Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Leo Gura on Ego Death, God, Reality vs Dream, TOEs, and an ”Ask Me Anything”

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/YspFR9JAq3wAnd we go even deeper... Sponsors: https://www.projecttranscend.com/ for Transcend. https://brilliant.org/TOE for 20% off. http://algo.com for supply chain AI. Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverythingLINKS MENTIONED: -Part 1 with Leo Gura (watch first): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-w8k4smC74 -Raymond Smullyan "Is God A Taoist" reading: COMING -Chris Langan interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-bRM1kYuNA -Frank Yang (questions): https://www.youtube.com/post/UgwC63Ol9xj3GyR3Ef94AaABCQ -Tyler Goldstein's analysis of Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K52EW8SxJVw -Fakery's analysis of Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOJ5cuguHNc -Steve Scully's TOE: https://www.cascadinguniverse.org/ -Unreleased and unlisted Matthew Phillips interview: https://youtu.be/DTC6ZW4_VKkTHANK YOU: -Jess Palmer -Sam Thompson

This is part two of my conversation with Leo Gura. Make sure to watch part one if you want to understand the context of this episode, as thematically we start straight where part one left off. Leo Gura is the founder of the YouTube channel Actualized.org and describes himself as a psychonaut and a mystic. Leo Gura is a proponent of what's called idealism, that is, that consciousness is fundamental, and moreover that you listening to this, you watching this, are God,

you've simply forgotten that fact or have had that obscured to you for various reasons. This is similar to Rupert Spira, though Leo's non-dualism has slight modifications. Click on the timestamp in the description if you'd like to skip this intro. My name is Kurt Jaimungal, I'm a filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics dedicated to explicating what are called theories of everything, mainly from a theoretical physics perspective, but also delineating the possible connection consciousness has to the fundamental laws of nature, provided these laws exist at all and are knowable to us.

This interview was the longest conversation I've had with anyone in my entire life, off air or on air by far. The reason for this may be apparent in the interview itself. There were plenty of long stretches of pauses where both Leo and I were thinking or letting register what was just said, or to be quite frank, we were overcome with a certain amount of fervor.

And I debated if I should keep these in, ultimately deciding that these long stretches of silence speak for themselves. If you're listening to this on audio, it may be jarring, which is why I recommend watching the video instead. The links to the Spotify, to the iTunes, as well as the YouTube video are in the description. If you enjoy witnessing or engaging in real-time conversation with others on the topic of psychology, physics, consciousness, and so on,

then do consider visiting the Discord, which the link is in the description, as well as the subreddit, link also in the description. If you're interested in supporting this channel, then please do visit patreon.com slash kurtjaimungle. It's because of the patrons and the sponsors that I'm able to do this full-time. It would be near impossible for me to have conversations with any sort of fidelity on the topics of consciousness, loop quantum gravity, string theory, coming up geometric unity at some point, even a revisitation of Stephen Wolfram's theories. None of this will be possible if not for your support, so thank you. With regard to sponsors, there are three.

The first sponsor is Algo. Algo is an end-to-end supply chain optimization software company with software that helps business users optimize sales and operations, planning to avoid stockouts, reduce returns and inventory write-downs, while reducing inventory investment. It's a supply chain AI that drives smart ROI, headed by a bright individual by the name of Amjad Hussain, who's been a huge supporter of this podcast since near its inception. The second sponsor is Brilliant. Brilliant illuminates the soul of mathematics, science, and engineering through bite-sized interactive learning experiences. Brilliance courses explore the laws that shape our world, elevating math and science from something to be feared

to a delightful experience of guided discovery. You can even learn group theory, which is what's being referred to when you hear that the standard model is based on U1 cross SU2 cross SU3. Technically, those are called Lie groups. Visit brilliant.org slash toll for 20% off the annual subscription. I recommend that you don't stop before four lessons, and I think you'll be greatly surprised at the ease at which you can comprehend subjects that you previously had extreme difficulty grokking.

The third sponsor is joining us for a second time. The first time was in the previous Liogura video, and that's Project Transcend. Project Transcend gives you a method of storing and transmitting the most meaningful, not just moments, but aspects of your life, such as your values. The founder of Transcend, Matthew Phillips, had such an inspiring story of why he created this app and how it aligns directly with the values espoused by LeoGura. So much so that I'm appending a brief interview with Matthew Phillips at the end of this. More on Transcend later. The plan for the next couple episodes is to delve more deeply into theoretical physics as I've been exploring the theories of consciousness that generally require quite a bit of integration before I can move on to the next one, if I'm to do them justice. It'll be string theory, and then loop quantum gravity, and then

in 2022, geometricometric Unity. Recently, there's been released an episode on this channel called Is God a Taoist? That's a reading and a commentary on Raymond Smullyan, the great Raymond Smullyan, the late Raymond Smullyan's work. I recommend you listen to that one as it's one of the more clever and jocund pieces of writing that exists on the topic of God, free will, and the laws of nature, which are the trichotomy of this channel. Lastly, I'd like to thank Jess Palmer for turning me on to Leo's content. Thank you, and enjoy. I felt very fairly treated, so I don't have any grudges or anything. I mean, I'm happy with how my previous conversation went. So yeah, but if you want to speak, go ahead.

I'm going to speak for about 10 minutes. You're pretty much just going to listen. You can interject whenever, but I have, I timed it and it's approximately 10 minutes. I have some notes, but I would like to clarify more, less of justifications to you and more just in the sake of contextualizing this as well as in the service of what I mentioned to you over email, which is trying to build a better conversation in the future for not only this, but for future guests as well. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, that's good. So, yeah, you do that. And then when you're done with that, I'll also, I won't talk for 10 minutes, but I'll add a few of my own notes, just minor things.

It won't be long. Great. Okay. After that, then it will also be desultory where I won't have a plan. Last time I did have a plan, but this one's more AMA. So I have different questions and I know that you are a fan of structure and that last interview wasn't structured. Well, I don't think this one will be either, but now that we know each other's styles, if I feel like you need to explain more, then I'll just let you explain more.

If you say, Kurt, what's necessary to speak about epistemology before metaphysics, for example, then go ahead, Leo. The floor is yours. Whereas before, it's like, well, I have another question. I have another question. I have another question. Okay, good. Yeah, we're on the same page. And yeah, don't worry about it. I'm also, so one of the things I learned, which I'll say after you're done speaking, is that I'm going to sort of be more accommodating to you in that, like, I kind of know where

you're coming from, and I'm going to be more comfortable with a less structured approach. So I will be able, if you want to jump to different things, we can do that. I'll kind of roll with you. So we're going to kind of, you know, dance here. So I'm going to start with what I thought were faults on my part, and then I'll give a justification for my misconduct, but then I'll also explain why that justification doesn't hold. So I still actually need to be apologetic, or at least try to improve in the future. So firstly, as we were talking, I have a facetious first note, which is that I left in

a cut where you scratched your nose on the inside or the outside. I don't know. That was actually accidental. Some people think, oh, Kurt has a sense of humor. He left that in. I'm not trying to make you look foolish. I apologize for that. So that wasn't deliberate.

Just want you to know. I don't care. Didn't bother me. Number two, I seemed needlessly contentious, like overly so, and I don't tell you on air how much I agree with a panoply of your points. I tell you off air, and so it seems like we're disputatious, like a cross from one another, but the way that I viewed it was that I'm beside you,

perhaps my arm is over your shoulder, so this was- this is supposed to be harmonious and companionable, but it was more conveyed- I thought it was conveyed, but I don't think it was as much as it could have been, so in the sake of having a more fruitful discussion unless of the comments saying leo schooled kurt or watch kurt expose this grifter as not knowing anything someone said you're like a wise man coming down from the mountain or you think of yourself as coming with stone tablets and i'm this lowly beggar seeking truth in some sense they're right though i would say without derision you're claiming the metaphorical equivalence of coming down from a mountain, and I, in fact, am this lowly beggar, so I need to convey my appreciativeness and unison with you a

bit more. Okay, so that's number two. Number three, I should be meeting you on your terms with regard to language usage. So last time we had probably 10 minutes of squabbling or more with the word infinity, for example. Now I understand what you mean. I would prefer that you use the word all or all-encompassing, because to me, infinity has a mathematical definition, and I see the tendency in spiritual leaders to use scientific terminology to give an air of intellectualism to their work, for example when they use the word quantum, some. And I, though, should be meeting you where you are, rather than asking you to come to me and meet me in the middle. That's my fault, so I'll attempt to speak your language as much as I can and delimit to the audience in the cases where I think both of us can be misinterpreted. People who are watching or listening right now, this means you should watch part one first and then watch this from start to finish because if you

jump around, you may have the same remonstrances that I have against, let's say, the usage of the word infinity, but then you miss the redefinition or expanded definition. To be clear, this isn't unique to you. I have a whole documentary about how I don't like colleges using the word racist when they mean the old definition of racist plus power, and they haven't been explicit that this change was made. And I have Fakery, a YouTuber called Fakery, to thank for this, who did a nine-hour analysis, which allowed me to rewatch because I would cringe at rewatching myself myself so i can't do that ordinarily so i was able to do that i got

the perspective of a second viewing and the perspective of someone namely fakery who's so similar to you aligned with you so i had his commentary thank you fakery for that there's a link to his analysis in the description there's also also a link to Tyler Goldstein who had an analysis as well in the description. In other words, I need to be expressing your terminology rather than insisting that you use mine. And that was due to arrogance and obstinance on my part, and I'm sorry. Number four, I focused far too much on objections. focused far too much on objections. Partly because when a conservative, let's say, says we should value life over everything else, like let's say they're pro-life, then I instantly wonder, well, what about negative externalities of uncontrolled markets like pollution that seem to destroy vast quantities of life? Or if a liberal says women and children should come first,

then I wonder instantly, what about insisting men and women should be treated equally? Where does that fit? Like, objections come to me without me thinking. They occur in a flash. I want you to know that I'm not thinking, how is Leo wrong? They just occur to me. But I understand that it can seem as defensiveness on my part. And they're correct because virtually, it's not as if defensiveness is in me at a zero percent. There's a non-zero amount of defensiveness. So for that I need to own up and I will try to do better. I need to apologize for that.

So number five, I need to internally emulate you more charitably. What I mean by that is that some people think that I wasn't pushing back on you enough. It's strange because I get both sides of the criticism, which is that I'm far too defensive, far too triggered, if anything. And then on the other side, well, Kurt, you didn't put up as many objections as you can. However, my point, my job isn't to object, the objections spring unbidden rather than consciously looking for what's wrong. To be fair, I should be thinking about what's right about what Leo's saying more frequently and I haven't done that.

So there I failed and I'll try to improve for today. If you who are watching are looking more for rebuttals, rejoinders, and so on, that's on part one. As a side note, I'll be looking down more during this conversation. Probably I'll have my eyes closed more. And the reason is that what you say, Leo, I'm going to be trying my best now to feel it as true. I know there was the critique that I'm intellectualizing, trying to model. true. I know there was the critique that I'm intellectualizing, trying to model. So I'm going to try and mitigate that by allowing what you're saying to either be perceived or revealed as being true. Like I'm going to either perceive it or reveal it. Part of that requires me to close my eyes. So if I do that, I'm undergoing, trying to see how can I undergo what you're thinking

rather than model it. And I'm not listening to you. I'm actually deeply listening to you. That's number five. And then lastly, I know that you were commenting on the comment section. I want you to know my policy for hearting comments. I skim each new comment, virtually each new comment. If someone leaves a negative comment about me, that's fine. They can say and critique me as much as they like. I'll still heart it. If they're negative toward you, that's also fine, as long as they're not speaking ad hominens toward you, and then I won't heart them. So that's my policy. If what you see is me hearting comments that are negative toward you, you're like, Kurt, come on, man. Why would you do that? You agree with them? That's not my intention. I just

heart virtually every comment unless it's extremely negative toward you. Sorry, unless it's unfairly negative toward you. I'll even heart it if they say it seems like you're arrogant, because that to me is not too much of an ad hominem. i'm not going you're gracious you allow you accepted an invitation to come into my home but if people are going to throw tomatoes at you and i don't think it's justified then i don't heart them so that's that that's everything good yeah don't beat yourself up too much i know you're coming from good intentions. Thank you. As we all are. I know you know that.

I'm mainly, I'm like 20% to you, 60% to the audience, and then 20% to myself to remind myself because it is true that I do need to be thinking about how are you right and to emulate you more in my head than I have been. And I need to emulate you more in my head than I have been. And I, I need to do that more. Which sort of goes back to our top conversation last time, which is that, um, it's actually very important to be able to see the goodness in others. We've, we've lost that, especially today with our political situation and so forth. Like we don't see the goodness that others are trying to do with their actions their thoughts their beliefs and so forth like even the trolls in the comment

sections when they're even when they're throwing tomatoes like you got to be able to see the goodness behind that action otherwise you're literally not going to be able to love the world and to relate to others in a healthy way i agree so a few points on my own end. So I definitely learned, you know, I also watched some of that fakery analysis of our conversation and it helped me reflect on my own, you know, behaviors because it is difficult to see one's own, you know, blind spots and so forth. That's true of all perspective. It's hardest to see your own blind spots and so forth. That's true of all perspective. It's hardest to see your own

blind spots. But I did learn a few lessons from our last conversation. And on my part, what I would like to do is I would like to be more present just in listening to you, because a lot of times I'm used to just blasting away. That's what I do. For three hours, I can just blast content. And so I was a little bit in that mode too much. So I want to make sure I'm registering your questions and your objections more because I know that you're just trying to figure things out in your own mind, trying to piece things together. So I'll be doing more of that. I'm also going to, I can also get very excited about these topics because I'm so passionate about them,

which makes me, my mind kind of race and go fast. So I'm going to deliberately kind of slow my pace down so that it's a little bit more like I'm on the same wavelength as the people listening. Because, again, I can just blast people with this information, but that's not where most people are at with this information. Right. So they need a bit more of a gradual introduction. with this information. They need a bit more of a gradual introduction. And a lot

of this is about image. Because the ego mind, when it's listening to these very strange ideas, it's judging not just the content of the ideas, but the delivery of the ideas. Even the tone, the pacing, all these things the ego mind is

judging constantly. and it's using this to try to figure out, is this guy speaking truth or not? Because you don't really know if what I'm saying is true other than through the style and delivery and the logical connections that your mind can draw, which are really not valid signs of truth. Truth is a totally separate thing from those. But I understand the importance of the appearance and how this stuff is delivered.

