Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Part Two: Access Your Divine Intelligence! Dr. Bernardo Kastrup Provides a Mind-Expanding Explanation of Consciousness that Leads You to Higher Meaning

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

Is Everything You Know About Reality…Wrong? What Is Consciousness & How Does It Shape Our Reality?? In this mind-expanding episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Bernardo Kastrup (Executive Director of the Essentia Foundation, CEO of AI company Euclyd B.V., and the leading voice behind the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism) explores the BIGGEST questions humans have ever asked, like: - What is the true nature of reality? - What happens when we die? - Is consciousness more fundamental than matter? - Does love actually matter? - Is suffering necessary, or just misunderstood? - Could reality be mental at its core, and not physical? If you've ever questioned what science can’t explain, like supernatural experiences, deep emotional pain, or why the placebo effect can shrink tumors and reduce the need for surgery, this episode will blow your mind. Dr. Kastrup reveals: - Why physicalism fails to explain human experience - How cosmopsychism gives us the tools to connect across political & cultural divides - Why cancer may be partly a mental phenomenon - How psychedelics model death - The spiritual purpose of menopause (yes, really!) - The loss of meaning as the real threat to humanity - How the universe mimics biological networks (and why that matters) - Why tinnitus became a spiritual journey of awakening for him - Shocking power of the mind-body connection to heal or harm - How addiction, capitalism, and overstimulation pull us away from life’s deeper truth - Danger of identifying with your narrative self - Why science isn’t enough to explain life’s biggest mysteries, and never will be - Plus: Why Bernardo rarely does interviews anymore…and what made him say yes to this one. If you've ever felt that there’s more to life than what we see, this episode is for you. For more information on Dr. Bernardo Kastrup and his work, freely downloadable papers, videos, etc., please visit: ⁠https://www.bernardokastrup.com/⁠ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, I'm I'm Bialek. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to part two of our conversation with Dr. Bernardo Castro. Really hope that you heard part one of this conversation. Dr. Castro is a philosopher and an analytic idealist. But as you probably glean from our first conversation with him, he's got something to say about why we are here. What's the nature of reality? What is this dream that we are living in?

And in part two of our conversation with him, we're going to talk about the practicalities of an understanding of the materialist world that many of us are believing that we live in, but how placebo effect can impact so many aspects of our health, how a cancer diagnosis is an example of dissociation that he believes we can also combat in really, really novel ways. And he's going to talk very personally about his own journey with tinnitus. Catastrophic tinnitus was his diagnosis. And we're going to talk about love, what happens when we're. die and yeah we really really hope that you enjoy part two of our conversation with dr castrop break it down i want to connect some of the topics that we're we have been discussing today including this notion of us being a reflection and part of a larger consciousness system

and i think a lot about the mirrored systems of of the world that we live in and potentially the universe at large all the way down to the level of the physical body in terms of how the immune system is functioning. And you have described this, but I think you can describe it in this context, even more fully, the experiment by which cancer stopped growing. Can you explain to us the experiment

and then what that might be saying about our place connected to a larger consciousness system and maybe the inherent wisdom, both of the body? And it even relates to meaning and purpose, that we may have individually. Okay, this is not my work.

This is Professor Michael Levin's work at Tufts. All credit goes to him, and I probably cannot properly represent his work here, so I do it in a more or less cumbersome way. But it does touch on some of these larger theories, so that's one of the reasons. So I appreciate the caveat, and also I think it's important

because sometimes this can be such an esoteric concept, but it does come back down to many things that people struggle with, including health, how their immune system functions, and then even, you know, feeling lost in the world and trying to find their way. Yes. And Michael himself is well aware of it. We have had several discussions because my own metaphysics, analytic idealism is something that may inform some of the results he's seeing. But of course, in his publications, in his scientific publications, there is no talk of metaphysics, as there shouldn't be. These are empirical results.

So the experiment goes as follows. You take cancer cells that are riddled with all the genetic mutations that lead to cancer and aggressive cancer. You take human cancer cells. I believe it was melanoma in the particular experiment I have in my mind right now. And you implant it in a frog. And of course, the cancer takes hold. and multiplies and eventually kills the frog.

What Michael realized is that if he controls the biochemical field that surrounds the cells, a field that seems to give the body a cue about the body plan, which is a global field, it's not only local chemical signaling. There is a bioelectric field that seems to coordinate morphogenesis, coordinate how cells grow, so they know where they are and what they should do and what they should look like given the place where they are.

So cells in the frog's arms are arm cells and cells in the frog's lungs are lung cells. So this bioelectric field seems to coordinate that. And what Michael did is taking this as a hypothesis, the bioelectric field coordinates growth, what will it do if I force the correct bioelectric field in the organism in which I just implanted cancer cells? Lo and behold, the cancer doesn't grow regardless of these terrible genetic mutations that otherwise would correlate with very aggressive cancer.

