Predictive History - The Story of "Civilization", "Secret History", "Game Theory" and more - Great Books #13: Gay Talese's Sparks of Light

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

Watch on YouTube: https://link-to-youtube.s.gy/gb13In this Friday, May 29, 2026 lecture to his Beijing high school students, Professor Jiang explains the genius of Gay Talese. ...

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Starting point is 00:00:22 free of charge. BetMGEMGEMP operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. This man, his name is... Gay Talese. This year he's 94 years old. It's still going strong. This is wife Nan Talese. For decades, they were the first couple of American literature in New York City. And I'm very proud to have him as my mentor. So about 30 years ago, I was in Beijing. I had just graduated from Yale College. I was working as a high school teacher.
Starting point is 00:01:06 But I wanted to become a writer. I was English Literature Major at Yale. And so I met some journalist friends who introduced me to Gay Talese. In the summer of 99, he came to Beijing to work on a story. And he needed a translator. So I became his translator for six months.
Starting point is 00:01:28 And during those six months, I received a batch education, any young writer could receive from the greatest American writer of his generation. He practices an art called literary journalism, and no one else practices this the way he does. So what he does is that he will spend hours and hours to just talking with someone, trying to get to know this person, trying to understand the world from this person's perspective. And then after spending days, months with that person and talking to other people around
Starting point is 00:02:19 him or her, he will try to draw out a memory from that person and put it in words in a way that resonates with his audience. And he is a genius. And what I mean he's a genius, I mean he is unique in what he does. Every writer we've read in the semester, whether it's Homer or Dante, even Gay Talese, we'll read him today. They are unique in what they do. Harold Bloom, the great American literary critic, says that great literature is shocking.
Starting point is 00:03:06 You read it and you are shaken by it in a way that you remember forever. It is a deep emotional experience that stays with you for the entire life. It shakes you in a way that forces you to reorientate your worldview. It forces you to better understand who you are, your place in the world, and your understanding of the world. And that's what Gay Talese does. What he does is unique. No one else does what he does.
Starting point is 00:03:38 No one else can do what he does. And it is shocking. It's shocking because it transcends time and space. Okay? His writing are able to transcend the time he's writing in and then spread across different cultures. So we will not fully appreciate his genius, maybe until 50 years from now, 100 years from now.
Starting point is 00:04:10 Okay? So he is mainly known for his journalism. He is the greatest journalist of his generation, probably the greatest journalist of all time. American journalism is dying, so people like him will no longer be able to be to work. These are his boxes. What's amazing about his boxes is that they are living souls, okay? You can't really see it because the picture quality isn't great, but what
Starting point is 00:04:43 he does is that he turns each box into a unique soul with its own time, its own place, its own memories. And he uses these boxes in order to create articles and essays and books. Okay, so he takes memories of life, real memories of life, and turns them into great works of literature. He is mainly known for his book, The Kingdom of Power, which is about the New York Times. If you work in the Times, you still read that book today as a young journalist. He wrote a book called Honor Thy Father, which is about the American Mafia. And he wrote an essay, a magazine article called Fracta Natchezer Has a Cold, which is considered the greatest American magazine essay ever written.
Starting point is 00:05:43 Today I want to talk about a work that people don't really discuss about Gay-Talise. It's called Thy Neighbor's Wife. Yes, thy neighbor's wife. And this is a book that is one of the best-selling American books of all the time. It sold millions of copies. It made him filthy rich. It made millions of dollars. At the same time, it basically destroyed his career.
Starting point is 00:06:15 Because in the late 70s, when this book was published, he was a really recent. respected journalist, writer. He was a celebrity, and he was married to a beautiful book editor named Nan Talese, who will go on to have a spectacular publishing career. And when you're famous as an American in the 70s, there are certain ways you have to behave. You have to respect rules and conventions. You have to respect taboos. And at the height of his fame, and this is like his, you know, like mid-40s, he decided to do something
Starting point is 00:06:53 that completely went against the convention, the rules, the morality of that time. He decided to write a book on sex. And there have been lots of books published about sex before, but the way he decided to go write about this book was itself unconventional. He decided to write about sex. He needed to go into the heart of darkness itself. He needed to explore the deepest, darkest, most depraved secrets of humans. And so he would spend at least 10 years engaged in all sorts of like really strange activities
Starting point is 00:07:42 rich famous men should not do in public, okay? I understand rich famous men are hypocrites and they do this in private but they don't do it in public and let the whole whole world know about it and don't certainly write a book about it okay but the guy decides to become a manager at a massage parlor he will go to California and engage in orgies he will masturbate with other men but he is an apapologist he is to understand the complexity of humans. And to do that, you first need to appreciate sex.
Starting point is 00:08:28 Okay, so this is a book that no one talks about because it is so controversial, it is so disturbing. It's disturbing because it's truthful, all right? Because it tells us that human beings are ultimately animals. And so I think this is one most courageous books ever written, because it puts a mirror to us and shows us that we're just basically monkeys. But at the same time, it's also one of the most enlightening, inspiring books that we've written because that has ever been written because if you look at the act of sex of human beings,
Starting point is 00:09:12 it's different from animals because ultimately what lies behind behind sex is religion, our need, our search for God. Ultimately, that's why we have sex. If you actually read this anthropological study of sex, then you understand that we humans are first and fundamentally religious beings that seek to return to God. It's something that Homer and Donning has talked about
Starting point is 00:09:43 before in the past, right? Okay, so before we go into that labor's wife and explore how it's fundamentally a book about religion, I'm gonna go into some occult mysticism, okay? So this is something called the cabala. The cabala means to receive. And the cabala is an understanding of how the universe works.
Starting point is 00:10:17 why we're here, where we came from, where we're going. Okay, this is called the Tree of Life. And the story is this. In the beginning, God is everything. It's pure energy. And God wants to know itself. God wants to complete itself. God wants to extend itself.
Starting point is 00:10:41 And so what it does is it creates a new being called Adam Catamon. Think of Adam Catamon as the cosmic man, the first cosmic man. And God is the will to bestow. God is love, generosity, forgiveness. So God wants to extend himself onto Adam Kenmon. And to do that, he creates Adam Kenmon as the will to receive, okay the will to receive god is the will to bestow adam can't man is the will to receive but the problem with this is that as the will to receive adam kentman is pure ego and so he doesn't really appreciate why god is so generous with him why god is willing willing to to bestow his essence onto him.
Starting point is 00:11:45 So Adam Kedman rejects God because he's full of doubt. He's skeptical. He's scared. He's embarrassed. And this ultimately leads to something called the shattering of the vessels. Shattering of the vessels. So what happens is that this is a tree of life, which is basically Adam Kedman. And as God is trying to pour his essence into Adam Kahnman,
Starting point is 00:12:20 Adam Kahnman turns away. And so what happens is the light spills outside the tree of life. Okay. And these sparks of divinity, sparks of divinity, scattered across the world. And this breaks the world. So as a result, this leads to sin, death, in our world. So in order for us to repair the world, what we need to do is collect those sparks that have spilled over from the tree of life and then combine them together, repair the vessel
Starting point is 00:13:06 so that God may come to our world and reunify with us. Okay. So according to Jewish Mrs. that is the purpose of life. All right? So this is a very basic understanding of the cabala, which helps us understand our place in the world and why we're here to do what we do. Now, there are three things I need you guys to remember about the tree of life, okay?
Starting point is 00:13:34 The first thing to remember about the tree of life is that it's sexual in nature. Okay? So the idea is that two forces are combining to create a new force, right? So God is the will to bestow and Adam and Catmon is the will to receive. It's been too long, cowboy, from Disney and Pixar. So that's the device. Me and the toys have been working to try and get Bonnie to make friends.
Starting point is 00:14:13 Well-a, friend made. What just happened? Lily Pad made Bonnie a friend in life. 15 seconds, I was counting. On June 19th. Our time ain't over yet. Bonnie still needs us. Come on, Bullseye.
Starting point is 00:14:25 Right for us. Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5. Only in theaters June 19th. Tickets available now. So this is a divine fundamental force to sex. Okay? You've been taught that it's a dirty thing, but in fact it's a very fundamental force of the universe.
Starting point is 00:14:53 And because the world is sexual, it moves in certain logic. And the logic is this. You start off with a being who creates another being in order to complete itself. And this leads to a new being, which then creates another being, which creates another being. And this is the Tree of Life. In other words, the Tree of Life is the fundamental. movement of the universe. And we can also frame it as
Starting point is 00:15:32 thesis, synthesis, or sorry, thesis antithesis, and synthesis. Okay, that's number two. This is a fundamental logic of the universe. And the third thing that we need to appreciate is that our mission on Earth, our journey or purpose is to repair the world by saving the sparks of light.
Starting point is 00:16:08 Okay? The sparks of light are fragments of God, memories of God, that are now scattered across the world. The problem is that as it becomes scattered in the world, they become enveloped by husk, okay? Material things. Hush. and we call these like the body right so other words our spirit in this sort of inside us it's divine but we're covered by our body which is the husk and as a result we're blinded by our material desires okay and so this is a fundamental conflict in the universe how do we go about repairing the world when we go by repairing the world by repairing ourselves but it's
Starting point is 00:17:03 discovering the light inside of us. All right? And so this is the question that Gay-Tales is going to undertake. What he's going to do is that he's going to risk his entire career. He did actually risk his entire career. And he's going to go into the deepest, darkest corners of the human heart to figure out how we can liberate our divine aspects from the huss that has imprisoned it.
Starting point is 00:17:43 That is a fundamental conflict driving the book, Thy Neighbor's Wife. And if you read the book, three different solutions are being proposed. three different solutions are being proposed to answer this mystery. The first solution is meditation, meaning that we ourselves have the energy, the power to liberate our spark from our husk through intense concentration. Okay? But in a sexual sense, what is meditation? Meditation is masturbation.
Starting point is 00:18:38 I know this sounds really weird, okay? I know this is going to be disturbing for some of us, but it would make sense when we get to the passage, okay? I'm just building the framework, the theory for when we read, thy neighbor's wife, okay? So that's the first solution. solution is to embrace sex. Okay, so the theory here is that sex is meant to be free, to be casual, to be joyous. But society has imposed restrictions on sex.
Starting point is 00:19:19 So sex is a mechanism to control your feelings, to imprison your soul, okay? Because sex is taboo. So for example, if you were to get married, you're not supposed to sleep with other people who is not your wife or your husband. If you do so, you will have betrayed your wife, yourself, and society as a whole. And then you ask yourself, well, why is that that important?
Starting point is 00:19:54 Why is sex? and love really the same thing. So what if you have sex with another person? What does that matter? Why can you separate your husk from your soul? Your soul can belong to another person, but your husk can be enjoyed with other people. And the way to liberate people from this convention, from this taboo,
Starting point is 00:20:22 is to fully embrace sex. The more sex there is between different people, the more they recognize that what matters is not the sex, what matters is the love. Through sin, you can break the taboo. You can liberate yourself from the taboo. When you liberate yourself from the taboo, you liberate your soul. And then your soul can then reconnect with God. So there's a second solution proposed in thy neighbor's wife. And the third solution is to recognize that the world as constructed is perfect.
Starting point is 00:21:04 It's not broken, it's perfect. It's not malfunctioning. It's doing exactly what it should be doing. Why? Because we're here not to find the sparks of light. We're here to create sparks of light. And how can we do so? We can do so for love and the imagination. Okay? We're not here to return to God. We're here to do what God cannot do and extend the boundaries of the universe by using our imagination.
Starting point is 00:21:47 By creating memories that are transcendental that travel beyond time and space and which are able to inspire others to imagine and to dream as well. Okay, and this is the idea of Dante. So you have three radical visions of what it means to seek liberation. You have three radical visions of what it means to free your soul and to be one with God. Okay? All right. But the argument I want to make to you today is that Thine neighbor's wife is a great book. The reason why millions have read it, the reason why that even though it's written 50 years ago,
Starting point is 00:22:30 and we still read it and resonate with it is because regardless if these paths fail or succeed, they do resonate with us because they remind us of our fundamental need to return to God. Okay? They remind us of who we are. And that's why thy neighbor's wife is still such a beautiful and divine book. All right. Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to look at all three different solutions together. Okay, so the first is meditation through masturbation. All right, so this is chapter one, this is a man named Harold Rubin. And Harold Rubin, at this stage, he is a teenager
Starting point is 00:23:19 living in a very abusive household. He's not happy where he is, he seeks escape. The way he seeks escape is that he falls in love with a woman named Diane Weber. The problem though is that that that William Weber is really not a person. That Weber is a model who poses nude on beaches and her woman will masturbate to the nude pictures of Diane Weber. So what is you to read a couple of paragraphs?
Starting point is 00:23:56 from the story of Harold Rubin in that neighbor's wife. And what I want you to focus on is the fact that this act of masturbation is really one of devotion. Religious devotion. You can read this and think that Harold Rubin is a priest in a temple, and he's working very meticulously very carefully in order to create a sacrifice, a devotion worthy of God. Okay? So don't think of this as a sexual scene.
Starting point is 00:24:32 Think of this as a religious scene. He's masturbating, what he's really doing is he's offering himself to his God. Okay? A lean, dark-eyed woman on page 4 attracted hero, but the photographer had posed her awkwardly on the neural branch of a tree, felt her discomfort okay this is a really interesting sentence what this is
Starting point is 00:24:57 saying is this when hero Rubin is reading or looking at pornography it is an act of giving it's an act of empathy and so what he's seeking is not control or power what he's seeking is to be with this woman that he's looking at It's an act of empathy, it's an act of imagination. So if she feels discomfort, he also feels discomfort as well. That is what religious devotion really is about, giving yourself completely to God in a way that you open your heart and your soul to God. Okay?
Starting point is 00:25:43 The noon on page 6, sitting cross-legged on a studio floor next to Isle, had fine breasts with a bland expression on her face. So it's like Harold is having a conversation with each of these people. His imagination is creating a person in front of him in order to have a dialogue. So it's not a sexual attraction, it's also dialogue in search of mutual understanding. Harold still on his back with knee slightly raised another blanket, continue to turn the pages past various legs and breasts, hips and buttocks in here, female fingers and arms reaching out, eyes looking away from him, eyes looking at him,
Starting point is 00:26:27 as he occasionally paused to lightly stroke his genitals with his left hand, tilting the magazine in his right hand to eliminate the slight glare on the glossy pages. So we skip a bit. And then there were those extremely rare pictures, those of Diane Webber that could fulfill him constantly. He estimated that his collection contained 50 photographs of her and within a moment he could locate every one of them and 200 magazines that he kept. He would merely have to glance at the cover and would know exactly where she was within. How she was standing, what was in the background, what her attitude seemed to be doing during that special split second when the camera had clicked.
Starting point is 00:27:09 He could remember too first seeing these pictures. Could reconstruct where and when he had bought them? He could practically mark a moment in his life from each of her poses, each being so real that he believed he knew her person, She was part of him and for her he had become more in touch with himself in several ways not merely through acts which Victorian moralists have defined as self-abuse But rather through self-acceptance his understanding that naturalness of his desires and asserting his right to an idealized woman. Okay, so think back to the cabala What is God? God is trying to bestore himself on to us when we receive him completely this creates a union which allows us to understand our ourselves and understand the universe. So this is exact describing the cabala where because Harold Rubin has been meditating on
Starting point is 00:28:00 Diane Weber for years, so much so that she's become part of him, this has allowed him to better understand himself as well as his sexuality. Okay? Not able to resist any longer, Harold turned the page to Diane Weber on the dune. He looked at her lying on her stomach, her head held up into the wall. her eyes closed, the nipple on her left breast erect, her legs spread wide, the late afternoon sun cast an exaggerated shadow of her crevacidous body along the smooth white sand. Beyond her body was nothing but a sprawling empty desert. She seemed so alone, so approachable and available,
Starting point is 00:28:38 Harold had merely desire her and she was his. Okay? So this is a climax. So this is what sex is for humans. Sex for humans is not about pleasure. It's fundamentally about discovering who you are and creating a reunion between yourself and another person so that you dissolve each other and become one and the whole okay so again i understand this is a scene about masturbation but what makes this genius what makes this beautiful and divine is it's really a description of religious devotion okay so the greatness of this writing is to show us that sex at its height, sex at its fundamental level is really about religious worship. Right?
Starting point is 00:29:33 But as you read this book, what you recognize is that Hero Rubin, ultimately he lives a fantasy. Because even though it sounds great that through meditation, you can become one with God, it doesn't really work. And so what happens is that Hero Rubin will actually never meet Diane Webber, because he was just wonderful life. And one major reason why he will never meet Diane Weber is because he's too afraid to meet Diane Weber, okay? Don Weber is not a real person.
Starting point is 00:30:06 It's just a fantasy. He does not want to meet the real Dan Weber because meeting her would shatter his fantasy and thus shattered his religion. Okay? So this is one solution. It doesn't really work. Meditation doesn't really work.
Starting point is 00:30:20 Another solution is, is proposed by John Williamson. Oh, sorry, John Williamson, okay? And this is wife Barbara Williamson. And what they're gonna do is they're gonna create a sex cult together. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement and nothing says it better than this.
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Starting point is 00:31:01 Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility, Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. And his understanding is this. Modern society has made everyone miserable. Why has it made everyone miserable? Because we're always lying to ourselves. because we're always repressed.
Starting point is 00:31:27 We know we don't like the jobs we do. We know that we didn't learn anything in school. We know that the person we married to we don't actually like. And so we have imprisoned our soul in the husk. It's society that enforces the husk onto us. So the path to liberation means to break out of this husk. And how do you break out of this house? By engaging in sex.
Starting point is 00:31:59 To remove the power of sex over you, right? Because in our society, sex is about shame. So what he's going to do is he's going to create a cult in which married couples come together have sex with other people. And this will liberate them from the limitations of marriage. And so when you get rid of the social convention, What is left is your love for either yourself or for your partner.
Starting point is 00:32:31 And there's no love, then that's good, because you will know that you've been living alive all this time. Okay? So what he's gonna do, what is first create his group. And so he's gonna recruit individuals in order to join his cult. And one of the first people he includes
Starting point is 00:32:52 is John Valero. And his wife, is named Judith. And they are in a conventional marriage, which is to say that they are in an unhappy marriage where they do what they're supposed to do. John Balleroy goes to make good money as an insurance salesman.
Starting point is 00:33:15 Judith is at home taking care of the kids. So they do what they're supposed to do, but it's unhappy. And so John Wilmson knows he's unhappy, and he arranges for John Belaro to have a full first with his wife Barbara and then with other people as well. And then what he's going to do is that he's in like both John Ballero and Judith to his house where John Ballaro is going to have sex with another woman in another room and Judith is going to be in another room listening on her husband having sex.
Starting point is 00:33:55 Okay, and this is a very disturbing scene. And it's so disturbing, we're not going to read it together, okay? But if you're interested in reading it for yourself, then you can pause the video and read it. Okay? But ultimately what happens is that John Belor is having sex, Judith screams. But the scream, it is considered cathartic. It's therapeutic because the screaming allows you to to purge yourself of your fears,
Starting point is 00:34:28 of your ego and your fear. You now see that your husband is longer yours. You lose your fear because you recognize that your fear that your husband will run away will leave you. Well, he's already done so. Okay? So when you leave your ego and your fear, what happens is the only that remains
Starting point is 00:34:50 is who you really are, which is the divine spark. Okay? Divine spark. That's a theory anyway, okay? It doesn't happen this way, but this is a theory. All right. So then what happens is that a few nights later, they do it again.
Starting point is 00:35:11 John Belillo goes to this house and he's having sex with another woman and Judith is in the room listening in, okay? But instead of just like listening in screaming, she decides she's going to have sex with John Williams. because now her soul is liberated. She's now free. She doesn't care about losing her husband. She doesn't care about being mocked by other people.
Starting point is 00:35:36 So she just engages, she indulges her passion, and she has sex with John Williamson. Okay? Then John Beliro hears this sex. He comes out and he has startled, he's traumatized to find his wife. his wife be having sex with another man okay and again you can pause the video and read the scene it's a very powerful scene and he is shattered okay but this shattering is good because it allows you repair yourself once your ego and your fear dissipate you can now resurrect yourself as you truly are okay again this is the theory i'm not saying this works on guys don't try this at home okay
Starting point is 00:36:25 But this is a theory. And guess what guys? It doesn't work. It doesn't work because maybe for the first couple of times it works with people, but when you actually try this at scale, it kind of screws up. So John Wilson decides to take his religion and spread to as many people as possible. So he sets up a retreat called the sandstone retreat. Sandstone retreat.
Starting point is 00:37:00 And it's basically just a second. club okay and when you and so Gaytalee will go to sex club and spend a lot of time there and he writes this scene about this sex club of like these they're just having orgies all the time and we know it doesn't work because one day Gaytalee sees John Wilms John Wilson looking at a very strong handsome muscular black man having sex with his wife Barbara and it freaks him out okay so the theory is great oh if we just sin enough we will absorb ourselves of our guilt of our fear and that was truly liberate us but in practice the opposite happens in practice what happens is that when you engage in sin the guilt compounds
Starting point is 00:37:54 itself. So the theory is to remove the husk, okay, the husk, so that the soul can be liberated. But when you engage in the material world, when you have too much sex, the husk just extends itself, and you become truly blind. Okay? And this is why, even though John Wilson succeeds in starting a sex cult, even though he becomes very famous with his sandstone retreat, what happens next is that he falls into a deep depression. Okay? And he turns away from the sex cult and I think he opens a tiger sanctuary. Like he goes to place with animals. All right? So the second solution doesn't work either. The first solution, which is devotion, meditation, that doesn't really work because you depart yourself from the world and from yourself. The second solution, which is that you embrace
Starting point is 00:38:50 sex, you embrace the husk, you embrace the material world. That doesn't work either because it just makes you even more guilty, it makes you feel more guilt, more shame, okay? So what's the solution? Well, at the very end of the book, Thy Neighbor's Wife, Gay-Talise proposes a solution, okay? And we're going to read it together. But what happens is this.
Starting point is 00:39:18 Gay-to-leash grew up in Ocean City, New Jersey. He is Catholic and Ocean City, New Jersey is mainly Protestant. So he's an outsider. He's Italian. Everyone else is white. And his family are immigrants. Everyone else has been there for generations. So he's always been an outsider.
Starting point is 00:39:37 And as outsider, you feel nothing but guilt, shame, and fear. And so after he takes this sexual journey into the heart, of human darkness into sex, he returns to Ocean City, and by now he's in his mid-40s, and he decides to do something really risky. He decides to go to a nude beach. This is something that, you know,
Starting point is 00:40:06 if you're an immigrant young boy, you could never ever dream of doing, okay? Because you or yourself already feel, you already fear being ostracized or being laughed at or being mocked at, right? There's no way you're going to a nude beach. But Gay-Tales is now in his mid-40s. He's still suffering a lot of scars
Starting point is 00:40:28 from his immigrant childhood. But he decides, I'm going to go to a beach, the new beach. So he goes to a new beach, and he's off his clothes, and he's there naked, and everyone else around him is naked. Then he spots selling across, and these are people who are, watching them okay so this is society this represents society laughing at you mocking you ridiculing you for being different and what happens is like gaitily stands up and he steers back at
Starting point is 00:41:03 them representing the fact that he's learned the courage to accept who he is he's learned the power to see social convention social taboos as prisons okay so this is the very last paragraph of that neighbor's wife. Painted on the stern of most of the boats beneath the declaration of their names was the lettering of the locale, Ocean City, New Jersey, and seated on the decks where people wearing Bermuda shorts and sailing caps, bathing suits, straw hats, and dark glasses. And in their hands they held cans of beer, thermos bottles, transistors radials, and handkerchiefs that they waved at the nudists.
Starting point is 00:41:47 This is a lot of detail. The only way you could have this detail is that if you were actually one of them on these trips, okay? So this is telling us that before going on the new beach, he himself was on a sailboat sailing like everyone else watching the nudist. And now he himself has become one of the nudists, okay? There were also some cat calls coming from the boats,
Starting point is 00:42:10 whistles and chairs, and after watching for a few moments, to least step forward on the deck, separating himself from the other quiet nudist, and he faced the boats, recognizing a few of the sailing ships, and he fought some of their passengers, okay? So these are his friends. All right? These are people that he's most afraid of knowing that he's nude.
Starting point is 00:42:33 He also noticed for the first time that many of the passengers held silvery telescopes and dark monoculars, and they sat rigidly on their decks and swayed in the water and squinted in the sun. So these are voyeurs. These are people who secretly spy on people being nude.
Starting point is 00:42:50 Why are they secretly spying? Because they are afraid. They have ego. They have fear. They have guilt. They have shame. So they have to hide themselves. And so to show that he's not afraid.
Starting point is 00:43:03 What he does is they were unabashed warriors and looking at him. And Talese looked back. Okay? So he's looking at directly at those spying. And he says, like, I was once you. I was once also afraid and living in fear. and now I've liberated myself. I am now free.
Starting point is 00:43:23 The question then is, how is it that Gaetali succeeded, but Harold Rubin and journalism, they failed. And it has to do with the nature of poetry and the purpose of writing. Okay, so the cabala ask us, where are the sparks of light? Okay? All right, so we first have to figure out what consciousness is.
Starting point is 00:43:59 And something that I've been teaching in this class for the past semester is that our consciousness is what's real. Our consciousness are infinite dimensions, okay? And we can know by using this visual depiction where our consciousness is spread through infinite dimensions. Okay? And at a certain dimension, we're all just one force, okay? The monad. So the separation is only superficial. In reality, we're all connected in some way.
Starting point is 00:44:36 Now, because of this, it tells us that memories are not stored inside our brains, but inside this universal consciousness. All right? So these memories are stored in the universal consciousness. Some of our memories are so powerful or so great that they're shared amongst others. So even though you yourself have had this memory, it is such a spectacular memory because it's so imaginative, it is so unique, it's so special that it affects other people as well. All right?
Starting point is 00:45:13 So these are these memories. And these are the sparks of light. So in other words, yes, the purpose of life is the finest sparks of light. But what we need to remember is, and this is what Homer and Donnie tells us, is that we have the capacity to create sparks of light ourselves by living great lives. What are great lives? Lives that are unique. Lives that are filled with courage, lives that are filled with passion, lives that seek to distinguish themselves from others. Okay? And that's how Gay-Tales wrote the book, Thy Neighbor's Wife, because he wanted to
Starting point is 00:46:03 distinguish himself from others, because he was on a search for the truth, okay? You wanted to, like, search for the sparks, okay? Search for the truth, the sparks of light. AI is moving fast across the enterprise. But without visibility, it's just chaos, different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. Service Now turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. And in so doing, he himself create these sparks of light. Why? Because he spent years interviewing these people in a drawout
Starting point is 00:46:58 the sparks of light from the universe and when you do that and you could write it down and show with others then you expand the imagination of the universe okay and this is really the purpose of life why are we here we're here to create sparks of light ourselves so that we can inspire others to search for their own sparks of light and And that is the ultimate message of thy neighbor's wife. Okay? All right. Well, that's it for us, guys.
Starting point is 00:47:40 All right. It's been great teaching you. This is my last class at the school. And this is not the end of my journey. I will continue to teach. Two weeks from now, I will be teaching Dante. I'll be live streaming Dante. to a global audience and after that there'll be more classes and I hope that this is
Starting point is 00:48:05 also the beginning of your own journey into life remember that it's ultimately your choice how to live your life but to live a truly great life remember that there are sparks of light out there and it is your opportunity to create sparks of light in the world okay all right so thank you Thank you.

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