Psychic Attack -Teal Swan- - How philosophy can save your life | Jules Evans | TEDxBreda

Psychic Attack -Teal Swan-




♪ Intro Music ♪
Hello everyone ...
Today I wanna talk to you about Psychic Attack.
Psychic attack is basically a fancy name
for negative energy being focused at you
with either the conscious or subconscious intention
for harm to come to you or any aspect of your life.
Of course, psychic attack can take place
on an energetic level, a mental level,
an emotional level or a physical level.
These negative energies are projected
in the form of Thought and Intention.
They're a by-product of the Psyche.
At the 'extreme'-end of the scale of psychic attack
we see the deliberate practices of hexes and curses.
Spells that were created to harm
instead of benefit an individual.
The reason that people feel so intimidated by psychic attack
is firstly, because they don't understand what it is,
and secondly, because of the name it was given.
Because of the name that we gave psychic attack,
people associate it with psychics,
with the supernatural,
and with magic.
We call anything 'supernatural' that we don't understand.
The minute we understand it, it becomes natural.
Psychic attack can involve ritualistic technique
but by far and away, the majority of psychic attack
is *not* ritual, and involves nothing more
than the thought and intention
for harm to come to someone.
Psychic attack has long been associated with Voodoo,
and with a kind of Witchcraft called Black Magic.
Black Magic is considered to be magic that is done
against the free will of another person.
In reality, you can't do anything
against the free will of somebody else
because, in order to experience anything in the first place,
like someone harming you -
you have to already be a vibrational match to that experience.
That way that people think about us
and feel towards us,
as well as their energy that they're projecting towards us,
creates strong energetic Signatures - strong Frequencies.
And when we're exposed to those Frequencies,
like anything, they affect us.
So here're some symptoms that you'll see
in conjunction with psychic attack:
- experiencing frightening nightmares ...
- seeing your attacker in a devilish way
either in your dreams, your meditations or your thoughts ...
- suddenly acting totally out of character ...
- major changes in clarity of thinking or analytical ability ...
- sudden ongoing fatigue for no apparent reason ...
- the feeling of being drained ...
- icy-cold feelings in parts of your body or all of your body ...
- hearing voices ...
- strange or re-occurring accidents ...
- a discomfort or fear in a specific room or area
in your home or office ...
- sudden illnesses that elude diagnosis ...
- feeling someone touch you or bump into you
when no one's present ...
- sudden depression without an apparent cause ...
- seeming on-going bad luck ...
- disturbing visions or hallucinations ...
- irrational fear, anger or sorrow ...
- a negative obssessive thought, desire
or fetish, that won't go away ...
- having thoughts and images of your attacker
creeping into your mind constantly ...
- or feeling that you're being watched
and seeing shadows around you,
from the corner of your eye,
even when you're alone ...
As you can see,
the symptoms that we see with psychic attack
can also be attributed to a great many other things -
which is why it's so hard
to decide or decipher
whether you are officially being attacked psychically
or whether it is in fact caused by something completely unrelated.
All of this being said,
this couldn't be happening in your reality
(if you're experiencing psychic attack)
unless you have somehow made yourself a match to 'attack'.
That's super-crucial.
Being aware of psychic attack
diminishes the effect of psychic attack, significantly.
Like anything - awareness is the first step.
But when it comes to psychic attack,
'awareness' has much more to it
than just recognizing that it's happening.
You also have to have an understanding of your attacker,
and you have to have an understanding
as to why you're lining-up with this experience.
In reality,
psychic attack has everything to do
with the out-of-Alignment state of the attacker
*and* the out-of-Alignment state of the victim.
Psychic attacked is based mainly upon
jealousy, anger, revenge,
or perceived powerlessness to you,
or fear of you.
The psychic attacker - like the victims they choose -
is a person full of trauma.
They view the world through the eyes of trauma,
and create lots of drama
because they engage with the world
as if the world is a hostile environment.
In essence, they live in a state
where they vaccilate between attack and defense.
It's really important to think about it this way.
In order to understand psychic attack,
it's important to understand that
no one will ever attack you
unless they think they've been attacked first.
This may confuse you - so to clarify,
let's take Jealousy.
If someone is jealous of you,
they perceive your presence
as being an attack on their self-worth.
