The Duratus Mind - Geoff Thompson - BAFTA winning screenwriter and self defence expert

The Duratus Mind - A podcast exploring all things mindset and motivation.  Gaz, a former Special Forces Sergeant Major but now performance consultant, opens up his network to try and understand what motivates some to risk so much, why some are so driven, and what it really takes to achieve success in any sector. 

Today's episode is Geoff Thompson, a BAFTA winning screenwriter: Author of fifty books, he has appeared on the Sunday Times bestseller list several times. His first book, Watch My Back, became a stage play, a BAFTA nominated film starring Ray Winstone, and a BIFA nominated featurefilm. Geoff has penned multi-award winning films for luminaries such as Ray Winstone, Paddy Considine, Orlando Bloom, Maxine Peake, Anne Reid, Alison Steadman and James Cosmo.

He is also one of the world’s highest ranking (8th dan) martial artists. Black Belt Magazine USA named him: “the most influential martial artist in the world since Bruce Lee”. 

Instagram: @geoff_thompson_official

Notes from a factory floor: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Notes-Factory-Floor-there-here-ebook/dp/B084VPPXLF

The Divine CEO: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1789044243/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_imm_t1_HkRcGbBM76KA2

Watch my back: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Watch-My-Back-Geoff-Thompson/dp/1840241896

 Contact details:

Instagram Management @resight_films 

Email: gabriela@resightfilms.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Okay, um this morning on uh the durated mind podcast, I think I'm on episode 27 now. Um I always start with I'm really excited with who I'm going to be speaking to today, but uh I I I I don't know what words to use because I'm super excited today if that's uh uh if that's available today. I've got uh Jeff Thompson on the podcast. Jeff, welcome to the Durators Mind Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Thank you, guess. Thank you for inviting me on. It's a real honour.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Uh like I said a minute ago, and it genuinely the honors all mine. Um I'm I'm very excited to see where this this goes for for for me and maybe maybe for you. Um so um I've received your um bio from um I guess it's your your PA. Um uh you happy for me for in fact, uh to keep it more authentic, are you are you happy to kind of give an introduction to yourself for people that uh might not know who you are?

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Yeah, well I'm um I was I would say that I was a budding artist till the age of 11. At the age of 11, I was sexually abused and put my put me right off track, sent me, really interrupted my life and sent me off track. I thought it sent me off in a bad direction, but as it turned out, um it sent me in massively into inquiry. I wanted to understand why I was so divided. So my life from that point onwards has been about exploring martial arts, trying to become fearless, climbing fear pyramids, um suffering massively with depression, using depression as a doorway to the higher mind, recognizing depression as a um a messenger of hope rather than a harbinger of doom, something that rises to either claim you or be claimed. And I saw it as a doorway. Um that led me on to kind of um a hard-end martial arts, nightclub doorman, because I recognized in the martial arts when I went into it that there was a massive amount of um dishonesty is probably unkind, but people would people were um people have no idea what was real. They, you know, I even I knew when I was 15, standing in a pub watching a fire kick off. Even then, as a purple belt, I knew that that what I was learning wouldn't work in that environment. It was too chaotic, it was too savage, it was too spontaneous, there was no room for any kind of defense, having block encounter, trapper encounter, it was it was violent, it was sudden. I wanted to understand that. At the age of 15, I got that, but immediately dismissed it because I just thought, who are you to question that? You know, you don't know what you're talking about, you know, get your grades first and then you'll understand. So even as a higher grade, even working with legends, even working with gods, they still told me that this this is how it works, this is how it is, and it was just a lie. Um, and I think people were uh they either didn't know the truth or they were afraid to see the truth, or they were afraid to see the truth and tell the truth. A lot of the times because their whole edifice was based on the lie, it was based on the illusions. You know, their livelihood. Some of them were running six and seven figures. Um, they got wives, they got families, they got kids going to private school based on you know, based on this lie. So it's very difficult. You you think to yourself, um, somebody must know, and you think you realize people do know, they're just too afraid to um to challenge it. But I was really a nobody in the martial arts. But by the time I got to the set a second, which is supposed to be a high grade, I was still terrified. I was still afraid. I was still, well, I was more afraid. Um, and I wanted to understand that. So part of my climbing this pyramid of fears to get some kind of desensitization to my endocrine system, I became a bouncer. And the first night, the environment taught me, guys. It was the environment. It wasn't a particular person. The environment said, This is Jeff Thompson. The environment is like an egregore, it's like a corporation, it's like the the the energy of all the bodies there was greater than the sum of its parts, and it was a being that spoke to me. And the and the energy said, This is Jeff Thompson, this is where he is, this is what he wants to learn, this is the pace he can learn at. This is what he's able to um absorb. And the environment said, Well, show you what works immediately, but you've got to let go of everything you know, you've got to abandon it because what you know is going to get you killed. Uh, and it's not an exaggeration. You know, four of my friends were murdered during my time as a bouncer in Coventry, where you could start a fight in an empty room, you know. It was that kind of environment, you know. So it was um the environment taught me what, and I just thought, God, that's why I've not been taught this. You know, the immediacy of preemption, you know, artifice, being first, um, learning to climb inside people's endocrine system and control it with the use of sound, um, knowing where to hit, knowing how to hit, knowing how to finish somebody without even being physical with them, you know, knowing how to control my endocrine system and in doing so, control their endocrine system, knowing how to control crowds, knowing how to knowing how to stand on a door in a violent city um and guard it. And at the time I didn't realise it was uh a hugely metaphysical experience. You would think that being a bancer is a clumsy job for knuckle draggers. It was the greatest metaphysical experience of my life because it taught me how to guard the mind door. I know your podcast is uh is it called Giratus Mind?

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Geratus Mind, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Yeah, and this was um, you know, the door taught me how to protect the mind door. It even showed me the geography of the mind door because I'm guarding a nightclub, I'm guarding the door of a shitty nightclub. Um, but actually, what what it was really showing me was that that's not what's important. What's important is your will and winning your will back. And and I consider the mind and the will and the soul as the same thing. So it's guarding the doorway to your will, and this is this is clumsy and this is violent and this is ugly, but this is how we're going to show you in very simplistic stick drawings how to control the mind door. So the first thing I learned from that was um controlling this microclub door, learning very quickly what worked and what didn't work. 95% of my arsenal disappeared overnight. Um, and it's difficult because you know, when I was going against the whole system, I was going against the whole martial arts really, because I was saying, listen, that stuff you're doing isn't going to work. That's how the chip shop on a Friday night, it's not going to work, and you may die because of it. I'm not being judgmental, I'm saying to you, you may die because you're not doing it right. So I started to talk about, you know, what really did work, and the environment taught me that. But more than that, what was really shocking with you know, you're going on there thinking, I want to find out what works, and you find out what works really quickly, and then you're knocking people out every night, and it's so easy that you're frightened to do it because obviously, for a little while, you're dehumanizing people, you have to in order to be violent with them. And then the next day you're walking down the street and you see this monster that you've knocked out the night before, walking down the road with his wife and kids, and it's horrifying to think I knocked a factory worker out last night. He's walking, his wife's surveying his face, I can see it, and it's battered, and that's what I've left with him. And his kids are holding on to the pram, and I'm mortified. So, what God started to show me, or my higher self started to show me, was that um these are real people, you know, and and violence has a consequence. Um, and we're not really interested in you learning how to fix the world out there. We're learning we want you to um trace back all those projections to yourself, to your inner self. We want you to fix them from the inside. If you if you forget about the um macrocosm and come into the microcosm, what what Muhammad calls the greater jihad or the greater war, we can fix this from the inside out. Then you're going to be of benefit to the world. But to fix it from the inside out, you got to uh you've got to have the courage to go in. Because obviously it's I'm not saying it's easy to go out because you know we had, like I said, people people died in in the job I was doing. People will have died uh it around you uh in the world you were in. It's very real, the consequences are very real, but I'm sure you've already bumped into it. Anybody that's been at any high level of combat will eventually bump into this inner game where it's more frightening to go in because there isn't a terrain, there isn't a map, there's no arms, there's no guns, there's no big right cross. You can't, there's no, you know, you're fighting against an empty jacket.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Yeah, it's you versus you, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:46