I believe the frog in question is still alive. You don't need to keep on forcing that bioelectric field 24-7. you apply the treatment and the tumor comports itself. When we talk about a bioelectric field, what we're talking about is the method of transmission for all cells, right, for neurons, for the nervous system, is through a series of electrical signals. It's voltage, literally. Voltage changes, and that releases the opening of certain channels that allow ions to flow in different directions. Everything that you're experiencing is actually from electrical signals that are being sent

down axons and dendrites, which, you know, if you've heard of multiple sclerosis, it's that myelinated sheath that in multiple sclerosis the signals can't get through, right? That's the signals we're talking about. The wire insulation goes back. Correct, correct, yeah. So we're, you know, that's the network. So what this kind of experiment is talking about is, if you manipulate the biological environment and the proportion or the distribution of signaling,

you are changing the milieu, as it were, you're changing an electrical environment that has an impact on then what signaling is occurring or not. So it's a very intricate, and he didn't just do it with cancer. So this is something that can be done with growth of limbs, regeneration, And, you know, I don't know. I think the question that Jonathan also wants you to sort of tackle is, how much can we extrapolate this out? You know, Jonathan, you know, has history of working in energy and across fields that we cannot see, but many people experience.

Can we extrapolate this out more from a philosophical perspective to say there is an extension, right? I mean, Neil Thes talks about this with the fascia of the body and with the, you know, the microbiome, right, that we share, right? When I live in a house with you, we share something special as organisms that other people don't. What does this say for a larger understanding of our experience? So of course, the temptation is to say, well, it's just local electrical signaling, you know, we know that, we understand that. And then there's nothing extraordinary here. But let me give you another study that Michael performed 12 years ago in 2013. He took some planaria, which are these little aquatic flatworms.

They have a small brain, and the brains, their entire nervous system is in their head. They have two eyes and a tail, and they know how to navigate water. So Michael put them in an aquarium and trained them to navigate a sort of a maze in the substrates to find food. And it took a while, but they learned. So they had to navigate a sort of a maze in the substrate of the aquarium to find food. And eventually they learned how to navigate that maze. so they could find food much faster than first time around.

They learned how to get to where the food is. And then what Michael then proceeded to do was to decapitate them all. And Plannaria have this amazing feature. If you cut off any part of their bodies, they grow a new one, including their heads. So here are this Plenaria that have learned. They are trained. So if you cut off the head and you grow back the head, the question is, will they still know how to navigate the maze?

Yeah, and they take two weeks to grow a new head, and lo and behold, they go straight for the food. What? Yeah. Yeah. So even though all their neurons are in their heads, and all neurons were dissected when they were decapitated, they grow a new one, they still remember. So, okay, now give me an account of that in terms of local, you know,

electrochemical impulses. Well, I mean, I was instantly thinking, if you tell me to stop dating people who are emotionally unavailable, and I say I never want to experience this pain again, when presented with an emotionally unavailable person, I will gravitate towards that person like a planaria that's been decapitated. There you go. Multiple instances of the principle at hand here. Look, this was published in a respected peer-reviewed journal. in 2013 by a group at Tufts University, which is very respected. Michael Levin, very respected. Why aren't people talking about this?

Right? But here you go. So the hypothesis here is that this field effect, it's not only about morphogenesis. It's also about memory. It's about mind. And mind seems to permeate everything. And mind seems to be field-like.

And it has applications in remembering stuff when your head is cut off and controlling the non-growth of cancer, not allowing mere genetic mutations from developing into an actual cancer. And it also shows that cancer is not only about genetic mutations. It's not only that, you knock off the wrong base pair somewhere in our cell, now you're condemned to cancer. No, because these base pairs are. are knocked off all the time.

There was this old study done with people who died in car accidents because it's a very neutral sampling of the population. And a lot of them had tiny little cancerous tumors. For most of them, those tumors are going nowhere. It's not genetic mutation alone. You may need a genetic mutation to be present to prime the process, but it's something else. Well, the field of mind-body syndrome and what is psychosomatic pain, right? The whole field of chronic pain is predicated on this notion that if you get a scan,

for example, and you have a herniated disc at L4, everybody gets a herniated disc at L4, L2 to L4, right? You have back pain, you need surgery. And Dr. Sarno, right, was the person who kind of revolutionized this notion in particular of back pain, but it has been expanded to understanding chronic pain in general. Many people, in multiple longitudinal studies, many people who have herniated discs report no pain. But also, I think about how this applies to conversations about trauma and PTSD in particular. We know there are all these other factors. You know, everybody's favorite word, if you've been on social media lately, is triggered. This triggered me. This triggered me. This triggered me. And as a neuroscientist,

I'm thinking, what's the mechanism of this trigger, right? What are we talking about? What pathway are we talking about that keeps getting activated, right? Let me just very quickly, quickly start with a disclaimer. I take modern Western medicine very seriously. If I had cancer, I would go through the standard protocols of treatment. Now, having said that, here's what I think. What the science and the philosophy seem to be showing is that when it comes to health, when it comes to mind, when it comes to memories, all these things seem to be holistic. They are not local patterns of causation. They are holistic. They depend on a overall plan that may appear to us in the form of what we call fields.