And because of that perceived attack,
they feel as if it's warranted for them to attack back.
In their minds,
they don't see this as the first-initiation of attack -
they see this as a defense.
As far as the victim is concerned,
it's important to understand
that if you were truly in Alignment,
you would be so far outside the vibrational range
of a Reality where you could experience
someone attacking you or coming up against you,
that you wouldn't even *meet* them.
They wouldn't even show up in your Reality.
We cannot discuss psychic attack
without discussing victimhood.
The victim does not know that they are the initiator
of the experiences that they have.
All the psychic attacker is,
is a vibrational-match to the unhealed aspects of us -
mostly that reside in the subconscious,
that we're not yet aware of.
You cannot be a match to the psychic attack
unless there is a Point of Attraction, of it,
within you.
So, inversely, this Point of Attraction, to it,
is seen as an asking-for-it.
If you do not have any awareness
of why these things are coming into your Reality -
(because you're not aware of your Shadows)
(and you're not aware that your Reality is happening
in response to your Vibration)
- then you're living in a Reality
where you're looking out at the world
and you're seeing bad things happen to good people.
People who don't deserve these things.
And so, you come to the conclusion
that it's possible for Other Things to
inflict themselves upon your Reality.
From there, it's a very easy jump
to say andquot;I need to start defending myselfandquot;,
andquot;I need to figure out a way to protect myselfandquot;,
andquot;I need to get bigger weapons so that I can fight against thisandquot;.
But therein lies the problem ...
Like all things, you cannot push against psychic attack
and not draw it to you.
When you give your attention to someone or something else
that causes you to feel negative,
you, yourself, are pinching *yourself* off
from the flow of Infinite Energy to you
and you blame the way you feel, on them.
They are the quote-unquote 'reason' you unintentionally
cut yourself off from your own Alignment.
You blame them for how you now feel
because the way you feel happened in response
to placing your attention upon them.
The problem is,
you cannot blame someone else for how you feel,
and not simultaneously acknowledge
or activate the vibration within you
of your own powerlessness.
Powerlessness increases our victimhood Vibration
and thus increases our manifestation of psychic attacks.
Prolonged states of anger ... rage ... resentments ...
... bitterness ... vindictiveness ... fears ...
and suppressed trauma from childhood,
will draw and attract people who are so not Self-Aware
that they carry out psychic attack.
Ongoing repressed negative emotions
will always eventually turn into a physical reflection
of those emotions.
To explain psychic attack, I'm gonna share a personal story.
Last year,
I flew to the East Coast to hold one of my Workshops.
And the day before the Workshop,
I held an Art Gala where I could expose
my Frequency Paintings to the world,
and also sell them.
A very disturbed woman showed up to that party, that night.
And she was operating from a space of jealousy.
Having considered herself to be a shaman,
and nearly 60-years older than me,
she was very frustrated that I was experiencing
the kind of attention
that she had always wanted but had never achieved.
To justify that anger and resentment for how she felt,
she decided that I was 'Illuminati'.
So she proceed throughout the night
to walk around the room picking up crystals
and attempting to cast hexes on me
and the people who were attending the gathering.
And that same night,
as I was interacting with other people at this gathering,
she invited people into the hallways
to convince them 'why' I was Illuminati,
how I was 'controlling' them,
and to try and convince them
not to attend the Workshop the next day.
She actually did succeed that night,
in persuading about 12-15 people not to show up
that next day for my Workshop
(as they confessed to me later).
Long-story short, I felt completely targeted.
For a while, I felt like I was being attacked.
Like I didn't deserve it, but it was coming at me.
Now if I didn't understand psychic attack,
I would have missed the fact
that I became a match to that for a very specific reason.
When I paid attention to the way I *felt* about the experience,
I noticed that it wasn't a new feeling.
What it was,
was a perfect reflection of how I felt
growing up in a Mormon town
where those families -
especially the women in those families -
ostracized me from the society
and separated me from their children
(who I really wanted to play with).
They drove a wedge between me
and the people I was trying to connect with.
This woman
was a messenger
that was trying to relay to me
an unhealed aspect of my Being.
It was an opportunity
presented by the Universe
for me to heal an unhealed aspect
of my childhood trauma.