Yeah, that's it. So you're going in, you versus you, but also you versus all the squatters that are inside you. Because you're like um uh you're like Odysseus coming back from the Trojan Wars after, you know, after these epic battles, he comes back home to his kingdom in Ithaca and realizes that it's been overrun, nobody recognises him. He's a king, but nobody recognises him, even his family doesn't recognize him, and he realizes his kingdom's still there, but he's got to win it back. And it's an allegory for waking up. We go, Well, I've got this kingdom, but I'm not sovereign over it. I'm getting battered every day by gossip, I'm getting battered every day by too many Mars bars, I'm getting battered by sexual pornography, I'm getting battered by judgment, I'm getting battered by um, you know, my unqualified opinions. I don't know who I am. Or you kind of when you wake up, you know who you are, but you have no authority. So you have to go to war with all of those old concepts, those old precepts, those old that conditioning, the mores. And you've got you haven't just got the weight of society trying to stop you and oppose you from doing that. You've got, according to Krishna Murti, thousands of years of conditioning forming themselves in this carapace, and you have to go to war with that. That's why it is worth getting up in the morning for and such an amazing challenge, but very difficult. So that's my journey from um my life being interrupted at the age of 11 by a demon working through a teacher, and I know why my life was interrupted. Um uh there's positives and negatives, it was interrupted because my dharma was to do what you're doing, to stand in front of people and and um be a shepherd, just say, This is what I've learned. I've gone through this door and I've gone through that door. Um, and I've and and you don't have to follow. I'm just saying, you know, I've I've climbed out of this burning building, um, and I recognize some people are still stuck in there and they they don't know where. And I'm just saying this is the way out if you want to go out that way. And and the devil abores nothing more than a shepherd. So when you go out as a bodhidharma, basically as somebody that tells your story of waking up, there will be massive opposing forces. Um, and these these forces um interrupted me at the age of 11 to try and stop me from going out and exploring my story. The good thing is that it's it set me on a passive inquiry that's led me through all of these amazing places to this moment sitting with you now.

SPEAKER_00 12:26

Yeah, which which is which is quite incredible. I mean, again, uh people may not know the kind of because again, it sounds like there's so much I want to say to what you've already said already, but they it sounds like um your writings are born out of this choice to effort people by telling this story. You know, people may not know you. The the book that I first read of yours, Jeff, um, I know I've just mentioned it to you earlier, but uh for people listening, watch my back. Um you know, this is a it became a fast-denominated film. Ray Winston starred in it. You know, Jeff for those listening is all is all written 50 books per minute. Um, penned multi-awater winning films uh for people like Ray Winston, Patty Conservative, Orlando Bloom, James Cosmo, just to name a few, and you know, speaking about his martial arts, he took it all the way to eight stand, you know, and Flatbelt uh USA magazine, one of the most revered uh martial arts magazines that are out there, you know, uh describing you as the most influential martial artist in the world since Bruce Lee. I mean, what what a claim to fame and and kind of uh pinnacle of um I guess ideal self that you thought you could have reached, right? I mean, but you're still on this journey, so yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:41

And interestingly, you know, you know, I wasn't there was you know, there were people around me who were much better martial artists than me. What what made me different was that when I was suffering with depression and looking for truth, I wasn't finding it. The authors I was reading weren't telling the truth. They are like I said, they either didn't know it or they weren't sharing it. Um, and I remember thinking to myself, when I find the truth, I'm gonna tell everybody because there must be other kids out there just like me. Because I knew what I was getting wasn't the truth, even though it was promised on the blurb of the book. And I didn't realize that I'd I actually I'd accidentally triggered on the secret to the tree of life. The secret to abundance is that if we receive in order to share with others, there is no limit to the amount of abundance we can receive in information, in knowledge, you know, and understanding. And I'd and I'd um I triggered on that accidentally because I absolutely wanted to help people who are suffering like me. Because when you wake up at four in the morning in the cold sweat, it's gonna be a long day because you're because you're crippled by depression. You're not the only person in the world that feels like that. But the brink thing that broke me out of it was this thing about I'm gonna find the truth or or the a truth and I'm gonna share it, and that's what I've been doing ever since. Um, and obviously I didn't realise how painful sharing it would be and how frightening it would be, because you know, in order to share that stuff, you've you've got to challenge the you know the you've got to challenge the the the existing truth, the truth that other people share, you know, what the masses share. Um, and you've also got to make yourself vulnerable because you've got to say, I'm scared pretty much every day, I'm afraid, but I've found a refuge from that. I turn inwards, I go to the center, I find my singularity, my geometric point. Yeah, you know, we call it God, I would call it God. So I find that and I access the Christ energy from that. So I access this other dimension, and that keeps me protected. I think the Buddhists call it the three jewels, Buddha Dharma Sangha. So it's the teacher, the teaching, and the and the community. So we place ourselves in the very center, we make ourselves invulnerable by keeping ourselves in the light. So when you put the stuff out there, like we're doing this now, and both of us would have experienced the searing of the soul in order to share this, we'd have had an anticipation, because it's not because you're afraid of me or because I'm afraid of you, but because we both know whether we're gonna we're gonna uh we're gonna burn our animal soul in order to create this piece of work for people to look at. We we're aware that um was it um Essechus, the Greek philosopher, said those who learn suffer. And it's very true because we have in the volition of learning, we have to burn up the parts of us that desperately don't want to learn. And this is what we were talking about earlier on, Gaz. You know, the devils, the demons, the the pain bodies, the semi-autonomous thought forms that are in us, that exist in us, that we have to win over. You know, we have we have to win back all the territories of our own body and mind. And then we've got to have the courage to surrender that will that we've won to our higher will and and start working in a binary world with binary intelligence and go quantum. Because then, you know, when you're working with God, you don't know whether it's gonna be a wave or a particle. I've got no idea what I'm gonna say next or what I'm gonna do next, but it always works out amazing. But it takes a lot of it takes a lot of faith to to surrender to that, to, to entangle yourself with God and go, I'm gonna trust this, I'm gonna I'm gonna connect to a divine satnav and I'm just gonna take instruction.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

I I I absolutely love it, Jeff. Um there's there's a lot of people going to be listening because I was probably one of those people six, seven years ago that if you'd have started talking about God or God, I would have probably closed my mind. I would probably switch it off because of you know the that's what the world tells you. And and this is why I'm so excited because I'm I'm you know, people that have got such authenticity in uh real living as yourself that I would uh you know look at and go, Wow, that man has got a million experiences that has led him to this point. That isn't something that's been uh preached to him from a child, it's something that he's learned as he's grown. Well, there's something to learn from that, right? And so I I'm absolutely intrigued with that journey. And again, it starts started for me with reading your book, Watch My Back. Again, for people that don't know the book, it's the story of your time as a bouncer on on a Coventry nightclub door. Is it the most violent in Europe, something like that? Um at the time. And uh, you know, I was I I'll be honest, uh, I mentioned this to you earlier. I was drawn in by the image of you, um, you know, across those uh cauliflower ears like you've got now and a knuckle duster on your on your right fist, and you know it was projected this image of well, I want to be hard at. I need to read this book. Maybe this man can teach me about uh toughness. And and I I I did enjoy the book. I was I was absorbed in lots of similar stories of you know, Elaine McCain, Gerard Shaw's at the time. Um and again, I think within me, I was trying to be hard. I just joined the military, I was about to join the military. I knew I had to be tough, I knew I was going to face things in my career that were gonna challenge me mentally, and and people that had um really been challenged by real threat. Like you, I'd you know, I'd I'd done a bit of karate, I've done a bit of boxing at that point, but it was it it didn't feel real in and people like yourself, I could see, had had proof, and that's what I guess what I was thinking. I didn't know this at the time, but it was what I was thinking, or currently my version of what I wanted to think. And then um I then bought a book of the old called Animal Day, um, a real small book. I don't know if you can remember it, I'm sure you can.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

