Geoff Thompson - Notes From The Factory Floor: How To Overcome Your Fears And Live Your Truth

Full transcript: Geoff Thompson on London Real

2:13 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose, my guest today. My guest today is Geoff Thompson, the British author, filmmaker, BAFTA-winning screenwriter, and martial arts expert. You were an early pioneer of street fighting techniques for self-defense, becoming a lead instructor for Chuck Norris in Las Vegas and holding black belts in karate, judo and aikido. Your first book, Watch My Back, recounts your violent experiences as a nightclub bouncer for over a decade.

2:47 This was later adapted into a stage play and made it into a BAFTA-nominated short film. You went on to write award-winning films for the actors Ray Winstone, James Cosmo and Orlando Bloom, and choreographed a West End play. You’ve also written over 40 books, many of them Sunday Times bestsellers. Your latest, Notes from a Factory Floor: How I Got from There to Here, chronicles your journey from a Coventry bedsit to the hallowed halls of BAFTA Piccadilly.

3:15 Geoff, welcome back. Thank you, thanks for having me, and thanks for being so kind as well. You’ve always looked after me, I was just saying about that, and I’m really grateful. You always look after me. Well, you know you’re worth looking after.

3:26 Thank you. I said to someone today, I said, this guy’s a national treasure, and I think you are. I think you are, Geoff. So people that don’t know you know we’ve had quite a history. I think eight years ago we had you on the show for the first time, back in the old studio.

3:40 Yeah, and then I had you back on for a one-on-one maybe a year or two later. This is before the leather chairs and the dog and all that stuff. And so we’ve had some really deep, incredible conversations over the years, and I know you’ve been, you know, gone underground for a while to create and do everything, and so I’m just really glad you’re here. And, thank you. I’m very grateful for the invite.

4:02 Yeah, we’ve got so much to talk about, the book and everything. You know, maybe kick off. We were just talking outside about one of the films you wrote called Romans, that’s now really finally been released in the States, and I think it was filmed maybe three years ago, stars Orlando Bloom. I got a chance to watch a screener of it about a year and a half ago, and it’s super powerful. And it’s amazing to see that, you know, it’s getting a lot of exposure.

4:28 I know Orlando’s being talked about, but the movie, you know, it has a lot of parallels with your life. It’s very autobiographical, and it’s very deep and it’s very real. And I just watched one of your short films, Bouncer, and anybody can watch it on YouTube. It’s nine minutes long. I think it was the first film that you wrote.

4:45 And again, you know, I’m living the life of a bouncer from Coventry, and I’ve never been to Coventry, and I’m from San Diego, California, and yet within the first 60 seconds, Geoff, it resonates as a real part of the human experience. And I felt the same way watching Romans. I just, I only needed a few minutes and I was like, there’s something real here, and people connect to that. And I guess I’m just wondering, how do you create something that immediately can be that resonates with people?

5:16 You know, how are you able to write that way? Well, you, you tell the truth. I remember when I was suffering with depression when I was younger. I was married, got young children, very depressed, trying to read books and trying to find out what was wrong with me. You know, I was tortured by depression.

5:32 I remember looking at books and reading things and thinking, I need to find the truth, and none of them were giving me the truth. I was reading stuff and thinking, this isn’t honest, this isn’t, they’re not telling the truth here. I need someone to tell me why I feel like this, and they weren’t doing it. I remember thinking way back then, when I find the truth, I’m going to tell everybody. So when I eventually did go on the doors and confront my fears, and I built a pyramid of fears and climbed up it and became a bouncer, when I found the truth, I decided I’m going to write a book, and I’m going to tell the whole truth.

6:06 I remember my older brother Ray, he was also a writer. He read the first draft of Watch My Back, and he said to me, are you sure you want to release this? And I said, why? And he said, because you’re so vulnerable in this. And I said, yeah, but what’s the point of doing a book if I can’t be vulnerable?

6:21 Who’s it going to help if I can’t be vulnerable? I didn’t realize, Brian, but I’d actually triggered on the secret to the Tree of Life. There’s an old saying in Judaism, it says, the master sets the table for the servant before he eats himself. In other words, if we want to know something, if we want to find something, find somebody that needs it more than us, and it will be given to you. So we receive in order to share.

6:48 Now, I did that by accident, because I just thought there must be loads of kids out there who are suffering like me, waking up at four in the morning in a cold sweat with their wife next to them in bed, asleep, who, you know, can’t help you, and your children, and you can’t explain to them why you’re so depressed, and the doctor who wants to give you pills because he doesn’t know the answer either. And you are surrounded by people and nobody, nobody seems to want to help you, or they can’t help you, or they are the right, or they either don’t know the truth, or they can’t articulate the truth, or they’re too afraid to say the truth. So I have to have the courage to tell the truth.

7:27 That’s all I do, really. I pick up on the rhythm of the, you know, Coventry’s a very poetic city. I pick up on the rhythm. I love the dialogue. We spoke about it at a love sound, the Japanese call it kotodama gaku, the use of magic sound.

7:44 In Egypt, in Egyptology, they call it heka, same thing, magic sound. So I picked up on that rhythm and recognized it wasn’t just the words and just the truth. It was about the rhythm. The rhythm can be healing. I was talking to one of your lads out there, James, and he said he read Watch My Back in one sitting.

8:02 It’s 120,000 words, but it’s because the rhythm is pleasing and it’s easy, and it’s full of truth. But you know it’s full of truth when you’re scared to share it, when you’re scared to give it out to somebody, when you’re scared to let somebody read it, when you’re scared to publish it. You know you’ve hit truth, and the truth means going inside yourself, like a pin in a crab shell, and pulling out the last vestments of sin or error or duplicity or fear, whatever it is that you’re hiding from, whatever it is that’s inside you, whatever parasites in there, you find it, you pull it out, and you transfer that onto the page.

8:44 You transform. You transfer the truth, and it becomes, you transfer the material into the spiritual. You’re transforming the dark into the light. So I was taking all of these fears, all of these depressions, all of these conflicting, divided voices, and I was putting them onto the page. I was exposing them to light, and I was giving them life outside of me.

9:11 I’ll tell you a story that I’ve never told anybody with Romans. I had a voice in my head. My tummy was playing up. My stomach was really bad, and I started to communicate with this element in me, or this elemental, and I said, what do you want? He says, you know what I want.

9:26 I said, articulate what you want. I said, I can feel you with me. I can feel you there. What do you want? He said, I want life outside of you.

9:34 I want life, eternal, outside of you. And I said, and how would you want that? I said, you know how I want it. And I said, you want me to write Romans, but I’ve already written Romans. Romans 12:20.

9:44 Then it clicked. There’s a bigger story. Romans 12:20 was about a short version of Romans, which was about the conflict of a person that’s been abused at the age of 11, and it is placing it violently at the age of 30 or 40. But there are other elements he wanted me to talk about, the relationship with people, why people deny that you’ve been abused, because they’re afraid of it, the police, you know, maybe family, maybe friends, maybe this internal voice that says, you’re getting a lot of mileage out of this, aren’t ya?

10:19 And so it wanted life outside of me. So I was working with Paul and Ludwig Shimazu, who, as you know, I love, the visionary, and they wanted to give me notes. I said, I don’t want any notes. I don’t need any notes. This element inside me knows what it wants to say, and I’m going to bring it out, and I’m going to say it, and I’m going to put in all the things that I’m afraid to put in, the things that I’m afraid for my wife to read, the things I’m afraid for my agent to read, the things I’m afraid to put out into the public.

10:49 I’m going to put the whole lot down. I wanted to write about not just the grooming and the abuse, but the second abuse, with, you know, familial denial. And also, you know what’s left inside you when somebody abuses you? They don’t just abuse you. They take something from you.

11:07 They take a part of your soul, and they replace it with the parasite. So even over space and time, they’re feeding from you. Do you think about somebody 20 years after they abused you? Rushes of adrenaline, fear, anger. I mean, I went on the doors.

11:16 I made myself into a monster, and I battered anybody that came anywhere near me. It was just massive displacement. Been abused at the age of 11.

11:31 That’s not going to happen again, so I built this armory. It’s not here now. All of my armor is in the books now, but all of the war paint. You know, all my body’s filled with war paint, a huge back, big back, you know, wings. And I got rid of all the prettiness, because I was a pretty boy.

11:50 I got rid of the prettiness, got cauliflower ears and a broken nose. Don’t come near me, I’m f***ing dangerous. Actually, I was just an insecure frightened boy stuck in the carapace of this martial arts legend. I wasn’t a legend. This martial arts master wasn’t a master.

12:09 I was a frightened boy inside this physical frame. The only way I was going to clean that, Brian, was to write about it and to say, this is, you think I’m a tough guy, or you think I’m this, but actually this is what I feel like inside, and I want to clean that. So the whole idea of writing the book was about telling the truth, so that if if I, if, if that book lands on, if that, for instance, Notes from a Factory Floor lands on, lands in the hands of another young family man who’s suffering with depression, who’s cornered by depression, who’s imprisoned by depression, he’s going to read that, and he’s going to find himself.

12:49 He’s going to find something of himself because there’s nothing I’ve left out. Everything that happened to me, all the terrible wild imaginations, the possession. You know, somebody abuses you, they leave a parasite in you, and even your, you can’t even trust your own hands. Even your own hands abuse you. You lose your will.

13:08 Your will is taken over, and the only way to get rid of that is to write it out, talk it out, you know, put it on paper, give this element a life outside of you. So that’s converted. I’ve converted what they would call in Judaism, the evil inclination, the evil element within everybody. I’ve converted it into spiritual light or into information, and it’s recorded in ink, so people can read that, and the sound, the sound waves, ironically, we were talking about sound out there, the sound will lift off the page, and it will become sub-vocalization in them, and that will begin their healing process, even if it just gives them information, even if it just gives them, you know, I think that in the Quran they would call it a remedy.

14:00 Some of the attributes of God are called remedies, and so it gives you a remedy. So you read it and you just go, this is me, and there is hope, and this stuff that’s blackmailing me, this stuff that’s keeping me in my small terrorist house, in this factory job, in this depression. Actually, maybe it’s not a harbinger of doom at all. Maybe it’s a messenger of hope. Maybe I can turn into that.

14:27 Intercourse with it, absorbed ninety-nine percent of it, as usual, says Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, absorbed 99 of it and converted it into something beautiful. So you said something to me when we came in, which is very kind, very prolific. That’s all, all of the stuff I write, the films I make, they’re my burnt offerings. That’s my animal sacrifice, in the Old Testament, they talk about animal sacrifice, burnt offerings. It’s an allegory.

