The One You Feed - Brian Tom O'Connor

Episode Date: January 18, 2017

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Brian Tom O'Connor Brian Tom O’Connor is an actor, theatre director, cabaret performer, and formerly depressed guy who stumbled onto the source of joy and happiness in the background of all experience.  He is the author of the book: Awareness Games: Playing With Your Mind to Create Joy In This Interview, Brian Tom O'Connor and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable His new book, Awareness Games: Playing with Your Mind to Create Joy Real reality vs Virtual reality Why games are a more effective approach than questions to exploring awareness The fact that you don't have to believe anything to play a game That trying to reproduce an experience isn't doable That trying to get rid of an unpleasant feeling isn't doable That the mind is an excellent servant but a poor master The power of noticing "the whiteboard itself" rather than what's written on it The three basic questions: What's in awareness now? What is awareness? Who/what is aware? The Future Fishing game The Past Catching game The game, Slippery Mind That awareness games can be a good break from a serious meditation practice The benefit of allowing emotions to flow through you The game, Include Include Include Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a question, there's implied a correct answer. And in games, there's implied you're fooling around to see what's there. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallyknoworeally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Brian Tom O'Connor, an actor, theater director, cabaret performer, and formerly depressed guy who stumbled onto the source of joy and happiness in the background of all experience. He is the author of the book, Awareness Games, playing with your mind to create joy. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses and time commitment. Go to oneufeed.net slash support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to 5% of our listeners supporting the show.

Please be part of the 5% that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you feed.net slash support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Brian Tom O'Connor. Hi, Brian. Welcome to the show. Hey, Eric. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to have you on. You have a book called Awareness Games, playing with your mind to create joy. I'm looking forward to getting into some of the different games that you have and asking you a little bit more about why you think games are a good approach. But let's start like we usually do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, I love that parable. I actually read it, I can't even remember where, but about a year ago, I read it. And I remember as soon as I read it, I found tears welling up in my eyes. I found it so moving. And I wasn't sure why. I

thought maybe it was because I was just moved by the idea of having such a wise and kind and clever grandfather, or maybe being a wise and clever and kind grandfather. And then I thought about it for a while. And I also realized that whenever I hear something with a ring of truth, I find that moving. And so that's part of it. And then you invited me to be on the show. And I thought about it some more in comparison to my book, Awareness Games. And I realized that there's a metaphor in the book that I think

really applies to the parable. And it's the metaphor of real reality versus virtual reality. And in virtual reality, it's not exactly the same, of course, as putting on those virtual goggles, but it's kind of what we do when we're completely occupied in thoughts about the past and going over what happened in the past and worry or planning about the future or having little conversations with other people in our minds. It's like putting on those virtual reality glasses and all of a sudden we're not here now we're not in what's actually happening at the present and the opposite of that is something i call real reality which is a combination of a couple of things it's just this that's happening here right now all the things we're aware of in

our senses at this moment and in addition to that the actual noticing of the awareness that everything's appearing in and i find that that's where happiness is and that's where love is is in that real reality of noticing exactly just what's happening now and noticing the background awareness and the reason is that pure awareness, as opposed to getting involved in the content of awareness, is like what's like a clear mirror that just reflects whatever is in front of it. It doesn't decide, oh, I'm going to reflect this orange on the table, but I'm not going to reflect that banana. I don't like bananas. It doesn't do that. It accepts everything. And our awareness is like that already. It's not something we have to do.

It's something we have to notice is happening. It's unconditionally accepting, and that is unconditional love, and that's happiness. So I find that the more time we spend in real reality which is like the good wolf the more that sense of acceptance and love kind of colors and flavors and perfumes the rest of our lives and when we notice that we're in this virtual reality of worry and fear and trying to fix what's wrong that that leads us astray and whenray. And then we're arguing with reality. And that's when things start to come up that you might associate with a bad wolf, like anger and fear, frustration, etc. So that was sort of my reaction to the parable. Excellent. So let's dive a little deeper into that, because you talk about, I mean, the goal

of the games that you have in this book is to become more aware. You start off the book by saying, upon it within me. So let's see if you can find it too. I bet we can all experience it if we know where to look and where not to look. It doesn't appear in the outside world. It doesn't appear in thoughts or concepts. It doesn't appear in anything you can give a name to, which makes it kind of tough to describe in words. You can sense it by shifting your point of view from the content of awareness to awareness itself. So elaborate a little bit more on that last sentence, because I think that's really important. Well, basically what we normally do is we think about objects in our awareness, the content of awareness. So that includes all of our senses, our sights and sounds, things that are happening, our emotions, our bodily sensations, even our thoughts.