Yeah, it's still out there.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Yeah, and again, it's for those people interested in mixed martial arts or combat, you know, I read that before. This was all way before the USD had been invented and kind of um that kind of theme. Um but it was talking about a day where you and your teammates would just hit yourself against each other almost in a no whole bar uh style and a way to really test your skills. And I was reading it thinking, this is fascinating stuff. Where on earth can I go and do this? Because I knew I needed that to kind of prove to myself what I knew. Me and a friend of mine are still friends of them now. Fortunately, we used to just glove up in my back garden and just see what worked, and just we only had these four or five-ounce gloves that we could grapple with, but we used to just you know do all sorts of damage to each other trying to because we would nod at it. And uh, you know, I laugh about it now, but this is where I was trying to explore and understand what worked and a kind of understanding of where your journey stopped. And I went off and did my career, which most people listened in a further. I know we've we've spoken about it before the part. Um, and and more recently, I've been reintroduced to you through again my continued journey of trying to understand what you've just been speaking about, maybe in a more spiritual form. Um, and um a friend of mine, Jonathan Payne, who I spent a bit of time with recently, um, who's met you on a number of occasions. But then uh listening to your London Real podcast, which again, anyone listening that's a steer towards that podcast we did uh with the London Real Reveal Podcast in many ways and such a fascinating insight. Um and again, I was I was drawn into that. And again, uh finally the last thing I want to steer people towards, and I can put the links in the notes, but your TED talk um bar um around fear, um maybe a number of years ago now, but I listened to it a couple of weeks ago and I've listened to it a couple of times one of the greatest TED talks I've ever heard because you're using the terminology, just I think of authenticity. It's it's a man that knows what he's talking about. And the the comments, um I hope you've been through the comments on on YouTube of what some people have said because it's so powerful how it's affected so many people hearing that truth. I don't know if you've got any thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

Yeah, it's uh I can't tell you the adrenaline I had when when I was invited to do that talk. I knew I was going to get I knew I was gonna be invited. It was one on my hit list of things to do. Um, I did 90 hours of practice to to remember that to to write the speech, to condense my experiences into a 15 minute talk and learn it off road and then deliver it. I I could feel the adrenaline. I mean, I've had people try to kill me and it wasn't as scary, you know. I've had people ringing me at four in the morning saying we're gonna. Shoot your wife and shoot your kids, and it wasn't as scary as that. It was disproportionate. But I know why. Because I know that in the volition of delivering truth, um, we sacrifice the animal soul, or they call it the animal sacrifice or the burnt sacrifice. So our our negative parts are literally consumed in the volition of creating a talk with truth. And I knew that if I was going to deliver a talk like that, I'd have to tell the truth and sit on the truth. My my new book, notes from a factory floor, is a painful confessionary of truth. And that was God asking me to go back in again, um go really deep, dig down, and bring out all the things I'd rationalised, all the things that I said were okay, all the things that I'd hidden in the vault, bring all those dead bodies back up again, and um allow them to be liberated in the writing of the book. Interestingly, the moment I finished notes, which is very painful because I had to look at the massive amount of violence inflicted on people, my ignorance, the affairs I had, how I damaged my children because of my selfish and narcissistic behaviour. Um you know, I I kind of kind of go deeply into that. And the the only way I can get it out of you is to completely and to clean it and to liberate it is to is to absolutely look at it and and accept it and own it. And then you don't really clean it, you give it over and it's clean for you, but you have to look at it, it parades by you, you know, um, and you have to watch every incident, every violence, every time you kick somebody's teeth out, every shitty affair you had, every time you were selfish, every time you put your own kids at risk because of your selfishness. It's very, very painful. But the moment I finished it, um I finished it on the Friday, 150,000 words, and it came through me in a rush. It took me about six weeks. I said to my wife, I've been trying to write this book for a long time called The Divine CO, and I I just couldn't find it. And I just said to me, I said to her, Did the Divine CEO's come. And I walked up to Coombe Abbey, my local park. Um, and when things are back to normal, they'd love to take you around there for a cream tea, me and you could have a walk round there. But we I walked up Coombe Abbey and 20 chapter headings downloaded in my head like coins falling through water. I wrote them down in emails and sent them to myself so I didn't forget. Um Monday I started to write The Divine CEO, which is probably the most astute book I've ever written, because I didn't write it, because it just because it rushed through me. I didn't know I didn't know what half of it was. Um and I and I I sat for another six weeks and wrote another 150,000 words, which was the divine CEO, which is all about creating a divine covenant. So the TED talk was about what I'd learnt. It was a 15-minute concentrated talk on what I've learnt about fear, what I've learnt about forgiveness, and what I've learnt about repentance. It was the beginning of my journey with repentance, and my my repentance started with forgiveness when I bumped into the person who abused me as a kid and I forgave him. Recognizing as I did it that I had the ability to kill him dead because I was a lump, I was a monster at the time. You know, I I I got a face like 10 boxes, and I was, you know, I was qualified in more systems than you could shake a sticker, and I was confident. I was knocking people out, I'd knocked I I can't even tell you how many people I knew how to do it. I knew I knew how to deal with this guy, and I knew the moment I saw him that if I did that, I'd feed the parasite he left in me.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

Absolutely keen to describe that story, but there's a few stages just before this that were you spoke in your TED talk about um it was uh Reynard Lesnar's quote about uh you were living a life where you would you were too scared because Reynard Lesnar was climbing one of the uh 8000 and he was too scared to go up, he was too scared to go down in the moment. In that moment he was afraid to live, and you spoke about how it affected you because although all this experience you had, and much like Reynard Lesnar, you know, an incredibly experienced mountaineer, in that moment he was afraid to live. And you had all this experience in your life that you were afraid to live because of this trauma. Is that right? That you experienced as a child. Um and again, again, how when you're seeing this guy, um because you built this here for uh can you talk about the fear pyramid on the back of that? So you're afraid to live and and how you overcame that fear to live.

SPEAKER_01 27:21

Yeah, I hadn't I had I kept suffering with massive depressions. I didn't realise it was it was a displacement from this um you know from this abuse when I was young. I didn't realise that this guy hadn't just abused me and groomed me, he'd left a parasite in me. Um he'd he'd taken something from me, he'd taken my autonomy, my will, he'd taken my um my soul or part of my soul, and he'd left a parasite in its place. And that parasite my first first martial arts teacher, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

Someone you trusted.