14:55 We sacrifice our animal soul. Our burnt offerings are all the things that blackmail us. We bring them out and we put them into the light, and we do it for one reason, and one reason only, and this is the secret. We do it because we want to share it with other people, because we don’t want other people to suffer. So whether you’re talking about Buddhism or Judaism or Islam or Christianity or Sikhism, or any of them, you’ll come to the same place.

15:22 When we want to serve other people genuinely, when we genuinely serve other people, abundance comes down, then it’s our job to deliver that. So that’s why, and I love it. I do love the feeling. I mean, if I pick that book up now and I read the rhythm of the writing, I love it, and I can objectively tell you it’s a great book, because it’s not mine. It’s picked up all my flavors.

15:45 It’s picked up all my stories, it’s picked up, you know, my own rhythms, but it’s not me. That’s too good for me. I couldn’t write that. What I had to do, Brian, was get in the way of that. I just had to get in the way of it.

15:59 I had to wait for it to come, and I remember it coming, and believe me, I put that book off for years and years. I kept saying, I don’t want to sit down and write that. Everyone kept saying, you should write a sequel to Watch My Back. I can’t write that, there’s so much to remember. I’ll never get in order what I was really afraid was, I knew behind those stories was a treasure, but to get to that treasure I had to dig past quite a few dead bodies, and nobody really wants to do that, but I did.

16:30 I had an inspiration to sit down and write it, and I sat down for eight weeks full time, never let nothing disturb me, and it came out 150,000 words. It came literally through me, and if I’d had more stamina it would have come sooner. I just had enough stamina. I finished that, and I’ve been trying to write a book called The Divine CEO for a long time. I’ve had three attempts, but it wasn’t coming out.

16:57 I just couldn’t find it. I knew I needed to do it. I couldn’t find it. I wanted to write a book about creating a divine covenant. I finished that on the Friday, handwritten, and I said to my wife, the CEO’s come, it’s here, I can feel it.

17:15 I went for a walk up Kumhabi, my local park, and 20 chapter headings downloaded into my head. I had to write them down before I lost them, and send them to myself as emails. I sat down on the Monday and I wrote for another eight weeks, 150,000 words, and that was a Divine CEO again, another book that I had hardly anything to do with. It picked up my stories. It picked up my flavors.

17:40 I have some delicious flavors. I have an Irish heritage. I’ve been around a few corners, so it’s got, there’s some nice stories, but the rhythm of it again is beautiful, and it’s healing. It’s a remedy. But it came through me, and what I’ve done with my life now is I’ve just got rid of everything so that I can make myself a vessel, just to receive this work and put it down.

18:07 But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, because it can feel like burnt offerings, animal sacrifice. You know, just by the nature of what I’m saying, you can tell it’s painful. Yeah, it’s uncomfortable to do. I had a bit of a flashback there, Geoff, two years ago, when I decided to tell my story of you know, heroin overdose and addiction. And for people to look at me, that’s the last thing they would expect.

18:30 When I was doing this Iron Man race, it just came out, and there was that, the night before we were going to release this, and I had all this fear, and I was just like, you know, how I was ever going to deal with it. And I hadn’t told my wife for 16 years. I hadn’t told anybody, Geoff. And then finally we released it, and, um, because I knew it was the right thing to do, because it was going to help a lot of people. Yeah, and, um, and it did.

18:50 It was an awash of people with all the same stories and family members, it just all came. But there was that moment where it was just, it was literally terrifying. But it really is. Yeah, I’m sure the reason I did that probably was planted seeds, maybe even some of your stuff. Yeah, you know, told me that it was going to be okay.

19:10 So I think it’s intercessionary, Brian. They call it intercession. Rewriting. So your work will go out there, your story, if you tell it, if you tell it from an honest place, which you do, and I do, then it’ll act as an intercession in somebody’s life. They will receive it at a specific time that will, you know, what you’ve known yourself from your own stories, that it can stop someone from committing suicide.

19:32 It can stop someone from making the wrong decision. It can interrupt their life and take them on a completely new path. We had a lovely story about Romans, because I said to the Vlad’s law, we all we need to do with this with Paul and Ludwig. I said, all we need to do with Romans is tell the truth, and we need to protect the truth, and when we put it out there, I can’t tell Orlando that it’s going to do well, or that it’s going to win awards. I’ve got no idea what this film wants to do, only that it’s got its own soul, and that once we’ve done everything we can do, it was a lovely line from Pope Innocent said to Saint Francis.

20:07 He said, I expect you to do everything. No, I said, I expect you to do. I only expect you to do what is possible, but you must do all of it. So I said, we’ve got to do everything we can possibly do, then we’ve got to let go of it. What it does after that is not up to us.

20:23 I said, but it will go out, and it will work, and it will touch people, and we will never meet. We don’t need to meet them. We don’t need to, we just have to trust that the truth will go out, and it will find its path. It ended up. I remember Rory Nolan is one of the actors in it.

20:37 He was in Europe somewhere, I can’t remember where, and he was there for a funeral, and he said he was walking down the street and Romans was being premiered in this small town. So he went in, and he said, oh, I’m in this film, and they said, oh, would you want to come and present it? So he said yeah, so he took his girlfriend’s family with him, and they all went and sat and watched this film. And they all, you know, got a lot from it. It’s a challenging film.

21:03 He said they sat around afterwards eating, and the mother of the family was saying, it’s a good film, but you know, I don’t think, I don’t think abuse goes on in the church like they say it goes on. I don’t think that’s really true. I think that’s a bit exaggerated, and her son at the other end of the table said, I was abused, Mum. And she said, what? This is in a room full of people.

21:25 I always abuse, Mom, What do you mean? She said, you said, do you remember that priest you sent me to when I was depressed? Yeah, he sexually abused me. The film acted as an intercession for him. That was the first time he’d found the courage to reveal it, and his girlfriend went, ah, you know, a gasp for the mother, but she couldn’t deny anymore, because it happened, and it’s happened to so many people, and we’re as sick as our secrets, aren’t we?

21:52 So this is the idea. I don’t need to know what the film does. I just need to know it’s got the truth. I know it’s got the truth, because, as you said, exactly the same as you. It wasn’t just about writing the film, that was frightening enough.

22:05 It was the thought that in two years’ time we’re gonna have to go over this, and we’re gonna have to edit it and get it right, and then it’s going to go out, and then people are going to want me to talk about it. They’re going to want me to just stand in front of a camera. They’re going to want me to go on television. They’re going to want, they want to ask me why I forgave this person. They’re going to want to know the details of the abuse.

22:25 They’re going to want to, you know, they’re going to want to ask questions, and when they ask questions, it will be good for me, because it will help me to reveal more little hidden parasites, but it’s very frightening, because you’re just thinking, do I don’t want my mum to see that, because I don’t want, I don’t want my mom to be hurt. You know, I don’t want my family to be hurt by my revelations. You know, these aren’t, you know, some of the detail of what I’ve written about in notes and in Romans.

22:53 You know, I’ve only just recently shared with my own wife when I wrote Fragile, which was the stage play, which was a precursor to this. There was stuff in there that I had to tell my wife before we went in to watch it. This is what’s going to be said. And you, I haven’t told you this before, because it’s so secret. I didn’t even know it was a secret.

23:13 I mean, only that it was, I was ashamed of it, and that it was blackmailing me. So I decided I need to, I need to call its bluff and just say, okay, do your worst. You know, if you want to blackmail me, come in, have a sit down. Here’s my wife, here’s my kids, tell them everything. In fact, you don’t need to tell them.

23:30 I’m going to do a play, I’m going to put it in front of everyone in Coventry. Yeah, and this play, I nearly swore, but this play would not go on anywhere else. It wouldn’t go on anywhere else. Wouldn’t. No one else would have it.

23:44 We don’t, and I said to the director, I was a West End director, Nick Bagnol, I said, I’m happy for this play to go on anywhere but not Coventry. I can’t have this on the Coventry. It will kill me. I said, the idea that my mum might see, or the idea that my friends might stand in front of this, you know, this play about, you know, the sexual abuse, and then my own self-abuse, and my own sexual self-abuse, and the detail of that. I said, I don’t want that in Coventry, but Coventry was the only place it would go on.

24:15 A guy called Hamish Glenn, who’s the artistic director, said, we’ll put it on, and I was like, oh God, that’s exactly what you needed. Yeah, it was all I needed. Yeah, and I just kept saying to God in my head, I kept talking to my highest self. I kissed him, just protect my mom. I don’t want my mom to be battered by this.

24:33 This isn’t to do with my mum. This is to do with me, articulating what happened and trying to find the truth. The truth was I was blaming everybody for what happened to me. It wasn’t conscious, but there was blame there. I was blaming my mom.

24:48 I was blaming my dad. I was blaming the person that abused me. I was blaming the police. I was blaming society. I was blaming anybody that denied what happened to me, when I actually did the play and went through the layers.

25:01 All I cared about, Ryan, all I cared about, all I cared about was protecting my mom. I loved my mom. I just loved her. I felt love at the very core of this. I wasn’t abandoned by anybody.

25:12 I thought I was abandoned by God, by my very source. This is what Julian of Norwich said, we’re not afraid of being abandoned by people, we’re afraid of being abandoned by God, by our source. Of course, when I got to that point, I don’t know how I’ve missed it, because all of my characters were screaming that, shouting, God, that Buddha, you know, at Christ, where the f***, where were you? And eventually I had a dialectic with God in my own head, and he said, you think, you think I abandoned you?

25:42 And I said, I said, yeah, I did. I do think that. And he said, I didn’t abandon you, but did you abandon you? And I realized I had abandoned myself. I’d abandoned myself for many years.

25:53 And I realized that God is omniscient, omnipotent, he’s omnipresent. It’s like that sound on your gong out there. It just permeates everything, and it just keeps building up. We can’t be abandoned by our source, because it is, it is us. You know, the Atman and the Brahman are one.

26:10 The soul and God are one. This body and everything in it is one with everything. Everything is connected. And when I realized, when I went through all of those layers and ticked them off one by one, it wasn’t his fault, wasn’t her fault, wasn’t their fault. And I said to God, it was your fault, and he goes, no, not me, but maybe, you know, maybe we can look a bit closer to her.

26:29 And once I realized that, I can’t tell you, this overwhelming release, this expansion of consciousness. It’s like I’d reclaimed something of myself, and it just filled with consciousness, and I just felt this overwhelming love for my mum. I just couldn’t stop touching. I wanted to. I kept pretending to throw her with me, judo throws, and I just, I just um, just such unconditional love for my mom, and for my dad, and for my sister, and for everybody.