If I had missed that
by thinking that I simply need to protect myself more,
or I need to combat that
with some Energy Technique or some other Spell -
(to try to prevent people from doing that in the future)
- I would have missed the opportunity
to come into a space of Integration
about that subject of ostracization,
and being targeted,
and being called-out unfairly.
She was, in fact,
a messenger, for a great many people who were at
that particular gathering that evening ...
... not just me.
She mirrored a lot of suppressed trauma,
for many people who attended that event. «winks»
*laughs* Sorry ...
If psychic attack has shown up in your Reality,
use the Contrast of that psychic attacker to do two things:
- the first is to recognize the reflection
of someone projecting negative energy in your direction
as a reflection of a deeply suppressed trauma within you.
A reflection of past feelings of powerlessness, despair,
desperation, hopelessness, fear and unfairness.
Explore the feelings you have about being a victim,
or, experiencing undeserved harm.
This what the revolutionary psychologist Carl Jung
would have called Shadow Work.
Prod around in the subconscious
in order to heal your unresolved traumas.
- two, use it to design your Reality
by identifying your desire.
Realize what you want
is to be more in control of your own Vibration than this.
What you want,
for example, might be Empowerment and Allowing -
and go in the direction of that.
Do more things that cause you to feel empowered.
Pay attention to anything or anyone
that causes you to feel more allowing of other people
and how other people choose to behave.
Understand that you can't arrange
the circumstances of your Reality
enough to control everyone else's behavior.
And you can't think about protecting yourself
without simultaneously creating the experience
of having something that you need
to protect yourself against.
Once you control your own Vibration,
you're exempt from experiencing
other people affecting or creating the way that you feel.
All other modalities of dealing with psychic attack
must come second to this.
There are many techniques for warding off psychic attack
which you can use in conjunction
with becoming aware of your own Shadow Aspects
and Integrating your past trauma,
as well as increasing your Vibration.
I'm gonna list some for you today:
- the first and foremost is White Sage.
You can buy White Sage as an Essential Oil
and you can dab it on your pulse-points.
You can also plant it around your house.
But by far, the best way to use White Sage
is to get a smudge-stick.
What you do,
is you take the smoke of the White Sage plant
around your house.
You can also use your hand
to wipe it into your Auric field.
White Sage is an amazing neutralizer
of negative energies,
and it's been used for thousands upon thousands of years
for this very reason.
- carry the Minerals whose frequency
is the very best at deflecting negative energies,
transforming negative energies and cloaking.
In my opinion, the very best are:
Black Tourmaline,
Obsidian,
Pyrite,
Moldavite,
Spirit Quartz,
Fire Agate,
and Chiastolite.
- use herbs or plants
that are the very best at deflecting negative energies.
In my opinion, these are:
Sage,
Rosemary,
Eucalyptus,
Frankincense,
Oregano,
Clove,
Lavendar,
Juniper,
Ylang-ylang,
Tea-tree,
and Sandalwood.
- visit Energy Worker professionals
who you feel drawn towards,
who're adept at Auric cleansing,
and who are also versed in psychic attack.
- visit open-minded, spiritually-oriented psychologists
who're adept at helping you do Shadow Work,
who're adept at helping you become conscious of the subconscious,
and recognize limiting and non-healthy patterns within you.
Now I'm going to give you a little special little treat ...
I'm going to share with you a Spell Formula
that's been used for thousands of years
to help deflect negative energies.
Originally it was known as a Protection Spell
but as we know now,
any kind of 'protection' only creates something
which needs to be protected against.
Nonetheless, this particular formula is very adept
at deflecting negative energies.
To do this we put 8 oz. of water in a spray bottle.
Make sure the water is obtained from a natural,
pure, fresh source such as spring water, lake water,
river water or Artesian-Well water.
If you absolutely can't find natural water
use bottled spring-water.
Put:
- 6 drops of Rosemary oil,
- 6 drops of Sandalwood oil,
- 8 drops of Frankincense oil,
- 5 drops of Juniper oil,
- and 3 drops of Lavendar oil, into the water.
Add:
- 8 Fennel seeds,
- and 3 whole Cloves.
Drop:
- 3 small Protection Stones of your choice into the water.
(my favorite is Black Tourmaline)
Expose the mixture to the color Violet.
To do this:
- you can imagine the color being diffused into the mixture,
- or, you can cover the bottle with a violet-colored cloth.