SPEAKER_01 27:53

Oh, I loved him, I idolized him. I was a kid, I mean, I absolutely idolized him, and I was the star of the class, you know. I was I was gonna go on and do all these amazing things, and he you know, and after this abuse, um you know, I was kind of uh kind of pretty much thrown out, abandoned. So it left me with a tremendous schema, confusion, dissonance, a tremendous amount of pain and suffering, but mostly dissonance. Uh I didn't realise until much later that he'd left this parasite in me, this um belief. So he basically um hijacked my will. That's what you know, that's what abuse is. It's like a possession, and the only way to get rid of a possession is with an exorcism. And the exorcism is what we're doing here now, this is an exorcism. We're talking about it, we're bringing it to light. And what we bring to light becomes a light. So this will go out, and this inspirational talk we were doing between us will go out and be a light for other people, hopefully. So I recognize that he's taken something from me and replaced it with a belief, a cognition, that nobody could be trusted, that the world couldn't be trusted, that your family couldn't be trusted, especially your family, especially those you love. So every decision I made from the age of 11 was conditioned by that one incident. I didn't realise it again, it was all unconscious, but I built I got all of this war paint all over my body. I got I was a pretty little kid, I looked like a girl, I got rid of all that. Um, I got my ears cauliflower and my nose broken, and uh I've got my back is massive, even though I'm a lot slimmer now. I went up to about 16 stand, I've got wings on my back, um, and I could curl 220 and I could punch like a professional boxer. I mean, you know. So I built up this armory, I learned all of these different skills, but inside, in the very centre, was still this um this 11-year-old frightened boy. Um, and that little frightened boy would would come out in um psychotic jealousy, deep insecurity, um, violent displacement, um, uh, you know, a fear of the world. I if I could solve it with my fists, I was fine. If I could hold a pair of focus pads, I look like the most confident person in the world. But there was no centre there. Um, and that's what I was starting to realize. I was starting to I was starting to see that, and I realized that if I was gonna really ever clean myself and find my center and reclaim my kingdom, yeah, in the old testament, the word uh the you know, when they talk about enter the land, enter the land of milk and honey, enter the kingdom, um the the the word land got comes from the root word will. So it's saying enter the will, claim your own will, claim your own mind. When you've claimed your own mind, you can surrender that to the higher mind. So I hadn't got my own will because I abused myself and sexually abused myself and physically harmed other people because I didn't have that will. It would this insecurity would take over. This lust for um pornographic sex or for violence would take over my body. I have no control of it, and suddenly I'm left with you know three or four unconscious people around me, or I've abused myself, and I'm I am steeped in shame and not more from the confusion because I don't know what's going on. And this was all going on, you know, especially this self-abuse was going on secretly in my mind. And it's because this guy, it it's a bit like quantum entanglement. He'd entangled with me at the age of 11, and even though we were separated by um by 20 or 30 years and by by a lot of space, he was we were still one. You know, we we we were not de we weren't discernibly different. He was in me and he was acting through me. So I didn't know that. And the only way I was gonna get him out was to understand this and uh and to forgive him. So obviously, this I'd forgiven this guy and I gave him back over to reciprocity, and I watched the damage it did when I did it. I watched him literally fall apart because he could no longer feed off me, he could no longer entangle with me. I'd separated that feeding tube and pushed him away. And so he wandered off and a few years later.

SPEAKER_00 32:12

Can you tell us about that that moment in the because you saw him in a cafe, didn't you, Jeff? And you were like, wow, this is uh this has been set up for me to do something with this now. And again, what did you feel in that moment?

SPEAKER_01 32:23

Well, I'd I'd been very violent, as you know, guys, and I'd been in a lot of fights, and I've been and I'll and I was starting to humanize people. Um I I'd nearly killed a few people and just had such remorse because I I wasn't even that I was afraid of losing my liberty. I was I I actually innately knew I was losing my place in the hereafter. I knew I was look I knew I was gonna fall into an abyss if I kept doing it. So I recognized I had to let go of the violence. And um, sorry, just bring me back to where I was. What was what was I just lost my other thread?

SPEAKER_00 32:57

So you saw him in the cafe. So you saw him in the cafe, and how and what were the emotions you were feeling in that moment, and how did you control that to then go and confront this this demon inside?

SPEAKER_01 33:07

I recognized that I'd got to let go of the violence, that that was feeding the parasite in me. And I started to talk about Buddha, I started to talk about forgiveness from a place of understanding as a giving over, and I started to talk about it as a metaphysical power. So, of course, the universe uh organized it so that I was sat in the cafe on the Sunday morning on my own, and there he was. I hadn't seen him for maybe a couple of decades, and I looked across, um, and I was like I said, I was a lump, and I could have a fight, but in that moment I was 11 again, and I recognized behind my behind my without my right cross, you know, without my fighting ability, there was nothing there unless I was able to go across and forgive this guy. So I've been talking about it, and the universe was saying, This is your chance to enter into the greater battle, the greater war. And this is just the beginning of it. But I felt like I was in a dugout, um, and I felt like I was climbing out of the bayonet and going into no man's land. That's how it felt psychologically. I absolutely was trembling. I felt like I could either explode in violence or just burst out crying. I wanted to walk away, but I knew of a dead because nobody would know, but I would know. So I had this opportunity. Um, and of course, I I was steeped in the fear pyramid. So I just thought my experience told me that if I can if I can intercourse with this fear, if I can absorb 99% of it, the fear will be liberated, and all the effort that's in it will come over to me. I'll reclaim that part. I couldn't articulate it quite like that at the time. Anyway, I walked across and I stood in front of him and he looked up at me. And obviously he didn't recognize me, it was a long time ago. And I just said, You don't remember me, but uh 20 years ago you sexually abused me. Um, and he went to stand up and I said, Sit down. It was a command. I said, sit down, and he sat down and I said, You fucked my life. I said, But I want you to know that I forgive you, I forgive you. Um and he he just kind of fell apart, he was disheveled, and I just walked away. I felt a relief, but as I went to walk away, he stood up and put his hand out, and his fingers were trembling like that. He wanted me to shake his hand. I couldn't articulate it at the time, but I knew what he was saying. He was saying, Let me go, give me over. He was accepting my forgiveness, which means he was saying, I'm gonna let you let me go, and then I can I can face reciprocity and you can go away and heal. And I knew that if I didn't shake his hand, it wouldn't be a complete forgiveness. And I'd have to, like Siddhartha said, I'd have to, if I don't do it in this one moment, if I don't complete it, I'll have to go back and do it all over again. And I didn't want to do that, so I shook his hand and moved away. And I realized then I felt very proud and very I thought I've done it, I've overcome it, and I felt this expansion, but I also felt a quiet conceit because I suddenly realized that I was so occupied with revenge on this guy, so occupied with what I could do to him when I met him, that that I'd I'd use that as a as a darkness to cover all the things I'd done wrong myself. I've got so many things I've done wrong. I didn't need to concern myself with his punishment. I needed to concern myself with the fact that I'd been violent for the last 10 years, I've had affairs, I've been dishonest, I was a criminal. For a while, I was a you know, I used to drive around for the kiters and um guard them and and you know, with my lack of intelligence, rationalize it, you know. I've done pretty much if I'd have been a if I'd have been around at the time of Moses, it probably would have been a an extra commandment and it would have had my name on it. So uh I've done everything wrong.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

Um when you when you when you saw him in the cafe, you said you said to him, because I've heard you say this story a couple of times now, and you you said I forgive you, and you said I forgive you twice. Are you are you are you aware of the the significance of that? Each time you tell it, you tell it, you you say it twice.

SPEAKER_01 37:19

Yeah, uh I knew I knew that the first I felt that the first time was for him and the second time was for me, with me saying, I definitely, definitely am gonna forgive you. So I said to him, I'll forgive you. And then I said it again. I reiterated it. I wanted to underline it. I didn't understand retroclothes people, but I wanted to, I knew, I knew there was a force that would deal with it if I let go of it.

SPEAKER_00 37:43

In in in the military, uh, we have a we have a sequence and a step to uh to orders whenever we're going out and we're going to do something. There's this process that we go through, and everybody knows at this what's that time what important information is going to come across. And the mission, which is arguably the most important thing that we're trying to do, is the only thing we say twice. And we always say the mission twice because we uh we highlight its importance, because that's what sets our boundaries for what it is we're trying to achieve. So that when things go wiry afterwards and things are going maybe a little out of control or aren't as planned, uh, we can reconnect to what the mission was because that's clear in our mind as to why we're there. Um, and and I see similarities in that with you, with saying to him, I forgive you. I forgive you, you know. And it you said sit down as a as a command, it was an order to him because this this was for you to do what you needed to do. I see so many similarities in that.

