 On this episode of Skeptico, a show about hearing the truth. You need to find the truth about yourself. It's quite simple, Jack. You need to get quiet, not just with your mouth, with your mind, and in that quiet you will hear the truth. Even if it's coming from yourself. How could you have to force yourself to be what you already are? You're here, so there's nothing you have to force. That first clip was from 2012 movie A Thousand Words and the second was from today's returning guest, Tim Grimes. The show's a little different from the usual Skeptico stuff, although I've done a few shows on this and as you know, this is really where my heart's at. What's nearest and dearest to me, so I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Skeptico, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Garrison. Today, we welcome back Tim Grimes. Tim is the author of The Joy of Not Thinking, A Radical Approach to Happiness. This is the book that first introduced me to Tim. It's still out there. You can still read it for free on Kindle Unlimited. Great book. Really enjoyed it. You can also find Tim at RadicalCounselor.com. I've pulled that up on the screen if you're ever watching on YouTube. And he's got a number of other books on Amazon, and he has a really great podcast as well that I love listening to. I'm just, it's one of the ones I wait for and see if it pops up and I get to it right away. So I have had Tim out a couple of times. Obviously, you can tell from what I just said that I really appreciate his work. So I pinged him to do this different project, and I just thought it'd be fun. And Tim, welcome back. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you, Alex. It's always a pleasure. I realize I'm sitting this chair. I have a very comfortable chair and I'm very far back from the screen. So I'm going to move up a little bit. I might move back later. Hi, everybody. That looks good. Now our heads are about the same size instead of me looking like giant head. So I pinged you a couple of months ago, I guess, because I have this practice. It's one of my daily practices. I won't say spiritual practice, but it is a spiritual practice. And that is that I have these questions that I've written for myself because I've found that questions provoke me and provoke that little voice in my head to answer them in a unique way or in a way that inspires me. So I said, hey, Tim, I've actually added to my list of questions with some of the questions that I've gotten from your show. What do you think about doing a show on seven questions for the voice inside your head? And you responded in exactly the way I would have expected and hope that you would find you're like, hell, yeah, I'm down for that. That sounds good. So I don't know if it'll be seven questions. It might be more, it might be less. But tell me, tell everybody kind of what you think of this idea in general of questions for the voice inside your head. Sure. I know you're a fan of the joy of not thinking that book. And in that book, it's a short book, it's more like a guide. One of the things I talk about is that there's something running in our mind constantly. And it's our thinking, right? But we usually consider our thinking to be. And a lot of the time it's annoying as all fuck and it's destroying our life. It's making us feel stressed out and incompetent as opposed to feeling decent and alive and feeling OK. So. You know, over the years, I've refined different ways to make it so that that bothers some voice in my head. It can be neutralized relatively easily and relatively consistently and relatively quickly a lot of the time. And there's different ways of doing that. That's the joy of not thinking is primarily about. And I think we're going to probably dive into some of those ways today. And these questions are a way of enabling us to, first of all, notice this voice in our head that is just a voice and it's not what we actually are. And secondly, the questions are going to allow us to. Via piece, even with this voice in our head being there, because we realize that if this thing talking to us is not actually the end all be all. Then things are. I love that. I love both parts of that because, you know, it's almost like end all be all, I think, is key. It's not that the voice inside our head isn't us. It just isn't all of us. Right. Exactly. It's not it's not our entire being. There's so much more there. Yeah. And the other thing that I really like that you bring us back to in such an awesome way is that the logical implications of that. If you really follow it all the way through and I hope we will as we get into these questions is exactly what you said is that maybe I'm OK. Maybe maybe I'm OK. And that is that is certainly the message. If it's true, that's certainly a message that might be worth kind of getting back in touch with. So we'll just jump right into these questions. Take a minute if you want. I can pause. I can edit this out a little bit if you need to. And we're not we're not in this out. This is the goals right here is me looking at these questions. OK, so start with one. I'm just going to go from the beginning. Is there anything I need to do or force to be present? Because that's a darn good question. Alex, you ask yourself this every day. It's a good that's a good question to ask. So again, just is there anything I need to do or force to be present? OK, we hear obviously all the time in popular culture now, you know, be present, you know, stay in the moment. And, you know, that lends itself to the question, well, how do I do that? You know, and do I, you know, do I have to do something special? Do I have to force it? You know, and people go so far as to be like, well, you have to meditate a certain way or breathe a certain way or say a mantra in a certain way. And in my opinion, that's all baloney. You do not have to force anything to be here right now. Again, like Alex just mentioned, this is just logic. You're