So in that sense, what is cancer? Cancer is when a part of the body doesn't follow this holistic body plan. It goes off on a tangent. It thinks, oh, I am my own thing, and I have to secure my own future. So let's grow some new cells to conquer more territory because we need to survive. It's exactly what we would do when we think that we are separate from our own environment. we are cancerous. We go off on our own journey because we think we are our own people.

We are not following sort of a broader natural body plan. So cancer, in terms of psychology, it's a form of dissociation. I use this metaphor with Michael, and I will let him tell you what he thinks about it. Cancer, if you understand the process psychically in terms of mental processes, and if cosmocycism is right, then everything is a mental processes that merely appears or looks like matter, cancer is a form of dissociation,

like when it becomes dissociated from yourself, in cognitive dissonance or as a result of trauma, when people undergo dissociative identity disorder, a part of you thinks it's separate from the rest of you. You're psychologically dissociated. Well, that's just like cancer. Cancer cells don't follow the body plan,

overall body plan. They go off on their own road. Now, if you understand things this way, what is the worst possible mental attitude you could have if you are diagnosed with cancer? It's to say,

I am going to fight it. I am at war with the cancer. That only bloody reinforces the dissociation. What you want to do is bring that lost part of yourself. back to the body plan.

So it plays in harmony with the rest of the orchestra instead of following its own tune. Like Fasnacht in Switzerland, the Swiss Carnival, in which everybody plays a different song at the same time in the same place. So our entire society sort of programs us with what I believe to be a very unhelpful mental attitude when it comes to some of our conditions,

including cancer. We go to war with it. We want to extirpate it. We want to kill it. No, if I am ever diagnosed with cancer and chances are one day I will, I will do chemotherapy. But my inner attitude would be, if I'm talking to the cancer, my inner attitude would be this. I'm sorry I'm going to do this. This is not what I wanted.

You are part of me. I want you to come back. But you're really off on your own trajectory. And if I allow you to continue, you will kill both of us. So I can't do that, but I want you to come back. I'm not at war with you. That would be my inner attitude to it. So it's an attitude of self-compassion.

It's not like cancer is a monster that parachuted from somewhere else within you. It is bloody you. My MBialx breakdown is supported by superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine, drink more water. There's no real data. There's no game plan.

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they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention myambiolics breakdown to help support the show. It reminds me of conversations like Louise Hay, who's like the part of your body that's sick will tell you the information about what it needs, right? And while that's, you know, it's kind of on the other edge of the universe from what we're talking about, but it's actually not. Right. Gabour Matte talks about this Vandercoq talks about it too. You know, where does trauma, rest in your body. Trauma unmet needs. Matte talks about it. Women are typically the caregivers, the doers, the shove it down, just do it. And, you know, every woman has a thyroid condition. It's literally the chakra. It's the, it is the center of owning your voice, right? A lot of parts work,

too, is how do you reintegrate the parts of yourself? It speaks to the Julia Mossbridge, be where we're going back in and it speaks a lot to unmet needs too because I think we should expand a little bit on this idea of the body plan because it feels like it's a part of your mission purpose in life like what do you mean by when you say the body plan? Well I was just talking the scientific language that Michael probably would use that the bioelectric fields have tremendous causal influence in morphogenesis, in the emergence of form in our body. In other words, they sort of determine the body plan, partly, at least, if not fully.

But going back to philosophy, how would I interpret that from a cosmocycist perspective? Under cosmocycism, everything in nature is a mental phenomenon. and what that mental phenomenon looks like when observed from outside is what we call physicality. That's why my inner life, which is mental, looks to you like a very physical body, made of the same atoms and force fields that constitute the rest of the universe. So under cosmocycism, the body, the physical thing, is just appearance. It's not the thing in itself. It's like the image that you project on the screen, but not the actual projector.

it's the external appearance of it. So cancer too is a mental process. The body plan is a mental process. It's an archetypal idea in a mind that is reflected on the outside or appears on the outside as a body following a certain anatomy, a certain plan.

This is very important because if this hypothesis, cosmpsychism or idealism, is correct, we really have to reevaluate how we think about things because when we think about physical things we tend to think in terms of mechanisms like a car engine

in other words we don't think about it in mental terms like a pattern of thinking and feeling which may also obey regularities that appear as the laws of physics but it's a different way to think about it when you think of cancer as a mental phenomenon with experiential qualities,

you bring psychology into bear. When you think about the expansion of the universe in cosmocycism terms, you have to bring in a form of cosmic psychology because the thing in itself is mental. Physicality is just an appearance. And this shift from thinking about things as mechanisms to thinking about things as the results

or the appearance of psychological, dynamics is very fruitful, naturally reorients our search for solutions, for a better life, in a very natural and intuitive way. So if this is correct, it's critical that we think along the correct lines. Stop thinking in terms of mechanisms, start thinking in terms of psychological dynamics that do have regularities. In psychology, you call them archetypes. They do have regularities, but they have qualities.

they are feeling toned. They are not blind, stupid, random mechanisms. This follows so much about many holistic practitioners approach. The mind and body as an integrated system and trying to understand how our perspective is going to influence our biology. We've spoken to a lot of people on the podcast who are taking Western medicine and saying, we have to integrate the other parts of our reality and our experience to know how it's impacting our biology and we are not only biological.