Then, by projecting your Intention into the mixture,
you can mentally ask the ingredients to 'awaken'.
Ask them to help clear you of negative energies
and deflect negative energies directed at you.
This is, of course, a very personal experience,
and so it will vary
(how much time it takes for you to
ask these ingredients to awaken)
but when you feel as if the time spent focusing
your Intention toward this creation is sufficient,
or when you feel as if the ingredients are coming 'alive',
shake the mixture 28 times
and spray yourself and anything else you want to shield,
with it.
Shake, and respray it anytime you feel like you need it.
This mixture will last for about 3 months
before it loses its potency and will need to be replaced.
Make sure you store it in an area
where it's shielded from
absorbing other energies within the house.
Another thing you can do to thwart psychic attack -
- is to do meditations and visualizations.
Of course, like anything,
there's a great many available to you to choose from.
But my personal-favorite are focused on Cleansing.
My favorite visualizations
entail visualizing a white, liquid, light
that is flowing through your body
and cleansing every aspect of your body,
both inside and outside,
and your Auric field.
You don't need to be guided to do this -
all you need to do - is with your intuition,
imagine this liquid white Light
flowing through your veins
into every tiny cell,
inside of your bones,
outside, through your Auric field,
to whatever degree you feel completely cleansed.
Another thing you could do
is to do a meditation or visualization
on taking a Sacred Bath.
You can visualize
getting into a sacred pool of water,
a lake, a stream,
an actual bath, anything ...
and visualize the water being whatever color you want it to,
with the understanding that it's going to
wash away all the impurities and negative energies
within your body.
So, visualize this water healing you
as the negative energies leave your body.
Visualize the particles of Negativity
or, the energy of that Negativity,
being taken away from you,
flowing into the Earth
and being claimed by the Earth-energy, and then,
because the Earth-energy is as powerful as it is,
being transformed by the Earth -
knowing, of course,
that you're completely cleansed now ...
... and refreshed.
These visualizations can be greatly enhanced
by doing them while taking an actual bath in water
where Himalayan Salt or Sea Salt has been intentionally added
to the water.
When you have successfully addressed
the Shadows within you that made you a match to the experience,
and when you've come into a place of empowerment -
then, it's a good idea to develop compassion
for your psychic attacker.
Chances are, you have no idea how painful
the life of the psychic attacker is.
The reason is - you can't project-out any ill intention
without receiving it back.
This is why, in Witchcraft, they have the Law of Three.
The Law of Three basically states
that whatever intention you put out,
you get back, threefold (three times bigger).
And this makes sense from a Vibrational standpoint,
because, whatever energy you project,
when you focus on it longer,
it comes back bigger.
That means that the lives of people
who engage in psychic attack
are *acutely* painful.
They will experience attack, themselves,
again and again throughout life.
They will seem like victims.
Psychic attack is not something to be afraid of.
It is not something mystical or supernatural
that is beyond our control.
It is, in fact, just a natural by-product
of people,
including us,
living in a world where the negative trauma that we experience
causes us to fall out of Alignment.
The most important thing to understand about psychic attack
is that psychic attackers are not there to attack you.
They are, in fact, just messengers
that the Universe is sending you
for unhealed, unconscious aspects of your psyche
and of your Reality,
that wish to be seen and acknowledged,
that wish to be integrated.
In other words,
they are reflections of unhealed aspects of you
that are begging for healing.
Psychic attack ... is a call
for further healing and integration
so that we can become more whole.
Have a good week ...
♪ Outtro Music ♪
Subtitles by the Amara.org community

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB4h7LptqAc


How philosophy can save your life | Jules Evans | TEDxBreda




So I'm going to tell you
how ancient Greek philosophy
inspired modern
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT.
And how through CBT

millions of people have got access
to the therapeutic wisdom
of the ancient Greeks.
We are realizing that philosophy
can help us as Socrates put it:
andquot;To take care of our souls.andquot;
So I'm going to begin
by telling you my story
of how philosophy helped me through
the most difficult phase of my life.
So when I was a teenager
in the mid 1990s,
my friends and I were -
I guess you could describe us
as amateur neuroscientists.
We liked to experiment on our own brains
with various different chemicals
every weekend.
