this anger and this rage that we carry around, it’s not good for us and it definitely keeps your level of consciousness very small. So when we forgive people, there’s two things we do, one we give it over to our higher power and the other thing we do is that we just release it from our body, we exercise it from our body, so if we are possessed we exercise it. So when this guy died, I knew I’d let go of it because when he died I didn’t feel neutral, I felt compassion, I felt compassion for a life wasted. Now I know he damaged lots of other people and I know these people do that. So when you forgive people it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a day in court. They should go to prison, they should meet the full force of judicial law, they will meet the full

40:23 Force of universal law. I have no doubt about that. Most people don’t believe that’s true but I’ve lived for long enough to see everything you do comes back to you. Everything. For me personally it’s happened in a big way and I’ve I’ve seen lots of people, I’ve seen some people where it took 40 years for it to come back, but it’s come back.

40:40 And I’ve seen other people who, you know, I had one particular friend who went into drug dealing and people said, the reciprocal law doesn’t work, this guy’s a millionaire and he’s a drug dealer. And I said, you’re not looking at his life closely enough, you’re taking a tabloid look at his life. Look closely at his life. His door’s being kicked down by the police. Every two weeks at four in the morning, his wife’s on valium, his kids are wayward.

41:03 And everybody that ever respected this guy don’t respect him anymore, he has no respect because he has no virtue, people are afraid of him, so he thinks they respect him. I said he’s massively overweight and he lives in a violent mindset, this guy is in a flesh and bone prison and at some point he will be in a proper prison and later on that came about as well. That’s insane. Hey Geoff, you know I wanted to ask you, do you still have a fear pyramid and if so what’s on it at the moment?

41:31 There’s a fear pyramid still there, yeah, but it’s not actually written on paper anymore, but it’s inside and everything’s internal anyway, everything we do. We think it’s external, but it’s all internal. So I’m working on the fact that I’m aware, I’m awake, so I’m aware that I am surrounded by massive potential, so much potential, and everybody else is. But like everybody else, I still have things that I fear. So if I have fear, then I need to connect back to purpose.

42:02 If we find purpose, which is often translated as God, or the breath of God, or the logos, if we can find purpose, which is our alignment with the soul, that fear will not be able to exist. It will be like it’s walked into the whole universe. So every time I feel fear, I recognize that that’s the direction I need to go in, and to overcome fear, I always connect back to soul. And to connect back to Seoul, I have to bypass old core beliefs, because some of them are still there.

42:30 The exciting thing for me is that my conscious net was probably the size of a golf ball. So when I read a book, I read a book with a golf ball-sized, you know, understanding. This comes from David Lynx, the film maker. Your conscious net. Your conscious net.

42:48 So if you imagine a golf ball, everything you see around you is just within that ball. So, we look around and you think there’s others in them, you know, there’s good and bad, you know, all these different, all these kind of core beliefs we, all these core beliefs you have. So, we don’t see anything outside of that golf ball. We don’t see, you’ve got a guy that’s here saying there’s a recession, we can’t make money, there’s not, there’s no potential out there, the world’s going to hell in a hand basket, it’s a terrible time, you know, it’s because the news is all violence and everything else, so it’s a small conscious net.

43:25 A bigger conscious net is when you look and you think there is ultimate infinite potential. In the Upanishads it said, they took abundance from abundance and abundance still remained because there is abundance, it’s infinite. We can’t exhaust it but often we can’t exhaust it but most people can’t see it because they’re asleep because they’ve got a very small, so the small conscious net is, we believe what it says on the news and ten times a day the news is saying to us, the world is terrible.

43:55 We believe what we see in the newspapers, and ten times a day the newspapers are saying it’s about tits and bums, it’s about porn, it’s about violence, it’s about lottery wins, it’s about catching photographs up celebrities’ skirts, it’s a very base understanding. Yeah, we don’t read newspapers anymore. But the thing is, if you do, this is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi said, he’s a psychologist in America, he said we’re being bombarded by about four million bits of information any one time, from the billions that’s out there, except our brain will process about 400 bits of those information. So our reality consists of 400 bits of information. So if your bits of information are taken from the general news, you have a very small conscious net. My information, probably the same as yours, doesn’t come from that place. My information comes from the great texts that are out there that people aren’t looking at.