26:59 I suddenly realized that, you know, I’ve still got things to work on, but God, writing that play took me, it took me to the very, very edge. On the morning the play came on, Brian, I broke my ribs in training. Everything was trying to stop me from getting to that play. Everything was trying to stop me. I thought my agent was gonna sack me.

27:19 I thought my wife would be ashamed of me. She actually said to me, yeah, but these things you’ve written here, they didn’t happen to you, did they? Like you didn’t do that to yourself. And I said, yeah, but I did, I did. And that’s the whole idea of writing the plays.

27:31 I said, it’s blackmailing me, so I’ve just got to stop it. I’ve got to bring it out. What did your mom say? Um, she just said, because I asked for it to be protected, she says, what’s the play about? I said, it’s about a boy that was abused, and I said, and his parents deny it happened.

27:47 I said, it’s an amalgam of lots of stories. Oh lovely, what do you want for breakfast? Did she see it? No, no, she doesn’t see my stuff. She doesn’t look at you, but that’s okay, she doesn’t need to.

27:57 I don’t want my mom to be hurt in any sense. I don’t, you know, I just love her. You know, everybody did their best, and my life is my life is prolific and beautiful and expanded and articulate, um, because that happened, not despite it. That sent me on a journey of understanding, trying to find not just knowledge, but not just understanding, but knowledge, certainty. I wanted to find certainties.

28:26 I wanted to find purpose. In the Old Testament, they would call it Logos. It literally means the Word of God. I wanted to find something that I could be certain of. It sent me on a path, you know, this didactic path of massive learning, and I would never have done that without that crisis.

28:44 I would never have done. There’s no way I’d have done that. I’d have probably just been the same as everybody else, that had probably just stayed in the factory and talked about doing something, but I was so driven. I was so driven. I was maniacal with what I did, and it’s led me into the most beautiful places.

28:59 It’s led me to this beautiful relationship I’ve got with Sharon, I’m able to sit here today because of that, not despite it. Yeah, so it’s, and because it happened, because I went on a search to understand it, into psychology, physiology, sociology, you know, into the metaphysics, to the spiritual realms, the Buddha. And I don’t mean socks and sandals and dream catchers. I mean proper Buddha, proper scare the s*** out of you, nearly take you to insanity.

29:32 Buddha, you know, it took me to places that have given me real understanding, real certainty. In Islam they call it yaqin. It means certainty, knowledge, so knowledge is a comp, knowledge is, it’s not like wisdom or understanding. They are the precursors to knowledge. Knowledge is a certainty that when it happens, it permeates you easier.

29:54 You become knowledge, that’s what you become. So there are certainties that I have based around some of the things I do, which are so certain that I cleave to God, I cleave to everything when I feel them. Some of the stuff I did in judo, some of the stuff I did on the door, the writing particularly. And can we talk a little bit about your backstory? Because we’re making kind of some illusions to it, but I’d love it if you could talk about it.

30:21 So you’re born in Coventry, yeah, right around there, and at some point it looked like you were gonna have just kind of another typical life there. Yeah, um, and you were really suffering from some depression, which led kind of to anger, and then to looking into your fears. And yeah, maybe we can just talk a little bit about that, just to kind of set the scene, yeah, of who Geoff Thompson was back then. I mean, what were some of those things that kind of tripped into that evolution?

30:49 I was, I was wanting to expand outside of the periphery of my small life, but every time I got to the periphery of it, every time I got to the edges, every time I tried to expand the borders, I was turned away by fear, by terror. I didn’t realize that I had to ultimately have to consume that, I had to absorb that in order to go through that. I called it the firing thorns around the kingdom. I had to go through that, but every time I met it I kept turning back inwards.

31:15 So I had this massive creative urge, but nowhere to place it. I was deep, I was suffering with periodic depression, which would literally wipe me out. It would make me feel, leave me feeling terrified, and this, you know, again, I had a young family and I was working, so this, 20s, okay, I was the second of the bloke in Coventry, who’s also in a factory. Okay, in a factory, but also severely depressed. Yeah, not knowing what to do with it, and not having anybody to talk to about it.

31:43 Yeah, and not having a book like yours to read about it, because no one had written anything like that before. There was nothing that I could find that, that you could relate to. No, there’s nothing there at all. Um, then it just, something happened. I would say this was my first communication with my soul.

32:01 I just, one day I was in the pits of depression, I just found this anger, and I just thought, I’m not having this anymore. I’m not having it. I’m not putting up with this anymore. So I just decided I had just had this idea to write down everything I was afraid of and systematically confront it, one by one. I drew a pyramid on a piece of paper.

32:20 Again, the idea just dropped into my head like a coin falling through water. I wrote my least fear on the bottom step, my worst fear on the top step, and I systematically started to confront these fears. I started to intercourse with them. I started to call them out, and one by one, as I overcame these fears, I developed desensitization to the biology, you know, the adrenaline. Um, I reclaimed parts of myself.

32:45 The part where all the fears were residing, there were places that was, they were squatters. So when I got rid of these fears, I would confront the fear and keep confronting it until the fear dissipated, so the nature of the fear would be liberated, and the effigence, the energy that was in the fear, would come back to me. So I’d reclaim these little parts as I started declining the pyramid. I recognized that the fears I’d written down, spiders, fear of dentists, were kind of placeholders.

33:12 They were covering deeper fears. So I was afraid of my wife, I was afraid of confrontation with my wife, I was afraid of my mother, I was afraid of any kind of confrontation. I was afraid of change. I was afraid of success. I wanted to be successful, but I was afraid of it.

33:28 I was afraid of what does it mean if, one minute you’re Geoff the factory worker, then suddenly you’re on Richard and Judy talking about a book you’ve written. What does that mean? How does that affect your family dynamic? How does it affect your friends? Not in a good way.

33:43 I can tell you, you can lose 90, 95 percent of your social circle just by becoming successful, because they’re, they’re like, oh, you know, people will tell you, can’t even speak to Geoff now that he’s doing well, and they just literally make it up. They don’t know how to cope with you being successful. They don’t know how to cope with you breaking outside the boundaries of what they know. So I started to climb the fear, the pyramid of fears. These, one of those was confrontation physically with another human.

34:11 That was the top fear. Okay, now on the way up I started to confront the idea that I was afraid of change, so I started to change my job. I went off shift work and went on to a day job. Um, I was I was afraid of standing up to my wife, so I started to stand up to my wife. I just started to get very confident.

34:31 The top fear was the fear of violent confrontation, so I obviously did what anybody would do. I took a job as a nightclub bouncer in the roughest nightclub in Europe. That’s with anybody. So I took this job as a nightclub bouncer, um, and I just thought, I’ll just do a couple of nights. I’ll just confront it.

34:51 My training was starting to get a bit more realistic, but I didn’t really know what worked in a real fight. Did you have some training? Had you gone to some martial arts? I was a second dan. That’s what made it worse.

35:00 I was a second dan, depressed. Had you started studying martial arts in order to confront the pyramid, and then when you got into martial arts you said, if I really want to confront it, I need to go on the door? I got into martial arts and I got a first and the second dan with the KUGB, which is like a very powerful shotgun association, under a Noida, from the [expletive] from the JKA, Japan Japanese Karate Association. These were esteemed people, but I was still very afraid.

35:28 I had all of these physical skills, but I was too afraid of confrontation. I had no control of my endocrine system. Other people had more control of my endocrine system than me. They could trigger my adrenaline like that, and I’d feel the flight response or the freeze response, and I’d be gone. So I didn’t understand this.

35:46 I didn’t understand what worked and what didn’t work. I’d got 20 masters around me, all telling me different things. They can’t all be right. They were all adamant, and they were all really believed what they were saying. But I, I remember being in a fight or watching a fight in a pub when I was 15, and thinking, I was a purple belt, and thinking my karate won’t fit into that.

36:07 It just won’t this is dumb. I am not prepared for this. I don’t know what it would do. It’s like this is like a cartoon fight with arms and legs coming out everywhere, and I knew even then, but I denied it. I didn’t want to challenge the norms.

36:21 I didn’t want to challenge the norms of the martial art, because it was all, this is what works, we don’t question the masters. It was really like some of the stuff we were being taught was like, like working with a horse and cart when other people were, you know, in the rest of society, working with Ferraris. You know, right, and this is before the UFC or any kind of sanctioned mixed martial arts. Right before that, everybody was in their their little tiny area where they were the best, and the black belt instructor, everyone would kind of, you know, let them run the show.

36:50 Yeah, and in that strip mall place, wherever you studied, they were the master. Oh yeah, you knew that a bouncer had a different life. I just knew, I knew that I hadn’t got the truth. I knew that I didn’t know what the truth was, even though it was right in front of me. And all of the people who I, who I loved and esteemed weren’t telling me the truth, and they weren’t telling me the truth because some of them didn’t know it, and some of them were afraid to look at it, because they’d got, like, six and seven figure companies that were built around something that wasn’t true.

37:20 Right? So they can’t just suddenly say that’s not true, because their whole business, their whole life, their whole personal security was built around something that wasn’t realistic. I went on the door, and the first night I did on the door, I knew what the truth was immediately. It was the obvious. The environment just said, yeah, well, you can get rid of all that s*** because it’s not going to work here.

37:39 It won’t fit here. It fell off me like an old coat, and I saw immediately what worked, which was what, which was preemption, attacking first. If you couldn’t talk a situation down, if you couldn’t avoid a situation, the only thing that worked consistently was to attack first, and all of the other stuff that comes with that, you know, like artifice, engaging the brain with a question, hitting in, hitting certain points which would guarantee, or nearly guarantee, a knockout.

38:07 No, using all sorts of deception. Um, and then when I started to, when I saw that truth and I started to study the exegesis of the martial arts, looking at people like Musashi, um, who was, you know, I think of something like a 15th century samurai or a ronin, and he never worked with anything but preemption. We talked about this on the last show we did, the three preemptions, you know, to hit before they think about hitting, you hit as they think about hitting, you hit as they twitch.

38:38 So we learned this, and it was so brutally effective, so brutally effective that in the end you didn’t want to do it, because it was, you know, like it was like shooting ducks at a fairground. You know, it was just too easy. Um, and it was almost like you’d been given some magic, you’d got this piece of magic, so you stood in front of somebody who didn’t know what you knew, which meant he was out of his depth. He was out of the fight before he even knew he was in it.