So we began our experiments with marijuana
and we had some interesting results,
and then we moved on to experimenting
with LSD, also quite interesting,
and eventually we were
experimenting with MDMA,
amphetamines,
ketamine, magic mushrooms,
all thrown into our neural chemistry
like ingredients into a druid's cauldron.
I mean, we had some great times
and hilarious visionary and even
spiritual experiences.
But then I noticed
some of my raver friends
were beginning to wipe out.
My best friend had a psychotic breakdown
when he was tripping.
He was just 16 and locked up and
diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
Other friends developed bipolar disorder,
depression, anxiety, paranoia.
And then in my
first term at university
I started to get panic attacks.
I didn't know what a panic attack was,
I just knew I'd be
in a quite unthreatening situation
and I'd suddenly feel
this full-bodied existential terror.
And that undermined my confidence

because I didn't know who I'd be
from one day to the next,
and it also made me more socially anxious
because I was never sure when panic
was going to jump out and humiliate me.
And my real terror
was that I had done some permanent damage
to the chemical balance in my brain,
in which case maybe there was nothing
I could do about it.
Maybe I'd ruin my life
before the age of 21.
So all the way through university
I'd became more and more miserable
and then I graduated
and I hit rock bottom.
I became a financial journalist.
(Laughter)
I got a job reporting
on the German mortgage bond market.
This is what happens if you mess around
with drugs. (Laughter)
My kind parents sent me to see quite
an expensive therapist trying to help me,
and he diagnosed me as suffering
from social anxiety, depression
and post-traumatic stress disorder.
I think he was being paid per diagnosis.
(Laughter)
He wasn't able to help me,

so I went away and researched
those conditions for myself
and found they could apparently
be treated by something called
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT.
I also discovered
there was a CBT support group
for people who suffered
from social anxiety
that met near me every
Thursday evening in London.
So one Thursday I went along.
I found ten people sitting in a circle
and there wasn't actually
a therapist present,
but someone in that group
had illegally downloaded a CBT course
for social anxiety from the Internet.
So we listened to that course
and practiced the exercises
and did the homework
and encouraged each other on,
and for me, at least, it worked.
I stopped having panic attacks
after a few weeks
and I began to understand
how to transform my emotions.
So I became fascinated by CBT
and I wondered where it had come from.
I discovered it had been invented
by an American psychologist
named Albert Ellis,
who lived in New York.
So one day in 2007,
I got on a plane to New York
and I went to interview him.
By that stage he was 92,
old, frail and sick,
and it turned out to be, sadly,
the last interview he ever gave.
He died a few months later.
But I got to thank him in person
for inventing this therapy
that had saved my life.
And I asked him where it had come from.
Ellis told me he had trained
as a Freudian psychoanalyst in the 1950s,
but he'd become frustrated with how little
progress his patients seemed to make.
So he looked around for other ways
to understand the emotions
and he turned back
to his first great love:
ancient Greek philosophy.
He'd been particularly inspired by a line
from a stoic philosopher called Epictetus.
Epictetus said:
andquot;Men are disturbed not by events,
but by their opinion about events.andquot;
That inspired Ellis' famous
ABC theory of the emotions.
A stands for the Activating events,
something that happens to us.
B stands for our Beliefs,
how we interpret that event,
and C stands for the Consequent emotion
that we feel through our interpretation.
It often feels that our emotions
just happen to us
automatically and involuntarily
in response to an event,
that it's just an action and a reaction.
Let's say we're walking
down the street
and we pass someone frowning,
we immediately feel offended and angry.
It feels that we're going
straight from A to C.
But if you look at that event closely,
what happened was
you interpreted it a certain way.
You thought:
andquot;That person is frowning at me.
They're looking down on me
in some way.
They shouldn't!
How rude! How offensive!andquot;
And that interpretation let you
feeling offended and angry.
Once we realize how our interpretations
lead to our emotions,
we can hold our interpretations
up to the light
and ask if they're definitely
accurate or wise.
We could ask ourselves,
for example:
andquot;Was that person definitely
frowning at me?
Maybe they were just frowning.
And if they were frowning at me,
so what?
Does that mean that I have to take
their bad mood with me
through the rest of the day?andquot;
We can start to choose our perceptions,
our interpretations more wisely
and this will affect how we feel.
So that might sound
quite simple, quite easy.