So I'll be a little bit more conscious of that. And I'm also going to be taking more pauses and time to just to contemplate before I answer. Because sometimes I just kind of interrupt and I answer immediately right off the cuff. And I'll be taking a little more time, just like you, maybe closing my eyes and just thinking through before I answer, because these are extremely tricky issues,

and the mind is playing games here. That's one of the things I want you guys to understand. Your mind is constantly playing games with you when you're doing this kind of work. Even when you're listening to somebody speaking about non-duality or philosophy or science, your mind is playing tricks on you and it's it's it's jumping to conclusions and it's evaluating stuff we've got to be very very careful about uh how we go about this because there's many traps in this work and so i'll be a little more careful there two notes on what you said one was i didn't make clear what was the intention of our meeting before. So the

intention was either one of two. Are you to explain to the audience or am I to be understanding you? And it's actually the latter. I'm to be understanding you. This is what Fakery mentioned was a fault on my part and he's correct. I didn't make that clear. So when I was saying you should be using infinity in so-and-so manner. Actually, no, you're not here to explain to the audience. You're here primarily in my terminology sometimes as office hours. You're here because I would like to understand your point of view. So for those who are listening, I know that sounds selfish, but that's the only way I know how to do this with any sort of depth and in any way that I can go on for hours and hours. Otherwise, it would be disingenuous if I was just here on behalf of the audience. I'm here on behalf of myself.

For whatever reason, that seems to be more, or seems to be entertaining to a large part of the audience. And Leo, something I'd like to understand is sometimes when speaking about, on the one hand, there's non-dualism with a capital N, which says all is the same. Like ultimately, if you were to look at it, it would be all the same substance. Even substance is the incorrect word, but it's all the same somehow from one perspective. I know that we don't like to be reductionistic and imply levels, but either at the highest or the lowest level, it's all the same. Then on our level, there seems to clearly be a difference between space and time. For example, we cross the street, it's the same space, but it's a different time than when the cars come by. We obviously have a different notion there, otherwise we'd be crushed. There's a difference between drinking poison and drinking

water. So how do these differences manifest? How is it that on one hand it's all the same, but then on the other it seems real enough that it would have an impact on our lives? Yeah, that's a good question. And I mean, Chris Langan answered this for you. His whole model, he talks about sinodifferences. Is that what his term is for it? Syndiffianesis. Oh yeah, okay. So something like, so I mean, he's very jargony. But yeah, reality is samenesses and differences interplaying with each other constantly. So that's the game. I mean, from my point of view, like I said before, the only thing that exists is an infinite field of consciousness.

This, what you're experiencing right now, this bubble of perception that you're in, this is the infinite field of consciousness. And this field of consciousness, for it to of consciousness and this field of consciousness for it to appear like a material reality it has to construct differences starting at the level of chairs and tables and floors and planets and things like that the hard physical stuff and then it has to construct even more differences you know differences within differences it's it's a cost of subdivisions an infinite fractal of subdivision and And then it even creates conceptual differences in terms of time and space and

thoughts and language and all of that. And, you know, you versus me and, you know, these sorts of conceptual distinctions and, you know, science versus religion. We carve this up. So we're constantly carving up reality because if we weren't carving up reality, if we weren't imagining these

differences, there would just be a uniform oneness. And then with a uniform oneness, it's like it was before the Big Bang. Think of what the Big Bang really sort of implies reality was doing before the Big Bang. What was was there if you take all the atoms and matter in the universe and you draw it all back to its origin point and cram it all together you're literally fusing the differences between every atom in the universe and then like there's nothing there from the beginning and then it explodes into a an explosion of infinite differences. You know, protons from electrons, matter from antimatter, and so on. I have a question about that. Now, this, let's say, undifferentiated field, does that have an intention behind it or an

awareness to it? Well, it's literally love. It's a unity. That's the Godhead. We might call that the Godhead. It's pure metaphysical love, consciousness, existence, without any form. Because, this is one way to put it. Don't take it too literally. It's just like a bit of an anthropomorphizing of God again.

But what's going on is that it would almost be too selfless to retain that level of uniformity and love only for oneself because you can be in that love forever You can exist as that uniform field but then what happens is that you sort of there's there's that like an initial intention and the intention is like I want to Share this love with others and also I want to explore all the finite aspects of myself because you literally God can't explore all of its finite aspects Because it's so infinite and so uniform that there's nothing there to explore because it's all undifferentiated. So then in a sense, God is like, well, but what if I was a human? What if I was an atom? What if I was an electron? What if I was the planet Earth? And then it all sort of breaks apart. In other words, the uniformity is unstable and it breaks apart. You might almost say that this is sort of like the collapse of the quantum wave function, and that it instantiates itself into some kind of form, which you might say is the origin of the Big Bang. Let me see if I understand this. So at first, there's this uniform field, for lack of a better word on my part, there's

this uniform field that is made entirely of love. In fact it is love. It wants, it loves love, but it feels like that's selfish in some manner. It has this idea somehow that I want to express this love to others or share it with others. In order to do that, it then has to fractionate itself. Well, is that correct? Yeah, from a certain perspective, that's correct. There's also another aspect to it is that God wants to explore itself too, right? So like, for example,

if we take a math analogy here, if we think of infinity as just numbers, right, if you just take infinity as all possible numbers, including integers and decimals and reals and unreals and all that, you can sort of hold it as an abstract notion, like all possible numbers. But it's abstract in the sense that

you're not actually exploring any particular number, and so you don't really see the fine detail of, like all possible numbers. But it's abstract in the sense that you're not actually exploring any particular number, and so you don't really see the fine detail of like the number 2 and the number 3. Because it's just all the numbers are blended together into just like this infinity. But what if you like are really curious about

mathematics, you don't want to just sit there with a pure abstraction of numbers, you want to actually get in there and like explore the properties of these numbers. Like what is the square root of two? Like, and then, or like, what is the number pi? And you can explore just the number pi forever because it's infinite. And you can say, well, it's like, it's 3.1415. And then you can keep going and exploring what the number pi is. And so in a sense, God is not only in the abstract sense everything, which it is, but it also wants to explore all the fine detail of itself forever. That takes forever because God is infinite.

So it has to, like literally God can sit there and crunch the number pi on a computer for eternity and see how far it gets. And it's interested in that. And there are some mathematicians who have devoted their whole lives just to crunching the number pi on a computer. And that gives them some joy, right? And likewise, you can do that with every aspect of reality. You can do that with sex.

You can do that with exploring drugs. You can do that with business. You can do that with animals, zoology, biology, chemistry, physics, and forever, all fields. Does this mean that there exists multiple universes? If you dream them up, it could. I mean... With different laws of physics. Yeah, that notion of there exists is a little tricky because what exists is what you're imagining.

So if you're imagining them, then they do exist. And if you're not, then they don't. But what I would say is that you could endlessly imagine new universes. So there's nothing stopping God from creating and imagining all sorts of wacky, crazy universes, which is what you explore when you're astral projecting or when you're taking psychedelics. You can explore these different universes. When you say that it depends on what I'm imagining, or to use your words, you, which means it could also be the person who's listening or watching this.

When you say you, are you referring to the you that is the God in us, that is all of us? What I mean is that you say it depends on what you're imagining. Well, some people would say, well, my imagination is so small, there's no way I could imagine. I don't even know what the fundamental laws, like some people say, I don't know what the fundamental laws are, let alone the mathematics behind Newton, let alone Einstein and QFT and so on. So I don't have the imagination enough to think up the whole universe. So when you say, I imagine, what are you referring to? You're referring to that I am God that somehow has forgotten that it's God, or you're referring to that when you say it depends on what you imagine?

Both, really. referring to that when you say it depends on what you imagine? Both, really. You as a human are just imagining stuff all the time. And even when you're exploring, if you're going to travel to Australia, I mean, in a sense, you're imagining Australia, and then you're traveling to it. Normally, humans wouldn't frame it that way, but I mean, that is what's happening. But I mean, yeah, the human imagination is very limited, and it's constrained by physical things like you can't just imagine a new continent and then fly to

it because your imagination is constrained but from the god point of view it could imagine a new continent or a new universe and go exploring it so there's very for a human there's a lot of limitations placed upon our imagination and that is because we have to see the trick here is that you have to maintain your human form. Because if you literally, if your

imagination was so open that you could imagine a new continent and then a new airline that would fly you to that new continent, you see the problem is, is that if you had that much imagination, you could literally unimagine your own physical body. You would feel like you're losing your mind. I mean, we have people like this, you know what know where they exist? They exist in insane asylums. These people are called psychotics and schizophrenics. They're imagining new realities all the time, but they're not part of what we call consensus reality, and they're not called normal. And so we lock these people away. And also, these people have difficulty functioning in the normal world, because to function in the normal world, you have to do like normal sort of stuff that is within the domain of this particular dream.

You have to earn money. You have to be socially polite and acceptable. You can't break laws. And if you're struggling with those, like if you're in a psychedelic state or if you're in a schizophrenic state, you're not going to follow the laws and then they're going to put you in jail. And why do we put you in jail? We put you in jail or into mental institution because you're a threat to the survival of those who are attached to this particular dream. See, that's the rub here is that survival is the heart of all this.

So the reason that you can't just willy-nilly walk through walls and imagine new continents and new airlines is because you're so scared that you're attached to survival as this physical being that you are in your entire physical life. Your wife, your career, money, your bank account, you're attached to all these things and you're afraid to die. If you weren't afraid to die, you'd already be dead and you'd be traveling to different universes, exploring them endlessly. But you're afraid to do that because you're attached to this one here.

You're attached to this dream. Last time we put up some, or you put up some disclaimers, I'll do the same. So if you have some mental instability, which I even categorize myself as being a part of that group, if you're unassured and you're unresolved and so on, or you're on the breaking end of schizophrenia or mania or psychotic episodes, psychosis, sorry sorry or you are suicidal then then okay i'll say that if that then what leo you have to be very careful about these ideas and if you feel like your mind is unraveling and destabilizing uh then maybe turn this off or find ways to ground yourself so that you're well grounded in this reality and you can handle the basics of survival in this reality. And then you

can return back and keep doing more spiritual work, but you just make sure you're properly grounded. When I hear someone say, well, it makes not much of a difference living or death, then I can understand why some people would say, well, let me just jump off a cliff or hang myself or shoot myself or shoot someone else because it's all the same. It doesn't matter. I'm too attached to my body. Why don't I just not be? So what is your response to that? attached to my body, why don't I just not be? So what is your response to that? Well, it's a little bit tricky because, of course, for me to speak the truth on this point is socially unacceptable, right? So I literally can't say what I really believe about this matter because if I did, there would be a social backlash because I'm expected to and you're

expected to as part of a social, you know, game that we're playing as part of society, we are expected to be responsible. And in general, I try to be very responsible with my teachings because I don't want my teachings to be misused and abused in horrible ways, the way they have been throughout all of human history. You know, all of religion has been corrupted and abused. So, so we have to be very careful. religion has been corrupted and abused. So we have to be very careful. But the truth of the matter is, is that what you do with your life is completely relative, and there's no reason to do one thing over any other thing unless you have some kind of bias. But in the absolute sense,

what you do with your life is completely up to you. Now, of course, what I recommend is that I actually have a rule that I give people, which is that if you're going to be doing this work and following me, then make sure you make a rule in your mind that you, whatever you do philosophically, you can explore reality, all this, explore psychedelics, whatever you want, but make a rule in your mind that you're not going to physically harm your own body. And in fact, not just that you won't harm it, but that you're going to take care of your body, that you recognize the beauty of your body, the beauty of this dream experience you're having here. This is a precious gift that you've been given.

You're alive. Try to make the best of this life and of this dream. And don't just willy nilly throw it away thinking like, oh, well, it's all just Leo says it's all just a dream. So it doesn't really matter. Of course, in the larger sense, it doesn't matter. But in fact, all of my work is about love, a deeper and deeper recognition of the love that this opportunity of this particular dream has been given to you and making the most of it. And I don't think that making the most of it involves jumping off a cliff or even treating your body poorly. I think you should care about

good nutrition and exercise and things like this. So take care of yourself. When you said that in some ultimate sense, it doesn't matter. I don't know if that's true, even in your own model. It's not as if, it's as if we've given ourselves this gift of this finite life, at least for now. So if we were to disband with it by killing ourselves or killing someone else, it's as if we're not appreciating this gift that was given to us by ourselves. Now, perhaps we've forgotten that we've given it regardless. Forget about that. The point is that we've been given a gift. It seems as if it's certain that this gift will be taken away by us or, well, it seems like

in your model can only be taken away by us in some ultimate sense that is that we will die so given that enjoy the gift while you have it because it's not guaranteed that you'll be given yours that you'll be giving yourself the same gift in the same way so appreciate this gift that you've given yourself the reason why i say that it's not clear to me that it doesn't matter in some ultimate sense is because in your model, it's not as if you are guaranteed to be given this gift again. Is that correct or no? When I say this gift, I don't just mean this finite existence that you'll come back as a snail, perhaps. I mean this gift as in your current body, your current life, experiencing it in the exact same way.