39:04 I would use dialogue to engage him, and then take him out of the fight with something that was so short and so effective, sometimes people didn’t know who’d hit him, because it was so effective and so short. What was even bigger than that, so I got that truth, and I go, well, I’ve got the truth, so then I spent the next four years knocking people out because I thought, I’ve got the truth. I was confident, I was arrogant, I became a bully. I would say that’s not easy to say, but I started to solve all my problems with the physical response.

39:33 I was no Kissinger, I know that much. Not just at work, but everywhere else, everywhere I was getting in fights, at weddings, at funerals, in car park road rage. I said to Sharon one day, isn’t Coventry violent everywhere I go? There’s violence, and she said that there’s a common denominator, Geoff. It’s everywhere you go.

39:51 So I recognized I’d got this filter in me, this belief that the world was against me, and that the world was dangerous, and that I needed to protect myself, and this all came back from when I was abused. Right? But you’re also feeling powerful at this point, you’re very, very man. Everyone’s scared of you. Yeah.

40:09 So even though maybe you’re still scared inside, no one can tell, no one could tell. This is the basis of your books. Yeah, no one could tell. I didn’t think they were scared of me. I thought they respected me, but they were just scared of me.

40:20 So I kind of built a legacy on that, but deep down inside I knew. I knew when I got my fifth dan. My fifth time was a master grade. I remember looking in the mirror and being so disappointed. Peter Considine said to me once, you get your fifth dan not for what you’ve done, but for what’s expected of you.

40:40 I remember looking at myself in the mirror and thinking, there’s no, you know, there’s no master here. Maybe there’s a masturbator, but there’s not a master. You know, I was addicted to sexual pornography. I was a bully. I was four stone overweight.

40:55 Um, I was ignorant. All I could do really was have a fight, and I thought that meant I was a master. So I had so much to do. It was so shocking to look in the mirror and see this honest reflection of this person that I didn’t like. Wow.

41:08 I was, but I was a bully in every aspect of my life, but no one would have said that I was a bully. They wouldn’t. I wouldn’t have seen myself as a bully, because I was, I still had a gentle nature, and I was still kind, but if anybody triggered that, um, that old parasite, I’d, I would be posturing, I’d be very big. Yeah, very big, very quickly. I bullied my wife.

41:30 If my, if my wife, if I wanted to cuddle with my wife and she didn’t want to cuddle, I’d slam doors, and I’d, um, you know, become monosyllabic, and I’d give her a cold back in bed. When I realized I was bullying her, because what I was actually saying was, if you don’t want sex with me, I’m just going to completely withdraw love. I couldn’t believe that. I couldn’t believe that. So this was, this is where I went from the exoteric training which is the normal, revealed martial arts, into the esoteric training, which is the hidden martial arts.

42:01 So I started to work on these base impulses as they rose up. They call it apophatic theology in Christian mysticism. Basically, it’s, we don’t really know what God is, but we can know what he isn’t, so we can find God through negation. So we can contract all of the things that God isn’t, and in the process reveal who God is, or we can find the self, the geometric point, the singularity in ourself. We can find that in ourself by getting rid of everything ostentatious, everything extraneous.

42:35 So my training, all then, all of my training became about contraction of the ego in order to expand consciousness, and that’s what in Islam they call the greater jihad. The lesser jihad is when we go out into the world and we try and fix the world, or we fight the world, or we take on the world, we buy into all of the different things going on, and we go out and we try and fix it, but that’s a little bit like sitting in the cinema, watching a horror film, and thinking, I don’t like this, and then going to try to change it at the level of the screen. We know it’s not going to change at the level of the screen.

43:08 We’ve got to come back to the projector. We’ve got to come back to the focus. We’ve got to come back to the film, and that’s our cognitions, our perceptions, our precepts, our, um, our truths, our beliefs. We’ve got to come back to them. We’ve got to challenge them.

43:24 So that was my apophatic theology, and this is a precedent set in all the different religions. It has different names. It was starting to find who was by negation. So I started to find out who I wasn’t, and I stopped engaging those parts of me. I stopped engaging in anger, I stopped engaging violence, I stopped engaging jealousy, I stopped engaging envy, any of the vices.

43:49 I stopped. I just starved them. I recognized that reality existed at the level of engagement. Did you have a moment where you said, I can no longer be this bully bouncer Geoff Thompson, and I need to make the transition? Because, yeah, you know, many of your former co-workers probably never made that transition, or it was made for them by going to prison, or getting stabbed, or maybe they still can’t figure it out.

44:11 How did you evolve? Was it just, is it your nature? I can tell you one point. I’ve been brought up Christian, so I’ve got a real, I’ve got a foundation of spiritual life, or an inner life, but I’d lost it somewhere along the way, and I got into a fight. I’ve been in a lot of fights, and I’d nearly killed a few people, more by accident than anything else, or more just because I was so aggressive, but this one particular night, I really destroyed this guy.

44:38 I’ve been trying to pull away from the violence, I’ve been trying to avoid it, and this one particular person, ironically, was a karate guy. He was another black belt, and he just kept pushing me and pushing me, and in the end I said to him, what’s wrong with you? You got a problem with me? Is that the club? This was in a pub.

44:57 Yeah, this was in a pub. He was just a guy in a pub who looked at me and took a disliking to me. I was bolding, um, I was articulate, you know, I was soft-spoken. I got a massive reputation as a fighter, so I don’t know how he got past that. He just must have thought, this, you know, I fancy this.

45:17 And he just kept bumping into me when I was collecting glasses and stuff, and I said to my friend Seymour, who was a guy I was working with, did he got a problem? What’s wrong with him? He goes, yeah, he just doesn’t like you. So I went over and said, do you want to talk outside? In inverted commas.

45:32 And he goes, yeah, actually, I would like to talk, and I went outside, and he was just completely out of his league. But of course, I’ve been trying to avoid violence for so long, just all of this violence just spilled out of me. I just battered him. I completely destroyed him, and when he was unconscious and someone was lifting him up, I, I’ve seen him come around and knocked him out again. I knocked him in the face.

45:54 He was savage. I’m not proud of it, but when he was on the floor, he was like he was dead, and people were saying he’s dead, and when they took him to a car to take him to the hospital, the toes of his shoes were dragging across the floor, and I just remember feeling this horror. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. Something had been released from me, and it was really weird. I was driving home from the pub.

46:14 This is a place called the Devon, and it was like the veil had dropped. I’d lost my liberty, I’d even lost my place in the hereafter. And I was driving through the streets, and everything was sparkling, everything was shining, and I was thinking, I’m losing this. I went home, and my wife was in bed, and my kids were in bed asleep, and I remember kneeling down by my wife’s side, and God, she was so beautiful. I mean, she, I was, she’s beautiful anyway, but I was seeing something else.

46:44 It was another dimension there. I went into my kids, and they were asleep. I thought, I’m losing this. I’m losing these over, because I’m just not listening. I’ll keep acting out on this, because it was something, and it was pleasing me.

46:57 So I remember finding my knees and saying to God, and I said, look, you know, please let this guy live, because I was certain he was dead. Please let him live, and if you’d let him live, I said, I promise you, I vow that I will turn this around. I will turn it around. And it was the longest night of my life. The next day I felt sick.

47:17 Anything on the news, and anything on television to do with violence made me feel physically sick. I felt ill, and I was terrified of ringing up the pub. I worked out to see whether they’d heard anything. It was the longest night of my life, and eventually I rang up the pub, and I said, look, have you heard anything? This is because, I’m, you know, I’m dying here.

47:37 He goes, he’s walking around, someone said he’s walking around, he’s okay. He came round, and that was it. That was the it was a good question, because I’d not thought about that, but I, that was when I started to turn it around. That’s when I decided to come off the door. I knew what I was doing was wrong.

47:54 I could feel it. I’ve had a couple of incidents. I’ve destroyed a guy in a club one night. He was a monster, Brian. He was a monster, he was a proper monster.

48:03 He needed what I gave him. The next day I was walking through the city center, and I saw this monster walking through town with, um, with three kids and his wife, and he was, he was a bomb site. His face was a bomb site, which is what I’d done to him. He got one kid hanging on to the handlebar here, one hand going onto the handlebar there, kids about my own kid’s age, a baby in the pram, and his wife’s just two steps behind him, surveying what was left of her husband’s face.

48:31 He was destroyed. I remember just feeling overwhelmed by what I’d done, because I could never have battered a father. I could never have battered a daddy. I could never have battered her husband. I had to dehumanize him before I could batter him.

48:46 It’s just a factory worker. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous, but he didn’t deserve what I gave him. So I started to bump into myself in all of these different places, and this final one was the last. I’d kind of seen it and felt it, and then, you know, and then kind of stepped away from it and forgot about it, but with this last one, it was, I was so terrified of losing my liberty, and I remember thinking, I don’t know where I’ll be, even beyond that.

49:13 I knew I was affecting karma in a very bad way, so I just decided to turn it around. That’s when I started to work inwards. And did the writing come next? Yeah, the writing came. I guess the real catharsis came when I started to write, because you start to write the stories, and I’d rediscovered I’d always wanted to write, but I’d lost it somewhere along the way.

49:36 So certainly I’m writing these stories in your 30s. Before you start writing, I’m 28. I didn’t publish until I was 32. I was working in a factory, and I was working the doors, and I was telling all the guys the stories over the dinner table, and I was telling them about the good stories, the bad stories, the funny stories, and one of my friends, Steve, said, you should write this down, this is great stuff. So I’d had a lot of practice in telling the story, so I got some notepads from the stores.

50:05 I was, I was just hired there as a floor sweeper, and I was going to the toilet every day, and I would write this, as Watch My Back. I’d write, I’d start writing all the stories. Um, and that became my first book, but my world was so small then. I didn’t know anybody that owned a typewriter. There was no computers at the time.

50:23 Um, I didn’t, you know, if you had a typewriter, he was posh where we come from. You know, I didn’t know anybody who had a typewriter. Eventually, the guy who asked me to write the book, who suggested I write it, said, have you written it? Have you done anything? I said, yeah, it’s finished, but I said, I don’t know what to do with that.

50:39 I don’t know anymore. With the typewriter he said, my sister’s got a typewriter, she’ll type it for you. So she typed it, so suddenly I’ve got a manuscript. Then I’ll just think, now what do I do? So success was calling me.

50:51 It was saying, you know, give it, give us your, give us your blueprint. What is it that you want to do? You know, so I wanted to publish this book. Okay, so I had, what probably should, put this book, so I had to start to learn how to find out what publishers did, how publishers worked. Um, I went to, actually went to the local newspaper, and I said, I’ve, I think I’ve written a book, but I don’t really know.