Unfortunately, it's not quite that easy
because all of the time
our interpretations
are unconscious and automatic.
We have a kind of running commentary,

an inner voice that's going through
our head all through the day,
making judgments about
the things that are happening to us.
Usually we don't question
that inner voice, we don't even notice it.
That inner voice would be made out
with all the beliefs and opinions
we've heard since we were children
and we'd internalized it.
We assume that running commentary,
that inner voice,
is always completely accurate and true.
But, unfortunately, it isn't;
it often gets things wrong.
You can think of that inner voice,
that running commentary,
as like a sort of 24-hour news channel,
constantly commenting on your life,
but in a very distorted
and biased way,
it never really checks its facts.
Now if you have emotional problems
like depression,
that would be because, probably,
your inner commentary
is jumping to very negative conclusions.
You might assume, for example,
that everyone dislikes you
or that everything you turn
your hand to will fail.
So according to the Greeks, then,
what often causes suffering
is our own beliefs.
We are our own imprisoners,
our own torturers.
We cling to our negative
or toxic beliefs
even when they hurt us
or even kill us.
So how do we free ourselves
from our self-made prisons?
Well, according to Socrates,
the father of Greek philosophy,
what we need to do
is learn how to ask yourself questions,
not just assume that that inner voice
is always telling the truth,
learn how to engage it
in a rational dialogue.
So that's what Socrates tried to teach
to his fellow Athenians.
He engaged them in a dialogue
in Athens,
getting them to think,
perhaps for the first time,
about their unexamined beliefs
and values and life philosophy.
And likewise,
if you go to see a cognitive therapist,
they'll also engage you
in a rational dialogue
asking you questions,
getting you to examine your beliefs.
You can do that for yourself as well.
Asking yourself questions and learning
to perceive, perhaps for the first time,
the bars of your prison cell,
your own beliefs.
Do we really have control over ourselves?
Can we really choose
how we react to things?
Aren't we the slave of circumstances,
the slave of our DNA, of our childhood,
of our social-economic situation?
So let me tell you
to explore that question
a little bit more about
this philosopher Epictetus.
He lived in the first century AD
and he was actually a slave,
his name meant andquot;acquired.andquot;
To be a slave in the Roman Empire
meant you had very little control over
your external life and your situation.
And yet Epictetus developed a philosophy
of inner freedom and resilience
which is still very powerful today.
The secret of his philosophy of resilience
was to divide all of life
into two spheres:
those things that we don't have
complete control over
and those things that we do.
And he said the secret of resilience
is to know the difference
between those two spheres.
So what we don't have
complete control over in life?
According to Epictetus
we don't control the weather,
the government, the economy;
we don't control other people.
We have some influence over them,
but they remain to some extent
out of our control.
We don't control our own bodies.
We can try and remain healthy
and we should,
but we all get injured sometimes,
we all get sick,
we're all getting older,
and we all eventually die.
And we don't have control
over our reputations either,
we can put a lot of effort into trying
to manage our online reputations,
but to some extent
they are beyond our control.
So what then we control,
according to Epictetus?
Well the only thing that we control
according to him is our beliefs.
And he thought that emotional problems
come from two mistakes
that humans often make.
Firstly, they try to exert
complete control
over something in that first area,
something external.
They insist that something in their
external life must be a certain way.
And then when it proves
beyond their control,
they feel frustrated
and helpless and angry.
Or they fail to take control over zone 1,
over their own beliefs and thoughts.
Instead, they use something
in the external world
as an excuse or an alibi.
They said: andquot;I had no choice because
this happened to me or because of that.andquot;
For example, when I had social anxiety,
I was very fixated
on what other people thought of me.
I thought: andquot;They must approve of me
and if they don't, it's a disaster.andquot;
Well, that was a classic recipe
for feeling very anxious
and alienated and out of my control.
I'd made myself a slave
of something external,
a slave of other people's opinions.
And the antidote to that
was always in my control.
At any moment I could say:
andquot;I'd prefer for other people to like me,
but that's somewhat out of my control,
I can still accept myself
and like myself
and do the right thing regardless.andquot;
As soon as I thought like that,
I felt less anxious and out of control
and more calm and in control.
So let's say you're here at a TED Talk
today and you have a light bulb moment.
