Rules to Understanding How Consciousness Works for a Better Mental Game with Jim Waldron

where the big flashlight beam of light is focusing. So you always know where am I paying attention right now in this moment, And if it turns out you're paying attentions in a bad place, a place that could trigger a yet for example, or a flinch or just a

poorly time release. If you recognize my mind goes to a place that then triggers a breakdown in the mind body, or just a bad swing is a result when my mind wanders off, knowing that that mind wandering off is the main cause or even the only cause of a bad swing can be of great help because now you have the opportunity to learn from your mistakes.

you've been doing. There's a golf mental game community. But what I wanted to talk about this is kind of this is kind of a main thing that I've been interested in, not just as a golf coach for the last forty years I've been doing it, but even since I was a very young child, I was always fascinated by the nature of consciousness, and I want to go in I think that would be a good topic today because I think the big critique I have of traditional

mental game instruction in sports psychologies particular even just general you know, Western psychotherapy, is it's too much based on what I call Shuldhism, which is the story we tell ourselves to get ourselves sort of what to get our mind wrapped around, you know, the nature of improved psychological performance. But the big missing link historically has been lack of actual pragmatic execution. Yeah. Do that makes sense? Yeah? Yeah? And you know the word should have could it right? Yeah? Yeah.

I mean everybody kind of knows. If anybody who's been a golf mental game podcast junkie like you and me, we're all kind of saying the same thing. You know. The experts are pretty much in agreement on the major points about what the ideal psychological state is. Right. The question is how do you go from a very anxious, nervous, stressed out, neurotic psychological state to a calm, emotionally stable,

confident state of mind. And that's the part where I think traditional approaches are sorely lacking because they don't understand that the essential nature of consciousness and good for us, there is a body of knowledge that's been around for twenty five hundred years, which is the Buddhist tradition. The Buddhists were the original, were the world's original psychotherapists, and it's the entire Buddhist tradition when it comes to trying to understand or explain the nature of the human mind,

is based on empirical observation. It's not based on theory, meaning Buddhist monks spend sixteen hours a day in the meditative state of mind, and when they're dreaming, a lot of them practice something in the West is called lucid dreaming. They're meditating when they're dreaming. So these are people who spend the bulk of their day observing how the mind works. Right, So we can learn a lot from that tradition, especially the mindfulness aspect of it.

going well on the golf course. But let's put it this way, when things are going well on the golf course, it's very easy to get into a positive, flowing state. But when you know, as the round progresses and you have an issue that becomes reoccurring, whether it be missing three foot putts multiple times, whether it be chunking off around the fringes of the green, which is my issue.

point of view. To keep it real simple, a there's a type of suffering that human beings experience, which is sometimes called in the Buddhist tradition secondary suffering or reactive suffering, which basically means when life presents a problem to you in the external world, how do you react to that external world situation can create unnecessary suffering sow is, there's sort of required or necessary suffering because of the nature of human existence, right that we don't get our way

all the time, and we don't we don't have one hundred percent freedom, and we don't have you know, we're not God's We have limitations that the physical world presents to us. But then there's how we react to that type of suffering. The original suffering become turns into reactive suffering, and then that begs a question, well, is there anything

you can do to lower that reactive suffering? And the answer is absolutely, from a Buddhist point of view, absolutely yes there is, which but it means you have to do the work. You have to do some type of psychological hygiene practice the way you do physical hygiene terms of working out or dental hygiene, brushing your teeth. I believe everybody should be doing at least one form of daily mindfulness practice just to maintain basic psychological health. Yeah, pretty important.

off the golf course. Yeah. And the first one is the first step, or the first stage, is to understand the nature of normal consciousness, meaning normal consciousness would be someone who's never done any type of mindfulness practice, right. And there's various aspects of normal consciousness, but I'm just going to go over a couple of the really big ones. One is random chaos. In Buddhism, that's called monkey mind, meaning your mind is constantly churning. It doesn't like to

be at rest, it doesn't like to be stable. It always wants to be moving at pretty high rates of speak thoughts, entering, leaving judgments, conclusions. There's this constant churning mass. It's sometimes described as a in Buddhist philosophy, right, like a like a like a class three rapid river with different abjects floating in the surface, and you're in the

river and you don't know how to swim. This is the basic depiction of sort of you know, baseline human suffering, and you're trying to keep your head above water, and what do you do to to not drown in the

in the river of suffering and mental chaos? Right, And so the idea is, uh, there's a way to basically find a way to basically keep your head above water so you don't drown, and then eventually learn how to swim a little bit and then eventually swim over to the bank of the river, climb climb up on the bank and sit and watch the river go by. That's that would be more of a more of an advanced