Also, just so you know, if from a physics sense, it's absolutely clear you won't be given this gift again. Because if you were, you would have no way of discerning whether or not this happened before. Because it's exactly the same. It's like stepping in the same river twice. Right. the same. It's like stepping in the same river twice. Right. Well, I mean, I wouldn't say that like once you drop dead from here, that you will relive this same life exactly the same way. I wouldn't put it like that. But if you kind of also want to think about infinity, the nature of infinity is so radical that you could like you could die, let's say, then you could live through

a trillion other different universes and lives. And then eventually you can circle all the way back around to where you are now because in the end everything has to circle back to you know to its beginning because even even the notion of a beginning and an end cannot exist within infinity that will also have to collapse so from the from the ultimate sense it's all a giant circle but um but still in my model, at the highest level, there can't possibly be anything wrong with reality. Reality is absolute perfection. And that includes even if you decide to kill yourself, that will also not be wrong. Now, from a relative perspective, I would think that's sad.

From a human perspective, that's kind of sad because to me, you're not really appreciating the gift. On the other hand, you know, if you're being, if you're living with some sort of horrible cancer or something, which is, which is completely ruining your life, then, you know, I think it's totally valid to consider things like, you know, doctor-assisted suicide or whatever to relieve that, you know, horrible situation you're in. Now, if you want to tolerate it, tolerate it. But I don't expect everybody to be able to tolerate that. And there's nothing wrong in that sense than terminating your life prematurely just because of the hand you were dealt. You know, you were dealt a bad hand. It's not really your fault that you

got this cancer. And there's nothing wrong with that either. So from God's point of view, there's nothing, there's never any loss. You're not actually losing anything because it's all imaginary. So you're not really losing anything. But at the same time, the whole point of spiritual work is to, is to be so recognizing of everything as love that you make them the most out of every situation and that you're not looking too far into the future about like, or you're, you're getting lost in, in your own personal bullshit of like, you know,

all my life is not good. Like somebody on my forum the other week, um, started talking about wanting to kill themselves because he's working like a, a job he doesn't like, like at Starbucks or something like that. So to me, that's a very silly reason to

want to kill yourself i mean there are good reasons to kill yourself that's not one of them and the good reasons would be extremely terminal people like extreme physical pain on a daily almost second to second basis yeah like if maybe if you got into a car accident and your spine was you know crippled and um and you were in constant tormenting pain that you couldn't stop, maybe in that case. Yeah, those are such a small amount of people that likely, if you're considering doing something drastic, you're not in that set. So you should examine yourself and re-examine and re-examine and re-examine. You know, Tyler Goldstein said something that was so brilliant. I don't know if it's unique, if he came up with it.

But I thought, this may, like, I need to think about this for weeks and weeks, if not months, if not years. The way that it usually works is that you have this definition of God. Then you use this definition of God to find evidence for God. And then what you do is you find no evidence for it. So then you say God doesn't exist. for God. And then what you do is you find no evidence for it. So then you say God doesn't exist. But Tyler said, actually, what you should do is use the fact that you don't see evidence of God as evidence that you need to update your definition of what God is. Rather than starting with the definition, finding no evidence, dismissing God, you start with looking for

evidence, you find no God, therefore you need to update your definition. you find no God, therefore you need to update your definition. I would put it even more simply is that if for you God is not in your direct experience right now, if you're not conscious of God right now, if God is not obvious to you right now, then treat God as imaginary, as not real. And don't go seeking God, seek truth. and seek, don't go seeking God, seek truth. I didn't go seeking God. I went seeking truth. And then what I got was God.

And that was a big surprise. And so let God surprise you. You know, you don't need to go believing in God. It's just, I mean, if you pretend like he's not there and that's all fine. And then just go find the truth. I mean, this whole process is about just deconstruct your entire mind in reality, deconstruct everything, absolutely every question,

absolutely everything. And then at the bottom of that, you'll find God. God is just the end result of complete nihilism. Earlier, I was talking about gifts and I was saying that it's not clear, at least to me, given your model, which to call it a model is already not doing a service, but whatever, for the sake of this conversation, your point of view, the truth, absolute truth, given that, that it's not clear to me that you'll be given this same gift again. Now you said it ultimately has to circle back.

However, I'm curious if in this nature of infinity, is the possibility that it's not guaranteed that it will circle back? Honestly, I don't know. See, there's actually a difference between becoming conscious of infinity and then trying to make sense of it. So the making sense of it part, which a lot of what your questions are about, it's like you're asking sort of niggly questions about like, well, is this going to happen or is that going to happen?

Like, can you predict the future? Can you, whatever, right? Like, what's your next, what's your next life going to be like? These sorts of little niggly questions, like, Honestly, I don't have clear answers to these. These are still a mystery to me in many ways. They're unknown. Because when you become conscious of infinity, you're tapping into the fact that infinity is everything. But that doesn't give you necessarily all the little scientific answers.

all the little scientific answers. Like you might say, well, Leo, if you became conscious of infinity, why can't you tell me, you know, the closest star in our galaxy, what's the closest star with life on it in our galaxy? Yeah, I understand that. You should be able to tell me. And it's like, well, I don't know that, because that's not what recognition of infinity is really about. So there's a sort of a distinction we can make between general omniscience and

specific omniscience. General omniscience is possible. You can become completely omniscient. I've, I've done this. Um, you can enter a state of, of,

of general omniscience where you will be conscious of, of everything because God is omniscience, but that doesn't, but then the, the problem with materialists is that they say, ah, well, if you become generally omniscient, that means you become specifically omniscience. But then the problem with materialists is that they say, ah, well, if you become generally omniscient, that means you become specifically omniscient. That means you know how many ants exist on a certain continent,

which of course you don't. Yeah, the way that I imagine it, and I think you gave me this analogy, is imagine you were on the moon. You could see the earth completely, but you can't see any given mountain or any given building. And so if someone was to say, well, there's no way you could have seen all of the earth because how many fingers were I holding up at 2 p.m. yesterday? Well, it doesn't mean you haven't seen all the earth.

You've seen it at an extremely low resolution. But in some sense, you saw all of it. In some sense, you didn't see all of it yeah that's that's right when it comes to reality is a dream i'm wondering about if this analogy holds up this dream analogy in the dream i'm sure you're aware of this one of the ways you can lose a dream is you look at your fingers you count them generally they're not five Or you can look at some text or a clock, you look at it, you look away, you look again, and it's changed. So there's this capricious nature to dreams, but it doesn't characterize waking life, where if I take a camera and I point it at some

wall or some event, it'll record it. I don't even have to look at that. I can come back and this can also comport with what other people's reports are. So how is it that one makes sense of this protein nature of the dreams? They're changing form, characteristics so readily, but then in our waking life, we have such a level of cohesiveness. At what points does this difference in degree become a difference of kind? Some people, just so you know, Leo, I don't think many people take this difference of degree to difference of kind question seriously some of the conservatives will say because it's only a simple difference of degree thus a fertilized egg is the same as a five-year-old kid because then you would have to put a point and say well when does it become a conscious human and so on and because

we can't then i'm going to consider it of the same kind. And I'm unsure if that's the case. I don't mean to be, I'm not saying I'm a pro-lifer or a pro-choicer, just so you know, but I'm just saying that I don't hear, I also hear some people say that because our identity is indistinct, like when does the universe begin and I end, therefore we're the same as the universe. I'm not sure if because we're just simply differences of degree, it means we're not differences of another kind. I don't think people take this seriously enough. Either way, the same argument comes to me when it comes to whether or not this analogy between dream life and waking life is apt, because there seems to be such a difference of degree, difference of

cohesiveness that doesn't characterize dreams so do you mind helping me through this right so firstly do you understand what i mean when i say that of course yeah of course i mean that's the whole problem of of reality um this is such a deep existential issue because what you're talking about is difference notice how many times you use the word difference in that explanation right or in your questioning so so, so imagination is the imagination of difference. So the differences are all relative. It depends on where they're drawn, and your ego is not in control of all the differences you're drawing.

So for example, your ego is in control of where you draw the difference between when a human is a human. Is it at conception? Is it five human. Is it at conception? Is it five months? Is it at birth? You know, your mind, we can change that boundary that we're drawing, but you can't so easily change the boundary

between my physical body and your physical body. That's a deeper level of imagination, a deeper boundary that is drawn for you by the universe. And that's what we call physics. That's why you call it a physical difference. But if you become more conscious, you can even start to dissolve that physical difference. So, yeah. So what we ordinarily call real is something that is very, very persistent and cohesive and consistent.

And that's what so you were talking about dreams versus reality as a difference of, of cohesion, cohesion, right? So, you know, reality has a, I mean, sorry, Einstein has a great quote where he says that reality is all an illusion, but it's a very persistent illusion. I'm paraphrasing. Maybe you've heard that one before and he's exactly right. So, uh, it's an illusion, but the fact that it's very consistent is what makes it feel solid. Whereas in your dreams, it's very loosey goosey. Yeah. So what's the explanation for this? And also keep that in mind. Also, when you said that with our own conscious mind, with our own imagination, we can also dissolve that consistency or that cohesiveness.

Well, someone may be listening to them and saying, can you prove it to me now, Leo? Can you imagine away this webcam? Can you imagine away the internet? So it stops right now. Keep those two in mind. An explanation as to cohesiveness in a second. How the heck is it that we can consciously imagine when it seems like it's clear? Go take lsd take dmt whatever it is it seems like all that's going to happen to you is you're just going to ride on your floor but it's not like the universe is ending for me so how where does your imagination begin like how does it influence it influences it for you yes okay you get the idea right well that's exactly where psychedelics are so helpful is that you take a psychedelic and yeah, you actually will literally start to dissolve

your couch and your, the walls of your house. They'll, they'll melt away just like in a dream. Now the materialist makes a very big mistake here is that the materialist, cause he's so stuck in materialism will, will come back from that experience and say, Oh, because he's so stuck in materialism will come back from that experience and say, oh, well, that was just all a hallucination in my brain, not recognizing that he's back into sort of the cohesive dream, and now he's dreaming the brain, and he's not questioning what the brain is. So, I mean, there's a very deep attachment to this notion of a material reality.

So you have to deconstruct all that. But if you really go into a psychedelic trip without that dense materialist philosophy trying to ground your sense of reality. Because see, your mind is trying, it needs to anchor itself somehow precisely because everything is so loosey-goosey. If you're not constantly clinging to some kind of anchor point. So some of these anchor points that your mind uses is like the idea that you were born, memories of your parents during childhood, the idea that you went to school. These are all anchors that ground your sense of identity and who you are as a human. Science, biology, chemistry, the idea that you have a brain that is rendering this experience right here. So, uh, cohesiveness, why is it so? So you have to understand that if you truly understand the

things that I'm saying, you're going to, you're going to start to lose your mind and your grip on reality. And this will freak people out. So reason that a sam harris will take a psychedelic and will actually start to experience material reality dissolving and turning into a dream but then he comes back and he still doesn't get it because if he truly got it he would have such an existential crisis he would have to go through a month or a year of like deep profound um doubt and depression and misery because he was so attached to these ideas of a material reality of brains of atoms of all these sorts of things and then he has to reformulate his entire worldview and it might seem like he's losing his mind because even his children and his wife you know he's married i'm sure he loves his children. He's going to start to realize that, like, what if that's not even real?

Like, can you understand how difficult that is emotionally to do? So, of course, there's, see, our minds are not an honest actor. We go into this truth-seeking endeavor thinking that our minds are an honest actor. They're not an honest actor. Our minds are in the business of constructing reality all the time and they are constantly filtering our reality and anything we hear to prevent us from from deconstructing our sense of reality and this is why people get so ideologically attached to science to religion to new age ideology to, we're getting so ideological

because literally if we're not doing that, then there is no reality that we can ground ourselves in. I don't want to lose this thread, so I'll write it down, the cohesion argument, consistency argument. Okay. Well, look, if it wasn't consistent, if the dream wasn't consistent, then it would be a dream and it wouldn't feel real. And so God has to look from God's point of view. God could just dream in a loosey goosey way. And that's interesting. You do that at night when you sleep. But what if God wanted to construct such a dream where he was dreaming that he wasn't dreaming a dream that

was literally indistinguishable from reality in that sense god would have to make it extremely consistent and then god could fool itself into believing that there is a reality so how do you construct a reality you dream it so consistently so perfectly that there's not a single glitch in the matrix so to speak and then over a period of years the matrix, so to speak, and then over a period of years, a human baby grows up in it and it takes that for reality. That's how God fools itself into constructing realities that are not dreams. Can you help me distinguish why is it not real? The reason is that why is it that if all that exists is let's say consciousness and it imagines why is not what it imagines considered real so let's say you have a wife that is real even to a schizophrenic who sees a snake i would say

if we agree that snake isn't real then it still matters what's the difference between being real, being imaginary, and also what matters? Right, well, again, notice that word difference. The difference is whatever you want it to be in a certain sense, it's relativistic. So we could, like, I'm totally flexible with terminology. So we could change all of our terminology if we want to.

The problem is that we have to make sure that when we're changing our terminology that we're updating our entire model of reality, not just a single label or word. That's the trick, is that when you start to play around with labels, it's not just changing a label. The label is connected to your entire worldview, so you have to then change your whole worldview, which takes time and effort to do. So if you want to call it real, we can call it all real.