here. There's nothing you have to do to be here. How could you have to force yourself to be what you already are? You're here. So there's nothing you have to force. And as Alex touched upon, too, there's going to be a lot of implications from this. But I think if we're looking at this kind of logically. We recognize. I don't need breathing or meditation or a nice bath or whatever. I'm just here. I love that. And I love the fact that you also play with the other side of it, which is if that is true and it's radically true, why is it hard for me to get to that place? And if I kind of say, OK, it is kind of hard for me to get to that place. What can I do to kind of boost my chances of getting there, of being present? So I'm going to start with my first question is one that I got directly from your podcast Law of Attraction Explored. And here's the question. What if I redirect my imagination to feel what I want again and again? And I'll tell you what really grabs me about this is I love the way you use imagination here. Because part of this voice that we have to wrestle with is the negativity associated with it, the negativity we've created. But we also have some positive aspects to our voice that we can tap into an imagination for me and I think for a lot of people is a positive term. Oh, yeah, I'm good at imagining. I'm good at daydreaming. I'm good at playing pretend. That's all imagination. Oh, so I have imagination. What if I could redirect it, which is such an awesome word to it's not forcing. It's just it's there. It's imagining. What if I could redirect it and what am I going to redirect it towards? Am I going to boss it around and tell it to do this or that? No, what if I just redirected it to feel what I want to feel? Oh, maybe I could do that. Oh, as soon as I say it, I feel it. I can't help but feel it. That's the magic of the question is I can't help but answer it. I answer and I go, oh, I just directed imagination to feel it was instant. Can I do it again? Can I do it again? And I do it a couple of times. I go, hell, man, I got the keys to the kingdom right here. What do you think, Tim? I ripped this off of you. So that's it. That's it. I mean, in my book, which is different than the podcast, although they really go hand in hand in my book, The Law of Attraction Simplified, I say the problem is that we're imagining all day long and we don't realize we're imagining all day long and we're predominantly imagining negatively. And as Alex just said, I mean, if you can work with your imagination, as we all do, because we also imagine positively, we've all done that in the past, you know, even though we are imagining negatively, it's kind of like we're doing that just on autopilot. So how about if we start playing with this whole idea more and realize that if we are seemingly always imagining, if really imagining might just be another word or synonymous with our thinking or consciousness, why don't we just start imagining more of what we want? And, you know, it sounds easy to do. And it can be more difficult than it sounds, but it also can be as simple as what Alex has mentioned about redirecting yourself to what you want to feel right now, because I'm not talking about changing anything in the external worlds. When I talk about redirecting your imagination right now, it's that what you want right now, if you're imagining all the time, you can imagine what you want to feel or you can at least start to touch that if you can't quite get there in the imagination, you can at least start redirecting it so you're getting a little bit closer and the closer you get, the easier it will be to feel it. And even if you can't go all the way right now, you'll start to loosen up some and you might be feeling like crap. And by thinking about what you really want to feel, you'll start not feeling as lousy and neutralize some of that negativity. In the very least, and what Alex is saying and many people can do this, they can just redirect, redirect, redirect, redirect until they're feeling pretty darn good, having done nothing except to just use their minds and bodies to imagine what's going on right now in the present moment. OK, why don't you pick the next one? Let me see. This is the best part. You know what they say? The truth is the silence between the talk or something like that. So how easy is so do we just do how easy is it to look between my eyes and just watch? Is that what that was, basically? It's similar, but I mean, a lot of these are going to be similar. They're going to intersect a lot of them. Exactly. Well said, right? They're going to intersect this one diagram thing. Totally. So yeah, how easy is it to just look between my eyes and just watch? So in other words, how easy is it to do this? Well, you might begin to be getting the drift here of what we're discussing. It's really freaking easy because we're not trying to do anything outside of ourselves. You're here right now. You are here right now. OK, that's pretty much undeniable. You're here right now. And you're imagining right now, in my opinion, that's also undeniable. You're thinking, right? So why can't we just be here right now? You know, the other thing I toss in there and I'll get you to kind of riff on this is that again, and I love this dynamic and I think people will either get it and appreciate it or they'll just think we're talking around in circles. Or not. Right. But that's this interplay between the doing and the not doing, you know? And it's very kind of non-dual kind of shit. But if there's a certain reality to it that we can relate to. When I physically use these little tricks to kind of trick this consciousness thing into experiencing being here now, it like gives me a little boost. So when I close my eyes and bring the attention of my focus to this space between my head, I know that's bullshit on some level of it's some kind of physical thing, but God darn it, if it doesn't work every time I do it. And it also for me, it stands in contrast to something you alluded to before of all this wacky messaging we get about meditation to do this way and do that in seven hours is enough, but might be too much in this and that. It's like, no, just do this for one second. Just close your eyes and look between that spot right between your eyes. Did you feel something for an instant? Oh, you did, didn't you? OK, don't even worry about what it means. But just wasn't that easy? You just did it and something happened. What is that a clue to to kind of break through this this voice in my head and don't let me alone. And I know you're an experienced meditator. So this is but Zen mind beginner mind of riff on any of that that you that you like. Yeah, I mean. I remember the first time actually that I sat down and try to perform a formal Zen meditation. I was probably 17 or 18 years old and I just read this book. I think I had read partisan mind. Beginners mind by Schumer Suzuki and I've read this other book by Deshi Maru. I think it's his name and I sat down and like I immediately was like in this ecstatic state and then I proceeded to basically meditate every day for the next 12 or so years in that ecstatic state was so fucking hard to come by. Sometimes it was there, but 98 percent of the time it was nothing like that and probably more like 99.8 percent of the time. You know, I lived at a fucking Zen Center for a year. Like I was meditating a lot and, you know, the great Zen teachers, they all basically say like they're like, oh, it's not about that. It's not about that ecstasy whatsoever. So what's it about? Because I like to a lot of those people. I like a lot. I still really relate to that stuff. What what is it really about? What it's really about is the fucking sensation between your eyeballs in the middle of your forehead right now. Or, you know, if you just bane your chest, I'm not going to do it too loud, except a mic on, but like if you bane your chest really quickly or if you were just to scream, I'm not going to scream. But if you were to scream that moment, what happened? You realize that that thinking mind is not the real you. The real you is something much deeper, profound, holistic and good. Or dare we say it, God. Within you, that's here all along and is actually running the whole operation. This little thinking thing is just part of it. And this little thinking thing has plenty of good practical purposes. Don't get me wrong. But when it is on overdrive and you think that is all there is, it will probably fuck you up in a bad way. That's, you know, most of my work is basically about that. And you do not need to do any formal meditation. Formal Brujaha have a special diet being, you know, some kind of. Crazy discipline, whatever, in order to realize that you are here right now. And what you are is not that little thinking mind. Nice. OK, I'll toss another one out there. What if it's OK just to be happy? And I love some of your earlier work about being playful, which is, I think, another way of getting to this happiness thing that we know that we want. And it's so interesting how we put up all these barriers to say, well, I can't really be happy until I finish the report. I can't really be happy until I lose that five pounds. I can't be happy until I make this much money. And it's like, yeah, what if what if I just gave myself permission to just be happy right now, happy, not like peaceful. I mean, that's happy. I think that's powerful. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, that's still some something that I feel like. Of all the stuff I've shared with people, I still think that's probably the most interesting thing that I've ever shared. It's just that if you are really. Goofy and playful and move your body. And again, I talk about this in the joy of not thinking. I have a whole video series called Stop Being Serious from a long time ago, from over 10 years ago, where it's just like literally me jumping up and down and doing all these ridiculous things and then talking about it some. If you do that, you're going to feel good, pretty much guaranteed. You can feel like crap. And if you jump around like a monkey and are blasting your favorite music and just do that with 100 percent effort, you're going to realize that you are not you. And what you actually are is that is good and that's going to make you feel very happy. You know, and that's like. That's a hack and a secret that's so obvious, like children intuitively kind of know it. I would say it's so obvious that it makes basically every adult in our culture uncomfortable, totally uncomfortable. I've spoken about this stuff for years and most people I speak to, you know, Alex is an exception, like most people I speak to about it, they don't even want to go near it. You know, I've got individual clients who are like, you know, I was trying to do the playful thing where I, you know, bang my chest like a monkey and I couldn't do it. And you have to ask, like, why not? You know, you're alone in a room. Why can't you bang your chest like a monkey? Why can't you make some funny noises? Why can't you talk like this to yourself for a minute or two or three minutes? Why can't you do it? Why can't you do it? Because if you do it, you're going to break those boundaries and you're not who you think you are, you're something else. It's very interesting how we are not comfortable being playful. Kids are, but adults usually not, not so much. Awesome. OK. Why don't you pick the next one? Sure. Oh, the whole vibing thing. I put that there, like connecting that. So we haven't really talked about that yet. Do you have anything to put it in the question? Put it in the question. Questions for magic. Yeah. OK, what happens when I vibe out? So when I say vibe out, that, again, circles back to just, well, what if I'm just OK being here right now? And I just relax my body to the best of my abilities and let my mind race like a motherfucker and think whatever it's going to think. And if my body, even though I'm relaxing physically is in pain, I just let it be physically in pain and I just relax into it as best I can. So what's going to happen if I do that for five or ten minutes? I remember the first time I interviewed you, I remember this line and it's like one of those. It's like your silliness thing that I'm almost embarrassed. I did all those silliness exercises are awesome, by the way. But you said, you know, I always wanted to be a bum. Yeah. That was Tim Grimes. It's like, fuck, dude, you admit that. You admit that like we all just wanted to be a bum when we were kids. We thought that was the coolest thing in the world, just to have nothing to do. Just to vibe out, you know, and then we got indoctrinated with all the rest of stuff, some of which is good. But I associate that when I hear you say, you know, vibe out, what if it's OK? Just what happens if I just vibe out? Do you want to? Does that connect? Of course. I mean, that's like. Again, this is all that you are not thinking, but like that's the thing. I mean, if I'm being honest with myself. I always relate it to people who are basically bombs, you know? And then like, you know, when I got to spirituality, I got spirituality relatively young, like, you know, you read about those Indian and Japanese and mystics, you know, and they're just living by the side of the river, you know, or they're playing a bamboo flute flute. Or they're not doing anything. That's what I can relate to to this day, you know? And I have a lot of responsibilities these days, most of which I enjoy, you know, I enjoy my children, you know, I enjoy the work that I do. But I can't relate to that go, go mentality because that go, go mentality connotates overthinking for me. And for some people, perhaps it doesn't. But I think that people are so very serious about living their life and being this certain kind of person. And in my opinion, you know, you did the great Kota Sawaki, you know, one of my Zen masters. I really looked up to he was the 20th century Zen master. He said, Enlightenment is like a thief breaking into an empty house. There's nothing to steal and there's no one to catch him. And I really that line summates how I look at life really. And that means like I'm kind of I have a bum sensibility. I'm not afraid to admit that, you know, in the same way, you know, they called Kota Sawaki homeless Kota Sawaki because he never had a he had like a traveling temple. He had no home and he goes, what's wrong with being homeless? We're all homeless anyway, in reality, you know, so. Love it. OK, let's try and do two more. Sure. Call it. We won't overdo it. I'll pick this one. I love this one. What if I didn't complain about the weather? And the reason I throw this in there is because it's kind of a little bit. We're all positive and all this stuff. It's kind of a negative part. It's kind of getting right at our self centered, egotistical, narcissistic voice that maybe we need to once in a while, just kind of. Check it a little bit, you know, just bro, are you are you really? You know, the sun's 94 million miles away and it heats up the ocean. That forms clouds and that forms rain. And, you know, there's a lot of billions of people on the planet. And in that context, you're pretty, pretty small element to be considering why the fuck is it going to rain on Friday or Saturday or that's my day off. You're not the center of the universe. Mr. Sun isn't shining on the ocean in order to rain on your freaking weekend. And whether I think it immediately catapults us into that, what are what are your thoughts on the kind of checking the narcissistic part of that voice? Well, I think it, you know, it ties a little bit back into what we were just discussing about being a bomb, like. If you're a bomb or a dropout, if it rains, it rains. All right, I guess I got to find shelter. But that's all there is to it. It's not like it's not a big deal and we live in a day and age where we're so inundated with people complaining and social media in many ways. There's a lot of good things about social media, but in many ways, it's like a gigantic pool of people complaining about the weather. And we're just talking about this dropping that from your life or the very least dropping that from your day to day reality, most stuff that we think we need to happen. Does not need to happen in order for us to be happy. OK, you get to pick the last one. We went way over seven, I think, which is great because seven was a trick, too, here in case you didn't notice it. Why do you need seven questions? I got about 30 on my list, but seven you were like, OK, seven questions. But pick the last one. Yeah, I mean, I was just going to say that obviously any of these questions, if they resonate for you and exactly like Alex did, you can make your own questions. Just asking a couple of them or even one of them a day to yourself is enough to see different things transpire, I think, just because you're questioning your sense of your normal thinking reality. So it's not about the number of questions to be obvious. It's about what you're asking yourself each day, and that can be one question or many. So, yeah, can I let go of some of the heavy stuff? Have we done that one yet? Alex, I feel like I really want you to do that one because I think I got that one from you, too. So yeah, can I let go of some of the heavy stuff? Again, all these things tie together, all these questions tie together. But when we go at things in this kind of alternative way, you know, I like to say radical way and we realize that that voice in our heads that is dictating seemingly everything is not actually the thing in charge and that there's something else in charge that's much greater than that. And that that thing is not really a thing, but it's just it's life itself and that we can relax into that because it's good in some like profound incomprehensible way. When we realize