You think:
andquot;Now I understand how to live my life.andquot;
The problem is that that might
change you for a few days or a few weeks,
but then you'll probably go back
to the person you were before
because we're very forgetful creatures,
we tend to sleepwalk through the day,
as Socrates put it.
And that's a problem for philosophy.
Can we really change ourselves?
The Greeks actually understood to what
extent we are habit-based creatures,
and they understood that if philosophy
is going to change us,
it can't be just beautiful ideas,
it has to be changed into
ingrained habits.
So the word andquot;ethicsandquot; in Greek
is very closely connected to the word
andquot;ethos,andquot; which means andquot;habits.andquot;
And I'm going to end by telling you
a few of their techniques
for creating habits.
One technique they used,
for example, was the maxim.
They would try to make their philosophy
easily memorizable
by turning it into maxims,
catch phrases like proverbs or mantras.
Things like, andquot;Know thyselfandquot;
or andquot;Everything in moderationandquot;
which students would repeat
out loud to themselves
over and over until they became
ingrained habits.
They'd also write it down
in little handbooks
which they'd carried with them
through the day called andquot;enchiridions.andquot;
CBT uses a very similar technique;
you repeat ideas over and over until
they become ingrained in your habits.
They'd also keep journals;
at the end of the day
the trainee philosopher
would write down in their journal
what they'd done well,
what they'd done badly.
The idea of that is that we
sleepwalk through the day,
we don't realize what we've done
or even who we are.
So the journal is a way of keeping
track of what you're actually doing
and also keeping track of your progress.
Are you really making progress
in weakening bad habits
and strengthening good habits?
Epictetus said: andquot;If you have a bad temper
and you're trying to improve it,
count the number of days in which
you've managed not to lose your temper
and if you get to 30 days, you can
consider you're making progress.
So CBT uses a very similar technique
of the journal.
The third technique
that the Greeks used was fieldwork.
It's not enough just for your philosophy
to be purely theoretical,
you have to go out and practice it
in real life situations.
Epictetus said to his students:
andquot;You may be very good
in the lecture room,
but drag yourself out into practice
and you're miserably shipwrecked.
So you need to practice in
all of different situations of your life.
Likewise, in CBT,
there's a big emphasis on changing
not just your thoughts but your behavior.
It's called
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
So when I was trying to overcome
social anxiety,
it wasn't enough to challenge my anxious
beliefs in the safety of the therapy room.
I had to go out and practice
in real life situations,
to go to parties, for example,
or practice public speaking,
so eventually one day
I might be able to do things like this.
So there are some other ways then
that CBT has rediscovered
the wisdom of the ancient Greeks
and CBT put it on a firm evidence base
which persuaded governments
to put a lot of money
into making CBT more available.
In my own country they put
half a billion of pounds
into making CBT free
on the National Health Service.
So if we have this new evidence-based
version of the ideas of the Greeks,
do we then still need ancient philosophy?
Perhaps now we have CBT
we don't need the Greeks anymore.
I think, finally,
it is worth going back to ancient
philosophy for two reasons.
First of all,
the ancient Greeks and Romans
wrote beautifully.
The works of Plato, Seneca,
Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus
are some of the most beautiful works
we have in Western literature
and that beauty makes it very persuasive.
And secondly,
CBT, though it created a wonderful
short-term therapy for emotional problems,
it left some things out.
It left out any ideas of virtue.
What does it mean
to have a good character,
a good life, a good career,
a good company or a good society?
And it also left out higher questions.
What's the meaning of life?
What does it mean to flourish?
Now the ancient Greeks and Romans
they answered those big questions
about what a good life looks like,
what a good society looks like,
but they had various different answers,
they didn't just have one answer.
Plato thought a good life
is a life that's close to God.
Epicurus thought a good life was a life
full of happiness here on Earth.
Aristotle thought a good life was a life
very much engaged with your society.
So I don't think psychology is ever
going to prove one answer to that question
of andquot;What is a good life?andquot;
We'll never find one scientific formula.
And that's why I think we need philosophy,
that's why I'd like to see
more practical philosophy
in our schools, universities
and companies as well.
So we learn not just techniques
for changing ourselves
but also we learn how to ask questions
about what it means to live a good life
so we can make up our own minds.
Thank you.
(Applause)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuwYvFlNGns