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Passion Quest

Two Easily Remembered Questions That Silence Negative Thoughts | Anthony Metivier

Updated: Jul 25, 2022

Anthony Metivier used to struggle with being able to silence his thoughts - especially negative ones - until he learned a simple method to control his own mind and change his focus. In this talk, he shares more about his discovery and his desire to help others evaluate and quiet their negative thoughts.


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Like many, Anthony Metivier had struggled with a noisy mind. Silencing his thoughts so he could focus on the task-at-hand, or sleep at night was an attractive idea - but an abstract concept if not completely impossible - until one day a visit with a friend would potentially change his perspective, and eventually his life, as he learned to master his struggle and the method to control his thoughts from now on. In this talk Anthony will share his story, and his method so that you too may also benefit by developing your own system inspired by his.


". . . sometimes you do have useful thoughts - And I found out that it's a very good thing to observe the usefulness of thoughts. So maybe you can have some more of them from time to time."


"It's not so much a focus on anything in the now, but rather tools that help us, not destroy, not dissolve, not chase away, but simply neutralize the noise."

 

Transcript

How would you like to completely silence your mind? I know you came here to have better thoughts - not no thoughts, right? But wouldn't it be nice to just shut them off on demand? In a way that creates just complete being - just perfect wellness on demand and in a way that lasts? I figured out how to do this and I'll teach you the basics today. I only hope you don't ignore this because I went through years and decades of mental suffering thanks to the blah blah blah blah blah in my mind, and it didn't help that I tried to shut those thoughts off by swallowing anti-depressants and anti-psychotics with alcohol. Day after day, after day for years.


But my biggest sin on top of all that was being a very committed atheist. You see, I didn't believe that turning your thoughts off was possible because I thought it was connected to who I am and I've meditated for years, but I certainly didn't believe in something called PNSE, or persistent non-symbolic experience - certainly not when my friend Ben told me about this while we were sitting outside of my favorite cafe in Brisbane.


-And I had meditated for years, so I noticed that the sun was shining. I noticed how good the hot chocolate coconut milk tasted, and I noticed that my favorite topics were on the table - meditation, philosophy, the truth - and what we can say about the truth in a way that makes it stick so that everybody is on the same page - which would be bliss, right? Well, despite all of Ben's many qualifications in meditation, the science of it, and his knowledge of the history of many spiritual traditions, I wasn't having any of this.


"Pavement has no thoughts", I said "and there is plenty of it". It's everywhere. I want lots of thoughts. Radiant thoughts - the most beautiful, perfect thoughts. Endless thoughts. Truth thoughts. Now I have to take responsibility for my ignorance in the end or at least my eye has to take responsibility. But I was also caught in a YouTube algorithm. You know, the kind where you press a button and then for three days, three weeks, three months, three years, blah, blah blah, blah, blah. In this case, new atheism science, science, science - if it isn't scientific, it's woo, it's the enemy.


He stops and looks at me with his clear, crystal present eyes. And he says, "You have to read Gary Weber". "Oh", I say, ready to completely knock this down because I know what's coming next. But it turns out that Weber was a very good professional scientist, who himself needed a secular way to stop the thoughts in his mind because they were torturing him for years - blah, blah, blah, blah blah, and he needed something that would work without the need to believe in it.


So I listened and Ben said really all it involves is memorizing a couple of things, and I'm a memory guy - So I thought "Game on" if that's all it takes. You see, I'd used memory techniques for years. I used them in University to deal with depression and to deal with the brain fog from swallowing your pills with beer. I've also used them to create wonderful language, learning experiences, and even wound up getting my wife with one of these stunts, because her dad was smart enough to not let his daughter walk away with a guy who couldn't have small talk in her mother tongue and sing a song at the wedding. I even sat with a 2x Guinness World Record holder for memory and did not too bad for a guy who swallowed his pills with Guinness on the way to the memory competition. It's not really that funny, but such was the extent of how I was trying to quiet my mind.


So I went home and looked up this Gary Weber guy, ordered a book called "Happiness Beyond Thought" shortly after that - another one called, "Evolving Beyond Thought" and sure enough, this is what Dr. Weber says - "Memorize some Sanskrit and your thoughts will start to turn down", and if you do it right you can maybe even blow them out like a candle so that they never start up again.