state of mindfulness practice. You got to start somewhere, and so that that type of practice in the Buddhist tradition is called samata or translating from power or censort to English, that means concentration or narrow focus. Yeah. Okay, So if you think of if you think of awareness or consciousness, which is often described not just Buddhist tradition, but most major religions and systems of psychotherapy will will describe consciousness

as a beam of light. Yeah. And the beam of light has three sizes or modes, which are a search light super wide, yeah, and then a medium wide, and then very narrow. So narrow would be like a like a quarter inch diameter laser beam. Think of it like that versus the big mind that super wide would be like a search light. And so what you're doing in early stages and mindfulness practices, you switch on narrow mode by focusing intensely on just one small thing, which we

call the focal point. And there could be any number of things and golf, it could be the target picture, for example, or it could be the feeling of grip pressure. Yeah. In sittying meditation, it's usually feeling your belly move in and out with your breath. Yeah. The exercise I start all my students with is a real simple one called candle flame concentration. So you when you're not stressed and when you're not tired, you sit in a dimly lit room.

You light a candle, put it on your coffee table, sit on the couch or the chair, set your phone alarm for two minutes, and the goal is to simply pay attention to the flickering candle. Flame without having any internal psychological reaction to it, and without your mind wandering off going somewhere else, which you know sounds easy fread, but it's really really difficult.

we think we do. In other words, again, there's an involunte even though we call it conscious mind, because what we're talking about is amenable, it's accessible to consciousness, right, So you can be aware of your thought patterns, for example. But the fact that you can be aware of what's going on in your conscious mind sort of mental space, doesn't mean that you have a high degree of control

over it so very much. So we're human beings. Are not too dissimilar to the famous Pavlovs dogs experiment where the dogs were trained, through what's called operate conditioning, to salivate when they hear a bell ring. Have we heard of that? So there was real reactive creatures. We're not primarily rational creatures, which is the big mistake of the

European Enlightenment philosophers who thought we were primarily rational. We're primarily emotional creatures, and we're primarily storytelling or myth creating creatures. We're not primarily logical, irrational creatures. So that's the second thing you realize when you do early stages of mindfulness practice that you're kind of like the dog. When the bell rings, you react. So when you triple bogie your first hole and around the golf and you got about a one or two minute walk to the next tee.

That's your opportunity to start to start salivating, so to speak, because you just messed up the first hole, right, So now you start going to the reactive suffering where you beat yourself up. You have this intense conversation with yourself while you're walking to the second tee, right, and that all that does is make the likelihood of your second of your key shot on the second hole being as bad as the first hole that you messed up. Right.

in the future. The present moment is completely unique and at the level of human psychology, the past has no influence over your ability to perform this shot.

as he could have. So past loses the body, but it doesn't influence the mind ironically, Fred, unless you believe it does due to the power of what we call in psychotherapy the as if principle, or the power of belief. So if you believe the past has some external, actual, objective force that's affecting you your ability to perform mentally now, then ironically it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, but objectively it doesn't have an influence at all. And yeah,

so those first two steps to read. By the way, did you know that close to ninety five percent of people who learn at least classical beginner level Buddhist meditation quit by the end of thirty days. They don't stay with it. It has a worse track record than weight loss programs.

a mistake, obviously in my view, to quit. I think if you could stick it out and get through the beginning of the second month, particularly if you're doing sitting meditation, which is designed to be insanely boring on purpose, if you can get over that first thirty days, that's when

the magic starts to happen. You get the benefits. Yeah, and again the main benefit is you start to create much more mental clarity and much more emotional stability, so less negativity, less negative emotions, more positive emotions, less stress. You become less reactive to stressful situations, and you become much better at the ability to focus your attention. And that's when the goods things start to happen. In terms of golf performance.

the same sensation pretty much every time. It's not fundamentally different, and your mind goes, this is insanely boring. I'm going to go I'm going to leave my belly and go up into my head space where the thoughts stream is and entertain myself by thinking about something pleasant that happened

yesterday or that might happen a week from now. And the problem with that is then you then you start daydreaming, you get lost in the thoughsterream, You get lost in your thoughts, and now you're doing the opposite of what you should be doing when you're meditating, right, You're you're feeding the thoughtstream. You're feeding the monkey might when you

do that. So the whole point of it is to get out of your head, get out of your headspace, and into your physical body by focusing on the sensations coming from your body when you're inhaling and exhaling. Right, But how to learning how to accept boredom and overcoming it, seeing boredom as it interesting challenge that should be overcome and not run away from. You know, this constant need

to entertain ourselves is in itself a form of neurosis. Right, There's never been a more entertainment entertainment industrial complex society than modern America in the twenty first century. We've we've got it. We've got a movie theater in our back pocket, your phone. We can constantly, we can constantly distract ourselves using the internet, right, yeah, Yeah.

don't need to ask you. I'll just ask Google, or I'll go on Chad GPT and have a conversation and get all the wisdom of the world ever recorded in my answer.

We'll see, we'll see how it goes.

literally simultaneously, but pretty much potentially simultaneously. We live in two different worlds at the same time. There's the physical world that science studies, also known as the external world or also known as reality. Right. Your body is part of that world, although most people don't think of their body as part of it. It is that your body

exists in the physical world. Right. Then you have a private psychological space, sometimes referred to in philosophy as subjective world or internal world, right, And one of the principles of the two world theory is that there's a massive wall of separation between those two worlds. They're literally like oil and water. They do not mix in reality. Now there's a subjective belief that they kind of intermingle, but that's because people who have that belief just aren't paying

attention because they don't meditate. Right. But when you start to meditate, you realize I can't be in my internal, private psychological headspace and paying attention to the external world which flutes my body at the same time. I can only be one of those two worlds in terms of

my flashlight being, so to speak. Again, if you think of consciousness as a beam of light coming from a flashlight, the flashlight beam is either pointed externally on the physical world, including your body at the level of kinesthetic or feel awareness, or it's inward and you're paying attention, you're paying to

your private subjective psychological space. Another principle of this, which is really a big one from the Buddhist perspective is this might be the biggest one, I think in the history of Buddhists thought what Buddhism, what the the experience of Buddhist monks who spend a lot of time what's studying their mind is is that when you're in your psychological headspace, paying attentions to thoughts, memories, hopes, fears, fantasies

of the future, forming beliefs, conclusions, mental pictures, all of that stuff fundamentally that state that psychologie logical stake. Functionally, this is equivalent to dreaming at night, meaning there's a made up aspect to it. It's kind of like we don't need to put a headset on, like the oculus set set that Microsoft has to go into a digital simulation world. We have a biological capability to create a digital so to speak, simulation world, and it's the private

psychological space we're talking about. We already have that. But from a psychological suffering standpoint, one of the primary reasons why we suffer psychologically, the secondary, the reactive suffering, is we take everything that takes place in our private psychological space, we give it as much credibility as we do the physical world, and in most people today, they give it more credibility than the physical world, which is stunning when

you think about it because again, everything that takes place in that private psychological space has an aspect of what is called symbolic consciousness. If you think of do you know anything about art history? Have you ever studied any art history? No? Okay, So there was a movement in the early twentieth century. There was a Dadaist movement and a Surrealist movement in art, and like the famous Salvator Dahali, you know, the Spanish painter, it looked like dreamscapes. Right.

So the purpose of sort of the social purpose, the underlying meaning to both the dataists and the surrealistic movement in art history was to help people wake up, to differentiate the clear distinction between a symbol compared to the reality that the symbol points to. And when you're in symbolic consciousness, there's a conflation between the symbol and the reality. So you know the old phrase, this was a big slogan back in the sixties, the map is not the territory. Yeah,

a map is a map. A map is not the same thing as the actual physical landscape that the map represents, right right, And a word is not the same thing as the object in the physical universe. So if I say the word flower, right, And after I say the word in my private headspace, I then go into internal visual mode and I picture a flower. So the word flower is not the same thing as an actual flower, and a visual image of a flower in my head space is not the same thing as an actual flower.

There's there's a fundamental difference between the word flower or picturing flower and an actual flower. Right. So, anytime you're talking to yourself, if you're doing what's called verbal thinking, where you hear your own voice in your head using language, or anytime you're picturing something in your mind's eye visually functionally, that's the same thing that happens when you're asleep at night,

when you're dreaming, you're engaging in symbolic consciousness. And in both cases, when you're dreaming until you finally wake up and go, oh, I must be having a nightmare, and then you wake up. But until the moment you sort of realize I must be dreaming, people don't think of it as a dream. They think of it as being real, right when you're in normal dreaming, right and in normal consciousness. People take everything that takes place in their private psychological

space way too seriously, way too credibly. So Therefore, if an average person suddenly had a series of very negative thoughts come into consciousness, like disturbing, highly negative thoughts, they will react to those thoughts as if the situation the thoughts are depicting was actually happening right now, when in the point of fact, they might have happened twenty years ago, but you'll experience it as being almost as real as

the original of that twenty years ago. But if a Buddhist monk had a thought of something that happened twenty years enter his mind, he would think, oh, that's interesting, I wonder why I'm thinking about that, and then he would let it go. He wouldn't have any emotional or psychological reaction to that shain of thought. Zero. Yeah, So that's kind of where we're going, where we should be going.

I think as metal game coach is more about get down to the nitty gritty the application, less about the ideal, more about how do I actually do something pragmatic to get to the ideal state? Right right?

it like, oh, I don't like this feeling. I wish I wasn't feeling scared now on the first ted because people are watching me, right. But when you meditate on a regular basis, you may notice those feelings of nervousness

or performance anxiety. But because there's less attachment to the negative thoughts and the negative emotion, the emotion of fear, Because you're less absorbed into the negativity, there's a sense of what is called psychological space between the negative thought or the negative emotion and your sense of personal identity. Once you have that sense of space, the intensity level of the negative thoughts and the negative emotion goes way down to a more manageable level. Jim, you lost me.

I'm sorry. I don't know where you're going.

I feel less captured by You know, when people have a really neurotic mindset, they often describe it as I'm walking down the street and it's a beautiful sunny day and next thing I know, a dark cloud passes over, and the next thing I know, I'm inside a tornado and there's powerful winds sucking me up into the sky. With someone's having a very powerful negative psychological experience, both

mentally and emotionally. That's people often describe it as like being stuck inside a tornado, where the fear, the stress, the anxiety, the depression, the anger, and all the mental chaos that surrounds it is so overwhelming that you feel

that you're it's like consuming you, that you're inside of it. Right, But when you meditate, it's like the tornadoes a mile away and you're here safe on the side of the road, and you're noticing the dark clouds and the tornado, but it's so far away you don't feel threatened by it because you're not actually threatened by it. That's what happens. That's called detachment or non attachment.

wide modes. It means it basically means the positive means big empty mind, but it also means the insights that you can gain about the nature of consciousness and the nature of the physical world when you're in that big

empty mind. But my view, and again most scholars would agree with this, is that you can't learn and you're kind of wasting your time doing the possitive practice until you do samata practice first, which narrow focus will eventually lead to the ability to have a bigger focus, you know, a wider awareness, but without having chaos, whereas again a

normal consciousness where you haven't done any practice. Most people most of the time are in medium wide or even super wide mode, and their mind is full of all kinds of thoughts and emotions. It's just a casual chaos. So the analogy in Buddhism again is to the beam of light. Right, So if you think of a flashlight being,

so consciousness is the being. But imagine that the lens cover covering you know, where the bulb, where the actual flashlight bulb is, has got a lot of dirt on it, right, And so part of Buddhists practice is you're trying you're trying to make the beam of light brighter and clearer and stronger by removing the impediments that you know, the dirt that's covering the lens. Yeah, that's one aspect, and I'll give you an actual story. My son and I

traveled to northern Burma in twenty twelve. We were doing a three month trip all throughout Southeast Asia, mainly hanging out with monasteries with monks, and there were three hermits living in a cave in the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains in northern Berner were borders Tibet and one. It was about an eight mile hike to get up there, up the mountain trail, but my son tie and we

went up and we hiked up there. I wanted to talk to him, and I talked to the head guy, who spoke fluent English, and I said, well, tell me what the life of a cave monk is like. What do you guys do all day? And of course I knew what they do. They read Buddhist scriptures and they meditate all the time. And I said, well, what do you like about it? He goes, Jim, Here's the thing, he goes, I've been a Buddhist monk for fifteen years.

I've been a cave monk for five and the main benefit of what I do here is I have a very clean mind. He used the word clean to describe his awareness, his beam of luck. I mean he's been working on removing the dirt that's blocking the light right. Another aspect of it is the ability to have a measure of control, and this is the most important one

for golfers. You have to be if you want to play your best, if you want to be good at the mental game, you have to have the ability to direct the beam of light where you choose to direct it and hold it there at least for a few seconds. That's the skill of focused attention. You have talked to me and my buddy Carl Morris, we've talked about this on his podcast. He's been on your podcast talking about this.

Oh yeah, the skill of focused attention. You have to be able to hold that flash flight in your hand, so to speak, and hold it on any object. You put it on a you know, you put it on target picture, for example, and you hold it there for a few seconds. And again, with normal consciousness, that's not

a thing you're going to be able to do. With normal consciousness, You'll start out holding it there and half a second later, it'll instinctively the flashlight will move in your hand and go somewhere else, and you'll lose focus. And that's why the skill of focused attention is so important in the met game, you know, m So, what are the rules of the road we've been discussing. These are some of them. There's there's there's a whole bunch.

this might be the most important one. Uh. The essential difference, even more essential than what I already mentioned between a mindful state of mind and a chaotic state of mind, is that the modern term we've used that you and I have talked about this the podcasts called meta awareness. Meta awareness would be imagine that your normal consciousness is

the flashlight beam. Imagine there's a smaller flashlight bolted to the big flashlight, and the purpose of the beam of light coming from a small flashlight is to always focus on where the big flashlight beam of light is focusing, so you always know where am I paying where am I actually paying attention right now in this moment. And if it turns out you're paying attentions in a bad place, a place that could trigger a yip for example, or a flinch, or just a you know, like a poorly

timed tempo or a poorly time release. If you recognize my mind goes to a place that then triggers some type of a breakdown in the mind body connection, or just a bad swing is the result when my mind wanders off. Right, knowing that that mind wandering off is the main cause or even the only cause of the bad swing can be a great help because now you

have the opportunity to learn from your mistakes. But when someone lacks meta like let's say, let's keep it real simple, let's someone's the typical golfer mid the high handicapper comes over the top generally speaking, right, most people do so that things their path is out to end, and if they don't compensate by changing the face angle, they hit

the ball left right like a dead pull. If that's their flaw and they're trying to figure out how to fix it, but they're not actually aware in the moment of how it is that their body creates the over the top move. If they're not aware of it, even if I show them on video, if I say, Joe, here's you come on over the top, blah blah blah, it's just it's just a waste of time. They're not going to they're not going to learn anything. They're not going to be able to stop coming over the top.

They have to be aware of how it is in the moment that the flaw is happening. How is this flaw manifesting in my body? When you can feel it, when you can experience the flaw happened with a with a measure of mental clarity, you know again the beam of light idea, and you know that you know that this is how you come over the top, then there's a chance you can start to break through and stop doing the flow. Can we talk about some other forms

of practice besides the candlelight? Sure, Okay, you'll like this one. I think as you mentioned swimming, because I do the same thing when I every day and twice a day. When I'm in Hawaii in the winter, I swim in the Pacific Ocean, and you talk about so I focus on the feeling in my body of me doing the breaststroke as my preferred stroke. So I'm I'm literally my consciousness is feeling my muscles contract and move my arms and my legs as I'm swimming. I'm not thinking about anything.

I'm feeling the sensations coming from my body doing doing the swimming stroke. Right. There's some there's a similar one that's a little bit probably easier to understand, but it's phoned walking meditation, right, and walking meditation. I always console my students do like a fifteen minute walk or longer, but at least fifteen minutes daily around your neighborhood by yourself. You won't work if you're talking of somebody else, won't work if you if you have a dog on the leak.

So it's got to be by yourself. But what you do is every you look at you look at an object in the fist. So you look at a tree and you look at it for about two to three seconds max. And you simply notice the size, tolerant shape of the object you're looking at. And when I say notice, I don't mean going internal and hearing a voice in your head say, oh, that's that's a point. That's a

black trunked pine tree with green needles. That would be that would be going internal and having an internal reaction. I mean simply pay attention with your eyeballs, with external visual and notice into in two to three second time interval, notice something about the tree, then switch and look at the next object and look at a car parked down the street and notice that it's a red camry, and

then look at someone walking towards you. So every two to three seconds, you're shifting your gaze with your eyeballs to a different physical object in the world. And the goal is to stay external the whole time. And this is why you don't want to look fred for more than about three seconds, because if you look at any object for more than three seconds, most people will automatically go internal and start thinking about the object. Wow, right, they get triggered by it.

I call this wave meditation. So you listen to the sound of the wave breaking on the shoreline, and you're in this case, you're in one hundred percent external auditory channel, so you're you're only paying attention to the sound of the waves crashing with your ears. And of course there'll be a moment where there's no sound at all, There'll be an empty space in between the waves, right, so you'll hear like.

whole idea of retirement doesn't make sense to me. I love what I do, and I'm helping people anyway. For the YIPS, Yeah, I mean I'm getting more and more people with YIPS. In fact, I've had I've had three people so far this week contact me with YIPS. It's getting me be the global pandemics. So between the YIPS stuff and just general metal game, but I also do a lot of swing instruction. I do a ton of short game instruction, short game mechanics, so I've been it's been very, very busy for sure.