So this aligns to a lot of what we've been hearing. We know the placebo effect exists. It's actually a problem because for you to approve a new drug, you have to show to the FDA that it is X percent better than placebo, and placebo is getting better. So it's getting more difficult to approve. Placebo is not denied by anyone with any awareness of what's going on. It's a growing phenomenon. It's very strong.

Even placebo operations of the knee seem to have compelling results, not only sugar pills. There was this whole study where people went in for fake knee surgery, and the people who got the knee surgery versus didn't get the knee surgery, there was no statistical difference in the result. Repairing a tendon in the knee seems to be something that is extraordinarily physical. There you go. So we are in a situation in our society today where everybody acknowledges the placebo happens.

But nobody is thinking, what does it mean then? How can a mental state completely influence the physical state of the body? Well, under cosmocychism, the body is a mental process. And the appearance of that mental process is what we call the body. But everything is mental. So it is no surprise at all for the idealist or the cosmocycist that the placebo effect is there. It's a necessity. It's exactly what you would expect. But because we deny that something like this should happen, even though we know it does because it's an empirical fact,

we don't even have the immediate next thoughts which are how do we use the placebo effect in treatment. shamans worldwide have been doing this for millennia. All that cigarette smoke blowing and feathers and dancing and screaming, what do you think that is? It is to induce the placebo effect. In the West until around the middle of the 19th century, most of medicine was the placebo effect. The good doctors were the doctors that had a reassuring bad presence.

Those were the good doctors. Figures of authority. I don't know if it's fair to say it's placebo. I think that harnessing the power of the mind is functionally significant. But that's what I'm saying. But like when I use self-hypnosis, Jonathan loves when I talk about giving birth, when I use hypnosis and I don't, you know, I don't experience birth as a traumatic state of suffering from which I need to escape or whatever, that is harnessing the power of my mind, right?

Yes. Yeah, we just happen to call it placebo, which is a sort of demeaning name because it sounds like insignificant random. And this is a cognitive dissonance in our culture because everybody who is anybody looking into this acknowledges the placebo effect is there and it's not small even.

It's compelling. You know, there are cases in the literature. I'm not sure you could call this. placebo, but it goes under the same category where you could cure warts through talk therapy. Oh, this is Dr. Amir Raz wrote the suggestible brain, and he talks all about these incredible cases. He cured Tourette's syndrome, you know, like this thing, because he told this little kid, like, oh, I've got this machine and it can detect when you're going to have a tick. The kid had no ticks anymore. Like, unbelievable. We have this cognitive dissonance.

we know it's there, but we dismiss it and we don't try to explore it. So we look at the shaman as an idiot, because there is no way blowing tobacco smoke, shaking feathers, and doing a dance. It can have causative effect on anything. Well, think again. If the patient believes that it does, then it has. And what is the causative effect? A mental inner state, a mental attitude affects a mental process.

And the image of that mental process is the body. There is nothing logical here. The New York Times, my father just recently sent me an article talking about how it's been observed and studied that the lack of meaning and purpose in someone's life increases cognitive decline. No surprise to the idealist or the cosmocycist. We don't exploit these things.

And we are comfortably numb because we know the phenomena is there. our entire metaphysics tells us it shouldn't be there, but it is, and we don't abandon our metaphysics, and we don't leverage it. And the result of that is at least in my country, and I'm very happy for how medicine is practiced in the Netherlands compared to where you guys are.

In the Netherlands, it's not commercialized at all, and the idea is minimal intervention. You only intervene when it makes a difference. You don't just intervene for no reason. or just because it makes the patient feel better. So I'm grateful to that. There are no commercials about medicines in the Netherlands. It's completely cut away from any notion of profit and commercialization.

I'm grateful for that. But today in the Netherlands, you go to your doctor, and only in extremely rare circumstances, your doctor will even touch you. Your doctor will listen to your story and then either will give you some medicines or we'll order some exoms. In other words, it is evidence-based medicine, I'm all for it, but we are living on the table the greatest value that medicine had

until the middle of the 19th century, which was the reassurance of your doctor, the authority of your doctor, what now goes under the name, the placebo effect. we don't reassure anyone according to the law your doctor has to be completely truthful and honest towards you so if there is a 0.01% that thing is a cancer your doctor has to say it maybe that's where we are now this is where we are we think the body is a mechanism and therefore doctors become mechanics and i think this is a tragedy because the evidence is screaming in our faces that this is not what is

actually going on. There is something to be said about the little dance and the blowing smoke, except that it should be adapted to our expectations, our cultural references, something other than that. You know, here in Los Angeles, you can't swing a dead cat without finding someone who did an ayahuasca journey. And the notion, you know, when you hear from indigenous people who use these kind of medicines, it's in an entire cultural framework that has a language, and a vocabulary. It's not just like you drop in with your girlfriends after the pedicure and like do some ayahuasca or, you know, have a mushroom journey, which I know a lot of people, and, you know,

there's many fascinating and very significant studies about, you know, the use of psilocybin's therapeutically in particular, but that notion that there's a framework for, in particular, mystical practices, which is also why I'm so interested in your story. And I mean, we may have to ask you back for another interview, another day. I have so many things to ask you. When I think about the body having intelligence and having a plan, I actually think each one of us are on some sort of course that we may or may not realize ahead of time.