Now that's a very huge promise. But I thought, "If I could even just go from volume 11 down to 10, this would be sweet mercy, and I was interested in this Sanskrit stuff because I did a PhD and took some Linguistics courses along the way and this was attractive to me. I like to learn languages as we heard today, already. It's not that hard. So I got into this Sanskrit. 3,500 years old at least and many wonderful philosophical texts have been written in this language. It's glorious for its precision and cutting through the noise and getting to the heart of things.


-But this work - it's not really about the Sanskrit. It's not even really about words. It's about the ability of patterns to neutralize patterns - and I found this out in a very interesting way because at the back of Evolving Beyond Thought, Weber has assembled all the Sanskrit he recommends you memorize, and he has these English statements with them that I took to be the English translations.


I'm a memory guy for sure, but also a little bit of an absent-minded professor. So I'm memorizing this Sanskrit. Clearly not English, is it? But what a beautiful mistake. What a blessing in disguise, because as I'm working with this day in and day out, this translation is very simple.


Are my thoughts useful? How do they behave? And as thoughts come roaring in, as they tended to do on autopilot, I start to answer with these questions. Are my thoughts useful? How do they behave? How do my thoughts behave? Are they useful? The order doesn't really seem to matter and these thoughts just start to fall apart. Unless of course, they were useful because sometimes you do have useful thoughts - And I found out that it's a very good thing to observe the usefulness of thoughts. So maybe you can have some more of them from time to time.


Now Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now has this quote that used to frustrate me. He says, "Focus all your attention on the now and tell me what problem you have in this moment". I don't know about you but this little undisciplined mind, it can find all kinds of problems when it focuses on the moment, right? But as we think about our future and how we're going to deal with the future, what I needed is what I think we could all use. It's not so much a focus on anything in the now, but rather tools that help us, not destroy, not dissolve, not chase away, but simply neutralize the noise. -Because the more I looked into it, the scientists and the spiritual people, they do agree about one thing. They are on the same page about one thing and that is that energy doesn't die. It just changes form. And I found out that the neutral form in my mind is pure bliss and it is agreement.


Now, I eventually figured out my mistake and memorized the proper English for this Sanskrit, and there are 30 sets of questions in total in this book Evolving Beyond Thought. And in this case, it's really just the simple mind is the great folly mind. It's that undisciplined little boy, but it's the mind that thinks it's the big man. And that thought is folly, that thought is illusion. This was beautiful to work with and beautiful to realize because we've seen all the best minds of our time roaring at each other. Keyboard warriors, Twitter storms. Even the best of the best think their little undisciplined thoughts are the big man, right?


We've got to be able to get past this. We can't afford to not see and extract value, even from the things we don't like and I realized that I almost missed this. I thought it wasn't philosophy. But this is a very ancient philosophy. You could call it self-inquiry as some people do and one of its earliest philosophers said that this inability to see and extract value from the things we don't like because we are so stuck on the things that we do like he called it the like dislike monster.


So one day I'm sitting there dealing with the internet, not so much Twitter storms or keyboard warriors, but a sea change. Can you run an online business? One day it's this way, the next day it's that, but instead of throwing my computer across the room and jumping up and down on it. I go for a walk in a park. Not far from that cafe where Ben set me on this adventure. And then it happened. All my thoughts disappeared. Just gone. It was exquisite. It happens more and more often, the more that I practice. Of course, I still have thoughts. I got myself here today. Planning thoughts, extroversion.


How can we help more people? How can we help them more often? Not so much I I but you you and you and you. And when a battle-axe of thought comes in, I have this great simple little tool that's super simple to remember. You don't need a bunch of memory techniques to do it. And these thoughts just fall apart. Are they useful? How do they behave?


Five years ago, a little boy who thought he was a big man wouldn't have agreed with Aldous Huxley who said that a totally un-mystical world would be a world totally blind and insane. I don't know about mystical or not mystical. These are just words, but I was blind and insane. And we see all kinds of people on network news, on the internet. They don't even talk into this anymore. It's disappeared into their ears, blind and insane.


We can't change them. We can't change anybody else. And we know that deep down inside. Because it's thoughts that make us think it's even possible - but you can change you. And I think you'll be surprised by how quickly it happens when you start to not destroy, not to dissolve, not to chase away your thoughts, but simply neutralize them. Now the question is, do you have to memorize as much Sanskrit as I went on to memorize? Piles of it. Mountains of it. It's amazing. I highly recommend it. I don't know. But I don't think so. The next time, the great like dislike monster raises its ugly head or maybe the next time you are the like dislike monster. You can simply stop and ask yourself, "Are my thoughts useful? How do they behave?"


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