51:15 And she read it, and, well, the first thing she said to me was, there are 15 reporters upstairs, all of them want to write a book, and you’ve done it. So no matter how this reads, you’re one step ahead of all of those professional writers. And she was really lovely, a guy called Sue Larry. She was really lovely. It was a very kind thing to say, because I was a working-class chip.

51:35 I walked in there, and I just thought, you know, I’ve got no right to be writing a book. You know, I’m getting above myself, but anyway, she encouraged me. She said, it was, there was a real voice there. I just needed to expand it. Then I discovered the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook.

51:51 It was like all of these portals to different realities. They’re not, they arrived as the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. We’ve got the name and address and phone number of every publisher in Britain. I just opened this portal that was never there before. This is what eschatology is.

52:05 Eschatology says, Christian eschatology, all and any of the faiths, says that everything is already there. It’s already there, it’s already available, you were not aware of it because there is dust in the way. There are obscurations blocking you from the scene. What’s already there? Everything is there in potential.

52:23 So suddenly this kid who’s saying, well, how do I get published, finds a book with a couple of thousand addresses and phone numbers of every publisher in the country. It was like, like an Aladdin’s cave. So I started just sending the book out to different people, but along the way I was building up my belief, because my belief was it’s not possible for somebody like me to publish a book. I had no proof, right? Not even intellectual proof, right?

52:50 So I found the intellectual proof. I started to look at people and think, oh, there’s loads of these writers, you know, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was written about working-class life by a working-class writer. You know, so I started to discover there were lots of people like me. So that was the first level of truth. I’ve got intellectual truth, proof that it’s possible, but is it possible for me?

53:13 Every time I tried to visualize myself publishing a book, I got all this interruption. You’re not good enough, don’t get above yourself, you know, don’t be a big head, don’t be pretentious. I had lots of inner dialogue, so I couldn’t see myself publishing a book. But once I started to get a bit of confidence, people started to say what you’ve written is really good, and then the publisher, a small publisher, finally picked it up and said, there’s something here, and I published the book.

53:40 And I had it in my hand. My belief went from understanding to knowledge, to certainty. Certainty is one of the yaqin. Yaqin is one of the 99 names of Allah in the Quran, and it’s an attribute of God. It’s actually a remedy, so when you get yaqin, certainty, you are actually cleaved to God.

54:03 So it’s like, it’s not just like I’m certain of something. You actually get a small slice of, of, of the absolute. So I had certainty. I had the book in my hand. One bit of certainty transformed my life.

54:17 I wrote another five books in the same year. I wrote a stage play. I thought, if I can write a book, I can write five books. If I can write a book, I can write a stage play. Why not?

54:28 If I can write a stage play, why can’t I write a film? Why can’t I get Ray Winstone? If I can write a film, why can’t I do a musical? You know, I just, I just suddenly knew with no doubt that anything was possible. It was a certainty.

54:41 It was so certain that it wasn’t like I was certain. It was like I was, certainty was that coming from the universe. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it’s an attribute of the universe. It’s a national consciousness.

54:52 Yes, I’d removed a lie, and it was replaced. I’d reclaimed the part of myself which I removed, a lie, an obscuration, and, in my view, the Buddhists called it the clear view. They said there were no problems. The only, the only problem is that people think there’s a problem. He said, but there is an obscured view, and a clear view.

55:11 If there’s an obscured view, remove the obscurations, and the view will expand. So consciousness means we just start to see a little bit more of what was always there. Everything was always possible. But our ego doesn’t want to see these things, and it will fight to the death not to let you see them, because the moment you see consciousness, it is consumed. It’s gone.

55:32 It doesn’t exist. The ego can’t exist in the light of consciousness. So these adverse forces will fight to the death to stop you from revealing consciousness, so you have to have tremendous courage. So I just suddenly knew everything was possible. I was working on the door, still working as a bouncer, and I was on talk shows with Hollywood superstars.

55:56 Even the people on the show were saying, how did you get on here? I just kept ringing up. I said, I was certain I could. I said to my publisher, give me a phone for an afternoon, I’ll get on any show. I just knew, this certainty was it was, it was actually me.

56:13 I was so certain I knew anything was possible, and of course anything is possible, but that doesn’t mean it’s probable, but it’s possible, right? So you can go, you can go from this small amoeba, this single-celled amoeba, one spark of an idea, and it can transform into, you know, into some being that’s trillions and trillions of cells. I mean, I look at your story when I first met you, and you were working out of that tiny little office, and, um, it was like this small spark of a brilliant idea that you’ve developed into this conglomerate.

56:48 Now you’re talking to some of the most incredible people in the world, um, Jordan Peterson and Mooji, who I love. I love Jordan Peterson as well. I mean, you’ve had some incredible people on this show, but that started from a tiny spark of an idea that you’ve developed and you’ve brought to a conclusion. So you really know, you’re sitting here now, you know you can take this wherever you want to go. It’s possible, because you have certainty of that, because you’re doing it, and that’s what happened to me.

57:19 One book, I just thought, uh, it’s possible for me to take this wherever, wherever I want to go. I mean, Orlando Bloom’s front room, talking about how we should do this role and what this means, and it’s, um, it’s very beautiful and very surreal, but we can’t underestimate, as you said, how terrifying that can be, and it’s not just like you’re saying, it’s frightening. You know, there have been times, if I’m being really honest, there’s been times, especially after writing Notes and The Divine CEO, um, when I was completely empty.

57:53 I had a complete kenosis, so I was completely empty, and I was directed to read the Zohar. The Zohar is, if you imagine you’ve got the Christian Bible, and the first five books are the first five books of Moses, which is the Torah, then you’ve got Kabbalah, which is the mystical of the Torah, then you’ve got, um, the Zo, you’ve got the Zohar, which is the exegesis or the commentary on the Kabbalah, and then you’ve got things like the Tanya, which are commentaries on the Zohar. So you’ve got this like 23, 24 volume set of books, and I was told to study that to replace what I’d let go, to replace what, what I got out.

58:35 And there were days when I was studying that, I was studying it full time. Full time. There were days when I felt I was going to tip into insanity, honestly, I’m not exaggerating. If I read even a chapter more than what I was able to do each day, I had to really collect myself to stop myself falling into insanity. I felt so on the edge.

59:00 I mean, I disappeared for about five years when I was doing all this stuff, but um, but I was just starting. I’d found an inner tutor, and this inner tutor was saying, read this, talk to this person, go on that show. Do you know, starting to get direct instruction from an inner guru, not from an external guru, but from an inner guru, from an inner tutor. But it was hugely challenging. I don’t know if I told the story, but when Sharon was writing, when Sharon was typing out notes for me, there was a point in it where she said, she actually cried.

59:36 She’s because it was hard work for her, typing out, because obviously I was going through a cut artist, and she was going through it with me, and she said, Geoff, I’m reading this. She was crying. She said, I’m typing this out, and I’m going over it and over it, and I’m thinking, has he lost his mind? And I said, Sharon, that went a long time ago. That ship has already sailed.

59:55 Don’t you worry about that. She said, yeah, but you keep talking about tightening the room. So when I was teaching, and I’ve got like, you know, big classes, if, especially my senior students, my senior teachers, if they started to hang on the periphery of my class, and they weren’t tipping in, and they were, but they weren’t tipping out. So if my, if your proximity to truth is strong, it will reject people, and it will draw people in. The proximity is very powerful.

1:00:24 It might, if people were on the periphery and hovering, neither for the ninja, falling out, I would tighten the room. I would double down on my certainty, and I would see people be spat out of the room, and some of them were spat out of the room, and they’d end up on the World Wide Web attacking me. You know, other ones were drawn in. But she said, you keep talking about tightening the room, and I’m looking around, and I’m recognizing that there’s only me left.

1:00:49 I’m the only one of your students left. I’m the only one of your senior teachers left. Is that, am I going to go, where is it, me next? And she was, it was so emotional for her. She’s such a, she’s such a strong girl, and we just laughed.

1:01:03 I mean, she was crying, we just, we just laughed and laughed, and just said, look, you know, all I’m doing is I’m finding the truth. I’m like Dorian Yates. I’m going to go in the gym, I’m going to find the burn quickly, and I’m going to stay in the burn long, because that’s all I’m interested in. And I said, and some people are going to be spat out because it’s too much, and some people are going to be drawn in, and it will be irresistible. I said, you’ve always been drawn in.

1:01:30 I said, there’s been moments, I know, when you felt like, you know, stepping away because you don’t understand it, but you understand me. You don’t need to understand it. So she’s always been really solid. She’s always been steadfast, but when you create a proximity, um, the whole world changes when you get a proximity to the truth. The whole world changes.

1:01:51 Everything around you changes. There’s all sorts of miracles and siddhas happen. But that’s what that book did to me. My hope is that there’ll be some kid out there that’s gonna pick it up, and it’s gonna, um, it’s gonna have a healing effect, like your story. You know, the documentary you did about, um, about the heroin and stuff like that.

1:02:12 You know, that kind of truth is gonna go out and act as an intercession for people. That’s all I’m interested in. That’s all I’m interested in. I’m interested in serving the truth. Tell me about when you finally decided it was time to write about the sexual abuse, and also to revisit that, because you had had the violent time, you had had now the communication via writing, but then it was time to talk about that, and you’ve continued to talk about it through Fragile.

1:02:37 Yeah, the TED talk I saw you do at Leamington Spa. Yeah, um, you know, this book, and Romans, you know, you weave a lot of your experiences but it’s something that has always marked you as an exceptional person. Can you talk about that, and then how did that show you full circle why a lot of behavior had happened in your past? I realized when I started to tip into the Buddha end of martial arts, when I got to a senior grade and I started teaching and tipped into the Buddha.

1:03:06 And it’s the Buddha, the Buddha is, uh, is the esoteric end of martial arts. So you’ve got the martial part of it, and then you’ve got the art part. So the martial is the physical, what works, you know, it’s the stuff you take to war, and the Buddha is when you fall into the spiritual end of martial arts, and all senior people eventually tip into it, or they should tip into it, and that’s when, when the training stops becoming, um, explicit, and it starts to become implicit.

1:03:31 It stops being out there, it starts being in here. So we recognize that this is the projector, this is where the film is, the cognitions, this is where all the filters are. If the world isn’t looking right, then I’ve just got to change the filters. It’s no good me rolling my sleeves up and trying to change the world. I’ve got to change myself, and it’s literal.