And we spoke to Rizwan Verk, who talked about how he was hospitalized when he believed his life went off plan. He knew from a very young age. He had a vision of he was going to work in the video game industry and become a venture capitalist. And then he knew at some point, he was going to transition. And when he didn't transition his life, he fell ill. Now, could it be

coincidence? Sure. But I think a lot of people, especially who have chronic disease or have significant health issues, they end up reevaluating them, their life and say, what really brings me joy? How do I connect with something that I truly feel alive and happy to be doing? And that begins to change how their body is on the physical level. So we can see it again in this married reflective states. That's also a huge component of this book and the struggle that you experienced and what literally you were confronted with. Yeah.

How to reorient my life and accept that reorientation when all the narratives of the culture would tell me, no, you're in the right path right now. Don't change anything. Our culture tells us everything about what Jung called and James Hollis calls the first half of life. It's not really half. It's the first part of life. like to say. Because in that phase of life, we have to carve out a space in the world for ourselves.

We have to find a way to have a roof over our heads, food on the table, pay for health insurance and the mortgage and so on, right? So our culture gives us the steps to get to that place. You know, go to a good school, then professional education or go to a university, you know, find a partner to have kids and get a good mortgage and a good health insurance, find a good job, progress in your career, attain some reputation, and accumulate some resources. Now you have carved out a place in the world for yourself, and you have some resources to express something in the world. What do you do with it now?

And our culture is completely mute about that. It doesn't give us anything. And then what you end up seeing is septuaginarian adolescents, people who keep on playing the same game because they don't know the game has changed. So they keep playing the only game they know how to play. More money, more resources, more status, more power. And then the plasma replacement theory, so you leave more years. And then you build a ballroom.

Yeah. Or you compete to be the highest in the Forbes list. You either save it and don't use it, right? Because you're leaving it for some abstract existence that you're not. even going to experience, right? You have this like this, this awe, this, this, like, shock and awe relationship with, you know, money that you're essentially worshiping as a God, which is a great transition to the question, what happens when we die? So if consciousness is this sort of thing that exists, right? You said, like, the body doesn't have consciousness, consciousness has

the body, right? What, what is happening? Because Jonathan and I spend a lot of time talking to people who have a tremendous amount of certainty that consciousness exists. For many of them, it comes as a download, you know, when they are out of their body, as it were. What does your sort of worldview and universe view allow happens next? And can you and I hang out when we die? Probably more than you expect. I will segue into answering your question just by completing the thought of the previous one, but they'll sew them together in such a way that you think I'm just answering your question.

Look, nature is stronger than culture, right? Even though culturally we don't get a recipe for the second half of life, nature is trying to do something through us because we didn't parachute here. We are creations of nature. We are nature expressing itself. And then the challenge is, how do you listen to that? And you allow yourself to be played by nature as an instrument, as opposed to artificially imposing the rules of the game that's not being played anymore,

which is the first half of life. Now, eventually, that comes to an end, right? According to nature's plan, it will come to an end. How do I see that? The only way to talk about death is to first understand what life is, right? Because death is the end of whatever life is. So we need to understand life. As an idealist, cosmocycist, you could say,

I think there is only one mind in nature. If we postulate multiple fundamentally distinct minds, we run into all kinds of problems, not the least of which is the interaction problem. It is a shit show. So you avoid all that by starting with, okay, one field of subjectivity in the universe. That's the only thing that exists.

Everything else is what mental processes in this one field of subjectivity look like from the perspective of other mental processes in it. But then the immediate criticism is, well, my inner life is not universal. I don't know what you are thinking about, what you're feeling, I don't know what's happening

in the galaxy of Andromeda. My mind seems to be very defined and localized in space and separate from all the rest. Well, you can reconcile that with there being only one mind because we know from psychology, from the phenomenon or the condition called dissociation, especially extreme forms of dissociation like dissociative identity disorder,

in which what was originally one mental space apparently fragments itself into multiple disjoint centers of awareness. We know this happens. We know it empirically. We know it clinically. They can also have distinct physiological states as well, which is fascinating. Yeah. The body is the appearance of mental processes.

So dissociated mental processes that different, from each other will lead to different appearances. And I'm not surprised by that. So the hypothesis that I put forward is that what we call life biology is the appearance of a dissociative process in this one field of subjectivity. And the boundary of the dissociation appears as the skin, the eardrums, the retinas, the outer surface of our body. And that's why we think we are separate from the rest,

because what we think of as ourselves is a mental process dissociated from the other mental processes that are unfolding in our immediate cognitive neighborhood because there is a dissociative boundary in between. So life is what dissociation looks like. So what is death? It's the end of the dissociation, right? It's the immediate implication of this account of life is that death is the end of the dissociation. And if that is true, then death is precisely the opposite of what physicalism would say. Physicalism would say death is the end of consciousness.