44:50 Comes back to London Real yeah I’m from places like this because when you look at the interviews you do you’re talking to very enlightened people what I love is if you if you see that circle there that’s the conscious net and and all the ideas you get are within that conscious net what about the ideas that are out here and out here and out here what about the ideas that are way out there so my my whole life is about expanding the second self so I can be a greater filter. How do you do that? Through, as we said before, through the most direct way to do it, the essence is to go into deep meditation twice a day, just on its own. And you’re a big fan of TM, Transcendental Meditation. Transcendental Meditation, I recommend it a lot because I’ve given it to a lot of people and they’ve gotten to deep meditation very quickly, but everyone can find their own way. But if you want a fail-proof way, I found that very effective. I found that people who have got quite bad illnesses have been cured through just through sitting in meditation. This is just my experience. So I would say meditation is the one thing that will do it without any effort if you can sit down. Also expanding the self, expanding the intellect and becoming what Rumi called a night traveller, hunting down your fears.

46:10 The poet Rumi talked about the night traveller, we need to go out into the night, we need to hunt down our fears, and we need to hunt down our fears to prove that they don’t exist because those fears are what’s standing between us and everything. Do you think your fears are finite, and it’s something that Nick and I have been exploring with this ayahuasca, and I was wondering if there’s only so much healing we can do until we’re aligned again with the self and the soul or together. I mean, do you still think you still have a big pyramid of fears, or do you think at some point you’re going to confront them?

46:42 So I think… Confront them all. Yeah, I think whether we do it in one light, I mean, that’s a journey, isn’t it? If you look at all the different religious texts, they’re all really just parables about us accessing the kingdom within and blocking the kingdom within. The Battle of Bag of Agita is all about Arjuna, Prince Arjuna, going into the battle to win his kingdom back.

47:05 And when you open the Bag of Agita, there’s thousands and tens of thousands of enemies And he’s going into battle and Prince Arjuna loses his courage, he doesn’t want to do it because he sees his uncles, he sees father figures, he sees brothers, he sees teachers. And he says, what’s the use of my kingdom if I’ve got to kill these? And Arjuna says, you’re falling into maya, you’re falling into illusion. Their destiny, their karma is already set. You need to follow your dharma.

47:34 People are watching, you are the prince of the world, they are watching, they need to see that you follow your dharma. you need to go and you need to go into battle and kill these and win your kingdom back. From my perspective what he’s basically saying is, these don’t exist anymore, they are just memory traces, they are kind of like software on the hard drive and they are stopping you from, they’re saying you can’t access your kingdom and what you need to do is you need to dissolve them so you can access your kingdom.

48:01 And that’s basically what he’s saying, if you look at Lord Krishna, he’s saying the same as what Gurdjieff said, is that your conditioning is stopping you from accessing, you’ve got the keys to the bank. What about you? You personally though. Me personally. Yeah.

48:18 I’ve still got a lot to work on. Brian, one thing is becoming very, very apparent to me, and that is we need to get Jeff on the ayahuasca. You know, I don’t necessarily agree with you. No, I don’t. I think that some people are drawn to it and find it and meet it, and some other people don’t.

48:33 Well, I disagree. I haven’t seen his conscious net though, I mean. You know, it sounds like, you know, he, I don’t know, I guess I don’t agree right away. Maybe I’m wrong, but. It doesn’t feel like the right path for me.

48:44 It sounds like he has a path and he’s got a very analytic way of going out through this process and he sounds like he’s been fairly successful. But I always wonder if you think there are just as many more fears you have to confront or if you’ve confronted some type of finite chunk of them. I think the majority of the things I fear, I’ve overcome a lot of different things. Most of the things I’m working on now, they’re very difficult to define, but when I feel them in me, I go towards them. But what the difference is now, I have a divine connection. I know who I am. I know who my authentic self is. I know the parts of me who I’m not as well, I can use those, you know, they can be soldiers, I can do something with them, but I do know who I am.

49:32 So we all have an authentic self. So if you imagine you’ve got the egoic personality at the front and you’ve got the soul and you’ve got the core beliefs in the middle, the internal parent. When those three connect, when they are talking the same language, when they are in agreement, you create a trinity, you create an authentic self. Do you recognize people who have become their authentic selves? Do you recognize them instantly?