These are objects and these are the contents of our awareness. And if we stop and sort of take a little half step back and ask, what are all these things appearing in or appearing to? And then we start to notice the awareness itself. It's awareness of awareness instead of awareness of just the contents. And when we do that and we let the contents be as they are, that's a big key. Just let it, everything be as it is. With some practice and with some playing around, we start to find this well of happiness starting to rise up because that's where it lives, in the background of awareness. Tell me a little bit more about why games. So you've written a book of a series of awareness games.

Why do you think that games are an effective way to get to this awareness? Because mostly what we're presented with when we get into this kind of stuff is various meditative practices, typically from a spiritual tradition of one sort or the other. So talk to me about games. It's true. In meditative traditions, you're usually given a set of very specific instructions that you're to follow, and often there's a sense of whether you're doing it right or whether you're doing it wrong. In addition to that, there's an authority there who decides, are you doing it right or are you doing it wrong? And we just sort of naturally give authority away. And in games, it's like experimenting with something. It's like taking a balloon and squeezing at one end and seeing if it comes out the other. We're our own authority.

We're playing with our own minds. We're testing it. We're squeezing it. Also, I find that sometimes, it, we're squeezing it. Also, I find that sometimes, even with regular meditation, sometimes it works for me on one day and not another, or maybe one hour and not another. So there are actually a lot of games, even though they're all basically the same game designed to draw your attention to awareness itself, there's a lot of variety in it. So if one's not working for you now, you try another one. And if that's not working for you now, you try another one. And if that's not working, you try another one. And then maybe tomorrow you go back to it. There's an example about how to play.

It's sort of like experimenting. When I was a little kid and I used to be in bed and I would be lying awake and I would say to myself, what if there was nothing? to myself, what if there was nothing? And I found that if I kept asking myself, what if there was nothing, I would get this feeling all over my body, this kind of weird, pleasurable, odd feeling, and then it would go away. And so I said to myself, gee, I want to investigate that. Let's see if I can get that back again. So I would play with asking these questions and imagining, if I can get that back again. So I would play with asking these questions and imagining, well, if there was nothing, who'd be there to notice the nothing? And it was that kind of sense of experimenting and playing with your own mind that kind of informed the games. Yeah, I love the approach you're taking because you talk about that in order to get to this

awareness, often we kind of have to sneak up on it. And our desire to find it, you know, we work so hard at it, you know, I'm going to meditate, you know, really all the time. And, you know, because I'm looking for this thing. And you talk about in the book about how sometimes that very process can get in the way. Yes, it absolutely can. Because a lot of times we're actually trying to make something happen or trying to avoid something happening. And that's actually natural. And that was something that I found through trial and error, through experimentation. Like one time I was watching a video, an interview, and someone said, what if you made no effort at all? And I start to think,

well, what if I made no effort? And then I just started to laugh because first of all, trying not to make an effort is an effort. And so that was a kind of a funny paradox. And then something relaxed and I really stopped making an effort. And I started to feel this sort of marvelous feeling where I was smiling so much I thought my face would break. And that was great. And then a couple of days later, I would say, well, let's see if I can recreate that. And it's this amazing paradox. If what you're trying to do is recreate an experience that you've had before, or on the other hand, if you're trying to get rid of something you're having now, like an emotion you don't like, it doesn't work.