SPEAKER_01 38:44

Yeah, because it is obviously it's the inner, it's the greater battle, you know, it's the greater war. It is a war. We are at war with these parasites that are in us, you know, these these beliefs, these abuses. So it is a war. It is it's a war without without arms. Budo means without arms, but it is no no less a war. And the the command, when it when I spoke to him, it was I was certain, there was a certainty in my command. I certainty um in Islam they call certainty yaqeen, and it's an attribute of God, it's actually got so much power that it contains an element of absolution or the absolute. So when I when I said sit down, it was a command, he had no choice, and I recognize through this, I recognize certainties, I recognize my own centre, and I recognize, you know, again afterwards, because I've kind of educated myself on it, I recognize that he'd taken something from me, and that the only way I was going to get it back was was going to be to a higher frequency, to a higher power, and that was forgiveness. That was for me to understand Dharma, to understand law, and to say, um, I know that you got I know that the moment I let go of this, you're gonna have to face the consequences of this. Um, and so I let so I was able to let go of him knowing that would happen. Later on, I understood the significance of that, and I understood why he later went and committed suicide because he was facing the consequence of his own actions. And then, of course, I had all my own stuff. Um, I had 10 years of um atonement and repentance myself because even though most of the stuff I did was displaced, I still did it, it was still stored, you know, even more spin, even more skin was speaking a testimony against the things I'd done. So I had to go back and look at them. I had to um Jung calls it individuation. We have to go into the unconscious, bring those things back up into the light. And it's not just that we release them or that we bring them into conscious knowing, they become a light. When you look at the Bible thing where it says what we expose to light, we always go, what we expose to light becomes light. It doesn't say that, it says what we expose to light becomes a light. So when we do a talk from certainty, that is a light. Yeah. So you put that light out there, and that light, once we've done this podcast or a book or whatever it is, and it's got truth in it, or a TED talk, once you've put that out there, that is a light forever.

SPEAKER_00 41:23

Yeah. No, I I connect with that. There's a couple of things on the back of that because you you've spoken about this with your BATAs. You know, you you've been and presented whether it's to schools or to audiences, and you've taken your physical BATA people question that BAFTA is your trusted demonstrator. What you're saying is authentic because it's two identified BASTA 5,000 fifty. My choice is my 1982 my career. Why is it 32 feet on the 5050 experience? It's authentic enough. So also what's interesting to committed to the story of this. I thought it's trying to realize that you couldn't live anymore when those turns become real to him. It committed suicide. And so um your abuser did the same on on all this coming to light, and it wasn't just you, it was the number of people that I've left.

SPEAKER_01 43:04

A number of kids, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:05

And and how did that make you feel? How did you deal with that?

SPEAKER_01 43:09

Well, the interesting thing is, um I've forgiven him, and I obviously I didn't realise at the time, sometimes you know, forgiveness is a process, there's still residue in you, there's still bits in that that need to be looked at. So sometimes we have to forgive several times. Might have to write about it or talk about it several times until it's gone. So the idea of just doing it once, it although it freed me to start working, I needed to do it again and again. So all the books and all the talks, each time I do that, um, it helps me to forgive more and to clean out a little bit more. But every time I come to do it, I don't want to do it. So when when I was I was watching a film by my friends, the Shimadin Brothers in London, and I leaned into my wife and said, This is great. I said, Can you imagine what they'd do with one of my scripts? Anyway, one of them came up afterwards and said, Uh, would you write a film for us? And I said, Yeah, I'd love to do something for me. Would you do that handshake film? And I said, What handshake film? And they'd obviously read watch my back and they'd read that I'd met my abuser and shook his hand and forgave him. And I said, Oh, you know, I said, uh I've done that. I can't I can't go there again. I can't go there again. Um, I said, if you get me some money, raise some money and and get me some money and commission me, I'll I'll I'll have a look at it. But I knew I was sabotaging myself. Within about two or three minutes, the fear in me was there. And I said to Sharon, I need to look at this again. So I went over and said to them, I'll write it for you. Let me write it for you. So I wrote it and I did it as a as a spec script. But the interesting thing was that as I wrote it, I wrote, I I kind of it was an amalgam of stories based on my arc. And as I wrote it down, um the abuser became a priest, and it I kind of related it more back to um uh you know to more of a fictional arc. But in but in the um in the script that was directed to me, that was given to me, um the priest committed suicide, set himself on fire. And this is in Romans 12, 20. So we committed suicide. But the guy that abused me at this point hadn't committed suicide. He was still about, you know. And then the day I finished the script, guys, the day I finished, my wife said, Have you seen this in the paper? And I said, What? And she said, That guy that abused you was uh he'd just been arrested by the police um for historical crimes in the 70s. So I said, Crikey, that's a bit of weird serendipity. About two weeks later, probably we were starting to cast it, it was moving quite quick. Um, and I was talking to uh a friend of mine on the phone, and his son was going to play the part, the the young, the young lad in the Romans 1220, and he said, Oh, did you hear about so-and-so? Now, this guy didn't know about my abuse, he didn't know about that, he didn't know about who who he was. He just said, Did you hear about so-and-so from the boys' club? I said, No, he said, Oh, he committed suicide. So the day we were going in to shoot, the the script that I'd written, which had been fictionalized, became true. It actually became true. When we were screening it in London, it had a profound effect on people. I remember sitting at the back of the audience and all sorts of amazing things came together. The money came like that. We got 30 grand like that to make this short film.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

And I assume that doesn't often happen like that, Jeff.

SPEAKER_01 46:31

No, but the money just came, everything was supplied. Lisa Gerrard, who did all the music for Gladiator and the Inside Man, let us use her music free. She said it's the best use of the music she's ever seen. We're at the screening and was watching the film, and at the end of the film, this huge lump stood up at the front of the audience, massive guy. This must be six, six, five, you know, 18 stone, uh, black guy, really handsome, but really muscular, and he was bereft, and he just headed towards me. And as soon as he got to me, he just hugged me and he didn't let go for a long time. And he said, That's me, that's what's happened to me. He wrote to me uh about two weeks later and he said, I I went to the police, I reported this historical crime, and in the time since I last saw you, the guy that abused me has committed suicide. So it started to have all loads and loads of those stories. And if I thought that was the end of writing about it, I was mistaken because there was I wrote about it in I did this film with Orlando Bloom called Romans, which is I'm looking at it from I'm looking at it from all sorts of angles. I'm I'm I'm like a like a pin in a crab shell, getting the last vestiges of uh this sin out of me, this um this error, this parasite that is left in me. And each time I've written it, I've learnt more, I've understood more. I sat with Orlando Bloom for a whole day, and he's gone, what does this mean? What is it? I mean, literally picking it apart. And I can't, honestly, guys, I can't tell you. I was I just wanted to go home. I was Mesna. I just wanted to be with my wife, I wanted to be back in Coventry, I wanted to be walking around Coombe Abbey on my own in nature, and and he and I just kept thinking, I can last an hour, I can last an hour, I can I'll just do two hours, we can get through the script in two hours. And Orlando Bloom is a consummate professional. He wanted to know every nuance, he wanted to know every purpose, every intent. Why is he doing this? Why is that happening? Why is he abusing himself? What's he looking for? And in the end, I just said to God, I'll stay as long as you want. You just tell me I'm gonna stay as long as I want. We ended up being there for about 10 or 12 hours. And it was an interesting thing because when it's all allegorical, but when we went to Orlando's house, we went down these weaving paths, it was like we were going into an underground bat cave, and it was his place was hidden in the middle of nowhere, and he had a chef with him and he had a personal trainer. And it was, I know I've not really spoken about this before, but they they were beautiful men, they were like angels. It was a weird experience, and I knew I knew it was the ultimate kindness that this beautiful man and these amazing directors were saying, let's just help you bring out a little bit more because some of that parasite is still in you. Bring it out, keep bringing it out. It took so much, it took everything I'd got to write that film. But at the same time, I was being asked to do a TED talk about it. Um, and I was being asked to work at the National doing a play, and Guy Richie had been in touch with me and asked me to come and talk on his documentary about fear and the ego, all at the same time. And it was just, you know, I mean, I was literally burnt out at the end of it. Yeah, I was absolutely drained, but it's you know, I would say it was a a kinosis, it was a controlled kinosis, and there were beings helping me through it, and and afterwards I was built back up again. So I disappeared for about five years. Um, and uh, you know, I'm a new man. All that old stuff went. So now I'm I'm seeing things clearer. Um what you what the what the Christian mystics would call deep seeing, deep hearing, deep feeling, deep insights. I'm not just seeing ordinary people, I'm not just hearing ordinary things. I've sometimes I've been with people, guys, and my deep hearing allows me to hear their thoughts. Yeah, you know, and I can look at somebody and I can I can see the spirit behind it. I can it's like I'm looking at something that's binary, and the deep seeing, not all the time, the deep seeing allows me to see the quantum. It's not a wave, it's not a particle. It hasn't formed, it's not a good person, it's not a bad person, it's not light or dark, it's not good or evil, it's just a bundle of energy, and that energy, what that energy, the form and the aspect of that energy will be determined by my observation of it. So my observation of it has to come from a place of kindness, of from a place of love. And we know that's not easy because we all get tripped up every single day when we're shaking our fist at the telly, you know.

SPEAKER_00 51:14

Our imperfect self comes out. I I I listen to um I I chat with quite a lot of people I talk to as clients. Um I I'm I coach and mentors uh people. That's that's part of what I do to partly. And uh I share with them quite often. We just described uh three, seven, five, four, six, two, four, five, two, five, five, four, five, five, four, five, five, four, five, four, five, four, five, five, five, four, five, five, five, five, five, four, five, five, four, four, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, six, five, five, five, six, five, four, five, five, two, four, five, six, five, four, fifteen, five, five, ten, five, it's just uh, intermingled and all of this. Intertwined, entangled.

SPEAKER_01 53:21

Yeah, entangled yes.

SPEAKER_00 53:22

Your uh your divine CEO uh bother you you said you you ended up it couldn't come for a long time, but then it came in in a really quick uh period of time. Do you want to talk to people about your book, the divine CEO?

SPEAKER_01 53:34

Yeah, um, first of all, uh before I I could the reason I couldn't get it out, guys, is because there was too many obscurations. The Buddha says that there are no problems. The only problem is believing that there's a problem, but he said there is a clear view, and the thing that blocks a clear view is obscuration. So it's basically saying some parts of us are occupied by old beliefs, you know, old perceptions, you know, uh by damage, by wounds, by schemas. And we've got to, in order to get a clear view, we have to go in and individuate those. Um, so every time I tried to write the divine CEO, because the title was there, and I've spoken to an agent about it, and he was really keen on it, but it just wasn't coming through. I I wrote at one point I wrote about 35,000, 40,000 words, and it was just rubbish. I just looked at it and thought this this is just not it. Um so I I didn't realise at the time I had to clear this stuff through before it before it could come to come through me. And the clearing through was the atonement or the repentance. So I had to make my way back to the centre. So if you imagine repentance means to return to God, it means to return to centre or to find refuge or to repair. So I had to, I had to from where I was I had to turn even more acutely towards the center, towards this still point. But between me and the centre were these obscurations, and these obscurations were all the things that I hadn't owned, all the things that I hadn't written about. You know, you can't have 10 years of violence and then just go, I've had a moment of clarity, so none of that matters. It's still in the plumbing. So I did have a honeymoon period after my first epiphany. I was invited to teach for Chuck Norrit in Las Vegas, and I come back, had a moment of clarity, and I was floating for two years. I I would there was miracles happening around me, people were being healed in my proximity, all sorts of amazing things were happening. That was the honeymoon period, and after that, this voice came and said, now we've got to do the work because all that stuff's still in the in the we've shown you what the potential is, but that stuff's still in the plumbing, and we need to get it out. We need to reclaim all these parts of you. You can't surrender your will to God if you haven't got your will. Your will's still partly owned by all of these covenants and other things. So I started after I wrote notes, which was the kinosis, the emptying, the divine sea had room to come in. So literally 100,000, 150,000 words just downloaded pretty much as quick as I could write them. And it was one of those very rare books that once I finished it and polished it, there was no uh there was no edits on it. It very rarely happens because normally, you know, a lot of edits, a lot of stuff that you miss out. But it just came through me. I knew it, I knew, I knew what to say, but I'd not known it before. It wasn't it wasn't the divine CEO that I was trying to write, it was the divine CEO that wanted to be written. So I would say that this was a gift from the dove. We we get several gifts when we experience the dove, the holy dove, or you know, uh uh this kind of awakening, this opening, or this Christ energy. So it was coming through, and the divine CEO is a beautiful book, it's very esoteric, and I know it's beautiful. Uh, the feedback from it's been amazing, but I didn't write it, so I'm not taking credit for it. I'm taking credit for the fact that I sit down, I sat down and had the discipline to write it, but I didn't know any of this stuff. So the divine CEO is about what we're saying. It's about um first of all recognizing um you know, if you're depressed or you're fearful, that's that's waking up. We'll we're awake, but we're aware that we're not um we're not sovereign in our own kingdom. So we have to go back around and win our kingdom back. We have to win our will back. The kingdom is the will, the kingdom to God is the will. If we seek the kingdom, seek the kingdom and all good things will come to you, or seek the kingdom and his righteousness, and all good things will come to you. So, first of all, seek the will. So I have to win my will back, and that's what the divine the is about. It's about recognizing depression and fear as a messenger of hope, uh, not a harbinger of doom. Um understanding Dharma, understanding law, understanding this is the world of causation. We can either keep acting unconsciously and keep getting the boomerang of karma hitting us in the face, or we can start recognizing that what we think and say and do will return. We pay for everything, but also we get credit for everything. So once you realize that, you recognize that it's only the negative parts of you that are creating negative karma. They incarnate you, we get a we get a rush of rage, it rushes the mind or it takes over us, we do something inappropriate in the world or a rush of passion, and then it recedes back, and then you know, like the respectable, respectable uh Dr. Jekyll, he's always having to pick up the bill for the disrespectful Mr. Hyde. So we're we're constantly having to pick up the bill for parts of us that we um that we think are us, but they're not. You know, they're they're semi-autonomous negative thought forms that we haven't cleared. So the divine theo is about hunting them down, as Rumi says, becoming night travelers, hunting down these aspects of ourselves that aren't kind, aren't connected to kindness, and either ousting them or converting them. Better if we can convert them, because then they become oil for the lamp. So we're aiming to convert them. The moment we expose them, the moment we sit in front of them, the moment we have the courage to stand in front of the demon, and the word demon comes from the word divide, when the self is divided and divided again. Uh the word demon comes from that. So we're divided several times. We're occupied by lots of semi-autonomous thought forms. The moment we start to reduce that, and the Christians call it um apophatic theology, we don't know what God is, but we know what He isn't. So if we reduce all the things that aren't God, we're just left with God. If we reduce all the things that aren't us, the unkindnesses, we will eventually shrink back to our geometric point, to our authentic self, to our will. So the divine CO is about the process of contracting in order to expand. So we contract the ego in order to expand consciousness. We expand consciousness through meditation, through surface, through sacrifice. Um, and and when we expand consciousness and through prayer, when we expand consciousness, of course, that's inhospitable for the ego, for the lower ego. So as we expand consciousness, the ego contracts. As we contract the ego through mastery of palate, through kind acts, through being careful about what we eat, what we drink, what we take in through the eyes, what we take in through the ears, what we believe, what we watch on telly, what we read. When we start really controlling the palate, um, we we make it inhospitable for the winter lion. It can't feed if there's no prey. So we contract in order to expand, we expand in order to contract. Once we've won the will back, we don't have to ask. The moment we win the will back, this high energy automatically flows in. We create a connection between the lower and the higher soul, and we have a divine covenant. Then the divine covenant is then I've got my free will, and I choose to give it over to you, and I'll take direction from you. I don't know whether you're going to give me a particle or a wave, and I don't know what you're gonna ask me to do, whether it's gonna go anywhere or what it's gonna do, don't care. I have complete faith, I have certainty that if I follow what you ask me to do without needing to understand it, um, it it will be like light coming through water. It will calculate the billions of possible routes and give me the the perfect route for me within this lifetime, within this incarnation. So that's the process.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:45