49:56 Let’s say you walk into a room, can you tell straight away who’s connected and who’s not? Because it’s just really congruence. Gandhi would say like, when you’re thinking and saying and doing, when you’re thinking and saying and doing are in alignment, you have an authentic self. Yeah, it is congruence. Yeah, it’s just congruence. And that’s basically what Krishna is saying to Arjuna. You just need to be in alignment. The Bhagavad Gita actually is a spiritual discourse that you give to people to bring them back into alignment to say, don’t forget, this is all yours.

50:30 This is who you are. So for me, I don’t even know whether you can get it done in one lifetime, but I’ve certainly gone from working in factories with a very small consciousness to traversing the globe and creating wonderful things and standing once or twice in front of death. But now I have this spiritual connection, and I rely on that a lot more. So I bring forward that divinity. Did anything of your fellow doormen, did you convert them?

50:58 What I realized is you can’t convert anybody and you shouldn’t even try, you just put the stuff out there, if people wanna come towards it. I only talk to people that are really interested in developing, you can’t do anything for anybody because it’s the same as hypnosis, all the hypnosis is self-hypnosis, all healing is self-healing. So if people come to me, I don’t turn anybody away. Anybody that’s placed in front of me, I’ll do my best to help them, but I don’t go out searching for people, but I do throw seeds all around the world wide web.

51:29 That’s why I’m really grateful for this because this conversation might talk to a guy at four in the morning who’s debilitated by depression and something one of us says might just bring him back into alignment. So I feel at this stage of development, my job is to help bring people back into alignment and to help them to find a process where they can bring themselves back into alignment when the other people aren’t there. And that’s why I think the books are very good.

52:00 So I’ve seen people saved from suicide by one line in a book. I’ve seen people’s whole destiny change because of one line in a book. So I’m interested in, I don’t know, at the moment, there’s probably a million versions of me in the world somewhere telling this story through books, through articles, you know. Is this what you were saying earlier about the divine economy? Is that what you called it?

52:22 Yeah, well, the divine economy, I mean, you know, people talk about the economy, they talk about the recession. Brian always brings it back to economics, right? Yeah, but there’s only really the divine economy. I mean, I know there’s economics out there. You know, money doesn’t exist, money is a perception, politics is a perception.

52:38 Trace money back, you know, and it just leads to a perception. When I asked in my meditation, what is money? So money is an exchange of energy, and the value is based on perception, market conditions. So you could go and buy a bottle of water from Sainsbury’s for 59p, but that same bottle of water in the desert, someone would give you their Ferrari for it. It’s just market conditions, just perception.

53:02 If somebody thinks I’m valuable, I can charge more. If their perception of me changes, it might not to then be worth anything. So that leads you back to we need to change people’s perception of us, but the only way we can change people’s perception of us is to change our perception of ourself. And the only way we can change our perception of ourself is to work on ourselves through a congruent if we’re not congruent Then at some point people are going to realize we’re small thinkers We’ve got a small consciousness and that leads you back to serving from love only ever serving from love And we all fall in and out of that But I’ve worked with a lot of executives like business people and I don’t try and teach them about their business I try and teach them about their business which is them and I showed them that you know If they’re in alignment and they’re congruent, they’ll push some people away, but they will attract massive, they will attract massive opportunities because people will cross the globe to touch the hand of congruence because it’s so rare.

54:00 That’s interesting. There’s that expression that if you change the internal world, there has to be a reflection on the external world. So it’s similar to what you’re saying. It’s the hermetic law as within, as without, and the law of Swedenberg again about correspondence. So the exciting thing for me is that we just need to work on ourself.

54:21 I don’t have to work about, you know, because there are so many things that people are distracted by. I have friends who are horrified by religious fundamentalists and they want to take them on in campaigns. And I’m saying, you can’t even solve the problem you’ve got with your wife. You can’t even make the rent. You know, you’re not in a position to do that, but it’s a very juicy, convenient distraction.

54:44 It’s out there. business people I say you don’t need to worry about that you don’t need to worry about what the people are doing there’s no competition if you’re congruent you are on your own you’re in very high altitude and very few people will be able to sit with you but you’ll you will attract the best business in the world and then you’ll go into a room and you’ll meet the most powerful man in the world and he won’t even know he’s the most powerful so you know you start talking about divine networking yeah so what is divine economy and divine networking divine economy is that everything you give out selflessly will bring back rich returns. Everything you give out will return anyway. All of the Bibles concur on this. My 50 years on this spinning planet concur with it as well. Everything I’ve given, I can trace back the father and son of every consequence that’s happened to me. I can own it and when I got that I was able to start using this divine economy and looking every single day for the millions of opportunities I’ve got to serve people selflessly and it might be a prayer, might be a meditation, I might sit on the tube and just feel I can expand my consciousness and fill the tube and just go, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. I can really just, I can just keep, I’ve got the opportunity to do that every single day.

55:55 That’s something everyone should try. I’ve never tried it, but I know you’ve never tried it. So you’ve got the opportunity, but here’s a good example. I did a course the other day, This is the divine economy. Everything you plant in the divine economy, which is, I don’t know, my sound’s gone very funny.

56:15 Okay, it does that sometimes. I think it’s just the connection down there. That’s okay. So everything you plant in the divine economy is going to return to you. Once you understand that, and this, I had an epiphany about ten years ago, and it was intuitive to me because the epiphany expanded my conscious net and I woke up and I knew that everything I did would return. That was really exciting Because it said, everything I do will return to me.

56:40 If you want to see massive profit in the world, just keep serving people selflessly. So that’s what I started to do. I wrote a book called The Formula. We gave it out for free for years and years. And it basically said, the secret to perpetual motion is selfless service.

56:56 And then I started to study all the Bibles. And of course, like I said, the seven days of creation. This is just one interpretation. But what excited me was that the Torah, the five books of Moses, the Mosaic texts, you know, Genesis and Exodus, and we’re basically, you know, the seven days of creation is basically just us developing so that we can get to the stage where we serve selflessly. Everything will come back. So in the Christian Bible, in the New Testament, it says, when you serve a prisoner, you serve God, so when you serve difficult people, there’s an even bigger return, and it talks about, seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness. If you seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, everything will come to you. So the Kingdom of God, first of all it’s seek it, so we’ve got a search which is what we’re doing here. The Kingdom of God is a frequency of love. God is represented as love. So seek the frequency of love and His righteousness. In other words, follow a righteous path. Don’t have all your power kind of spread out into all your addictions.

58:05 Kill the addictions to get your power back, seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness and everything will come to you. And when you do that, when you start going out and thinking, I’m in front of somebody, how can I serve them? What is it? I say, I’ve talked to God directly, what is it that you want me to do with this person? How can I help this person?

58:23 You start serving from the right place and instead of the self-serving core beliefs. Like what can I get out of this person or what can I get out of this situation? Absolutely. thinking like that, which is the small thinking, we start thinking, we start talking to the soul, how can I serve this person? And this comes back to Buckminster Fuller who was one of the greatest inventors of our generation. He did a great book called The Critical Path and this was a great inventor but this is a man that had lived to the age of 40 and had achieved nothing. He had a breakdown at the age of 40 and he didn’t speak for a year.

58:59 He said, you see, he realized the power of words. He said, I’m not gonna speak again until I know what the fuck I’m saying. After a year, he looked back on his life, he called it guinea pig self. He said, I’m gonna experiment on myself, I’m gonna go back and I’m gonna look at where was success from where I was happy. And where he’d had unprecedented success only ever happened when he did something selflessly.

59:19 Where, you know, you just go, I just love doing this. That’s where his massive success came from. And all the other times where he bartered was kind of hit and miss. So he said, from now on, I’m only going to do things. And listen to this is what I love.

59:32 He said, I’m only going to do things that serve millions of people, millions of people. I only want to invent things that serve millions of people. I’m not going to do it for money. I’m just going to do things that serve millions of people. It’s interesting.

59:43 And of course, all the money came. He used to have conversations with the Maharishi. He was dying by kings and queens. It became one of the most celebrated men of his generation. But he discovered the secret, which is selfless service.

59:56 And we still have to do all the other things within that. We don’t sit on our ass and wait for it to come. We still have to work prolifically. We still have to understand economics. We still have to understand the world.

1:00:07 We still have to pay the rent, basically. Yeah, but most people don’t even understand, most people are trying to talk about world economics, but they haven’t even got their own bodily economics right. Dude, there’s a lot to think about. What do you think of the UFC? It’s just, it doesn’t change gears.

1:00:21 Do you still watch martial arts or do you? No, I don’t really watch, I don’t really watch the UFC or anything anymore because I did so much of that in the early days. We did Animal Day, when I was really exploring the martial arts, we did loads and loads of Animal Day type training where anything went. And then after that, the UFC came and I thought, this is really good, it’s very refreshing because so many people in the martial arts were asleep. I didn’t think they needed all the different ranges.

1:00:49 So I thought the introduction of the UFC was really good and we had quite a few of our guys who went in for it. But because I’ve been involved in so much violence on the doors, you know, thousands of violent situations, I just couldn’t really look at it anymore. Does it promote violence, you think? Does that make sense? I, can I just tell you how it makes me feel?

1:01:12 I don’t know whether it promotes violence or not, because I think different people are in different places. When I watch it, I just don’t feel comfortable. I love watching, say, The Graces, and I did a little bit with Higa Machado in America, and I love the gentleness of the BJJ, because there’s a play there and they roll with it, and I just don’t like smashing people’s heads in, because I did that. Well, I understand what he, I don’t like the way it makes me feel, watching it anymore either, to be honest.

1:01:39 Interesting. Yeah. That’s it really, but I was there myself, so there can be no judgment from me, and I pioneered a lot of that stuff when I started talking to karate people, and of course you’ve got to involve grappling, And of course, we involve gouging, biting, everything. We had kind of pretty much unrestricted. We wanted to see how dangerous it really was.

1:01:58 We wanted to see what really worked. My first night on the door, I went back to my class and said, we’re doing this all wrong. We need to change, this isn’t right. This isn’t gonna prepare you for a fight outside the chip shop. And I think if we can prepare you for a fight outside the chip shop and show you how to kill people, you’ll be able to let go of that.

1:02:15 And while you romanticize it, and while you think there’s not a consequence to it, because there is. In my world, if I hit somebody on the door, there’s a fair chance I’d get a four o’clock phone call saying we’re going to shoot your wife and kids. Or they might turn up at my house. Like I said, a couple of my friends were shot in the head as they got out of their car. But they didn’t even get out of the car as they turned up at home at three in the morning.

1:02:39 Other people got killed. One got knifed on the door and killed, and the other one got hit with a bat and killed. So the consequence was the ripples were everywhere, wherever you went. I still enjoy watching MMA, but I just treat it as an art form, and I just think it’s a beautiful thing when they do it to the best of their ability like a sport, but I understand what you’re saying. It’s funny, you talk about things I don’t like to watch anymore.

1:03:01 I was watching that show Cops a couple years ago, and it’s all about American police pulling people over and all the crazy stuff that happens, and then I just found myself feeling more and more sick because I watched just the horrible dregs of society, and then I was an active participant in funding this thing that would go out there and show the horrible Drake’s Society. But don’t you feel the same way when you watch Breaking Bad? I just pushed away from that because this was reality for some reason.

1:03:25 No, I find Breaking Bad beautiful art as well. I love the way it’s filmed and well, you know, you write screenplays for movies. One of the things I wanted to ask you, Jeff, because I was watching some of your short films and they’re obviously written very well. You’re known for that. And it’s some real world dialogue, which is always nice.

1:03:42 You know, it’s very like David Mamet ish. Yeah. I love my, I love my, he was like, he’s known for it. for writing dialogue that really exists as opposed to just you know people that make words up but um I was watching these films and and unfortunately you have to go through the medium of a director sometimes yeah and I was just wondering how you deal with that do you find it frustrating do you because it’s really out of your control wasn’t it once that’s sold collaborative yeah it’s collaborative but you’re also on set but then of course you can’t really do everything on set and I just wondering how you how you work with directors it’s good been good for me because it’s teaching me to let go yeah it’s That’s teaching me to do my part of the process.

1:04:17 Part of your art! Yeah, it’s very difficult. And some of the films I’ve done haven’t come out how I wanted them. They’ve not come out right, but I don’t think you can blame that one person. I just figure if it’s a mistake, it’s a collaborative mistake.

1:04:30 And it goes out there, and it will still serve people. I mean, The Club was not my favorite. It’s my first feature, but it wasn’t my favorite film. But a lot of people really love it, and there’s part of it that I’ve really served people. It’s not, I’m not massive, I don’t really, I don’t think it captures what I wanted to capture, but I think Brown Paper Bag did, and Brown Paper Bag is a version of Alchemy.

1:04:55 It’s based on, my brother died from alcoholism, it was a hideous death, it was very traumatic and I took that trauma and I created a film and it won a BAFTA, so I’ve made something beautiful from death. It’s interesting because I did a talk the other day for some people and I took a BAFTA with me because it’s part of the talk. And he says, what are you carrying in your backpack? He said, it looks very heavy. I said, I’m carrying death. And I was. I was carrying my brother’s death. And it’s in this bathtub. But now it’s in the form of something very beautiful. So that’s pure alchemy, taking the trauma. And the trauma always blocks you from connection to the divinity, making something from it. So I always say to people, if you’ve got trauma in your past, it’s a gift. It’s a reservoir. You can draw from that. You You can create prolifically with that, there’s a massive amount of energy you can draw from that.

1:05:43 Do you think it’s a necessity? I don’t think it’s a necessity, but I think if you connect to divinity you can access the same things that Michelangelo and Leonardo connected to, but I think if you’ve got trauma in your past then all of those flavours will be picked up by that divinity as it flushes through. Would you change what happened to you at 12? No. change anything, to change anything at all but to change who I am and I really like who I am.

1:06:11 I’m full of faults, you know, I’ve got a lot of problems, problems but I feel very imperfect and at times, you know, times I feel more fearful than I think I should, if I had more faith I wouldn’t be so fearful, but I’m also aware that I’m in a transitionary period in my life and every time I have any fear I embrace it, turn into it. I’m pretty sure I speak for both of us when I say, we think you’re pretty awesome. Thank you. It’s really interesting because like Nick asked, we had Graham Hancock sitting there, he was a really well-known author and Nick’s kind of like, you’ve got everything figured out in your life and Graham’s like, no, I don’t.

1:06:50 When I recently did an ayahuasca experience, I found that I had been abusing cannabis and I realized it and it’s like, you always assume these accomplished people have everything figured out and I’m starting to figure out it’s almost the opposite. people that get these things accomplished are always in the weird transition state. Absolutely. First through the door gets battered. I’m always going through a new door. I’m a very courageous guy, but that doesn’t mean I’m not scared. There’s a great story from St. Francis of Assisi. Again, you think of Assisi as this practiced, this accomplished saint.

1:07:25 And, you know, when you read his life story, you realise that he was a saint and he did create lots of Siddhas and lots of miracles, but he was constantly having to bump into his fear. And he talked to God in his meditation and said, I’ve got this debilitating fear of lepers. This is one of the miracles of Francis. And God said to him, well, you better go out tomorrow and find a leper and kiss him on the cracked leper lips. And of course, you think Francis is going to go, God’s spoken to me, I’ll do it.

1:07:56 And he’s gone, he’s gone mad, he’s gone, I can’t believe it. I’ve confided in you my most debilitating fear. And you’re sending me out to find a leper. And he was really angry at this intuition. But of course, when he realized that it was for his own benefit, he went out, he found a leper, he embraced the leper, he kissed it on the cracked, bleeding lips.

1:08:17 And he wrapped the leper into a cloak and started taking it to a refuge. We’d only got a few steps when this body started getting lighter and lighter, and when he unwrapped the coat, the leper had disappeared. So the message from God was, fear cannot exist in the same place as love. Fear just doesn’t exist. So if we’ve got fear in life, it’s because we haven’t got enough love, but part of the process of getting to love is overcoming fear.

1:08:43 Gandalf didn’t become Gandalf the White by reading books, did he? He became Gandalf the White by going into the dark tunnels of the unknown and fighting against the dragon, his nemesis the dragon, he didn’t even want to go into the tunnels. He wanted to go around the mountain, he wanted to go the other side of the mountain, anything, he didn’t want to go in the tunnels, but he met him and he had a big fight with the dragon. He fell down and they fought to the death and then he said, he said, I didn’t become Gandalf the Grey by beating the dragon, I became Gandalf the Grey by beating the and emptying myself and then having to crawl back out the mountain again and I’ve had that myself when I’ve faced personal dragons and I’ve been on my knees, literally on my knees at a place where I am hugely vulnerable, you know, everything you do will hurt me, everything you say will damage me and you’d look and think, I can’t see a warrior in this guy but I’m a warrior because I’m in that place and then you revolve to the gold body, what the Buddha’s talk about the gold body, through the process of defeating the dragon and then rebuilding yourself again.

1:09:47 And it seems to be cyclical, you know. So it’s that thing of trusting that, you know, you’ve got to keep kissing the leper because it doesn’t have any existence. It can’t have any existence in the face of love. And that’s where humanity is aiming for. At the moment, they’re not there and there’s still a lot of war in the world, but there’s not any war in my life.

1:10:07 There’s bits of war in my body still, and I’m working on that, because that’s my process. There’s a great poem by Rumi, which I love, when he talks about the chickpea. He said the chickpea’s being bored alive in the pot, and he’s trying to climb out, and the chef keeps pushing him back in with the ladle. And he says to this, the chef says to me, you think I’m torturing you needlessly. He said, I’m not torturing you needlessly.

1:10:31 I’m trying to make you sweet so that you can sit with the rice and the herbs. And when the chickpea realizes that this is a benevolent force and it’s just trying to purify it, he says to the chef, push me in twice. Push me in twice because I can’t do this on my own and I want to be sweet. So when I’m at the point where I’m struggling and the struggle is part of the process, I remember going to Neil’s class with Judo and coming out to my wife and feeling so depressed and just got mangled by a green belt.

1:11:01 Absolutely mangled. I just said, I don’t know what I’m doing. No idea what I’m doing. Neil stopped the class and said, take it easy on this guy, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, because I don’t know Judo. You know, I’m a kind of veteran in other areas, but I didn’t know it.

1:11:13 And I remember that feeling of just feeling so helpless, not knowing my way around. But then, of course, coming out after I finished this 18 months and knowing exactly where I was and understanding grip and understanding the Ni Wazan, having a direction. If you don’t get that without going through that battle with these internal dragons you know so it’s that feeling of you’re not you’re not you’re not you want you are the real deal because you’re going through those things you know people they only can’t be the real deal someone said to Paul McKenna of the day well why would we listen to you you’ve struggling with depression yourself he said I’m struggling with depression because I’m evolving I’m growing depression means old depressed parts leaving you know it’s part of the process. Our leaders need to be frail, they need to be vulnerable. That’s where the growth is. None of us want it. I don’t want it to be true, but who’s going to, you know, they’re never going to make it an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

1:12:11 The biggest thing I’m taking away from today is this fear pyramid, and I think I’m going to try to draw one later. And I would encourage everyone to try to do that because I think most people, the last thing they want to do is confront their fears. But I think ultimately you’re forced to confront them in one way or the other. It’s so true. The biggest thing I learnt from the door was I was working with monsters and they all were scared. They just learnt to contain it. They learnt to drive it. If you get a chance to watch the life of Pi, the life of Pi is a great parable. If you watched it, obviously the Bengal tiger represents his fear. And he says, I know I can’t tame it, but I can train it. And when he goes onto the island, where he has respite after the big storm and he rests and he goes back to the boat, what’s the first thing he does? He calls the tiger. He needs fear on the boat. Fear is going to help him survive. So we need to get better at managing it and understanding it. So if we can change our perception to fear, then our fear will change. So if you’ve got a body builder, his perception of pain is not the same as our perception of pain, because he knows the growth’s in the burn. So he goes into the burn quickly he stays in the burn long and he actually enjoys it great burn today really great burn well emotionally it’s no different we have to and we have to recognize that when we’re in these emotional burns that’s where

1:13:33 Our growth is that’s where we’re being purified you know just the fact of knowing that and recognize it makes it easy to get through that massive when you look at people say oh God’s testing you and people go I don’t I don’t like that kind of God and then but then when you look at what the word test means, test in Old English means to separate the impure from the pure in metal by heating it. So I want to be tested, I want the impurities to fall away, but you know, like that old saying, enlightenment please but not just yet, you know, at a pace I can manage, but when you change your perception of pain and when you change your perception of fear, then the fear and the pain changes, so I like the pain when I’m doing weights and we have to learn to, we have to learn to accommodate fear and if we can really change our perception we can learn to embrace fear, court fear, you know, that’s all I’ve ever done really and I’ve always been a little bit reluctant but I’ve always done it and that’s why my world has continually expanded, you know, because of that. Do you have anything to add to that Nick? I just need to sit down and process all this. Defrag the hard drive of my brain. I need to watch this episode again later.