that a lot of seemingly negative shit can be going on in our lives. You know, we can have problems, you know, serious problems, you know, health problems, financial problems, relationship problems, what have you. But this thing is still here. This sense of goodness, even when we think with our thinking in our mind that everything's terrible, this other not thing thing is here the whole time and you can still focus on that thing between your eyes or jump up and down like a monkey or vein your chest or do whatever the heck you want to do and bam, maybe just for an instant. You realize the truth is not what you're thinking and all of that heavy stuff ultimately as terrible as it may be is not real in the way you think it is. And that is a tremendous, tremendous, tremendous relief. And that's something you can practice doing, you know, on a daily basis pretty much. Yeah, that's great. We're all just playing with these ideas. But a lot of times it seems to me like the heavy stuff is the stuff we just feel. I can't I can't let go of that. You know, like the grief that I feel and what I caused. I mean, yeah, Tim, tell me about the other shit. I'll try and I can't let go of that. And it's like, well, what if you could what if you could let go of some not all of it, but what if you could let go of some of the really heavy stuff because maybe you've told yourself, no, no, the heavy stuff, you know, just another way to pick this thing apart is the way that. The way that I saw it, you know, maybe a way to wrap it up. And I want you to tell people about what you do and your books and your podcasts and your coaching and that kind of stuff. But I also want to talk about what you and I were talking about at the beginning, which is what it means from a practical standpoint to remove some of these barriers. Because in a way, what we've been talking about is the stuff that kind of clutters us from this magic that's going inside and, you know, from your experience working with people, what does it mean when some of that stuff is kind of cleared out of the pathway there? I mean, frankly, you know, miracles can happen is what people think. But really, I think it's just you get out of your own way. So stuff, stuff correspondingly kind of starts to straighten out, you know, whether that means relationship issues. You know, I've worked with quite a few people who've had serious relationship issues, whether it means, you know, something with like divorce or kids, stuff like that. All of a sudden the relationship is, you know, it's remedy to a large degree, something like that. I think as you get out of your own way and that you allow for something like that to happen, that's a good example. But when you stop taking that inner voice to seriously, you become a more empathetic person, you know, you don't become dispassionate towards other people's needs. You become more able to deal with people. So I think that interpersonal thing is something I've really noticed. And, you know, obviously, not obviously, but your health generally improves the more crap you get out of your mental crap. You get out of your system. You might be surprised that your health improves more, you know, for some people, their financial situation might improve, you know, they meant so much of it just comes back to being open to life and not being overwhelmed by the thoughts in your head and thinking that is all there is to life, but being OK with you're here. And that's that's fine to be here. And it's actually good just to be here right now. So, Tim, as we wrap it up, tell folks more about your work broadly, your podcast, your books, your website. Yeah. So I've written at this point, I've written a lot of books or several books, I should say, that mainly deal with what exactly we were talking about, just mental health, stress relief and then kind of bringing them together with spirituality, spiritual concepts and a lot of law of attraction concepts. I use the term law of attraction loosely. I have a whole podcast where I explore a lot of the older 20th century law of attraction teachers because they have a lot of great practical information that you can tie together with what we've been discussing today. So I talk about a lot of teachers that I think should be known, but really are not well known and a lot of their ideas tie together with. You know, just being open to the moment, like it's like we just have been doing for the last hour or so. So I tie all that stuff together and then I provide counseling and coaching for people who want to basically just go deep with me to do the stuff that Alex and I just did, you know, and realize that. What's happening right now is just good, you know, or if you want to use a spiritual term, what's happening right now is God, but we don't have to use spiritual terms. It's just realizing that what is going on right this moment is fine and there's nothing wrong with you, you know, that with that comes relief. That's the stress management element is that you feel better when you realize there's nothing wrong with you. So that's what I do with people. Awesome. Glad you're out there doing it. Glad I found you, man. You're just a gem. You're a gift. It's always a pleasure, you know, talking to you, Alex, and this I hope that this this hour or so has been helpful for people because I know it's a little bit different. And I think hopefully what we were just doing is something that people will be able to utilize in their own day to day lives, you know, in terms of the questions and stuff like that. So awesome, buddy. We'll leave it right there. Terrific. Thanks again to Tim Burms for joining me today on Skeptico. The one question I'd have for you is what is the question that you ask that voice inside your head? Let me know your thoughts. Love to hear from you on the Skeptico forum or email or any where else you might reach me. That's going to do it for this episode. Until next time, take care and bye for now.