You have to sort of allow everything to be as it is and just accept what's happening now and then take that little step back to notice the pure background, like the white space, like the whiteboard instead of the lettering on it, or the blank page, or the empty screen. It's tricky and you have to play and you have to sort of hope that you might play around the well in hopes that you'll fall in. You also say something that I think is really interesting. You say, because you don't have to believe anything

to play a game. If I try and teach you something, your mind runs it through the truth checker. Is it true? Is it not true? Is it a crock? With the game, it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters

is what you find out for yourself while you're playing around. Yeah, that's so key because I found myself, because I've certainly read a lot of spiritual books and talked to teachers in both psychological and spiritual and philosophical, and they would say these things and my mind would say, no, wait, that can't be true. Wait a minute, that's that's crazy i mean if i look at a tree and you say the tree isn't outside it's in my head you know wait a minute i don't believe that and what it did was it activated that little part of the brain that's always on alert for right or wrong or true and false so that you can argue with it and that's actually turns out that's not where happiness is. That's not's happening. It's where happiness is. And yet there's the other part of the mind that we need a great deal of the time

to do a lot of the things that we do in the world. So what's your perspective on the balance there? Yeah, that's a really good question and a really good point. It reminds me of a famous quote. I can't remember. It was probably Einstein or I may be totally wrong who said that the mind is an excellent servant, but a poor master. You do need that part of the mind to accomplish tasks. And it's really great. And what I find is that when you take some time to notice the pure awareness that's already there and already happening, but we don't notice, it's sort of been clouded over by all our thoughts. We take a little time to do that. And then maybe we take another time and you can do it small moments, many times a day, or you can do it for longer periods. Once you do it often enough, you start to click into it pretty easily. And then an odd thing happens. It actually colors when your mind does

start to go into a daydream or does start to go into planning. There's some sort of perfume or some sort of feeling that's left over that colors and resonates the rest of your life. So that when you are actually just doing things like going into a store and buying something from somebody, all of a sudden you realize that your relationship with that other person is totally different because there's a kind of a friendliness and a warmth and a lovingness to your interactions that comes by surprise, even though in that moment, you're not actually playing an awareness game, but it colors everything. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the wooly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. I've got a couple of quick announcements. The first is that the One You Feed one-on-one coaching program will be opening up again in several weeks. We're opening it less frequently this year, so if

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O'Connor. At the very heart of all these games, they're all a series of questions, essentially. They're all a series of questions, essentially. So what is it about a question that is so useful? And why do you call them awareness games versus awareness questions? Well, that's a good point because they really are questions. Yeah, it's a good question. Exactly. The question about questions is a good question.

The difference between games and questions is that in a question there's implied a correct answer. And in games there's implied you're fooling around to see what's there. You're really just sort of messing around inside your own mind and poking it here and poking it there and seeing what comes up. But one of the tools is questions, like asking yourself the question, could I not be aware? Is it actually possible to not be aware? And then just seeing what comes up. And so it really is a matter of giving you the freedom to look and play as opposed to finding something correct.

Yeah, as I looked through the book and tried a couple of the exercises, I really liked that sense of playing as a game instead of looking for something in particular. And I think, and you say it yourself in the book, that every one of the exercises is sort of a variation on three basic questions. So maybe let's talk about those three questions, and then maybe you could lead us through a couple of the games, and so that listeners could get a little sense of what we're talking about. Okay, sure, yeah. So the three basic questions that are just a series of moving back and inside. And so first you ask, what's in awareness? So basically you're just noticing what's appearing in awareness now. And that includes everything that's appearing to all of your sense perceptions, sights, sounds, smells, etc. That includes all the sensations that are happening in your body,

your kinesthetic sense of your body, your feeling of your body against the chair or the floor, the breeze on your face. It also includes any emotions that may be going through right now or even thoughts. So you're asking yourself, well, what's in awareness now? And this is sort of what we traditionally think of as mindfulness, right? If mindfulness done right is that awareness of everything that's in our consciousness. That's right. I think it's very related to that. And that's, I think, where you start. And then you ask, well, what is awareness? So you're moving from the content to awareness itself and you're trying to look at awareness. And one thing that you might notice is that it's the same awareness that a sound appears in.

It's the same awareness that a thought appears in. Or the same awareness that an image appears in. And so you start to realize that even within you, it's one thing. So after progressing from what's in awareness to what is awareness, the third question is, what is aware? And that's very similar to the classic self-inquiry question of who or what am I?

So you're realizing that, so what is aware? Who or what is it that is actually aware? And usually you might say, well, I am. Well, what am I? And that's when you can start saying, well, I'm aware of the body. Is that what awareness is or is awareness separate from it? And so it's a little shift in identity from the objects, including your body, including your thoughts, including your perceptions and sensations, into the pure background, or some have called it the ground of being, or pure subjectivity, or just beingness. is that you can approach it from a lot of different ways, a lot of different things, and maybe some of them will trigger something. And my experience certainly is that the same question doesn't get me to the same place. The very first time we had Locke Kelly on the show, whose work sounds very similar to yours in a lot of ways. And Locke Kelly has this question of, you know, what would be here right now if you had no problem at all? And for me, that was the first time he said that was a really profound moment, but it doesn't work. I, I, you know, I can't get back

to that same place by asking myself that same question again, which is why, again, I, I like the idea of the games. So let's, let's maybe walk through a couple of them and maybe you can tell us, you know, how, what a couple of them are and how you do with them. One of the games is pretty simple. It's, there's actually a pair of games called future fishing and past catching. And this is just to help give you an idea of thoughts about the past and the future that are going through your head.

And it's just helping you by giving a little bit of a visual image to it. And so in future fishing, basically, you're just letting your mind wander. You're going to let it go where it will. And it will. It'll just wander. And then you think of your mind as a stream that passes in front of you. So you imagine you're fishing in this stream. But instead of fish, what you're fishing in the stream, but instead of fish,

what you're fishing for are thoughts about the future. So a thought about the future comes, you just catch it on your reel, you reel it in, you pull it out of the stream, maybe you put it in a little box or a basket beside you on the shore, and then the game is just to see if you can allow whatever flows through the stream. And whenever you see a thought about the future, you just catch it, you pull it out, put it in the box and see if it's possible to clear the stream of thoughts about the future. It may be possible, it may not be, but it really helps highlight that there is another option other than just thinking about the future. And my experience with what happens as I do some of these things, it's similar to what happens in

meditation, which is I start doing that. And then the next thing I know, you know, who knows where my brain has gone. And so I come back to the game, so to speak, the visualization. So it sounds like you're kind of talking about visualizing something in this case. Yes. In this case, you're using a visualization to kind of help you along to focus on the thoughts about the future. And so in the way that you see it, am I actually like spending a fair amount of time really trying to see the river and the fish and all that? I'm just kind of curious how you do some of these things. I know there's probably not a right answer. No.

Well, it does depend on each individual person. The way I do it, though, is pretty simple. I don't really work too hard at it. I try and use the least. Sounds like Chris. I think I like Chris. Couldn't resist. I haven't gotten a good Chris joke in lately, so. I'm glad I could afford one here. Yeah, I tried to use the least effort possible. So if I can imagine myself sitting on a stream or imagine my mind is the stream. And if a thought about the future comes like I have an appointment tomorrow, but

it's going to be too close to another appointment. What am I going to do about it? You just snag it. You just imagine that thought biting on your hook and you reel it in, you put it away, and then you just let the stream wander again and you play. And the thing is, it's not something that you do necessarily for a long time because a lot of times I'll sit down in one session and I'll play a bunch of different games. I'll try one and say, oh, that's not really quite doing it for me today let's just let's let's try another one and you play around and then you see one and it sort of catches you and you say oh that's really good like slippery mind is another one that one seems to be really fun and good for for extended amount of times when i was a kid i grew up in near a shell Westchester, and there was this

amusement park called Rye Playland. And it had this fabulous fun house with a hall of mirrors, and this was this great old Art Deco amusement park. And it had this little thing, and it was a disc. It was a very smooth, polished metal disc, and all the kids would sit on the disc, and then it would start spinning. And the idea was to try and stay on the disc but the centrifugal force would just push you off and you would just slide right off the disc and some kids were successful in staying on the disc but we all suspected that there were little screws located here and there and that I think that some guy controlling it could put a little tiny

jolt of electricity through it and shock you and make you shift your position so that the friction of your clothes released you and you went sliding right off. So when I was thinking about that, I thought, oh, that would be so much fun to make a game out of that, an awareness game. So in Slippery Mind, you just imagine your mind is a very slippery smooth surface no walls no fences and nothing to hold on to it's a circular surface and you imagine your mind's that way and when a thought comes in it can't say it's it can't stay it's too slippery it just slides out the other side and so sometimes a thought will come in, and it'll circle for a little while.

And so if you notice this thought circling in, you can do something like you can tilt the disc a little and make it slide off, or you can send it a little jolt of electricity or nudge it to slide off. And this is something that, I don't know, I find I can sit and play this for quite a while. And what happens is you don't get engaged in the thoughts. They don't take over.

They don't say, hey, let's get involved in me as a thought. And let's think about it and let's ruminate over it and examine it. It just, there it is. Okay, let's just send it out the other side. So it's just kind of a fun way of doing that. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Do you do these games in addition to a formal sitting meditation practice or in place of? I think that it can be either. It can be complementary to a formal sitting meditation practice. I often sit in meditation. I like guided meditations. I think they're great. I think Locke Kelly has some great ones. Rupert Spira is a wonderful guided meditation guy.

I do listen to those. But I found out early on that I wasn't the type of guy who had this impeccable discipline to say, okay, at 8.30, I'm going to sit and do this meditation for half an hour. And I knew that wouldn't happen. I mean, I might try it and it might work for a week or two and it would go away. And I just despaired. I thought, well, you know, this is the way I am. I don't think I can change this. And then all of a sudden I realized, well, I don't have to change it because I was determined to find a way out of depression and to find where happiness is.

And then I said, well, wait a minute. Maybe I don't have to do that. Maybe I can just play myself on my own terms at my own time, whenever it occurs to me, whenever I feel like it. And so I think that there's a little freedom that you get when you think about it as games that you can play whenever you want to. But I know a lot of people who have meditation practices who love the book and who play the games in addition as well. How many different games are there in the book? You know, I can't remember. It was probably about 70. I'm always bad with numbers. I can't remember. There's four. No, I know it's way more than four. There's more than four and less than a hundred. Okay. That's a good range. Well, another thing about games is that my background is in theater. And my mom was an actress and a teacher.

And she specialized in teaching theater to kids. And she taught us something called theater games. And they were invented by a woman from Chicago named Viola Spohlen, who was very instrumental in starting the Second City Theater Group in Chicago in improvisational theater. And these were games that you did in rehearsal for plays. And that also influenced the idea of awareness games, of using a playful way of arriving at something as opposed to an effortful, hardworking way of arriving at something. I love the approach of it as a way to augment or,

you know, in some cases, in place of a meditation technique, because I really do think there is a lot to be said for the over seriousness sometimes of some of this stuff and anything that can help with a lighter hearted approach, I think is almost always good medicine. Yeah, I think so too. But also I know that my personality is such that I respond better to lighthearted things, whereas other people may, may respond better to very serious things. And then another book might work for them. Yep, exactly. So one of the things that I have found when I am dealing with this idea of trying not to be so focused on the contents of my thoughts is that once I'm emotionally stirred up to a certain extent, that seems near impossible. And so I was just kind of curious,

what are your thoughts on that? And what is the role of emotion in this? Because one of the questions I'm always exploring on this show is trying to strike the balance between what I would call sort of a spiritual bypass where you just you get rid of emotions any way you can. You let them slide right out of the slippery mind versus actually being more present to them. So I'm just interested in your thoughts on that topic in general. I agree. And that was one of my thoughts about the good and the bad wolf. Like, do you starve the bad wolf? And you really can't because if these emotions come and you just sort of stifle them, they're going to form a little eddy inside you and they're never going to leave. But when you are loose enough and relaxed enough and non-resistant enough that when an emotion comes, you can let it come, it actually flows through you to the other side. And this is going to happen when you do any kind of approach like this, even as playful a one as this. Emotions are going to come up. And one of the games that I have called Include, Include, Include addresses that when you have really tough emotions.

And what you really need to do is you notice the emotion and you notice the awareness that it's appearing in. And you don't try to change the emotion. You allow it to be there. But you include everything else. You include the sounds. You include the feeling of your body, you include more and more and more, and you just include, include, include everything that's in awareness. And what happens is that that emotion becomes, instead of something that overtakes you and

becomes you and becomes everything, it's just really one small corner of what's in awareness right now. I love that idea. You're broadening your awareness and trying to be less myopic. Yep. Well, Brian, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. I enjoyed the book. I'm looking forward to trying more of the different exercises as I go on. I'm glad to have more than one or two at my disposal to kind of play around with. I'm happy to have the book. Great. Well, it's a pleasure to talk to you, Eric. Excellent. Well, take care. Thank you very much. You too. Okay. Bye. So long. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support.