1:03:51 You start to change yourself, and the world around you is affected by that, so you fall into other realms, you fall into completely different realms. So when I started to work on that, I realized that my view was broadening, but it was still restricted. I still felt insecure. I still felt jealous, psychotically jealous. I still felt like I could trip violently very easy.

1:04:15 You know, there was, I could easily have a judo flashback and drop someone on the head, because when it went, it went, you know, and I knew I needed to work on that. So I knew there was something in me that was calling me, that needed to be, um, regenerated, transformed, but I was scared to look at it, because to transform it, I’ve got to absorb 99 of it, and I do that through the writing. So the writing then started to become my martial art, this, what we’re doing now, this talking.

1:04:46 You know, when someone said to me the other day, what does your martial arts look like now? I said, it looks like this. This is it, now, coming down here, talking to you and telling a story, and overcoming the two or three days of massive anxiety I had before I came here. Not because I’m afraid I’m not going to be treated well. I’m always treated beautifully, but the part of me that doesn’t want to be exposed, that doesn’t want to be transformed, that doesn’t want to be a burnt sacrifice, doesn’t want me to come here, even though you’ve put all this out there so many times.

1:05:18 Yeah. It’s still challenging for you because there’s unknown bits. Yeah, that you might unlock. Yeah, that part of your subconscious or conscious says, I’d rather not do that. Yeah, if I’m gonna do it, I gotta prepare for battle.

1:05:29 Yeah, okay. Every time if I go and do something and I get a massive resistance, I know there’s a huge conversion on the way. I know there’s a conversion on the way. I know that there’s something that needs to be converted, so that negativity that rises up in me, that resistance that most people listen to, I look at it, and I see that that is oil for the lamp that’s literally going to be consumed in the volition of this interview, and because it’s full of truth, because it’s full of, you know, direct honesty, it will it will talk to people at whatever lamp, whatever level they’re at.

1:06:03 You know, wherever they are in the room, it’ll sit above the room. So we’ll talk to somebody that’s heavily into the exegesis of, you know, the different religions, but it will also talk to somebody that’s just struggling to get out of bed in the morning because of depression, because it will say to those, it’s okay. That’s stuff that you’re running away from. That’s your fuel. You’ve got to master that.

1:06:23 You’ve got to get control of that. You know, you know it’s calling you. Actually, it’s actually looking to be mastered. We need to sublimate the animal soul. We need to get control of our physical, psychological, physiological, sociological body.

1:06:40 We’ve got to get control of that, so it will speak to people, because it’s coming from a place of truth. So the Buddha, for me, was really about the writing and sitting on the truth. Um, and I think I said to you outside when I was working with Orlando, it was amazing, because um, I think we, you know, invited us to his house, and I went and sat with him. I didn’t want to go. I thought, I’ll go, I’ll go and do an hour with him, an hour and a half.

1:07:07 We’re going to go over the script. Why didn’t you want to go? Because I knew he was going to bring stuff out, because he’s a consummate professional. Script of Romans is very autobiographical, you’re reliving things that happened to you in such detail that we know it’s true, specifically about the post-abuse, right? You know, after someone abuses you, that’s not the end of it.

1:07:26 You know, I had a parasite in me. I was partly possessed by the stain of this person, so I would sexually self-abuse. Now that was a secret for many, many years. No one even knew about it. I didn’t even know it was a secret.

1:07:38 I just, it was just something I did. No one knew about it, and the only way I was going to clear that was to write about it, and you do it in rounds. You can’t write about it all in one go. You just pull a little bit out. I wrote a little bit in when I did the second version of Watch My Back.

1:07:53 I wrote about what Paul and Ludwig called the handshake story, and when I met the person that abused me and I forgave him, and I shocked him about that. Yeah, don’t have a background on what happened with the abuse, and that handshake story, I, um, and this is all part of the cleansing. This was all part of me drawing these stories out and drawing these parasites out. I’d reached a high level in martial arts. I was starting to talk about metaphysical power, one, and one of the metaphysical powers is forgiveness, or giving, recognizing the dharma, recognizing the law, recognizing comp, the law of compensation, reciprocity, and giving this person who abused me over to that law, rather than pretending I can pardon him, and holding on to that, giving him over.

1:08:40 So I started to talk about forgiveness as a metaphysical power, but I was only talking about it. Then one day, I’m, I’m a lump, you know, I’m about 16 stone. I can kill in 30 different languages. You know, I was training all these martial arts, and we sat in a cafe in Coventry, and look across, and there he is. The guy that abused me, and he was a martial arts instructor.

1:09:01 He was a martial artist. When you were what age? When I was 11, 11. He groomed me and sexually assaulted me. The grooming was more damaging, and then after the sexual assault there was, you know, lots of, um, lots of stuff went on where I was like, uh, kind of kicked out the class, you know.

1:09:21 I was ridiculed, and, you know, it was like you imagine you’ve got the person that you hero worship, that you idolize, and then he abuses you, and then he starts to ridicule you, because he’s obviously afraid that you’re going to tell somebody. So suddenly, you know, I didn’t realize until much later that at the age of 11 this guy you know, altered my life by about that much, and by the time I’m 40 I’m two country miles out of sync. I’m completely out of balance, so I’m trying to bring myself back to the centre.

1:09:52 Did you remember what had happened? Had you blocked it out? It’s a lot of it’s still blocked. A lot of it, I can’t, I can, I can only remember up to a certain point. I remember being terrified.

1:10:03 I remember waking up with my pajamas undone and all my, all of my genitalia out. I remember a hand on my, on my ass. I remember, I remember weight on me. I remember, just, I remember this darkness in me, this terror, this absolute terror, and I remember then, then I don’t remember anything. The next thing I know, I’m, wait, I wake up in the morning, and this guy’s, he’s pretending to be asleep, but his mouth is touching mine.

1:10:32 His face is so close to mine, it’s touching, and I wake up to this, um, and I know he’s pretending to be asleep. I can feel it, and his mouth is, my mind, and I’m, and I’m so terrified. I’m so afraid, and when I pluck up the courage a little bit later in the morning to say to him, someone was touching me in the night, and he just laughed it off. Said, are you sure you’re not imagining it? You know, and I’m like, I’m 11.

1:10:56 I’m, you know, probably closer to 12, but you know, it’s not, it’s not something, it’s not a fantasy. I haven’t, I’ve hardly kissed a girl. You know, I don’t know anything about this kind of stuff. I just not idolize this guy, and when he realizes I’m traumatized, he absolutely s*** himself. He completely s*** himself, and tells me not to tell anyone.

1:11:14 Don’t tell your mum or dad. You know, there’s no, he doesn’t need to tell me that, Brian. I’m not going to tell anybody. I’m so ashamed already. I’m so afraid of being noticed that I just bury it.

1:11:24 So, um, this happens at this age, and I don’t realize that from that age on part of me jumped out, part of me abandoned myself, and then I just built, I’ve got this frightening kid in me, and I build this carapace of armory around it, so by the time I’m in my early 30s I’m a physical monster, and I can have a fight, and anybody that threatens to try and control me or abuse me, I just knock them out. That’s it, and I’ve got the skills to do it. I’m starting to see that’s not right.

1:11:57 I’m starting to see that I’m battering daddies and uncles and brothers and sons. I’m seeing that, I’m seeing it’s not right, and I’m starting to bump into Funakoshi and Kano and Ueshiba, the gods of martial arts, and they’re talking about Buddha, so I’m starting to explore that, so I’m starting to talk about forgiveness, and then suddenly this guy turns up in a cafe in Coventry, and this voice goes, here’s your chance, and f*** it now. My skill’s gone. My, all my armory’s just gone.

1:12:29 It disappears. I’m 11 again. I’m terrified. I’m trembling. I know I can have a fight.

1:12:34 I know that’s there. I’m not worried about the fight, but I’m 11. This this kid comes directly to the service surface, but I know instantly that if I go over and I’m violent with him, if I’m physical with him, I know that I’m going to feed whatever parasites in me. I knew innately that the only way to get back what he’s stolen from me would be to find some level of compassion. Compassion is like, it melts hatred and anger like butter on a griddled sweetcorn.

1:13:04 It is a very, very powerful remedy. It’s a very powerful internal tool, if you can actually pull it off. You’ve got to be able to pull it out to talk about it. Gotta feel it, right? So I’ll go over.

1:13:15 Part of me wants to run. I’ve felt like I felt part of me climb out of my body and room. Um, and I just thought, no one will know if I just walk out, and I thought, well, I’ll know. So I went over and I just said, uh, you don’t remember me? And he just locked up.

1:13:31 He’s a big guy, and I said, when I was a, when I was a boy, you sexually abused me, and he went to stand up, and I said, sit down. Stay where you are. And it was a command. You know, I just said, and I was trembling. I was emotional.

1:13:43 I was nearly crying with anger and rage and fear, and I said, you f*** me when I was a boy. You abused me. You didn’t literally f*** me, but I said you f***ed me. Um, you f***ed my head, And I said, and you need to know, I forgive you. I forgive you, and he just crumbled, and I went to walk away, and he stood up and he put his hand out, and he was trembling like that.

1:14:08 He wanted me to shake his hand. I know what he was saying. He was saying, are you forgiving me, or are you forgiving me? And I knew I had to shake his hand, and it wasn’t like I was letting him off, because I haven’t got the power to do that. I recognize now that we don’t have the ability to pardon people.

1:14:24 We don’t have the ability to let them off. We don’t have the ability to forgive people in the way that people think. All we have the ability to do is give them over to reciprocity, give them over to their own karma. We’ve got the ability to repent ourselves for all the things we’ve done. We’ve got the ability we haven’t even got the ability to forgive ourselves.

1:14:42 We’ve got the ability to repent, and repent means to return, or to find refuge, or to repair. It means to come back to the still centre. So I knew, I knew I’d got the, I knew I’d got the power to give him over to reciprocity, and I trusted that whatever would happen would, whatever needed to happen would happen. So I shook his hand, and that was a big, the very, very beginning of my repair, my healing, my return back home. A few years later, as you know, we heard the news that he committed suicide.

1:15:16 Um, and that was reciprocity working. Lots of lots of abuse cases caught him up from the 70s, and he went to London and he hung himself in a hotel room. How’d that make you feel? Uh, just tremendously compassionate. I felt really sad, because I knew, I knew that this guy had been possessed by the exact force he tried to possess me with.

1:15:40 There was a force outside of him and outside of us. You call it evil, or you could call it the devil or demons, whatever you want to call it. There is a force. There is a living force, a repellent force that tries to stop people from achieving their goals, and it tries to get inside them, and it tries to feed off them. Eckhart Tolle calls it the pain body, the world pain body.

1:16:02 We have individual pain bodies and world pain bodies, and these energies try and find matching vibrations and then feed off them. So this guy was a victim as well. I’m not condoning what he did, what he did, you know, and who he hurt. You know, it’s indefensible, but I knew I knew that he was a victim to this force. The same, he’d made me a victim to it.

1:16:24 I’d severed this bond. I’d stopped him. I’d broken off his feeding tube. I’d stopped him, and this other energy from feeding off me, and broken away from it, but he hadn’t. And it consumed him and ended up killing him.

1:16:37 So there is a force in the world, and it’s an ordained force. It’s, you know, it’s, we can call it all sorts of names, and we can easily get hysterical about it, but it’s just a force that, um, we can, we either use or we be used by. We can either consume it, or it will consume us, but we can’t. If we don’t understand it, we’ve got to understand what this force is. And I obviously, since I’ve had lots of epiphanies and stuff, I start to see that force around.

1:17:07 I start to see it acting through people. I see people’s personalities change. I see the masks that people put on. It’s one of the gifts of expanded awareness, that you see in other people, you still recognize bits of it in yourself as well, but that force is out there, and that force is good if we’re able to recognize it and use it. An esoteric um, practice, they call it feeding the bear.

1:17:32 The question is, are you feeding the bear, or is the bear feeding you? So in other words, when these energies rise up in the form of gossip, in the form of anger, in the form of violence, are we engaging it and feeding it, or are we able to observe it and consume it in the volition of, you know, if we get a look at that? This book here, this book here is that energy, which was partly in me. There was a partner in me, and the energies out there. That energy has been transformed into something spiritual.

1:18:04 This book is full of truth because it is that energy, um, converted from the material into the spiritual. So I’ve converted it. I’ve made something powerful with it, right? Every time you do a program like this, that’s what you do. You convert the material into the spiritual.

1:18:24 So that’s what I recognized, and I felt tremendous compassion for him, but I recognized that he put this parasite in me when I was 11, and by the time I started to deal with it, I was like, late 30s, early 40s, and then doing the film with Orlando and stuff like that, so I continued to still get parts of it out of me, even to, even to three years ago, working with Orlando, when he was going through the scenes and saying, why does he do this? Why is this guy raping himself? Why is this guy abusing himself sexually?

1:18:59 Why is he acting out and battering people when they come too close? Why is he pushing his girlfriend away? Why won’t he talk to his mom and tell her what happened? Yeah, you know, and he was saying he was like, he said he was like a pin in a crab shell, trying to pull the last bits out. I must have been with him for 10 hours.

1:19:15 Yeah, 10 hours. He was so professional and so meticulous, and I was in agony. He doesn’t know this. I don’t think Paul and Ludwig know this, because I would have just come across as I am now, just as I am, but I have the ability to be able to see these forces and these energies, and observe them, and even though they’re compelling me to go away and not to do anything, I can still, I can still make the burnt sacrifice. I can still make the animal sacrifice.

1:19:44 So when I sat with Orlando, he became a big part of this atonement. So this little, little bits of this parasite was still hovering around the situation when I was working with Orlando, and it drew it out, because he’s a Hollywood star. He’s doing the small indie film. The film would have cost him money to do, because he didn’t have a big budget, and he wants, he wants absolutely the best of it, and he spent hours and hours and hours with me, asking me, what does he do this, what does he do that, read that to me again, read that to me again.

1:20:18 And I realized, when I went to his house and I was working with him, I recognized energies around me. There was, uh, angelic spirits around me, which I could feel, and they were encouraging me, bring this out, bring this home, we want you to come home. You can’t come home while you’ve still got those obscurations in here. So he helped me to draw it out. It’s exactly the same when I did the thing with Guy Ritchie.

1:20:43 He did a documentary on the, on the, Guy Ritchie did a documentary on the ego, and I had a phone call out of the blue asking me, would I get involved in it? My friend Judo Jim, um, guys, he’s a friend of Guy Ritchie. He said, guys, he’s doing the documentary about the ego, and he wants to know whether you’ll get involved. He said, he’s, he said, there’s something missing in it. He’s got some great people in it.

1:21:06 He’s got Sam Harris, he’s got Eckhart Tolle, totally in it. He’s got, um, Deepak Chopra in it. He’s got these amazing people, he said, but there’s something missing. He needs a troublemaker. That’s what Guy Ritchie called me, a troublemaker.

1:21:17 And, uh, and I said, the guy, which he ran me up, and I said, can I have a look at what you’ve done, and I’ll just see whether I fit, see what I’ve got, anything to say? And he was right, there was just a piece of the jigsaw that I could offer my place to. But I remember sitting outside his house before I went in, and just this rush of terror in my body. You can’t go and do that. Sam Harris is on this.

1:21:40 He’s a, he’s a, he’s like a white shark. He’s an intellectual white shark elite. He’ll often spit you out for breakfast. You’ve got Eckhart Tolle on this. He’s the master.

1:21:49 You’ve got D Patrick. You’re in, you’re out of your league. You’ve got a Guy Ritchie. You’re going to go in there. He’s going to humiliate you.

1:21:54 He’s going to show you how little you know. All of these voices, and I was going, yeah, yeah, well, I’m going in anyway, and I went in, and I had a wonderful time with Guy Ritchie. He was like, you, he just looked after me. I went in and I knew he had my best interest at heart, and I became a big part of this documentary. It hasn’t been released yet, but, but the, the amount of opposition I had rising up in me.

1:22:20 It was opposition, then there’s opportunity. And it’s amazing to me that you still feel that, you know, yeah. I just, we, I assume with all your work that you know you’ve, you’ve settled with those demons. Yeah, you feel, you feel like, um, the thing is, now it’s not so much that I’m dealing with anything inside me anymore, Brian. There’s, there’s not really much of a residue left inside me.

1:22:40 What I’m dealing with now is that I’m going out and telling the truth, so there is a collective, the Aurobindo called them the adverse forces. So there’s a natural energy that doesn’t want these stories to be told, and those energies will create an opposition to stop me from telling the story. So it’s not so much that I’m dealing with stuff that’s in me anymore. I’m dealing with stuff that comes from the outside. Why is there an opposition to the truth?

1:23:04 Well, why is the gravity in the gym that helps you develop a physique? If there’s no gravity, there’s no physique. So you go into a gym, what do you do in a gym? You look at Dorian Yates. We both love Dorian Yates.

1:23:16 He goes into the gym, he uses heavy weights, and uses gravity to create pain to develop a physique. That’s the realm we’re in. This is the great earth. Even the Buddhas come here to perfect the way. It’s not meant to be easy.

1:23:29 We’re not here to play. We’re here to work. We’re here to perfect. So there’s got to be adverse forces, and these are serious forces. We both know people that have taken their own lives.

1:23:40 We’ve both known people that have fallen foul of these forces. So these forces are real, but if we can use them, if we, instead of being used by them, if we can use them, instead of being consumed by them, if we can consume them, then we can create. We can bring these two forces together, intercourse with them, and create massive abundance. So even the forces that are naturally against us will start to work for us when we completely engage them, when we completely intercourse with them.

1:24:09 So they are there, they’re as natural as gravity. And then, and you know when you’re onto something good, because they will try and stop you. They will put things in your way. I know you’ve experienced a lot of this lately. Yeah, it says double meanings, because we’ve been bringing out certain truth narratives this year, and there’s been people against us, but also, like you said, when there’s a proximity to the truth, it pulls in all of this amazingly positive energy too.

1:24:35 Yeah, so true. You think about the word purpose. If you’ve got a purpose, purpose creates corporation. Corporation is a body of people that will come together for a purpose. So purpose is intrinsic.

1:24:49 In the Old Testament, the word purpose was the word purpose was Logos. It was Logos. It meant Logos, and it literally meant the Word of God. So when we find purpose, we are literally finding, you know, the keystones of the universe. We are finding, um, we are cleaving to God.

1:25:06 So when we find purpose, and we have a strong purpose to do something, the universe literally conspires in all of its elements to help us achieve what we want to achieve. So purpose is the Word of God. So if anybody’s struggling out there, my purpose when I was a kid, which was an accident, which, when I find the truth, I’m going to tell everybody. I’m going to be brave and tell everybody. That was my purpose, and I triggered on the purpose.

1:25:33 Receive in order to share. If we receive in order to have for ourselves, we’re never sated. We fall into the evil inclination. We fall into the negative side. In Judaism they call it the sitra achra, you know, the adverse forces.

1:25:47 Everything, we can have all of the material things, but it consumes us, and we’re never happy. If we start to work because we genuinely want to pass on something to other people, we will become a vessel. We’ll become a temple for it. It’s one of the lovely lines in the Old Testament: tell them to create a temple, and I will dwell with them. I love that.

1:26:11 Tell them to create a temple, and I will dwell with them. How do we create a temple? The moment I want to serve you, I’ve created a temple. The moment I create a temple, I will receive all of these amazing forces, and they’ll come through, and they will serve you. But of course they’ve got to, they’ve got to saturate every one of my trillions of cells.

1:26:29 They’ve got to be processed through me, so I get, I get to cleave to God. I get to experience the universe at the absolute. Just by serving you. In Judaism they would call this, you, they would say the person you serve is a charity carrier. He will allow you to experience God to serve him.

1:26:49 So it’s not you doing him a favor, he’s doing you a favor. So the rabbis would say, oh, there’s a guy down there begging for some money and for some food. Let me be the first to earn credit from him. Let me be the first to experience God when I serve him. He’s a charity carrier.

1:27:05 So everything starts to get reversed. So the purpose, you’re absolutely right, find the purpose, and the purpose, what you will find, the corporation will develop around you. The most miraculous things will happen, and the most but you have to have courage all the way, because these adverse forces do not want to be consumed. They do not want to be revealed, because if they are consumed, or if they’re revealed and people know about them, then they can’t use their greatest tool, which is artifice.

1:27:32 They don’t want you to know they’re there. The devil was never so happy as when people said he didn’t exist. These are real forces. When we feel opposition, we know we’re under something very powerful. So we have to call on all of our positive elements, all of our angelic guides.

1:27:49 And if you look at the angelic guides, or the sefirot, the different levels, the angelic guys are just really higher levels of understanding. You can look at it as an angel with wings if you want, but it actually just means an elevated level of knowing. So my protection isn’t the fact that I’ve got a big right cross. My protection is my certainties. My certainties have come because I’ve reclaimed parts of me that were ignorant, and that’s been my whole journey.

