How to get over sh*t and be happy | Brad Blanton | TEDxCluj

Translator: Carla Gattone Reviewer: Denise RQ Well, what about honesty? What would it be for you, just among your friends, to change the degree of honesty? What if you are honest all the time with everyone you meet? People you already know, and you weren't too worried about tact or diplomacy, you just said what you thought, like a child, like a child. What do you think it would do to your relationships? What would be different if you were radically honest? There is a story about a woman who was interviewed for a job and her potential boss asked her a question in the interview: What do you consider to be your worst flaw?

She said, "Honesty." She said: "I don't think honesty is a flaw." And she said, "I don't give a damn what you think." (Laughs) I really like that joke. I think, would you hire her if you were her boss? I would like to. I wish someone she could trust wouldn't take care of me. Who I could trust to handle things and be honest. There is a problem with being honest about what is going on in your mind, and the problem is that we have three minds. We have at least three minds and all our lives we have been taught that our mind is a very valuable thing and that thinking is the most important thing.

I don't think that's right. Our first mind is called the reactive mind and we are basically a recording device, we have been recording multi-sensory recordings of what happens to us since we were in the womb. We had no vision there, but we have these multisensory recordings of successive moments of the now. We have them filed away in a somewhat orderly way, some of them weren't recorded very well, some of them were a little off but they're still embedded in us, we have these records of things that we've experienced. They are not just sight and sound, they are proprioceptive recordings of taste, touch, sensory and smell.

So that's a mind, it's called a reactive mind, and that's because every time something was recorded it had a little bit of trauma or some shock or something, that was recorded with that. Then, from time to time, those things show up later in your life. So that is the reactive mind. The next mind is called the personal construction mind. That is based on replicated experiences. We have this experience of something over and over again. Let's say the baby has the experience of breastfeeding, and then not breastfeeding, and then breastfeeding and not breastfeeding, and after a while, after many, many repetitions of this, a little construction begins in the baby's mind: breastfeeding time. and not breastfeed. time.

Then the baby cries when she wants to be breastfed and is breastfed, and after a while it gets there, and she begins to operate on the construct: breastfeed, want to breastfeed, cry and then be breastfed. She functions well except when she wants to breastfeed and cries and doesn't get it, she gets very angry. We have all these little things there, of expectations associated with constructs that we build in our minds. That is what we call the personal constructive mind. Then we have the categorical mind, or the planning mind, the linear mind, which we normally think of as our mind.

It is mainly about verbal skills and has to do with having definitions of things and pointing out objects and ideas; the mind as we think it. The problem is that these three minds turn on and off more or less randomly and are not very precise. In fact, there's a section of one of my books, titled... it's a copy of the American Negro College Fund advertisement, they say, "a mind is a terrible thing to waste" - and my book says a mind is a terrible thing to waste. These minds are very unreliable instruments, and one of the things that makes them unreliable is that they tend to mix, to confuse each other.

As if our categorical mind likes to take responsibility for the things that simply come to mind. We believe it is basically used to rationalize the impulse that comes from the reactive mind. Then, what are we going to do? Well, a tourist stopped a New Yorker and said, "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" She said, "Practice, practice, practice." What we need is practice, and what you must do is practice to know the difference between noticing and thinking. Knowing the difference between noticing and thinking and in a new context where you have been taught that thinking is the most important thing in your entire life - that is wrong - noticing is much more important than thinking.

Thinking is an unreliable disaster. We have three minds and they are all screwed up, and they are interfering with each other and the reactive mind is always trying to think of things, and the constructive mind had an idea that wasn't accurate in the first one. place, and now it's forgotten halfway, and it interferes with the linear mind, and we all try to take credit for the ideas that come to us, but basically, they didn't occur to us, they just jumped out of our minds. Basically, the mind is not a very reliable thing. To get some clarity, we need each other, because my flawed mind needs a report delivered to your flawed mind and we need to be able to talk about it, which means that if we're not honest, we'll be even more screwed than we are. that we are already So what we're looking for is some kind of clarity, what we're looking for is something called shared co-intelligence, and I'll get to that at the end.

So what should we practice? We practice the distinction between noticing and thinking. Now, stay with me here, with an entire continuum of consciousness, everything we can possibly be conscious of can easily be divided into three parts. You can be aware of what is happening outside of you right now, I could be aware of you, you could be aware of me, right now. That is one aspect of the continuum of consciousness. The second aspect is that you can be aware of what is happening within the confines of your own skin at this moment in your body - sensations: hot, cold, tingling, tension, heat - where they are in your body, you can be aware of that. .