1:14:43 Can I just leave you with one thing, because whenever I talk to people, people always feel as though there’s a lot to remember, but there’s only one thing to remember, and that is, if you can consistently meditate, your consciousness will expand, lots of the things you fear will dissipate, lots of the blocks you have will go just on their own, just by, it’s anti-intuitive because people think you always have to do massive physical things, but sometimes just the meditation on its own will allow you to see things that were always there and it will dissolve things that you thought you couldn’t get rid of. We’re big meditators, we’re always talking about on the show. Good advice.

1:15:19 I’m slacking on my meditation. It’s so easy to let it slip, but then when you look at your show, that’s evident, you look at your life, it’s evident because of the people that you’re getting on the show. There are some amazing guests, some very expanded people, and I’ve talked to lots lots of people on the phone, there’s only one person to work on. You haven’t got to work on everybody else. You work on yourself, your wife will certainly be a lot better.

1:15:43 You work on yourself, your son will be suddenly a lot better. You work on yourself, and things around you will certainly take in a different perspective. We only need to work on ourselves. And that’s what I’ve picked up from my own life and from all the different Bibles, is that we just work on ourselves. And the big thing I got from the bag of a Gita, which I live my life by, the self is the self’s only friend, the self is the self’s only enemy.

1:16:10 They’re not out there, they’re in here. And if we can change ourselves, it’s what I think Gandhi said again, I really like Gandhi, but he said, be the change, be the change you wanna see. And I think too many people are sitting waiting for other people to change you, but it’s an exciting time because we can change yourself and we can start now. And the information’s available, most of it free. I love that, meditate and start with yourself.

1:16:32 Make a big difference. How can people get a whole new website, Twitter, that kind of thing? I’m at jeffthompson.com, there’s three sites on there, there’s about 150 hours worth of free articles on there, people want to go and read them. It’s spelled G-E-O-F-F by the way. G-E-O-F-F and it’s Thompson, T-H-O-M-P-S-O-N, and you can email me through there, the books are available on there, but there’s a lot of free material on there as well that people are welcome to read, they’re welcome to lift it and place it in other places.

1:17:02 I would appreciate if they did, because I want to, I like the idea that there’s a version of me sitting with a kid who’s depressed at four in the morning, and I’m talking to that kid. I like the idea that I can be in 500,000 places at one time. Talk about by location. That’s a proper sitter, isn’t it? And I think that’s a gift from God.

1:17:22 So I like the idea that if people can take the articles and just scatter them everywhere. Don’t worry, I’m sure there’s loads of depressed kids that are going to be listening to this at 4am in the morning around the world, right? We get feedback all the time that we’re catching that one person in that one little place. That’s what it’s all about. Yeah, it’s wonderful.

1:17:37 With this medium, it’s very possible. Yeah, we can touch people, we can affect people, you know. And it’s all about, I said before, it’s all about love. It’s not complicated, but the journey to love, because it’s a frequency, is a difficult journey. Because, you know, to be in love all the time is to be enlightened, and I’m certainly not enlightened.

1:17:55 I don’t think I’ve met anybody. I’m in and out of that place, but I’ve not met anybody that’s consistently there yet. But that continues to be the aim. So watch this space. It’s an exciting time to be alive, isn’t it?

1:18:06 It is, indeed. It is. Excellent. Jeff, thanks so much for coming on. Thank you so much, Jeff.

1:18:10 You are not what I expected, which is fantastic. I love a pleasant spot. It’s a great honor. It’s a really great honor, thank you. Awesome.

1:18:18 Anything else you want to add, Mr. Gabriel? No, dude, that’s about it. All right, guys, thank you very much, and until then? It is most certainly all about the journey.

1:18:28 All right, boys. Thanks.