1:28:15 And your journey on London Real, to pass on information to help people, is exactly the same thing. We want to pass on information, because information, if people act on it, is their protection. You know, when we recognize that kindness, um, automatically connects us to the goodness in the universe. We start to recognize that kindness is a protection. When I’m kind to other people, that forms a protective shield around me, so of course it encourages me to want to be kind, and it encourages me to look at all the parts of me that aren’t kind and get rid of them, convert them, either get rid of them or convert them.

1:28:55 And all I need to do to convert them is watch when they rise up. If I don’t engage them, if I don’t emotionally identify with them, they are just conceptualized, any energy forms that will dissipate and just fall back into the void. They’ll go back into the singularity. Whatever goes into the singularity doesn’t come back out again, and whatever comes out of the singularity, and that’s in us, can become anything. And that’s what me and you, our guests, and people like Dorian, are trying to show people.

1:29:28 You know, look, I’m doing London Real, and look, I mean, you know, all your kids out there, they’re amazing, and they’re lovely. You know, and this whole setup is incredible, and it’s all come from this single-celled amoeba of an idea. And I look at my 50 books and my plays and my films, and all of these different things. They come from those little sparks of ideas that I sit down and develop into projects, but because my purpose is to serve people with information, the corporation comes around me, and I get great people like you saying, come on my show.

1:30:04 Let me put you in front of all of these different people. That happens naturally. I just have to have the courage of them to know that when I come to see you, there will be forces trying to stop me from seeing you for two reasons. One, they’re going to be consumed in the volition of me talking, and two, they’re going to, there’s going to be a level of exposure. So it’s a game.

1:30:23 All of it’s a game. This world is a game. It’s a game that can’t be won, but it’s the game we must play. Yeah, and must try to win, right? Yeah, yeah, and you, well, you were finally able to make peace with this whole situation, and you, like you said earlier, you had that conversation with God where you said, uh, where he said, the reason that happened to you was because you had given up on yourself.

1:30:44 Yeah. Now, no longer can you play that playing game, and that allowed you to kind of transcend to that next level. Absolutely. Take responsibility. The zara arrest of the whole philosophy of Zara is, um, the world is relying on you to perfect yourself.

1:31:01 The world is relying on you to bring yourself to balance, to bring yourself to redress, to bring yourself to that centre point. It’s relying on you. It’s not relying on me to tell you how to live your life. It’s not relying on me to point at that guy over there and say you’re too violent, you’re too greedy. He’s relying on me to get my own s*** right.

1:31:19 It’s relying on me to find balance. It’s relying on me to find physical, physiological, sociological, metaphysical homeostasis, balance, centre line. It’s relying on me, and if I get myself right, the world will pretty much look after itself. So what people tend to do, and I understand it because I’ve done it, is they go out and they try and fix everybody else, but we’ve got to get ourselves right. It’s no good trying to change the world if we can’t wipe our own ass.

1:31:47 You know, it’s no good trying to take on Al-Qaeda if you can’t settle an argument in your own front room. You know, it’s no good trying to take on these forces if you can’t even control your own waistline. We’ve got to get mastery over, if this magic is real, which we know it is, if it’s real, if it works, then we’ve got to prove it to ourselves and to other people by doing it on this physical body, and we’ve got to we’ve got to show the proof of that in the way we live, and not just about the fact that maybe I produce a lot of books or do a lot of talks, but by the fact that my raison d’etre is to be kind.

1:32:23 My raison d’etre is to serve people well. Not even to serve people. My raison d’etre is to serve God. I couldn’t articulate what that is, but I only know that I feel it when we’re talking now. I feel it coming through me, and when I talk to you, the message for me is that when you tell him, uh, what you know, I’m going to give you something else.

1:32:45 You’re both going to know something that you didn’t know before. I don’t really know what I know until I tell you, until we tell other people. So it’s saying, you know, pass on what you can to the nations, pass it on to everybody, and be brave, because there are forces that will try to stop you, but you need those forces. Those forces, once you are certain and you are not going to pull back, those forces will join you, and they will be converted. Now, look at Dorian again.

1:33:12 I always, I know I keep pulling Dorian up, but what I loved about Dorian was that he brought his life to a singularity. His purpose in life was to develop this physique, and his whole life was based around that whole thing. Nothing counted, mattered, and he took himself from a tiny little gym in Birmingham to the biggest stage in the world. You know, I mean, they called him The Shadow, because people would say, if you’re not political, if you don’t know the managers of the magazines, if you don’t know this person, if you’re not connected with that person, you’ll never do it.

1:33:47 He did none of that. He just turned up with the physique, and what I loved about him was that he dedicated his whole life just to doing that. Spiritually, that’s what we’ve got to do if we want to work metaphysically. If we want to find our own geometric point, our own singularity, our own point of reference, we have to dedicate our whole life to it. We have to get rid of everything that isn’t that, and just concentrate on that.

1:34:15 So Dorian has remained an inspiration to me, because when he did that, when he did that, I looked at that and thought, that’s what I need to do spiritually. Yeah. I’ve got another friend, he’s a powerlifter, and he’s held the world title, and I watched him lifting the most astounding weight, and I said to him, what you’ve got there when you lift that weight, that solidness, that steadiness, you know, that power, that’s what I want to be inside. I’m not sure he understood what I meant, but I’m looking for that inside, and that is what the Buddhists would call the still centre.

1:34:50 Scientists would call it singularity, or the quantum vacuum. It’s it’s when we go into the nothingness, when you find that place, when you find that solid place, you are, you are it’s not that you’re the most powerful person in the world. That you just, that you become everything, so object and subject become one. You know, um, there’s no longer, there’s no longer separation between anything. And the job then, as I said, my job now is not to, it’s not to try and get any more s*** out of me, because it’s not there.

1:35:24 The last bit, if it came out of that book, but it is, it is to recognize that I’m going to tell an uncommon truth to the common man, and there will be forces that will try and stop me, and I have to recognize that, not let them trip me up, not take it personally, and be strong enough, and call in my guidance, so that I can consume that and create something beautiful with it. Yeah. And you have, man, you have, uh, such a great message, especially in these current times, uh, Geoff, because a lot of times everyone’s pointing the finger at everybody else.

1:35:57 Yeah. And if we could just go inwards and solve our own demons and problems, that’s ultimately the solution here, and so I hope everyone absolutely can listen to that. Uh, the book is incredible, Notes from a Factory Floor. I’m guessing people can find it in booksellers and online. It’s released on the 10th of September.

1:36:13 They can pre-order it now. It’s with Urbane Publishers. Okay, excellent, and they must watch Romans as well. Yeah, it’s an incredible film. Like I said, I got to see it a couple years ago.

1:36:22 Uh, it’s stunning, because it’s so genuine, it’s so truthful, and Orlando, I mean, he really went there. I mean, I, I just felt it, and all the things we talked about, uh, it’s, I’ve never seen a movie that describes this, because we usually get the first-order version of sexual abuse, but we don’t see what happened, and we don’t see what happens with the relationship with his girlfriend, and his, with himself, and his mother, and everything, and, uh, is powerful, and, uh, that movie could only have been written by Geoff Thompson. Thank you.

1:36:50 So, uh, Geoff, you are a national treasure. We appreciate you, um, and thank you, so much, this has resonated with me and the journey we had this year and just truth, and what I’ve been doing here at London Real. You know, I didn’t understand it in the beginning, because I had never been of service my whole life until I was 40. I wasn’t, I was just a selfish bastard working in the City. They’re not all like that, but that’s what we do there.

1:37:10 And until I started being of service, I started realizing things changed in my life. I brought great energy, people, into my, my, my sphere, and I just knew I had to keep doing this. And you were one of them early on, and I just kept, have to, pushing forward. And so thank you for your mentorship from afar, and your example. Thank you, Brian.

1:37:27 And, um, I hope this resonates with someone here today that’s listened to us or watched us, because there’s a ton of truth in here, and it is what life is about. Unfortunately, the version we get that life is about, on our multimedia, is, is kind of the opposite of this. Yeah. So we go down these paths where, yeah, but somebody doesn’t feel right in life. Why am I not happy?

1:37:47 Well, it’s because you haven’t gotten back to that core. These quarters come in, work inwards. It’s not working out, it’s working in. Yeah, very much so. So, Geoff, uh, until next time, let’s not make it six years next time.

1:37:58 Please don’t be such a hermit, but I know you need to create, and I appreciate you keep your space, and you allow that stuff to flow into you. I, I had to exile myself for about five years. I was working at the National, and I just had a message. It came to me and it said, get rid of everything and just concentrate on this, which was this spiritual epiphany I had, so that I had five years of uh, of just clearing all that stuff out, then writing these two books, and then it said, yeah, well, now you need to go back out and talk again.

1:38:30 Back out. I’m back. Yeah, that’s good. You’ve got to do this too. Yeah, well, that’s what, you know, I, you know, someone said to me the other day, what does the future hold?

1:38:38 I don’t know what the next five minutes hold. I’ve got a covenant with God, and I take directions, and if he’s, I’ve just, I had, I was meditating the other morning, and it just came into my head, 99 reasons to forgive. I wanted to write a book about forgiveness for a long time, and I sat down and I wrote it in a week, and I remember thinking, that can’t be any good if I’ve only written it in a week. But I went back over it, and everything I didn’t know about forgiveness was shown to me in this book.

1:39:04 So my job is to follow the directions I get. They come from an inner tutor. In Judaism they call it. He says, your soul will teach you. When you reach a level of, uh, cleansing, your higher soul will come down and join with your lower soul, and your higher soul will become your instructor.

1:39:24 It will guide you. Then you’ve got a divine sat nav, and it will say, move forward, move back, you know, stand still, push, yield. And then it’s just about me having enough discipline and enough sovereignty to be able to sit down and do the work I’m being asked to do, or turn up, you know, if it means coming to do an interview, then turn up and do the interview. Yeah. Now, one final note I want to say is that I know you put all your work into your books and your plays and your movies, but I will say that I think just as powerful as you sitting here and talking.

1:39:54 Ah, thank you, Brian, that’s great, thank you. I know that you like to put other people in front of your, and express your work, but I think this is just as powerful, and will probably change, uh, the same number of lives as your work. So let’s do this more often, and thank you for being here. Thank you. And again, wishing you all the best, Geoff.

1:40:09 You’ve been a big part of London Real, and we really appreciate you. And if everybody checks this book out, check the films out. Absolutely incredible. So, um, thanks for being here, and we’ll see you next time. Alright, thanks Geoff.