The third aspect is that you can be aware of what is going through your mind at this moment. All these consciousnesses are right now. That's all there is, I call it inside, outside, the other way around. After my favorite children's book. So you can notice what's happening in your body, you can notice what's happening outside of you, and you can notice what's going on in your mind right now. The only problem is that if you actually tell the voices in your mind, "Okay, go ahead, I'm listening," suddenly your mind doesn't know whether to take a shit or go blind.

He simply doesn't say anything because he is ruled by resistance. If you're trying to stop your mind, that's the best way to keep it going. So, noticing is noticing what is happening outside of you, noticing what is happening in your body and what is going on in your mind. Radical honesty is reporting what you notice, period. You report what you notice without any particular and common form of lying, such as courtesy and diplomacy. Diplomacy works the same way: the world is completely screwed and it's all about diplomacy. We usually talk about going to war or using diplomacy.

That is not true. Diplomacy is what causes war. So what we are looking for is to capture the value of paying attention. So if you are going to tell someone else what you notice in your mind, you have to report it all in all three minds. They will be contradictory; your reactive mind will come up with something, you'll say it out loud, and then your linear mind will come up with something else, you'll say it out loud, and they contradict each other. Then your personal constructive mind says something else and people think, "What are you crazy?

Are all these things going through your mind?" Yes, and you too. So us crazy people have to find a way to better guess what's going on. But if you are lying, no one will have the opportunity to intervene for you, and you will not have the opportunity to intervene for anyone else. So what is the value of honesty? You see, life is a problem. Period. If you have three minds, you have problems. If you tell a lie, you will get into trouble. If you tell the truth, you will get into trouble. So lying gets you in trouble and telling the truth gets you in trouble.

And the question arises, what is the best type of problem? And the best kind of trouble is the kind you cause when you tell the truth. Even if it upsets someone, hurts their feelings, or offends them. I recommend that you offend people, that you hurt people's feelings, and that you stay with them until they get over it; It only takes about 90 seconds or so. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. Realizing what you do has to be in a certain order. We like you to notice what's happening outside of you first, use your eyes and ears, your sense of balance and your relationship with gravity, and notice what's happening in the world first.

Then tell whoever is nearby. Then secondly, look at what's happening within the confines of your own skin. I notice that there is a kind of tension in my stomach, a little tension in the right shoulder here, a little movement here, they report that, and only after they inform those two, then they start to report what is going on in their minds. . Now, the best way to get in touch with what's going on in your mind is to start from the right place, and the right place is not in your mind. You never want to start any new project thinking.

In fact, you want to be grounded in your experience, which means the continuum of consciousness. I ran this eight-day workshop for about 20 years, 3, 4 or 5 times a year, it lasted 8 days and about 16 people attended each time. We spend 12 or 14 hours a day trying to condense into one week what a year of psychotherapy would do. About 10 years later, we discovered this surprising discovery. We discover a song that puts you on the path to enlightenment; in fact, you are enlightened in three minutes. I usually charge a lot of money for this, but I'll give it to you for free.

This is the chant that will surely lead to enlightenment in three minutes. (sobbing) Duuuuhhhhhhh... Duuuuhhhhhhh... Duuuuhhhhhhh... And if you drool, you'll arrive in two minutes. So you drool... (Laughs) You used to get dumber than a stick, dumber than a box of hammers. Duuuuuhhhhhhh... This is how you start if you want to become enlightened. You don't become enlightened by being smart, being smart is the biggest blocked enlightenment there is, that's okay. It's not thinking. So if you stay stuck in your stupidity, what we call stupefaction, if you stay stupefied, there is a way in which you start to notice the way you normally stop observing; which is with your mind.

And the reason for doing all this is this: when you have an experience, it comes and goes. When you resist having an experience, it persists. The main way to resist your experience is to think. So if you're thinking, trying to think about things, the first thing you need to do is stop thinking and feel things. When you open yourself to your awareness in your body, and to your awareness of the other person in front of you, and to your awareness of what's going on in your mind, and you report them all, not as an advocate trying to persuade you that you're right. and they are wrong or something, but just to inform, so that you can share and check each other, then tell the truth about what you are experiencing, because it is vital information that we both need in order to be able to succeed in the world.

I think your personal happiness is critically related to this, depends on this, and I think the survival of humanity is as well. So I want you to go out and start being radically honest. Thank you. (Applause)