It's the end of your inner life. Analytic idealism, cosmocycism, as I interpreted, would say death is the end of the dissociation. Therefore, it's an unfathomable growth of your inner life because you reconnect with your cognitive neighborhood. So you become many times more than you thought you were. Think of it as what happens when you wake up from a dream. A dream is a dissociative state. When we are dreaming, we identify with our dream avatar, not with the rest of the dream,

even though we are the whole thing. We are doing the entire thing, right? When we wake up, our dream avatar dies. It's toast. It's the end of your dream avatar. But what happens from your first-person perspective? Why are your dreaming? Your mental inner life is small.

It's constrained by the circumstances of the dream. When that dissociative state we call dreaming ends because you woke up, you still remember your dream. You didn't lose that. But now you know much more. You went back to a much broader state of mind, meaning your entire life, your past, your present, your entire world, not just the dream.

I submit to you that death should be very analogous to that has experienced from a first-person perspective. It's probably a mind-boggling enlargement of our field of awareness because it's the end of a dissociation. And the best model we have for death today are psychedelics because we know now that their effect is to reduce brain activity. They don't light up your brain like a Christmas tree. Like we used to think until, you know, 2012.

they actually suppress brain activity. What is death? Well, it's the ultimate suppression of brain activity. So if you take psychedelics to be the best model we have for the experience of death, ego dissolution and the tremendous expansion of awareness during a psychedelic trip probably only gives us minor taste of what the experience of death is, which is the cessation of the dissociation, not just a weakening of the dissociation,

associative boundary, which is what I think psychedelics do, but a complete cessation of the dissociation. If you ask me, am I afraid of it? You bet I am. I'm bloody terrified of it. It was much better to think that death is the end of it, because there is nobody there to be afraid, to experience surprise, horror, whatever. And in my worldview of today, which I truly believe in, and I live accordingly, death is a very tricky thing. Because I know I will be there to witness that. And if a psychedelic trip is a sobering experience, whoa, I'm bloody terrified with the whole affair, if you ask me.

Do you partake in psychedelics, or is this something you've tried to dabble in as a kind of consciousness expansion? I haven't done it in years. I don't feel the call to do it again, but I have done it several times high doses over 10 years ago as a part of a personal study plan. I didn't do it like people would normally do,

like with friends to have fun and experiment with it. I read the entire bloody literature. I went to my doctor. I had my liver checked, my heart checked. You know, I had a plan. I had a protocol. start with low doses to test my sensitivity, then grow slowly.

I had the whole shebang about how to go through it in a deliberate way, and I had copious notes. I tried to train myself, to maintain my self-reflection during the journey so I could come back and write it down. So I did all that. So I had pretty deep psychedelic experiences.

I took vast doses at first doses at some point because I realized I'm a very hard head. It's very difficult to shift me off my baseline consciousness. So what happens is if I take a medium dose or even a high dose, I resist it. I don't break through. So to break through, I need to take a dose that completely smashes me. There's so many components of the Diamond and the Soul of the West, finding identity, meaning and purpose in a sacrificial life,

that, I mean, I could do an episode on each of the chapters. It's just so great. One of the most human things that you talk about is how you experienced tinnitus. I wonder if you can just tell us a little bit both about how that resolved, meaning how you've gotten to the place that you are, and also what you believe that diagnosis and journey has led you to. So my tonight sounds like a dentist's drill and I have one inside each year so it's stereo.

It's 24-7, there is no off-button. A couple of years ago, I became religious and I had this profound, sincere, gut prayer to God. And my desire was, can you please give me 10 seconds of silence? that was all I wanted. That was the miracle and I needed. Give me 10 seconds of silence so I can experience silence again.

So it's not the end of it. It's not like I'm locked out of paradise forever because I am a natural introvert. Silence for me is very important. My level of tinnitus clinically is the same level that two or three people in terms. the Netherlands every year undergo euthanasia. So I just want to be clear, the kind of tinnitus that you experienced qualifies for a request

for euthanasia. Yeah, and two or three people do it per year on average here, here. There was one case that was very publicized and the woman was vilified because she had two young children and she did it anyway. Yes, I remember this case. I almost committed suicide twice. Today, the tinnitus is there. It didn't change much, really.

And I'm perfectly okay with it. I mean, almost complete peace with it. There are some brief exceptions to that, and I'm like, ah, this is an annoying thing. But there are many days I go through the entire day without thinking of it. Of course, now I hear it, because you're talking about it

and it's in the center of my head. The tinnitus is there. It did something for me. You know, we were talking about the transition from the first to the second half of life. The nature of the game changes completely, but we resist that transition because all of our adaptive armor

is effective only for the game of the first half of life. So you resist becoming naked again without having any adaptive weapons to deal with the new game. So I resisted it a lot, and I'm bloody strong. I can resist stuff all the way to catastrophe. I'm very hard-headed in that sense. And the only thing that broke me was the tinnitus.

Theonitis just flattened me. It was the end of me. And it changes you because once suicide is a very concrete thing that is going to happen. It's not an abstract idea. It's not a hypothesis. It is going to happen in the next. 30 minutes, once you've been there, it becomes impossible to orient your life in terms of what you stand to lose.

Because you were just there ready to lose everything voluntarily and gladly in a hurry. Once your mind is imprinted with that, it's very hard to go back and say, I'm not going going to do this because my financial security and you know it life changes in that way so tinnitus did it to me it opened me up to the second half of life i quit my job i started a foundation essential foundation well i didn't start it fred matters is the founder and the architect behind it but i started dedicating my life to it recently i sort of went back to technology i started an AI company that is also a pattern of the second half of life in the sense that I'm not doing it from money or status.

I'm doing it because I think somebody should do AI in a responsible way. And I don't see myself as the hero, but if I have the thought and I don't do anything about it and I'm just a hypocrite, a hypocrite, so if I have the thought, I should do something about it. I face life in a much softer way now. I don't try to control everything. I'm loser. I'm too keenly aware now that I've never been in control.

I am not and I will never be. It was an illusion to think that I was in control. So I don't try to be in control because I know it's impossible. It's a very different way to live life, a much more natural way, I think. At least that's how I experience it. Well, and one of the most powerful and powerless experiences is we can have is that of love. And, you know, for me, as in neuroscience, people are always like,

well, explain love. And I say, well, I can do that. I can tell you all the chemicals. I can tell you all the things. I can tell you physiologically what's happened. I can do it. But I want to give you an opportunity to tell us a little bit about Claudia, because the way that you speak about your experience of connection and love with another human, you know, many people are searching for that one. or they're searching even in their relationship for a point of deep connection. I wonder if you can explain as someone who is so grounded in technology, in AI, in philosophy. What is the purpose? And for you, what is the sort of theoretical mechanism of love?

What love was for me had nothing to do with what I thought it was. I also didn't see it immediately. I resisted it for months. It didn't care about my expectations, my models, my preferences, my ideas. It wholly ignored the checklists. Does she check this box and that box? Prows and pros and cones.

Completely ignored that. And it was not like what people refer to as following in love. it had nothing to do with infatuation. It operated in its own terms. It was relaxed. It wasn't possessive. It just felt right. And it kept on feeling right.

And at some point I surrendered to feeling right. And it's been 12 years. I love that. And, you know, I was very, very moved. moved in in this book in particular when you talked about how that love was one of the primary things that you feared harming if you harmed yourself yes it was I found that very moving because you know you're such a rational person and you've got all the things and all you know like you said everything is very compartmentalized and and it kind of like it breaks your heart right and the

notion that there was a life waiting for you on the other side of that pain. There was something waiting for you to kind of hold this next part of your life and that she was kind of the window to that. That was in the two occasions that I was very concretely following the steps of suicide. It was the middle of the night, Claudia, was asleep. And I was going through the motions of doing the thing. and then the image came to me of what she would see the next day

when she would wake up and that image just, it's like you're hitting the face with a two by four and the immediate feeling is this would be so incredibly unfair and selfish of me to do this and that and of course a generous dose of cowardice

stopped me both times it's very clear to me not in a conceptual way, not in terms of opinion, but as a felt experience, the whole psychological trajectory about suicide with me was based on, was resting on this notion that my life was about my happiness, my well-being, and therefore if tonight is made my happiness impossible, then my life had no more point.

And today I look back at that and I realized how incredibly fucked up that kind of thought is. It's so unnatural. It is incredibly unnatural for any one of us to think that our lives are about us. That's not how nature operates. The life of the apple blossom is not about the bloody apple blossom. It's about the whole scheme of apple trees and life on earth and the universe and all that. But we are locked into this notion. And I certainly was locked into this notion that the purpose of life was to make myself happy.

And if therefore that would be impossible and it was impossible in my view because of theonitis, then I should pull the plug and the image of Claudia finding what she would find the next day coming to me, revealed in a very sort of pungent, guttural way, very clear, not conceptual, without intermediaries. how absolutely rubbish that notion was that my life was about me, that image made it crystal clear that that was not true. And of course, as a philosopher,

that was a little thread hanging and I started pulling from that thread. And the result is what you saw in the book, which is that my life is not about my tinnitus. And therefore, I'm in almost complete piece with my tinnitus today. There was some time ago a friend who is a researcher to the academic medical center here in the Netherlands.

He was telling me, oh, there is new research to control tinnitus by giving shocks to the back of your tongue. And then I was listening to that, and I thought the feeling came to me, even if this is true, even if this works, I don't need it. It's okay as it is now.

I almost fall off my chair telling this to you because it's such an impossible thing and yet this is how I feel. I didn't pursue that. I'm okay with my tinnitus. It is, if I could transfer it to you for 30 seconds, I think it would drive most human beings absolutely insane. At 30 seconds of that, you would say,

I cannot live with this at all. But amazing, amazing. nature is such that you can find a place in your mindscape where even this is perfectly okay, so much so you're not even trying to get rid of it anymore. And a lot of it has to do with this notion and it is very ingrained in me now, which is my life is not about me.

So if I am not happy with my tinnitus, who they have cares? It is not about me. Yes, there is a bloody tinnitus. it's not preventing me from thinking, from feeling, from doing something in the world, from expressing what nature wants to express through me. So I sleep like an angel. Tonight does I know.

It reminds me of that quote that we talk about. You know, death is only the end if you assume that the story is about you. And I guess that's true for everything that ails us. I think it's the most oppressive thought a human being can have is the thought my life is about me. because now you are in a catch-22 of a magnitude that is unlike anything else because it is completely impossible to make sure that you will be happy because the number, the sheer number of variables that have an impact on how you feel is so mind-boggling.

You can't even catalog them, let alone control them. So you convince yourself that the purpose and so meaning of your life is to do it. something that is completely unachievable. It is the biggest shackle you could ever put yourself in. It's a disaster thought. If you truly believe it, your life is about you.

You are in for a ride that is not fun. And the problem is that everything in our culture including the well-being industry is telling you that your life is about you

and you should take the range of your life and you should take the steps so you achieve that which is impossible which is to be happy all the time to have control over life the universe and everything you're not in control you're not in control of your life of your body of what is happening around you not even of your actions many of which are taken through unconscious impulses or subconscious impulses so liberating myself from that is something that i don't think i would wouldn't have happened to me. It's not an achievement. You don't achieve this kind of liberation. It happens to you. And I think Tenaitis was one of the instruments that allowed it to happen to me. Today, I find it

irisible, laughable, the thought that my life is about me and yours is about you. It's like saying the life of the apple blossom is about the apple blossom. Good luck with that thought. Bernardo Castro, it's been an incredible honor to get to talk to you. If people want to learn more about the work that you do, where would you like us to direct them? BernardoCastrop.com for my personal philosophical perspectives or essential foundation.org for the broader work that we are trying to do, including the thoughts of many other better, greater scholars than I am. Thank you so much. This is really incredible. Thank you for the opportunity. I really enjoy. enjoyed this one. I don't know what happened today in that conversation with Bernardo, but

I had a great time. We didn't even get to talk about AI. We didn't get to talk about AI. We didn't get to talk about aliens. Also, I didn't get to say like, this book is like, what? Okay, tell us a little bit about the book. I haven't read it. The book is called the Diamond, D-A-I-M-O-N, and the Soul of the West. So a Diamond is, hold on, I need to look this up so that I say it correctly what a diamond is. It's not a demon. A diamond is a term from ancient Greek mythology. Shout out to Brian Mararescu. It refers to a lesser deity or guiding spirit. It's not necessarily bad or good. It's kind of this neutral force. What's it lesser then? When things go south in our lives, we are prone to blaming mere circumstances or contingencies for the reemergence of the ever-present primordial

lack in the field of our attention. We're very good. at conjuring up eminently reasonable causes for what's always with us as part of us. We blame the economy, the boss, the partner, the weather, the neighbor, the death of the father. But it hardly ever occurs to us that the lack we feel wasn't caused. Instead, it has always been present. Sometimes more visibly, sometimes less so, but always there as an intrinsic part of us. were simply put together this way, archetypally. Archipally?

I don't know how to pronounce that. And the Western life is surfed atop a forever rolling wave of primordial lack. Paradoxically, this wave is what sustains and propels us forward. For in a state of total contentment, we wouldn't care to lift an arm or achieve anything. Life would lose its impetus, its drive,

and grind to a frozen halt. So, I mean, that's just a little taste. That's just on page 37. he had a moment his father died when he was 12 and it was devastating as it is for for young children and in particular he was an only child of his parents and he literally heard a voice one day he said it was his voice but not my usual tone and it said the boy really is desperate now and he remembered being like what the what's who's this what's happening And he realized in that moment, there was an observer of his experience.

Now, we are taught to do this in meditation. We're taught to do this even as a philosophical concept. But as a child, it literally dropped in. It dropped in like that, that there was an observer and he was tapping into it. And this became his life's experience. This is why it reminds me of Peter Kingsley, the Book of Life. He was able to interface. and that's how he's lived his life.

He went into computers and tech and that was his world and he had this complete change of life where he realized, I am a philosopher. There's a poem in here, a very long poem that just dropped into his brain. This would happen to Peter Kingsley.

He would hear messages and things from other realms that just dropped in like that. What was already obvious to others suddenly became obvious to me too. I had no control over life, had never had and would never have. At best, I could nudge it in certain directions, but certainly not take the reins of its course. All the adaptive mechanisms I had constructed to deal with loss,

useful as they had been, had a fatal flaw. They deceived me into the illusion that I could amass enough power in life to prevent the rug from being pulled from under my feet again. There's too much actually to dive into. There are so many little sub pockets that we can talk about. I love how this conversation dovetailed to so many of our other episodes, from consciousness to very practical things about the mind-body connection and what we're learning about medicine and how medicine is changing in order to incorporate a much more holistic perspective of the body.

Really, really hope that we can continue this conversation. And in case you're not subscribed to Substack, make sure that you are because I think that this is going to be the topic of a lot of conversation over there that we'd love to continue to get into with you. Check out Miami-Bi-L-X breakdown on Substack. We release exclusive content, not available anywhere else, and it's a growing breaker community that is there. Can't wait to see you over there.

From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's Miami-Bi-Lix Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's going to break down. down she's gonna break it down