You talk about it being a book about people being able to reach their greatest potential ultimately and becoming their own internal chief executive officer. That's what the CEO stands for. Um again, I think people all towards the one that I'm gonna be um reading the future having yet um unfortunately come across in the last couple of weeks because in in that you mentioned uh again with with regard to some of the net or greatest protection. I I can't bypass Chuck Norris uh in the conversation. I've never met a man who's uh who's spent any time with him. So can you tell us a little bit about Chuck Norris? I mean, how um is he revered and respected by so many? You know, what's your kind of take take on Chuck?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:39

Well, what I love is you know I don't know if you've ever read Al-Ghazali, he's a great um Islamic iman. It's amazing, it's real you'd love him because he's really pragmatic, he's right to the point, you know. But he says that um if we fall out of alignment, we are noticed. And there's an emphasis on noticed, we're noticed by darker forces. When we fall into alignment, we are also noticed. So as I started to get more and more aligned, as I started to speak truth from my little Coventry nightclub and my little Coventry Crassy Club, it was a tiny little private club I ran. That truth was so potent it rippled out across the world. Um, it it uh landed with a guy called John Will, who was a great BJJ player in America. Um he gave it to a guy called Richard Norton, who was a big kind of martial arts movie star, and he was close friends with Chuck Norris. So they ended up taking my Animal Day videos and watched my back for Chuck Norris, and he goes, Want to get this guy over, he can speak his truth. So they invited me to Las Vegas to teach for their uh at their association, which is like something like 500 of the top black belts in America. But of course, that brought out that automatically drew out negativities in me because I just thought I'm just a snotty coventry kid. My my um my default setting was to sabotage, so I put in an impossible price to go over, and they said, Yeah, we'll pay it. And I said, I need a UK, I need a partner. They said, Yeah, we'll we'll pay for her to come as well. This was Sharon. And I said, uh, it's no good me coming to Las Vegas for four days. I'd need to really come for longer than that to make it worth my while. And he goes, Yeah, it's done. They put me up in a hotel for 10 days. Um, and I was terrified of going.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:26

Yeah, I was putting them up, yeah. Yeah, I was putting them up, but when when you start to when you start to um when you start to hit the truth, you start to touch all all of the higher echelons within the greater of all of them. I was I won't go into too much detail, but um I was I'm working on with a guy on a guy on a film at the moment, and we were doing some talks about it. Well, and he was in Washington at the inauguration of the new president, and and he was talking to me from America, talking about this script I'm doing on repentance. There is a direct link. I'm doing a powerful film about the a very muscular film about the power of repentance and the ability for all of us to repent. And I was talking to a guy who was at the inauguration of the president, and he was saying to me, you know, when you touch the truth, you you are you are closely connected to all of the higher echelons, all of them. So it's kind of so this this was the very beginning when I hit a truth, and suddenly Chuck Norris is saying, Come over, come and teach. But he's invited me three times now. Um, and I put up lots of barriers, I self-sabotaged. Um, my wife didn't want to come, she did, she was really scared, and I just said, I've got to go. There was people were saying, Are you gonna go over there? The Machados, the Graces are teaching on the same seminar, Benny Akidas are teaching, um, you're gonna get challenged, you know, they won't like you. And there's all of this tremendous forces, and of course, I always know when there's tremendous potential, but there's tremendous opposition, there's tremendous potential. So I said, I'm gonna go. I'll I'll go on my own. Anyway, we ended up going over there, and I'm I end up sat with Chuck Norris having tea in Las Vegas and him talking to me about when Bruce Lee used to ring him up and say, Do you want to come round and spar? And what I loved about him, he's a Christian, he's a deep Christian, but he was uh when he was talking, it was the gentleness and kindness that came through. He was soft spoken and he just kept saying, Could do this, anybody could do this. This potential is there for anybody. There are barriers, of course, but those barriers will be consumed in the volition of expansion. He he was certain it was possible. It's not probable because most people don't want to encounter fear. They certainly don't want to eat fear, they don't want to consume fear, they don't want to come face to face with their own personal be eligible and consume him in the act of creation. But he was he I was basically there for him to say to me, This is what's possible. Then when I came back, I had this massive epiphany and I just expanded, I just expanded so quickly, so much. And I just it was a weird thing, guys, because I I suddenly could understand books. I would read Sun Tzu and I knew that it was uh it was it was about the connection, the inner connection, it wasn't about an external war. You know, I could read I could read the the Christian Bibles and see the allegor, the allegories behind them. You know, I mean obviously if you look at Kabbalah, it talks about the the you know the allegor, the allegories of all of the different Bibles. You know, people were turning up with copies of the Gita. You know, if somebody sent me a beautiful copy of the Quran from Dubai, I was suddenly getting teachers coming out of the woodwork because I my I'd expanded and I was able to see what was already there. So consciousness or eschatology, the uh Christian eschatology says that the second coming of Christ is an internal phenomena. It's it's when the Christ energy enters us and it says that everything is already there in potential. It's very quantum. Everything is already there in potential, it's already there in its unformed state. You determine whether it's going to be a wave or a particle, you determine whether it's going to be positive or negative, you determine whether you're gonna um you know build a prison with your negative traits or whether you're gonna build a kingdom with your positive traits. So I started to get all of this teaching, and it, you know, a big part of it was this going to teach with Chuck Norris was basically him inviting me onto the world stage. I knew that, uh, because I knew he didn't invite very many people. And when I sat with him, you couldn't deny his ordinariness, but you couldn't deny his greatness, you couldn't deny his and his greatness came from his humility. Um, but once I'd been there, I just knew anything was possible. I've just been, you know, just been to Las Vegas with Chuck Norris, and he's talking about sparring with Bruce Lee.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:04

You you I absolutely love that. I mean, I've heard so much about Chuck Norris. One thing being that is it right that he invented giraffes by uppercutting a horse?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:15

Probably probably you know, you know, when you put his name into Google and and it it says something like, You don't find Chuck Norris, he finds you. You know, uh you know something's happening.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:24

But it's it's it's a true legend um what a greatness. That is a good word to use greatness. You spoke about um in terms of that uh earlier about um it's easier to deny fear than it was to face it. You're a man that face it your fears. I'm super conscious of time here. Um and I again I'm gonna have to get off shortly as well. But what I'm really thinking to be able to do as well is to try and give people some practical advice as to how they can face their fears. Because we all deny our own fears. And if we can really turn inward, as we spoke the golden thread to all of this is looking inward and and to find the answers that are things that are holding you back, these fears that we all have to reach in our own potential and being our own divine CO. So I know you created quite a practical way of building this fear pyramid. Do you mind explaining that to people? Because that might be able to help some people to build their own.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:25

Yeah. Well, the main thing I'd say, the the big key is that the brain has a strange quirk and it can't deal with with uh genuine curiosity and fear at the same time. So fear rises up and you go, here's that feeling. I'm gonna work with this. This is an energy, um, and I've given it, I've given it a concept, and that's giving it an aspect. It's giving it a form and an aspect, which is makes me terrified. I I can change that because beyond beyond the form, beyond the aspect and the form um and the concept is just uh neutral energy. So I'm gonna be curious about that, and I can't I can't work with this energy unless I'm curious, and I can't work with it unless I see it. So if you suddenly go, I want to see that feeling, I want to feel it more, I want to put myself in it and get desensitized to it, and see whether I can um go to a place of denotation, as the Buddha says. He's he said he was freed from he was he was freed by consciousness from denotation. In other words, no longer looking at things with names and forms, just looking at things as neutral energies. Um, and then us going, okay, I've got this energy. I used to call it fear, but it's just an energy. Uh, if I can, if I can get enough will, enough power over my will, I can make that energy into a conglomerate, into a book, into a film, into a talk, I can make it into a marathon, I can make it into whatever I want. But while my concept of it is that it's an enemy, it's always going to grow fat on that concept. So if I can go to a place of denotation, or to make it simpler, if I can be curious, let's be curious about this depression that wipes me out every three or four years. Is it a harbinger of doom or is it a messenger of hope? Let's go into it, let's have a look at it, let's read everything on it. Let's go on the internet and educate ourselves, let's expand our knowing. We expand our understanding until our understanding spills into knowing. When we know something and we're certain of it, that fear no longer exists. So, in the center, in the very center, and we get to the center through this curiosity, there's no illnesses, there's no need for a remedy, there's no enemies, there's no need for weaponry. There's a still centre where everything is still in the neutral form. So, what I did to understand that was um was when I had this first moment of um I'm not going to live like this anymore, that that courage came or that anger came with an idea to draw a pyramid. And the idea was that if I if I draw a pyramid and put each of my fears, my known fears, on one step of the pyramid, I can confront them one by one, one by one, and at very at the very least get desensitization to the feelings of adrenaline. I can get control, I can get some control of my endocrine system. And that started to lead me on to understanding psychology, you know, physiology, sociology. Like I understood if I if I could slow my breathing, if I could practice diaphragmatic breathing, I could stop the negative cycle of adrenaline just with my breathing, just with observing, just with observation. Do you know one of the big things they say about quantum entanglement? The best way to break it, observe it. It automatically goes on with being observed and it changes, it disentangles.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:47

You can't fix what you can't talk about, right? And I I use all the uh get to people all the time. I don't I don't know where I heard it first, but uh the saying thinking ink. So to get it out of your head, that entanglement in your mind and get it down on paper. I'm never too far away from from from a notebook and and a pen. And and the thinking ink allows me to and you built this fear pyramid, so the your nearest or shallowest fear verse at the bottom, and then you at the bottom, the biggest fear at the top. Then I just literally can I ask what was what was at the top, Jeff, at the time.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:20

The bottom was the fear of spiders, which sounds silly, but it would stop me sleeping at night. There was a spider in the bath, I'm not going anywhere near it. It was a it was a hysterical fear, but with a guy that had no will, you know, it was the fear it was a fear enough to control to control me. The top of it was a fear of violent confrontation. In between, there was a fear of going to the dentist, there was a fear of um uh going into karate tournaments, there was all sorts of fears that bullied me. What Ushaba says, Maria Ushaba, is that in order to um uh transcend fear, we have to absorb 99% of it. We have to intercourse with it, and it won't give up its, it won't, it won't become a it won't dissipate until we absorb 99%. But when we've absorbed 99% by going right into it, by observing it um clinically, by by really observing the feelings and following the feelings, it just pops. And when it pops, it gives you the message that it's meant to bring. But it's hidden within those feelings. So I started to confront these fears. So spider was easy enough, find a spider, pick it up, put it down, pick it up, put it down until there's no fear. So the fear is liberated, and the effulgence, the energy comes across to me, I expand. So I suddenly go, I've got a reference point, I've overcome that fear, that was possible. That used to debilitate me. So the fear of spiders and the fear of violent confrontation might seem very disparate, but they're only separated by degree. When I went on the door, I used the same process. I took the job, I became a doorman, and I just stood in front of the fear. When the feelings rushed in, I observed them, I used breathing techniques to control them. I created an eye wall in the centre, this geometric point. In other words, I found my very centre, and I sat in the centre. So sometimes, you know, we'd be we'd be in a place of mayhem, maybe for months, you know, with the threat of comebacks, the threat of someone shooting you, um, the you know, the threat of violent criminals coming to take over, and you'd have to sit in that or the threat of going to prison. I was up for I think four eighteens during my time as a bouncer, just as a just as an occupational hazard. So you'd have to sit in that and you'd have to find a centre and sit in that, sometimes for months at a time, and you really do build a very strong eyewall. I mean, obviously, you know, I've watched people's eyewall crack and I've watched them fall into the chaos of the storm. But so that's what I use the the fear pyramid for. I'll I'll like for instance with a dentist. I went to the dentist once, the fear went, it's never come back again. Crassy tournaments. I said the first tournament that comes up, I'll enter it. It was the Liverpool Open in the KGB, and it was what it was probably the toughest tournament in the country. I went there, I wasn't a good competition fighter, I had about four or five fights. Um the fear just left me, went completely. And of course, it's not just about overcoming the fear, it's about that, it's about the fact that you've you've taken back a territory.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:18

Yeah, you've stepped towards it, you've ran towards the fire rather than turning away from it and avoiding it. So it's about making this in it.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:25

Some of them disappeared just just when you turn look at them, some of them have disappeared just because they'd know they've been noticed.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:31

What did you say? You used a quote by Rumi. You said a quote by Rumi before. I loved it.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:35

It was about um fear knocked on the door, love answered, there was no one there. Yeah, yeah. And that and that, but to get that, again, if you get a chance to anybody gets a chance to look at Ushaba, there's a great book uh by a guy called Ellis Dimore called Dueling with Osensi. Um, it's all a it's a book about how Ushaba went from very physical martial arts into the Budo. And he had this great quote where someone said, Are you worried about anybody challenging you? He said, No, he said they the moment they approached me, they would realize they're taking on the whole universe. He was so he was so in the centre of love that to get to him that they would have to enter the centre of love with him, and automatically, of course, they would become love. There would be no threat. He goes into that quantum place where he's not anything. So he's a great guy to look at, and he he was a guy that really lived and breathed it. Even if you just look him up on um on Wikipedia, some of the quotes, some of his experiences are very inspiring.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:37

Uh I'll do that and I'll stick something in the show notes so people can find that as well. That's a great idea. So, everyone listening, get your fear periods written down, approach these fears because when you approach them and you make them real and you engage with them, then they disappear. And this is what we all have to do to encourage in a nutshell. Facing your fears, it starts with uh getting that pen, writing them down and starting on that journey. Um you don't have to do it in a day. You uh you can take your time over this, there's no roof, but uh the sooner you start, the better, I guess. Um Jeff, uh that's sorry sorry to interrupt you, guys.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:11

I'll just I'll just just say that I wrote a book called Fear the Friend of Exceptional People. And that this whole process of building a fear pyramid and an inner pyramid is it all in there? It's a really simple book. If people want to look it up, I think it's still on Amazon, Fear the Friend of Exceptional People.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:27

Right. Well, there you go then. So again, everybody immediately jump on that. It's gonna have a little spike for the next day or two, Jeff. No, um that's been absolutely incredible. I've I've thoroughly enjoyed it, Jeff. I've there's so much I've taken away personally. Um one of the best things about this podcast for me is the fact that I'm the one that gets to tweak it, edit it, uh, which I'll be doing next and of on this one, by the way. But I get to relearn the messages that you've shared. So I'm truly grateful for your time. Uh truly grateful. Um and I do hope we can take that walk round Coomba. I'm definitely going to chase you up for it. And I'm not a mandate. So I'm hoping the SAS. I need to think to make that correctly.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:16

No, but it's it's but it's the same, but it's the same as a thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:18

I did again. I I I know where you're coming from, and uh it's it's that's a thing for me. And uh but no, I truly appreciate your time today, Jeff. And uh I look forward to our path casting again. So so thanks very much.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:30

Mark, thank you, Bad.