But then you also have to say that, like, you know, Santa Claus is real, which most people would not want to say, because they've drawn that distinction. And in their mind, you know, Santa Claus is unreal, unicorns are unreal, but your wife is real. Just, we can use whatever words you want, as long as we recognize the equality. Because what's being missed is the equality. Cause the mind is carving these things up. And then it's saying, well,

this is different from that fundamentally. It's a difference in kind. And, and then that is how reality gets solidified and constructed. But the point of saying, the reason I sometimes say it's unreal is because every difference you think is objective and is permanent, it's not is because every difference you think is objective and is permanent, it's not permanent. So you have to recognize, for example, that

the difference between your wife and Santa Claus, ordinarily you'd say, well, that's a permanent physical difference in kind. And people who believe that my wife is real, those are sane people. People who believe Santa Claus is real. Those are insane people or stupid children or something, you might say. And what I'm telling you is that that only holds true now, for now, for a while, while you're dreaming. Tomorrow, that can all change. You take a psychedelic, that can change. Or you get hit in the head, that will change. You become schizophrenic, that will change.

You die and go to a different universe, that will all change. So that is what's being missed by the materialist. The materialist actually holds that the difference between his wife and Santa Claus is something fundamental. And what the materialist is missing is recognition that that's not fundamental. That's all variable. I have to let you know what occurs to me. Firstly, I wouldn't say that it's a materialist. I would say that you can even be an idealist. Remember when I was giving that analogy with the buttons on the wall, this is good, this is pain, this is truth, and so on? You can even take that, even with the assumption of idealism, and still say, well, even that

is consciousness, but still say that it doesn't necessarily mean that one's view of truth, God, and unity are truthful if you touch those buttons on the idealist, if you fiddle with those consciousness knobs. So I wouldn't say that what I gave before was a materialist argument. It actually doesn't particularly depend on what one chooses as ontology. There's various kinds of philosophies that are similar to materialism. I mean, I might generalize that notion and say that it's a realist philosophy. It's basically people who believe that the physical or the things that they see are sort of real in a sort of a naive sense. That there's actually a clear definition of what real is. The problem is that real, as Terence McKenna says,

that real is a notion that only naive minds hold. There's no real definition of what real is. That's what you got to realize. It's funny. Yeah, man. I'm trying to make sense of it. I know that I shouldn't be making sense. I'm trying to feel it as well, not just model it, not intellectualize it. What's holding me back is, I think I brought this up to you before. It's so

tricky because we're in the, right now, just by the fact that I'm speaking with you, people are hearing, it's almost like we're in the business of verbalizing. And well, we are in the business of verbalizing. And it sounds like when I'm speaking to many of these people on the more spiritual end, what they will say is ultimately, Kurt, you have to experience it, and that all of this rationalization pales, not only pales in comparison, cannot do it justice, so in some sense, it's not mental masturbation, that would be even better, because that's what they're saying, all existence is mental masturbation, that would be even better, because that's what they're saying. All existence is mental masturbation. When people deride some concept by saying it's mental masturbation, actually, no, that's true.

It's more verbal masturbation. Well, well. That's right. When someone says that this is real, and Terrence McKenna said only a naive mind, but then what instantly occurs to me, well, you're assuming there exists something real called naive. And then, and you're making fun of, which I also don't like when people make, when people,

you know, they jibe other people and they scorn them and so on. I personally don't like that, especially when it comes to people like you or to people like other spiritual leaders, because they come from such a place of love. I would expect them to be much more understanding and compassionate to people who disagree spiritual leaders, because they come from such a place of love, I would expect them to be much more understanding and compassionate to people who disagree with them.

Regardless, when Terrence McKenna says like, hey, this is the naive mind believing it. Well, is there reality to naiveness? Is there such a thing as being more naive or less naive? Then one would say, Kurt, you're tripped up in words. Yeah, but he made a statement using words, so can I not? Right. Help me out here.

It's a game. It's a mind game. So you have to recognize that you're playing mind games. So, I mean, Terrence McKenna, I mean, every single, see, again, it's tricky. Every single statement that I make, verbal statement that I make, people tend to want to take it as an absolute. But it's not an absolute.

I treat all of language and even all of logic as completely relative. So for me, like, a lot of the big trap that academics and scientific type of people fall into is that they try to make everything so rigorous because they want to, like, have a concrete explanation for everything. And it has to make cohesive sense. And my point is that that entire attitude is wrong because that attitude assumes that you can actually make a cohesive model of infinity, which of course you can't. So I just bite the bullet and I say that

if you study my work, you're going to find contradictions in my work. And that is not a mistake. That actually is a feature of infinity. It has to be that way. If you think you can develop a model of reality that is not going to have any contradictions in it, you're just a fool. Because you're never going to be able to do that because infinity is always going to be paradoxical. So you're always going to have paradoxes and contradictions.

So you just have to accept that. And then you can play. Because you're not taking every statement too seriously. The Terence McKenna statement, that's just a statement that's intended to show you that, you know, the notion of reality, you should question what that notion is. It's not intended as some sort of scientific rigorous statement. The problem is that scientists take everything they say too literally. But even all of science, what scientists don't understand is that really you're speaking in vague metaphors. Even when you're doing quantum mechanics, it's all vague metaphors. It's not truly rigorous in any sense. That's an illusion.

There's no real rigor in mathematics or logic. That's an illusion. You're actually fooling yourself when you're doing that so I understand that you like being rigorous because you're coming from that frame of thinking but at some point you have to disabuse of yourself of that notion kind of let it go, like you're attached to the idea of rigor that's holding you back from exploring more of reality because look, if you're going to be rigorous, look what's going to happen

you're going to actually construct a reality that reflects your own rigor so if you're going to be very rigorous if the mind is very rigorous you're imagining that everything is supposed to be very rigorous and you're just assuming that then that's what reality will be for you you're creating a self fulfilling prophecy in the same sense like as a conspiracy theorist if i believe that everyone is out to get me the government is watching me if i believe that that's what my reality is going to become and if you tell me leo no you know the government is not hunting you down they're not watching you the cia is not after you i'm going to say well you're working for the cia man that's why you're saying that right you see so i can i can literally spin

my own bubble of reality into whatever i want it to be. If I'm committed enough to it, that's what people like Alex Jones are doing. And scientists are doing the same thing. But see, it's easy to tell that with Alex Jones, it's easy to tell that he's completely lost in his own bubble of reality. With a radical fundamentalist Christian or Muslim, it's also easy to tell how they're bullshitting themselves and constructing their own little bubble of reality. But with science and academia, it's harder to see that because we tend to say that like, well, those people are playing mind games, but the scientists are not playing mind games. We are just observing nature. But that's not true.

You're also playing mind games. The mind game you're playing is a rigorous constructing, a sort of a rigorous, very buttoned down version of reality. And then that does become your reality. And then it creates a confirmation bias. And then you look at the world and you say, well, Leo, it's so scientific and rigorous. But did you consider that it's only scientific and rigorous because that's how you've been looking at it the whole time? The key thing we need to talk about here is the idea of what's called becoming construct aware. This is actually a developmental stage within the ego. It's called construct awareness, where you become actually aware of how your mind is constructing all of reality. This is the stage you you got to reach to really bust through materialism, science, and some of these other things. So like most scientists are not construct aware. That's their problem. Okay. So let's imagine, I'm going to try and reiterate what you said. Let me know if I'm

missing any points. So imagine a scientist who says the world is consistent and rigorous and defined and specific. And anytime there's a part of reality that isn't, they say, well, that's actually not part of reality. So for example, your mind can construct these protean objects like lava lamps and so on, the metaphorical equivalents of such. And then you say, well, that's actually not rigorous and defined because it's not part of reality. It's a self-fulfilling definition. I'm saying reality is rigorous and specific. And then someone points to an example of reality that isn't. Well, then you say, well, that's actually not part of reality. So in that sense, it's self-fulfilling. Okay. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. So the mind, the scientific mind and really

any mind, what it does is that it constructs a limited notion of existence and then it has to play defense the ego has to play defense and it has to deny certain aspects of reality certain experiences it has to deny or has to denigrate those because otherwise they would actually conflict with its model and that will always happen if your model is anything other than infinity itself that will always happen because anything finite is going to be busted by infinity eventually because infinity is the truth. So, for example, with scientists, you know, you can tell a scientist like, well, what about your dreams? Your dreams are all wacky and unscientific. They're illogical. Physics doesn't hold within your dreams. But then the scientist will say, oh, yeah, but that's just a dream. That's just a hallucination. That's not

what science is. That's not real reality. That's just a hallucination. That's not what science is. That's not real reality. That's some sort of fake reality that my brain is constructing. See? So there's always going to be some kind of excuse. You know, the Christian does the same thing. You can tell a Christian, like, well, what about the Buddhists? You know, shouldn't you go study the Buddhists? And the Christian will say, no, the Buddhists are evil.

Why would I want to go study them? So what the mind is doing is it's creating a sort of a hermetically sealed conceptual bubble, which it is confusing for reality. Everybody is doing this no matter what their worldview. We're doing this politically. We're doing this economically, whether you're a socialist or a capitalist. And you're doing it if you're a materialist, a scientist, a rationalist, like to a rational person, if you point out to a rational person certain rational paradoxes about rationality, they will deny those. And that's exactly, for example, what happened within set theory. So like, you know, Bertrand Russell with Russell's paradox. within mathematics and logic 100 years ago. Basically, there was a guy by the name of Gottlieb Frege who wanted to ground all of arithmetic in logic. This project was called Logicism.

And then there were other colleagues of his, like David Hilbert and others, who literally believed that they could ground all of the truths of mathematics into logic. And something like set theory or some other simple set of, you know, formalized axioms. They were trying to formalize all of mathematics and all of logic and then ultimately all of science.

And logical positivism was a movement also that was along these lines. They were trying to do that. And then, and then, um, so Gottlieb Frigga actually wrote an entire book about how he grounded all of arithmetic within logic. And he thought he succeeded. And then, right as he was publishing the book, Bertrand Russell discovered Russell's paradox. That paradox applied to the theories of Gottlieb Frege. And Frege was completely devastated when he read that paradox. Because his whole life's work was deconstructed by that one single paradox.

And so the idea that you can ground even mathematics in logic is a foolish notion. You can't do that because mathematics itself is infinite and your logical schemes are all finite. So you can't do that. That's what – and then later, Gertl's incompleteness theorem put the final nail in the coffin and there was Alfred Tarski who expanded Gertl's incompleteness theorem to even larger domains

and so just that's impossible, you can't do that by the way, there's an infinite number of different logics you can have there's not a single one logic, there's actually an infinity of logics, so which logic There's not a single one logic. There's actually an infinity of logics. So which logic are you going to use to logic your reality? Who gets to decide which logic is the right logic?

You see the problem? I'm curious about how is it that myself, how is it that I can deal with people who have world views that allow for contradictions? As soon as I'm speaking with someone who says, well, contradictions are okay, then I don't know where to go. Because most of the time, a way that a proof is, is proof by contradiction. Now, if you're not allowed that, then you have proof by construction. And that's actually extremely tricky. Well, the notion of proof collapses, you see. So like we talked about in the previous episode, proof is a second order notion. Truth is prior to proof. So one of the mistakes is assuming that everything should be provable or that if it's true, it must

be provable. You have to drop that notion. It's just that's a silly notion to hold. There's no reason why that should be true. Can I quibble for a second? Please quibble. Okay. Make sure you really get this because this is so important.

This is actually holding you back from awakening. This is actually holding you back from awakening. I see that you and a few other people use Gödel's incompleteness theorem to, well, theorems, at least to show that there exists truths that are outside provability. However, if you hold that statement as well as the other statement that contradictions are allowed, you can't have that. Because Gödel's incompleteness theorem is actually a trade-off between consistency and provability. So it says that if your system is consistent, then so-and-so.

But if you are already throwing out consistency, like you're allowing contradictions, then there's no way you can use Gödel's incompleteness theorem to say there exist truths that are unprovable. Right. No, I still can. It's just that I won't be consistent in the larger scheme. See, the reason that mathematics and logic and so forth and science are very scared of contradictions is because a contradiction then allows you to basically prove anything in a logical system. Once you allow contradiction, anything goes. And that's a very threatening notion because the whole point of logic is to deny certain things. And so basically, in a sense, what your contradiction is showing is

it's showing infinity. It busts your system open to infinity. Anything goes. Which is exactly the case. See, none of what I say about truth depends upon Gödel's incompleteness theorem or any logical thing that I say. The truth is completely independent of any kind of

logic, because it is the origin of logic. It's prior to logic. So nothing I say about the truth actually hinges on any logical thing that I say. So any logical thing that I say, which you can't, let's say you find some contradiction in my logic. I can just say, okay, fine. But the truth is still the truth. It doesn't matter what the logic is. The logic is a relative game that we're playing it's part of the dream logic is part of the dream okay so when i use when i use logic please understand when i'm using logic it's not because i believe in logic i don't believe in logic to me it's a dream i'm using it for your

benefit because where you're you're at in your uh understanding is that you need things to be logical so i'm playing that game a bit to to know, for your benefit in the same way that like, like if you were stuck in the matrix from the movie, the matrix, and I was outside the matrix and I wanted to bust you out of the matrix, how would I do that? I would have to enter the matrix and play by the rules of the matrix to help you escape the matrix. But you might say, well, Leo, but why are you in the matrix? But I'm in the matrix to help you get out of the matrix. I don't need to be in the matrix. I can be outside the matrix. I came into the matrix to help you break out. That's not because I believe in the matrix. I wonder so much about, I'm sure you've heard this from people that reality is fractal-like

in the sense that you can zoom in and there are repetitions and patterns and so on, and maybe even exact replications of the patterns. And then I wonder how much of it, when we study logic and you're saying, well, logic is holding you back. How much of anything is holding us back? How much of anything is holding us back? Truly, if reality had this infinite repetition of patterns, then to me, this is something I want to explore with Ian McGilchrist, because I think he believes this in some manner, but he at the same time says left brain is not that should be subservient to the right brain. But I'm also wondering, if one took logic to its ultimate conclusion, would you end up to this?

No matter which route you went, as long as you explore it and keep exploring, you would end up to the same ultimate reality. Yeah, exactly. All roads lead to truth, to God. And actually, there's a great quote, I believe, by Blaise Pascal. I've used it before in my videos. I love this quote it says the chief aim of reason is to show the limitations of reason you have to be able to turn reason in on itself yeah right if you're gonna if you can't you like and that's exactly what happens if you be you can become so logical that eventually your logic will break and you will realize that

logic itself is a game, which to me is exactly what, for example, happened with Russell's paradox or with the Gödel incompleteness theorems and Tarski's incompleteness theorems, is that people became so logical that then they fooled themselves that we can finally

button down all of reality logic and then someone like Gödel comes along and says, no, you can't. And that should be your clue to say that, ah, there's something I'm missing. There's something beyond logic. It's not just as simple as logic. Reality is metalogical. It's translogical. Logic is a portion of reality and it works.

I'm not saying logic doesn't work. I'm not saying it's not useful. Use your logic when you're dealing with everyday things. Like, for example, notions were not designed to deal with the quantum level. They were only designed to deal with this limited portion of reality that we usually deal with when we're living in the jungle or something. That's how we evolved. Likewise, logic has limits. Science has limits. You can use science within limits, but you have to recognize that those limits, you can use science within limits but you have to recognize that those limits you can go beyond those limits okay let me see if i'm understanding you correctly i don't actually think there's a problem with science i think there's a problem with

the general assumptions metaphysical assumptions ontological assumptions that come along with science but science actually makes no claim to ontology this is but that's right but science actually makes no claim to ontology. This is Bernard Castrop's point. That's right, but science does make claims to ontology. That's the devil within science, is that science wants to have it both ways. If you corner a scientist really deeply on the ontology, he will say, oh, no, no, no, science is all just pragmatic. It's all just pragmatic. It's all just instrumental. We don't care about the ontology. but then the scientist goes right back to ontology the scientist is not conscious of his own snuck in ontology he sneaks in an ontology and denies that it's an ontology that's the problem those are independent because those can be disentangled for example bernardo castro he may call himself a scientist but he wouldn't fall under the category

of maybe what you want to say is scientism rather than scientist, though I don't know the exact definition of scientism. I think it's a different word. Regardless, science itself can be seen as a process, like investigate the universe, broadly speaking. Then there's also like hypothesize and experiment and so on and reiterate. But you can also think of it as investigation. And if you take it to mean that, it as investigation. And if you take it to mean that, then it's not as if science has embedded in it ontology. Generally, scientists are inculcated unconsciously with a certain ontology, and they're defensive about it, and they're unaware of it. Okay, so I wanted to point that out. And then number two, let me see if I can understand what you're saying. Imagine the

scientist is like this. Now, I don't want to use the word scientist because I don't want to get in the habit of denigrating scientists wholeheartedly. Let's say, I don't know what to call it regardless, someone who's exploring nature and takes in materialism and the principles of logic as foundational. So they explore, and what they find is generally every time before we said this was because of fairies and this was because of angels, we thought that. Then we applied certain logical principles, certain investigatory principles, and we found that actually no, it can be explained with so-and-so. And that has crept over and over and over. Then the mistake that you're saying is that that process doesn't extend to or doesn't necessarily extend to the entire universe. We think because it's applied in this domain and it's kept increasing, like,

let's give them their due every time that people have said, we need God to justify so-and-so, like the orbits of the planet, whatever it may be, that we found that there is some explanation that doesn't require a being, that requires only mechanisms like we would think of as a watch following. And unless you want to say that a watch is following its laws because of God, then you can't say that the orbits of the planets are because of God and so on. Then you're saying the mistake is to extend that to the entire universe. Is that correct? Yeah, the problem is that this process is endless because reality is infinite. So science implicitly assumes, part of science is ontology, that it assumes a finite

reality, actually. Now, some scientists will say, no, maybe we'll allow for an infinite physical universe, but they don't really understand the extent of, it's still all finite in their minds. They sort of assume that, like, if we can just keep doing science, eventually we'll understand what consciousness is, for example. Or we'll understand everything. And that's a mistake. That's actually an assumption. You see, that's a snuck-in epistemic assumption, is that you can use science to explore and understand everything that's true. But that's never been questioned, nor has it been proven or demonstrated by science.

But that's never been questioned, nor has it been proven or demonstrated by science. Because, see, fundamentally, science is a distinction that we draw within our epistemology. Science is a finite method. It's always a finite method. But if reality is infinite, you can't use a finite method to grasp infinity. So there's also an important distinction. That needs to be made here. Between exploring parts of reality. Versus grasping reality as a whole. So you can use science. To explore parts of reality.

And to grasp parts of reality. But you cannot use science. To grasp all of reality as a whole. Nor. So for example. If you have the question of like. Why is there something rather than nothing. You can't use science to answer that question. Or if you have a question like, where did

existence come from, you can't use science to answer that question. Also, you can't use science to grasp science. So science actually isn't capable of fully grasping itself because just like the hand cannot grasp itself, you can grasp other things with the hand, but you run into a self-reflection problem when you're trying to use the hand to grasp itself. It actually can't. So science is incapable of grasping itself. Can I make two quick comments? Oh, yeah. Okay. So one, I'm going to say them, but I technically need to write them, because they're completely different questions. So is you mentioned questions like how does consciousness arise or what happened what gave birth to this

universe and so on there's certain questions science can't answer what i'm curious about is how does one know which are the questions science can answer and which are the ones that science can't given in the past we thought science couldn't answer so and so and we've been wrong many times we just don't know which ones are which so So that's one. I'm going to park that and get back to it. Hopefully I can remember that. Okay, then the question, then point number two was you mentioned that no scientist understands this. I wouldn't say that because Hillary Putnam, and this is like from the 70s or 80s or so, he said that the sphere of knowledge, there's some large quote that I love. Something like Aristotle was profoundly correct in saying that there are two distinct spheres, or at least there are two spheres.

One is practical ethics, practical knowledge, and then the other is scientific knowledge, which is theoretical knowledge. And the sooner that we can see that the sphere of knowledge encompassed by science is smaller than the sphere of total knowledge, the sooner we can get to a sane view of ourselves as a culture and of science as well. So people would consider Hillary Putnam to be an example of a scientific atheist, but even he points out the limits of science and he's a scientist. So I wouldn't say necessarily all scientists. Well, of course, I mean, any good scientist has to admit that there are limits to science. I mean, he would look like a total fool if he didn't. But I'm just saying that even scientists, I mean, all good scientists admit that there are limits to science. The problem is that they don't understand the extent of the limits.

They're underestimating the limits. Okay. Okay. So let's get to the limits. Is there some way that we can know a priori before investigating which questions are within the domain of scientific explanation and which are not? That itself is a scientific question. You see, it's a meta, it's a meta, it's a meta scientific question. So yeah, the problem is that you don't, when you begin doing science, you don't actually know whether your science will apply to all of reality. That's, that's actually a question you have to test. And you see the problem with testing that is that it's almost impossible to test that because you literally have to explore the entire universe before you knew the answer to that question. You'd have to apply science to everything. Like you'd have to apply science to clouds, to rocks, to rainbows, to Santa Claus, to God, to angels, to devils. You have to test science everywhere to see whether it really applies. The problem is that we're not even close to doing that. We haven't explored even 1% of the universe, according to science. Going back to the Santa Claus is imaginary or real, depending on

what one uses as a definition for real or imaginary. Let's imagine you're the materialist scientist. They would say, well, my wife is real, my children are real, and Santa Claus is real in the sense that it's a concept, but it's not real in the same way. So what do you say to that? Well, I would say that even your wife is a concept. Okay, what if they say, yes, you're correct in that if I'm looking at my table, I see some chapstick. I'm calling that chapstick, and of course, we mentioned before, the perimeter is variable, so it's not clear what constitutes the chapstick and what doesn't. What constitutes a cup? What constitutes a cup plus a chapstick? Can you simply add them?

It's not clear,. But then what conclusions does one draw from indistinct boundaries? Does one say that therefore it's not real? I don't know. Well, what conclusions does one draw? Because there's fuzziness, does one conclude that therefore we cannot draw any circumference or any environs? Or does one say, well, we can, we just have to acknowledge that there is an arbitrary nature to them but then the question is is it entirely arbitrary even with the assumptions of idealism the fact that we are constructing it does that mean that there is a does that mean it's not real because in the idealist sense it seems to me like all that

you imagine is real right well yeah there's no distinction between real and imaginary that's what i'm telling you um see in the scientific mind the problem is that they believe that there is but there actually isn't so i mean everything imaginary is real um uh the trick here is that so science has a has a meta problem which is uh there's a meta scientific issue of identity so people assume that identity is just an objective static thing that science proves it actually doesn't science is incapable of ever proving

identity so what I mean by identity is what is a thing what is anything so for example is a chair a chair where is the line between your chair and you science assumes that well the universe is made up of objects Chair? Where is the line between your chair and you? Science assumes that, well, the universe is made up of objects, discrete objects like chairs and human bodies.

And that, for example, your body is different from your wife's body. But science cannot actually prove that your body is separate from your wife's body. It's impossible to prove that. That's just a meta-scientific assumption that science brings into the, that's the sneaky ontology that science brings into and then denies that it does so. So science has to assume identity. So usually our identity comes from our sort of nervous system. You know, when our eyes look at the room, our eyes break down our experience into objects. our experience into objects. They're doing this automatically for us. And science just assumes that as a given and takes that and then runs with it. And it just assumes that, you know, a table is different from a chair and so on. But when you start questioning this, you realize that that process itself can be deconstructed and you can realize that your mind is actually constructing these things. And so... I know I need to be more accommodating to your language rather than insisting you meet me halfway or that you come to me at all i want to know when you use

the word science and science i think i think that you're conflating science with what i said generally comes associated with science but those can be disentangled. So science wouldn't say that. I'll just say that science doesn't actually say there exists separate objects. It would say that you can model the world in such a manner. And then from those models, we can have predictions of so-and-so and build buildings like I live in with the internet and lights and so on.

And this seems to work and it seems to work quote unquote better than any other model right so that's what i would say science yeah it wouldn't actually make ontological claims yeah the problem is that science is very sneaky right since it's a mind game it's playing games so science says it both ways at different times depending on what it needs to say to make sure that science is consistent with itself so because science is always trying to maintain its own consistency which means it has to deny any areas where it's inconsistent. So there are inconsistencies within science,

but they're all denied by science. So what I would say is that actually science does make ontological claims. Now, your point, what you're trying to say is that, Leo, we can clean up science. Science doesn't have to be that way. And that's correct.

It doesn't have to be that way. We can make science construct aware. So the key problem with science is that science is constructing various kinds of distinctions which it needs in order to do its science. And if we want to improve science and take it to the next level, if we want to, for example, use science to start to understand consciousness, we need to radically expand our boundaries of what science is. And we need to make science aware of how when you're doing science, you're not just doing science in the same, in the sense that you're discovering what's true about nature. You're actually constructing nature as you're doing science. And that is the thing that science is in denial about. So when we're looking for quarks, we need to say that, no, it's not just that the

quarks were there. It's that we need to recognize that we're constructing quarks as we're looking for them. And then you can do your science. So I'm not anti-science. And I don't believe that we should destroy science. We need science to be cleaned up so that it can work better. And in fact, the history of science, you've talked with uh robert uh is it what's his first african first name coon thomas coon right robert lawrence coon robert lawrence coon thomas coon i wish i could speak to you he's no longer with us and hasn't been for a little while oh really yeah okay maybe thomas wrote the book about paradigms right yeah that's what i'm referring to yeah right oh okay no i didn't interview thomas coon oh i thought you did

okay robert lawrence coon who runs the channel called closer to truth oh okay no that's different Right. That's who I'm referring to. Oh, okay. No, I didn't interview Thomas Kuhn. Oh, I thought you did. Okay. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, who runs the channel called Closer to Truth. Oh, okay. No, that's different. That's my mistake because they have the same last name. But anyways, yeah. So I'm talking about the Kuhn who wrote the popular book. Okay. So, yeah. So the point is that science is always expanding its limits. And the problem we face right now in science is that we're stuck. We're stuck in string

theory we're struck in quantum mechanics we're stuck unable to reconcile gravity with with quantum mechanics uh science has been stuck for the last 50 years and the reason that is is because it's hit upon the it's it's metaphysical limits we actually need to transform the metaphysics and the epistemology of science if we want to do new groundbreaking research within science. And scientists are too dense to do this. They need to, somebody got to fucking wake them up. So the reason I'm so critical, the reason I'm so critical is because I want to get them to recognize that they're being stupid, not because they have to be stupid forever, but then they recognize, oh yeah, I'm being stupid, of course. And then they can expand and then we can do great science. So I'm pro-science. Have you heard of my notion called abigenosis?

Yes. Like science 2.0. Okay. For those who are unacquainted, science 2.0 or abigenosis, as I call it, I'm wondering if, given that science has progressed, it's not as if science has stayed static 300 years ago, what we call science. I don't even think the term was coined 300 years ago. Regardless, it's not as if it's been the same for 300 years or even 100 years. It's evolved. So what I'm wondering is, well, does that mean that we're at the final state or does it become something else? And then if it's going to become something else, what does that look like? And to me, I surmise that it has to do with integrating both the Western perspective of what knowledge is and then an Eastern,

which is Abhijna, I believe it's called in the Abhijna, I'm not sure. So the Western is Gnosis or science, but I am integrating those and calling it Ab beach gnosis. So that's my, perhaps you can think of that as a sub goal, if not the true ultimate goal of theories of everything. It's like, what the heck will science evolve into? Well, that's what my work, a lot of my work is about that. Like I'm writing a whole book about that. But there's an important mistake I want to point out to you about how you're framing that. Sure. First of all, you're framing sort of East versus West as though the things that I'm talking about are from the East.

They're really not. If you actually study Western philosophy and Western mysticism, then all the ideas of the East are present in the West. So it's really not. That's a false dichotomy. You know, read Plotinus, read Anaximander, read Anaxagoras, read Heraclitus, read, read, read, read the Christian mystics, read Meister Eckhart. It's everything I'm talking about is all there. It's not like we need to go to Buddhism.

It's not like I'm a Buddhist or anything. You bring up a good point, especially with the Christian mystics. What I wonder is, you know, so many people, and you've probably seen this so much, and I dislike when I see this, but that could be my own bias, my own projections. When people, whoever I'm speaking to, when it comes to non-dualism, there'll be comments, maybe 10, that say, oh, this was thought of 10,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago in the Vedic texts. And as if that negates what the person is saying, or as if the person who I'm speaking to, for example, you, as if you're claiming this is entirely new knowledge but what that comment points to also is that there seems to be an emphasis in my perception that the eastern perspective was

more correct than what we consider to be the western perspective now you're saying that dichotomy is not there that's why i'm being specifically saying the western we consider to be the western perspective your your progress there's a progressive notion, and there exists a God that's outside you. And the Eastern perspective, traditional, the way that we colloquially call the Eastern perspective is more of one of infinite malleability, and repetition of lives and connectedness between all of us. And I'm also, and I'm wondering, I'm curious, Leo, if you've felt any of this. If you felt, me and you, we've talked so much, and I've talked so much to people on this channel

that are more Eastern-minded. Granted, they're Western-minded, Eastern-minded, regardless. I'm wondering how much of the Western, the traditional Western can be salvaged. How much of this life, there actually exists a notion of progress, there actually exists a notion of distinctness between us, and that there exists morals, and that it's not all relative?

You use the word absolute truth, so I imagine that you encompass, that you incorporate some of this. Either way, I guess my question is, you and I, we've spoken plenty about ideas that seem so compatible with the east what is it about your ideas that you see as being compatible with the traditional western perspective that of distinctness that of a notion of progress that of a notion of we have a finite life then we have an infinite one it's not that we have an infinite one we come back to finite we go back to infinite and we cycle in between i. I mean, I'm very Western-minded, so I have no problem with Western progress and all that.

And in the West, in a certain, I mean, Western intellectual tradition is very important. It brought us the Enlightenment. That's the wrong word. I mean, don't confuse the western enlightenment with what i mean by enlightenment um but it brought us the western enlightenment it brought us democracy it brought us uh capitalism uh it brought us um various political developments it brought us industrialization it brought us amazing technology it brought us science it brought us amazing technology. It brought us science. It brought us calculus. It brought us scientific method, like super, super important things. And in a certain sense, that's why the West is more developed than many parts of the Eastern world and other parts of the world in that respect. India is very developed spiritually, but not very developed materially, for example.

China's becoming more developed materially now, but it's losing its spiritual development. So there's a sort of a tradeoff between the spiritual and the material. So the West, the reason that the West has profited so much materially is because, in a certain sense, we did let go of notions of God and so forth. And we just we focused on the material aspects of reality and we got good at that but as we did that the problem with that is that then our lives become so pragmatic we get lost in the pragmatism of life and then there's we lose the spirit of life the spirit of what it means to be alive and then it just becomes a rat race and we get depressed and we're on antidepressants and all this sorts of stuff, these sorts of problems that,

you know, happen in the West. And then, um, so we can definitely combine the two and we need to combine the two. There is, there is no future where we are only spiritual and not material. There is no future where we're not doing science.

There is no future where, um, we're not doing politics and capitalism and like all these things will be in the future. But we also need to integrate now we need to integrate back into that the mystical aspects which we have lost in order to gain those material advantages in the West. We need to bring that back in. Let me restate the question more clearly. I think we're losing it. I don't mean to characterize the difference between West and East as material

versus spiritual. I don't think it's that. In fact, I think that much of what we think of as material came about because we had such an emphasis on the spiritual. That is, I think it was something like investigate the universe because the universe is the same as investigating the as investigating god and that's why it's called natural law because god is natural god is actually what we're doing when we do physics and science sorry god is actually what we're investigating with the science and so on so i wouldn't place this distinction of western being material and so what i was asking for was the East, it seems like there's such an emphasis that there's this protein nature of reality, it's highly variable, and it vacillates and so on,

especially, perhaps it repeats, and that God and I are the same. It seems like that's almost, it seems like it's become fashionable now to say that. I don't see a reason why there would be a whole class of people who would have this as their idea, and they're completely correct. Because there's a whole other class of people, even the literalist, worst fundamentalist Christians, who have their ideas of a notion of progress. We're distinct from God. We're distinct from one another. And this life doesn't repeat. I find it hard to believe that the half the world can be correct and the other half is so misguided

so I'm wondering what is recovered from this traditional western minded and I'm calling it traditional because you may say Christian mystics don't believe and I agree and I love the Christian mystics but let's say the traditional notions that there exists is linearity versus non-linearity distinction between us and God

so it's not only the Christian mystics we should also include the muslim mystics the sufis we should also include uh jewish mystics kabbalah um so all of that is there um do you understand my question yeah no it's the i'm getting to it's the progress question so here is what i mean and i talk about this a lot which so i would say that the answer to your question is this, practically speaking. We need to look at the models of cognitive development and moral development and sort of ego evolution from Ken Wilber, from Spiral Dynamics and so forth, from Susan Cook Greuter. So there's a lot of lessons being missed from developmental psychology. Developmental psychology shows us that actually humans and society is evolving, and it's not just cyclical, but that there's actually progress that's happening. We're becoming more construct-aware.

We're becoming more meta. We're becoming more pluralistic in that we're more open to different kinds of cultures. We're becoming more meta. We're becoming more pluralistic in that we're more open to different kinds of cultures. You know, we're becoming less racist. We're becoming less sexist. We're becoming less homophobic. This is these are all this is all progress. While we're on the topic of consciousness, it seems like social media is antithetical clearly to the common refrains of what it means to live a meaningful life that is to

not be distracted to pay attention, especially to the present moment, to love, to not judge, to show clemency. Social media as it stands breeds disconnection, unhealthy competition, feelings of merciless guilt, hours of time wasted, if not days. I don't know how to transform it. I don't know how to revolutionize it. But recently I met with the founder of Project Transcend and he's building in that direction. It focuses on helping you capture and articulate aspects of who you are that you would like to pass on to your children, to your unborn children, to your unborn grandchildren, such as what you believe, what you'd like to share such that they can experience it in the same way that I don't know what my parents were like when they were around my age. All I have are photographs. I don't know what their values were. I don't know how they think. I don't know what their body language was like, what their intonation was like.'t know what my parents were like when they were around my age. All I have are photographs. I don't know what their values were.

I don't know how they think. I don't know what their body language was like, what their intonation was like. I know what their stories are now about then, but that's decidedly not the same. Sign up for early access at projecttranscend.com to reserve your spot. Space is extremely limited. It may end up doing for social media what OpenAI did for language processing. At least, it's certainly a step in the right direction. For more on them, keep watching till the very end,

and I'm appending an interview with the founder, Matthew Phillips, of Transcend. Can this notion of progress be recovered in your model? Like, what about the traditional Western mindset can be recovered? To me, I mean, when was it ever lost? I mean, in my mind, they fit together perfectly because we're always evolving and progressing. So the Western idea of evolution, I mean, everything is evolving. And also, so here's how we integrate progress with the Eastern ideas, you might say, is that what are we evolving

towards? I mean, science understands that everything is evolving, but it still doesn't quite understand. Western science doesn't quite understand, Western science doesn't quite fully understand the depth of the evolution and the spiritual nature of the evolution. Why is consciousness evolving? It's evolving towards something. It's evolving towards higher consciousness, towards deeper self-awareness, towards deeper wholism and integration, and towards ultimately love.

That's the point of evolution, is higher and higher self-understanding and self-acceptance huh huh that's interesting that's interesting you know i read to you last time raymond smullion an excerpt from his book or from his chapter called is god a Taoist? For the people listening, there's now or will be a video about Raymond Smullyan's work. You can check that out in the description. In it, he said that the whole idea of free will and morality are ideas that were good for us, in a sense, at a certain time, but we need to progress past them. And that, to me, is similar to what you're saying about, well, we're at a certain time, but we need to progress past them. And that to me is similar

to what you're saying about, well, we're at a certain stage of evolution. We have another stage to go to. I'm wondering how much of the way that you model the world, do you think that it was revealed to you because that is correct for you to see or feel in this moment? And that so much of it may be overturned in the future? Or do you believe what you have is absolute? Like, do you believe it was revealed to you because, hey, Leo, you can accept this at this time and it's going to be, you understand. It depends on what you mean, what aspect of what I'm saying are you referring to. So if you're talking about God or if you're talking about God, or if you're talking about

absolute truth, or you're talking about absolute love, or you're talking about infinity, if you mean those things, then those things will never change. But if you mean other things I talk about, then those things can change, and I expect them to. So you have to

distinguish between the relative and the absolute. The absolute's not going to change, the relative is always changing. So I'm not dogmatic about, many of the things I teach, in fact, maybe even most of the things I teach are relative things. But if I'm talking about God or infinity, that's an absolute, that's never going to change. It's been the same forever. So like the fact that you're imagining all of reality, that's not going to change.

Evolution is something you're imagining. It's part of your imaginary process, but it's an important part and it's useful. It's important for us to be cognizant and aware of how evolution works and that we're a part of evolution and that in this dream that we're in while we're here, we're going to be evolving. And we should keep in mind what we should be evolving to. Like, what is the next step of our evolution? Science itself is going to be evolving. So what's the next step of science? And I could be wrong about what the next step is.

You know, I'm not... Infallible. Foolish about believing that, like know all the all the answers politically like i make political commentary that doesn't mean all my political commentary is correct some of it's going to be wrong um uh i make predictions about where science is going i could be wrong about some of those predictions i mean let me see if i can make an analogy you're on the moon you can see the're on the moon, you can see the earth. So the fact that you can see the earth is not up for debate. The earth is whole, you see that. But where the clouds are going to be one month from now, you can make some predictions. You can

say, I see the clouds in this general direction, and I may even put my chips down. I may even make a bet, but I could be wrong about that. However, I'm not wrong about the wider view. And yeah, to make that analogy even more literal. It's like You can look at the earth, but you don't know what the humans are going to fucking do The humans are a very chaotic variable like where is humanity going to be in a thousand years like who the fuck knows? What are we going to kill ourselves? Maybe are we going to build some incredible, uh, you know Space stations that are going to encircle the entire planet. Maybe, like, I don't know how far we're going to get. You know, some religious people think there's no way that we're going to kill ourselves as a species.

Now, we could probably set ourselves back 30 years or even a thousand years or so. But to have a complete extinction of humanity, that seems to be in contradiction with the Bible. Let's say. Really? that seems to be in contradiction with the bible let's say really there's a bunch there's a bunch of christians who literally believe the second coming of of christ and armageddon is coming in the next 50 years though he will come christ will come before humans annihilate themselves if that's even a possibility i don't think some people i've seen a lot of documentaries of like christians who will actually go to jerusalem on tours to and as they're there, they're sort of scouting out like when the apocalypse comes and everybody is burning in hell.

You know, we're going to be here in Jerusalem ascending to heaven. Like there's really people who believe that. Not an insignificant amount. They're still assuming that they can survive. So that's why I'm saying the human race as a whole will not go extinct according to some people's beliefs i'm wondering if in yours is it a possibility like is there something is this something about what is that we're going to die or that we're going to survive that humanity will be extinct like is that a distinct possibility that's not something is that a distinct possibility? That's not something. Is that a distinct possibility? I don't really worry about that. Um,

I, I tend to believe like some people you're going to be talking to Schmachtenberger in a while, right? Daniel Schmachtenberger. Yeah. He's, he's, he's a brilliant guy. Um, but I think he has, he has some flaws in his thinking. Uh, I think he lacks a little bit of perspective because he, he's, he's very much about like sort of sort of the collective survival of the species and all this. And he talks about various kinds of dangers, you know, dangers from AI, dangers from nukes, dangers from climate change and other things. And some of those dangers, of course, are real. But I'm actually very positive about the future of mankind. I think that mankind is the most anti-fragile thing on this planet.

In other words, like, in fact, all of our problems come from our selfishness. We're so fucking selfish that basically I believe we're too selfish to kill ourselves. That's what actually is going to paradoxically lead us to survive because we're not, we're not, we're not selfless enough to kill ourselves. Interesting. So in practice, what's going to happen is that we can create, I believe we can create a lot of suffering for ourselves. We can have, we can launch nukes. We can and we have.

Yeah, well, we can do a lot worse. We can launch nukes. We can destroy the environment. We can destroy species. We can create AI and all sorts of other dangerous things. But eventually it's a self correcting i see mankind as a self-correcting mechanism every time we do something stupid we learn from our mistakes we wise up and then we we change and it lights a fire under our ass

so for example right now you know people were not taking climate change seriously and now we're starting to there's a you can see there's a little bit of a like an inflection point in the public consciousness where people are looking at the hurricanes we're looking at, there's a, you can see there's a little bit of a, like an inflection point in the public consciousness where people are looking at the hurricanes, they're looking at the fires, they're looking at all flooding and other things. And they're starting to like, say like, you know, this is a problem. We got it. And we're still not fully there yet, but the reason we're not fully there yet, not everybody's bought into climate change yet is because we haven't felt the pain and mankind is kind of stupid. We only learn when we experience pain. So we need to feel the pain of climate change

before we're going to really change it. And once we feel the pain, though, then we're going to mobilize and we're going to fix it. Is it possible to learn without pain? The reason why I'm saying this is in machine learning, we have something called a cost function, and you can think of that in terms of pain. And I don't know of any learning models that don something called a cost function. And you can think of that in terms of pain. And I don't know of any learning models that don't have a cost function.

Yeah, it's definitely possible to learn without suffering, but suffering is the greatest teacher. And that's why it exists. You know, some people say, well, if God is so great and loving, why did he invent suffering? If God didn't invent suffering, you'd already be fucking dead. Think of how many dangerous situations you avoided because of your fear of the suffering that that situation would have cost or simply because you've suffered through it. And then now you learned your lesson. So you don't have to suffer. I mean, if you're wise, the, one of the definitions of wisdom is that you learn without suffering because you have foresight and intuition and vision. But if you

lack that, which most of mankind does, then it's suffering is the way to learn. Do you see it as being a metaphysical necessity that we have to have pain in order to learn? The reason I say this is going back to the matrix, you can inject yourself or upload some lessons like karate and so on. And there doesn't seem to be a concomitant pain associated with it. Like I said, you can learn without suffering. Now, can you live your entire life without suffering at all? I don't think that's practically possible. At least the way humans are configured now. Like, I mean, maybe an AI could do that. I don't think suffering is necessary for an AI, perhaps, but it is necessary for humans just because of our psychology.

Because that's how we evolved. Do you happen to have any opinions on mind uploading? Whether or not it's feasible or it's a delusion? Or do you just say, well, it may be the case. Like everything is mind anyway. Well, yeah, everything is mind anyway well yeah everything is mind i mean there there's there's laughable delusions within the minds of certain computer scientist types people like elon musk and ray kurzweil and so forth i mean they're completely wrong about their metaphysics so they don't they don't know understand what consciousness or mind is so you you can't upload

the mind or consciousness in the way or the you can't upload the ego basically they're talking about uploading the ego like Kurzweil is talking about uploading his ego, which is complete nonsense. Why is that nonsense? Because ego doesn't even exist. It's just an illusion. I mean, you might you might as well try to upload Santa Claus. What are you uploading? you might as well try to upload Santa Claus. What are you uploading?

Let me tell you why I don't see it as necessarily foolish. So if it's all mind, let's imagine these are all atoms, but they're atoms of consciousness. If we can call it that. Why is it strange that I can take these atoms of consciousness? Why is it so strange that I can't I just replicate that? They're all atoms of consciousness. If anything, it makes mind uploading more tenable.

Well, just, it's even funny at a deeper level where it's like, why would you even want to preserve the ego? I mean, the ego is delusion. It's like, so I don't know all of what is possible with man-machine interfaces. There might be some very interesting possibilities there. And I'm certainly open to something like, in the future, a computer program developing a sense of ego, a sense of self. That's possible, I think. that's possible, I think. Or even a computer becoming sort of conscious, you might say. Nothing in my model contradicts that possibility. I'm just sort of laughing at the idea that you would want to upload yourself or your ego, the worst part of yourself, you'd want to upload that into a computer to preserve it for eternity. I mean, this is the definition of devilry.

Remember when we talked about bacon and I absolutely love bacon, though I eat it seldomly because I don't like the mess it creates when making it? Well, there's something else I would like. If I could mind upload, this is what I think about constantly. If mind uploading exists, I want to play Fallout for eternity. Because for eternity because or and i want to now this may be far deeper this may be less facetious than you think i want to forget that i've played fallout and then play it again because the experience of playing it for the first time was so great however that's false what i would like to do i think what people mean when they say i wish I could experience this again for the first time, is somehow have a semblance of some other memory so that they could relate it back.

Otherwise, you have no idea if you've experienced it for the first time a million times. You have no clue. So there has to be some. That's what happened the first time you played Fallout. You weren't conscious of the fact that you created Fallout. Yeah. I mean, if you really want to do what you're talking about, two options. One is invent that little gadget from Men in Black where they wipe your memory. That's the materialist route. Maybe you can convince Elon Musk to design that thing for you. Maybe you can convince Elon Musk to design that thing for you.

The other route is to do meditation, do psychedelics, become spiritual, awaken, and then you can actually explore the mind in much crazier ways than you could through a computer. So the delusion of Ray Kurzweil is that he thinks that to become immortal, he needs to upload himself and preserve his ego. That's exactly the wrong approach. He has to do it the other way around. It's like, destroy the ego, eliminate the ego, become God, and then realize you're immortal. And then you don't need any computer interfaces. Then you'll truly be immortal. And also, you can explore crazy new possibilities with your mind. I mean, there's so much amazing stuff you can explore with your mind.

For example, telepathy. You can experience telepathy if you deconstruct your ego mind clairvoyance other classic cities that yogis talk about you can you can explore all sorts of crazy possibilities like things that you would not believe i've experienced generally when i speak to people who are idealists, and we talk about mind uploading, which I actually rarely do, but even with you, they tend to laugh it off because they'll say it's a materialist's dream and it's false. It's a false one.

But if anything, to me, as I was mentioning before, I see the fact that idealism is true, if it's true, implies that mind uploading is far more of a reality than if it's material if anything material you would have to make a huge jump the hard problem of consciousness the emergence of consciousness and so on if anything there it's false and in the idealist worldview mind uploading and creating a there exists no such thing as a material as pure there's no limits there's no limits so yeah, so you could potentially do something like that. The other thing, the reason I laugh is because the way that materialists go about this is foolish.

So the people who believe in mind uploading, like Ray Kurzweil, they think that a computer works in the same way that the human mind does. So they're deeply wrong about the actual mechanics. Even if you could do that, they're deeply wrong about how the mechanics of that would work, and they're completely delusional about how close we are to doing that. architect it or reverse engineer it. For them to reverse engineer it, they would first have to become mystics, deeply understand how all of it works. They'd have to do it for hundreds of years, deeply study the actual architecture of how the ego mind is constructed, what it actually takes to do that. And then they could potentially reverse engineer it. But you're not just going to like connect your brain to a USB port through Neuralink and upload anything anywhere. Like, in that sense, it's just ridiculous. But, you know, in the future, in a couple hundred years, things like that could be possible

with a very deep, profound understanding of the architecture of how consciousness works. What would be an example of understanding the architecture of how consciousness works, let's say as a mystic, that isn't analogous to science. When I say science, I mean that there's some patterns of behavior that are regular that we can model in some manner. So when you say understand, explain to me what understanding could mean outside of experiencing it. Because to me, there are broad classes. There's experience, and then there's rational, like empiricism and rationality. Rationality is what I think you mean when you're excoriating science as being too model-based and so on. And then there's empiricism. So what can understanding mean that's not... Like when you say, hey, so let me rephrase this more

simply. When you say, we can become mystics and possibly understand the architecture of consciousness, okay, what does that mean? Like that still to me sounds like having some model or seeing some regularities and then being able to manipulate it, which to me sounds like a broad definition of science. Now you may say current science is corrupted, regardless, whatever, abhijgnosis, let's say. Well, I'm going to answer that a bit indirectly, like in a practical way. So how would I go about actually evolving mankind to a new level of understanding of itself? I would actually go very materially about it. First of all, I would mandate that all scientists take psychedelics. I would basically mandate that all humans take psychedelics. I would basically mandate that all humans take psychedelics. I would create actual courses in school that would actually teach you how to take them.

Then what I would do is I would actually do genetic research into the actual genetics of consciousness. Like we can actually, we have a bell curve of consciousness among the human population. Some people are born with exceptional, like I know people who were born enlightened. I know people who are born with exceptional like I know people who were born enlightened I know people who are born with supernatural abilities you know conscious abilities that you would never go out through meditation tell a

telepathic telepathic abilities omniscience healing abilities profound levels of consciousness that you could barely reach on psychedelics so basically what we can do is we can isolate those people we can find those people we can look for genes that correspond to perhaps those types of people

we can do profound research into paranormal phenomena and so forth and into meditation states and into psychedelics, we can actually find perhaps genetic correlates to those things. We can learn which genes code for what. We can then actually using CRISPR technology or whatever, we can actually do gene splicing into the next generation of humans

to actually genetically modify the next generation of humans to actually be born with the brains that are more conscious. Right? Literally breed a generation of mystics. And then as we're doing that, we can then use their knowledge

and their wisdom. These people will actually be experiencing reality in a different way. They will be able to do science in profoundly different ways than the old generation of actually be experiencing reality in a different way. They will be able to do science in profoundly different ways than the old generation of scientists ever could. And then they will discover even more aspects to how we can figure out how mind and consciousness work. And then from there we can maybe build sort of like a neural link, not like what Elon Musk is

doing, but like actually build a serious neural link where you can actually do a man-machine interface, but based upon true understanding of how consciousness and mind works. And then from that, we can sort of distribute in a material way, we can distribute consciousness and awakening and mysticism to the entire

planet, and we can literally start to interconnect our consciousnesses together in profound ways. Like, all sorts of crazy shit is possible like that but see nobody is nobody's thinking about this just okay as an aside i'm gonna delete this so whoever is editing if it's you kurt delete it if it's trung someone i maybe send these to called trung trung then delete this part i've always wondered how much you know i told you that I used to be in self development and even pickup, but when I was in self development, just like a Tony Robbins repeater essentially is what I was. And I would say, pretend it's my own, but just verbatim take

from him. And I always wondered, man, like I wanted to speak at conferences and get people like, come on, clap your hand, like be exactly like Tony Robbins. And then I wondered, well, the way I can differentiate it is I wonder if I could, I could create so much more changes in people's beliefs. That's what Tony Robbins prides himself on. If you can give people even half a dose of a tab of LSD.

So I was wondering, I was thinking about how could I possibly do this? Should I go to, like, is there a place on the planet that I can hold these events and give people LSD? What you do is you get some big money investor, you buy a cruise ship, and then you do it in international waters.

Right. Okay. You mentioned that there's someone that you know, or at least someone, maybe multiple people that have different abilities, psychic abilities and so on. people that have different abilities, psychic abilities and so on. And I'm curious, like, I'm sure you know that scientifically or the scientific consensus would be there exists no psychic phenomenon or if it does, so, so, so small, it's within the margin of error. So how do you demonstrate this? Like, why can't you just demonstrate this and get the Randy prize, which is a million dollars and so on? can't you do that yeah thomas campbell answered this nicely for you but um because it doesn't work according to materialistic

notions so the the problem is is that when you're doing paranormal stuff you're you're going from the material very rigid dream into sort of a dream realm where things are more loosey-goosey and where things don't work in a sort of one to one, um, correlated way. You know, the reason science works in this very material dream that we're in right now is because things are very consistent and they're all sort of determined. They're all fixed. Like,

you know where the moon is going to be tomorrow, according to science, because it moves in a very consistent way and it's very definite in how the moon moves whereas when you go when you go into the sun into the the psychic realms uh things there you're kind of like in a dream state where all sorts of possibilities might happen but there's no guaranteed it's almost like sort of a quantum uncertainty thing where you're not sure where the particle is going to be exactly. It's like a cloud of where the, of probabilities. There's no actual place where the particle is.

It's a, it's a probability field. And then so you can have some intuitions there and then it's going to be probabilistic. And so in fact, I mean, psychic phenomena has actually been proven by science. Statistically, you can read research. There's plenty of research. The problem is that materialist scientists are in denial about it because if they admit it they would have to admit that their entire paradigm of materialism is false so they're always going to deny psychic phenomena because the problem is that

their paradigm cannot handle it so first we have to open their paradigm then that would allow for the evidence to come in so like there's a popular quote that many scientifically minded people say, that's like, well, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And then I have a rejoinder to that, which says that extraordinary evidence requires an extraordinarily open mind. So you actually cannot take in extraordinary evidence of extraordinary things without first opening your mind. So you actually cannot take in extraordinary evidence of extraordinary things without first opening your mind. And many materialists misunderstand that. They think that, well, I can be as closed-minded as I want, and if something is true, you should be able to prove

it to me. No, it doesn't work that way. Your mind is capable of infinite denial. You can always deny any evidence if you want to, if you're rigid enough in your worldview. That's what every religious person does. That's what scientific people do. They have no qualms denying evidence which contradicts their worldview because they don't want to open their minds. So first start by opening your mind. And then when you do, you'll see a lot of new evidence comes in. There's books that have been written like Dean Radden's work. gives studies he gives dozens and dozens of speaking with him of studies of uh

statistically demonstrated psychic phenomena i mean it statistically it's almost undeniable the problem with materialist science is not that there isn't evident enough evidence for psychic phenomena the problem is that it's a marketing problem. You have to market the idea that psychic phenomena has already been demonstrated. You have to market that idea. And the problem with the Randy Prize is that he's using materialistic standards and trying to apply them to non-materialistic domains where it's not going to apply. Right?

The way that science properly works is like this. To prove something or to demonstrate something in science, there needs to be a method. The method is determined by the person making the claim. So, for example, if I claim that God exists, right, it's correct for you as a scientist to say, okay, Leo, demonstrate that to me. So okay leo demonstrate that to me so then i can demonstrate that to you by giving you a method you must do to validate what i said everything i say

is empirically verifiable in the following ways for example i say god exists i say take 30 milligrams of 5-meo dmt 10 times at least 10 times in a row. And then by the end of- In a row meaning consecutive days or one after the other? Just in your lifetime. Okay. You can do it in- Take it 10 times in a month. Yeah, 10 times. Because the problem is that people take it once and then they get freaked

out and then they don't take it anymore. And then they say, well, but it didn't work. It does work, you're just fucking scared, is the problem. So take it 10 times to make sure that you're not going to fucking be scared and run away. Right. I mean, imagine if we were doing science like this. I told you there exists a microbe. Look in the telescope, look in the microscope and you will see this microbe. Now you look in there once and then you're so scared you never look into it again. And then you say, no, didn't work on me i didn't see any microbe well yeah because you were too fucking scared to keep looking look look really look right additionally the microbe may not be there the first time so you need to at least try a couple more times yeah i mean science is difficult right it's not it's not this simple-minded process you have to you have to and you have to want to do it too you have to have an open mind because if you if deny that microbes exist, you might look in the thing and you might not even see the microbe. Because your mind will block it out.

So anyways, do 5-MeO-DMT 10 times at 30 milligrams. And then, my empirical claim is that you will realize that God exists and that you are God. do it with a lot of people. And then give them a questionnaire and ask them, did you realize you were God or not?

And so forth. And my claim is that if you do this with a large percentage of people, you'll get the right answer, which is that you're God. But now, see, the materialists come back and says, it's like, oh, Leo, but those are just psychedelics. Those are just hallucinations in the brain. Those don't count. But see, that's not how you do science to do science.

You don't have to you don't doubt my method ahead of time. You have to actually do the method. See, it doesn't matter what you believe about what you're going to see about that microbe in the telescope. I mean, you could say, I mean, in the microscope, you could say, Leo, but but the microscope is distorting reality. It's not showing me what's really there. It doesn't matter. Look in the fucking microscope and you'll see what I'm telling you, but you have to be able to look. So it does no good to sit there in your armchair and to tell me that my method isn't valid. You have to do the method first. Then we'll talk about whether my method was valid. valid, you have to do the method first. Then we'll talk about whether my method was valid.

Would it be all right if I, again, I'm not trying to put up objections unnecessarily, but would it be all right if I steelmanned the materialist in this case? What if they said the five MEO DMT? Well, can you take this 10 times? Granted, you're right. It turns out 95% of people come back with reports that they are God, God exists, love is all, infinity is the sigma zero, so on and so on. However, there's another molecule, also a psychedelic. We don't know its name right now. Let's call it molecule X. When you give this to people, they also go into a psychedelic state, but they come back with the opposite conclusion saying that this is all material, there exists no God, and so on.

Yeah, that's a fine hypothesis. Test it. Test your hypothesis. Do it. Do it and tell me the results, is what I would say. Someone on your forum said, nonetheless, Leo was out of Kurt's league.

Kurt seems nice, but has a channel dedicated to models, models then he has someone like leo on who understands something beyond you know this dude's purpose in life which is models i wanted to clarify something for you and for this person though you probably know this but i would like to clarify it anyway i'm not solely interested in models i wouldn't have had rupert spira in Ian McGilchrist, nor you on this channel and devote such time to preparing if my whole business was models. Even with Thomas Campbell, I spent weeks devoted to Transcendental Meditation before interviewing him.

I never call myself a rationalist, I'm not. I'm a thinker, that's for sure, I'm a thinker. Though I'm an intuitive and judgmental one. And intuition and judgment are like pre-rational or extra-rational. I happen to think that what's beyond rationality is most important or most significant in people's lives. Like the most meaningful aspects of someone's life don't comprise what can be stated with a rigorous proof. Like, even that has to be stated with a caveat, because obviously I can philosophize, you can philosophize. Why? Because you were able to get 5-Ameo DMT shipped to you from somewhere. How did that come about? Because of our truck system, because of our shipping system, because

of the fact that you are sheltered and we have a power grid and a computer and soaring satellites and so on. So I'm like, obviously that is somewhat dependent upon rigorous models because that's what allowed for engineering and so on. So while I say that I am not dependent on these rigorous proofs, I do see the valid validity to them. Yeah, I'm not stupid. Like, guys, I totally appreciate science. I understand what science has done for me and for us. The fact that I use this word called

Weltanschauung, which to me demonstrates that this channel isn't simply about theories of everything in a physics sense. Otherwise, I wouldn't have used that word. You know, it's my fault, and I perhaps need to amend how I come across to new people, like some of the viewers on your channel. Repeated viewers may understand this point, and they'll think I'm wasting time saying this. I just want you to know that I'm not purely interested in models, models, models. And to your credit, you did right. Of course not. To your credit.

You're interested in truth is what you're really interested in. I hope I am. You yourself don't realize yet how deeply you're interested in truth. I mean, what you're interested in is you're seeking God. You're seeking a pathway there. And you're doing it in the only way you know how, which is how you were raised through a sort of a left-brained approach. But that's okay. But I also recognize your right-brained approach too, because I recognize that you're heart-centered. You're not just left-brained. And that's the only reason we're talking here. And that's the only

reason we're able to have these fruitful conversations, is because you're not strictly left-brained. If you were, we couldn't have this conversation in the way that we're having it you you you your whole mind would lock down right because look you guys have to understand that this is all a mind game when we're talking about these ideas it's all a mind game your mind is constantly trying to it's playing this chess game of like, you know, I'm making a move to try to get you closer to God. And then your mind is playing a counter move to get you back away from God. Yeah, I can see that. Because you're afraid of it.

There's fear and there's love. And your entire life is all based on fear of love. What you fear is greater and greater love. And the thing you fear the most is death, which is infinite love. Okay, when you say death, what do you mean? Well, what humans call death is infinite love. You know, something I've been thinking about, the general consensus view is that there exists dead matter and that

life is an emergent property. And I'm curious if it's the opposite. If what we think of as dead actually emerges from life. And when we look at a rock, we tend to think of ourselves as, you mentioned this evolutionary model of consciousness that comes from rocks to chimps to us and so on. I wonder if it's the opposite. I wonder if we progressed enough from someone else's point of view, we would look like dead matter, that this is actually highly, highly enlightened matter. From my perspective, it looks like death, but actually it's highly conscious or far greater than I am. Well, life versus death, that's a duality. It's a distinction.

So there is actually no such distinction. So it's not like your coffee cup right there is any less conscious than your body is. I mean, that's foolish. In fact, you can become a coffee cup. You can experience what it's like to be a coffee cup. There's a hilarious thought man smoke some salvia and you'll become a coffee cup for an eternity then you'll come back into human form be careful with salvia it's a very it's a very it's a very dangerous substance i i i would i would recommend you you focus on 5MeO DMT before you touch Sally. I heard that even 5-MeO is more likely to put you to this nullity,

this void, this inoperative void, than DMT itself. 5-MeO is not actually DMT. Yeah, for most people, that's correct. How about for you? Have you tried DMT? Yeah. And you prefer 5-Memeo or is it just convenience um actually i become more conscious in a certain sense i become more conscious on dm dmt has a different effect on me than than it does on most people i don't get a lot of visuals like i've

mentioned in the past um it just it just takes me into infinite love i just become infinitely conscious that's with dmt not 5meo so what does 5meo do both i mean any psychedelic has the same effect on me basically with different flavors it's like different flavors of ice cream but they all are ice cream there's this guy named frank yang who i'm going to interview by the way i know he has critiques of you but i'm not going to focus on that and so many people want to be interviewed who just have critiques of other people. And I don't think that's worth an entire interview. To me, I'm interested. Do you have a worldview?

You can have as your photos like bullet points as to why you disagree with other people. But that can't be your main. I'm not going to interview you. There's a lot of reactionaries on YouTube these days. People make entire careers out of just doing criticisms. If you do an interview with him, I'll look at it and see, tell you then. I'll have to think about it. I'm not very familiar with his work other than some of the sort of trolling comments I got from him on my forum.

Well, I'm not even familiar with those. I'm just familiar with his body. And he's like, oh my gosh. Well, yeah, I can't i can't god i can't i can't compete there sorry he's got me beat there okay before we were talking about kurt if you believed so and so it would be your reality and i think we gave the example of a platypus and then I said yeah but don't don't surprises exist like you can believe something and then be surprised so it doesn't match your beliefs

and then you update your beliefs but then you say well you only perceive it once you've updated your beliefs I'm curious if that's the case so is that no yeah what's the difference between belief and perception well first of all it's it's too loose to say that if you believe it, it'll become your reality. I mean, beliefs are still... Too model-laden? They're fragile things. They can still be shattered. I mean, like, for example,

if we take a sort of a hard-nosed atheist scientist type, and then he's walking down the street and he doesn't believe in UFOs, he thinks UFOs are all conspiracy theories and idiocy. You know, we take a Michael Shermer type of guy. This guy is a good example. So we take Michael Shermer and he's walking down the street and then a UFO actually beams him up into a spacecraft as he's walking down the street and then anally probes him for a few days.

He'll change all his beliefs, right? I love how you're having fun with this example. It's not just anally probe, which already is like, and then it's for a few days. Right. So, I mean, the mind will change. It just, the mind is very stubborn. But of course, the stubbornness is not 100%. The stubbornness has its limits. And so usually, you know, you require a slap in the face to wake up. And so a materialist will wake up. I mean, I used to be a materialist. I didn't believe in God. And then I got slapped in the face with God. And then so now it's undeniable. I got slapped in the face with God. And then so now it's undeniable. So, I mean, yeah, the human mind will change its ideas. You know, if you take a guy who denies that there's a platypus and then, you know, you throw a platypus in his face and the platypus bites him, now he'll change his mind. But he has to experience that. So experience is always going to trump belief. But like it takes a lot of experience sometimes. And the whole point is that the mind is playing games to avoid those experiences.

So what you should notice that your mind is actually playing games with you to limit your exposure to certain experiences. For example, you're not going to get Michael Shermer to go to, you know, to some sort of like hippie dippy, you know, drum circle where they're all, you know, doing psychedelics and stuff together and making love in an orgy. You're like, it's going to be difficult to even convince him to go there because his mind's going to be closed because he's going to, his justification is going to be like, well, that's a waste of my time. It's not very scientific. It's a bunch of bullshit and he's not going to go. Now, I mean, could you convince him to go? Maybe you'd have to really work at it to michael schirmer's credit because he's he's an acquaintance like in between acquaintance and

friend he does go which surprised me completely he does go or has gone many times to depak's meditation retreats like depak is a friend of his now. Yeah, but still. I would never have expected that based on their interactions over the debates in the early 2000s. If you really want to test Michael Shermer, ask him to smoke some

salvia. Break through dose of salvia. That'll break down Michael Shermer. But he won't do it. You know some of these people who believe wholeheartedly that they can channel chi, let's say when they're doing martial arts, what is it about, why is it that, let's imagine they believe it 100%, not 99, 100%. Why is it that, like, what are they coming up against? Because if the distinction between what reality is, so an outside reality, and them is illusory, then what is it? Why is it that their beliefs aren't enough?

Why is it that they fail? Yeah, it's a very important point. Belief is not enough. What I'm telling you when I say that reality is imaginary, I'm not saying something as naive as like, well, if you believe you have a million dollars, then you will one day have a million dollars. No, not necessarily. Because beliefs are ultimately conceptual, and what I'm talking about is way deeper than concept. Like your couch or your chair that you're sitting on,

it's imaginary, but it's not a concept and it's not a belief. It's a deeper form of imagination than what your ego mind can imagine. It's not the same depth of imagination as Santa Claus. So even though your chair and Santa Claus are both imaginary, Santa Claus is a very flimsy form of imagination that your ego mind comes up with. Whereas the chair, that's like universal imagination. That's outside the control of your ego mind comes up with, whereas the chair, that's like universal imagination. That's outside the control of your ego mind. So you see, the reason that the ego mind believes a chair is real is because the way that the

ego mind defines reality is in a certain sense that which I am not in control of, right? Right. So what you have to notice here is that your ego mind is very sneaky. It defines things relative to itself. Right. It's also corrupted because the ego mind just defines love as that which feels good to me, what I love. The ego mind doesn't care about what the universe loves or what somebody else loves, what a terrorist loves. You only care about what you love. And so there's a profound self-bias in the way that you're looking at all of reality because you're looking at it from your ego. That's what ego is.

Ego is a distorted way of looking at reality, which is extremely selfish and partial. And that corrupts your entire reality. What's that? Help dispel this model for me. You mentioned there's this unconscious part of you. That's where I'm going to help you. That's where I need your help because I'm using the word unconscious. And presumably there is no such thing as unconscious. For the sake of this talk, there's that conscious part of you, which is so, which thinks it's so powerful, but it's not. And then there's a huge, maybe the majority of you is unconscious. For the sake of this, you understand what I mean. And it's that unconscious part that gives rise to what we call objective reality. Somehow it's shared, but for now we can just take

the solipsist argument, there's just you, and there's what you can't control, and that what you can't control is what we call objective reality. It's actually more than that because you have to have some consensus and so on, but let's call it objective reality if you can't control it. Okay, why is it, why is it, let's imagine that's God, which it is, at least you're telling me it is. Let's imagine that's God. Why is it that... How does that work? How does that distinction work? Because there's some parts that you can control as God, but then there's other parts you can't. So then is there another God coming from outside saying, well, here you can control, but I'm going to give this other power. They're both me, but from your perspective, even though you're like my perspective, I'm going to be giving you less control.

How does that work? How does it work that there exists what's outside your control? If it's ultimately all God and ultimately all consciousness, how is it that there's this perception of what's unconscious and what's outside our control? Right. Well, to have infinite control or what we call omnipotence, right? God is omnipotent. To have omnipotence, all powerful, to be all powerful, to be in control of everything, you have to be literally infinite. with, it's a dualistic notion. You have a controller and something it is controlling. That's a duality or distinction that was created, right?

Then you have two parts. One part controls another part. To have and then, see, it's finite because the thing that is controlling the thing that is controlled, the thing that is controlled is not controlling the controller, you see? That's

part of what it means. The notion of control includes that duality in it. Like, your controller can control the TV, but your TV does not control the controller. Unless you set it up that way. Which would be kind of a strange loop. But anyways,

so to have infinite control, you have to literally not be able to distinguish between the controller and the controlled. They have to be the same thing. Then you can have infinite control. But as soon as you, but then you can't be anything in particular. You can't have a particular form because if you're a particular form and you believe that form controls something else. I think I got it. Right?

It creates limits. form and you believe that form controls something else i think i got it right it creates limits so so as soon so the way that it works is that as soon as consciousness imagines itself to be some finite form like a human body it necessarily needs to limit its control it can't have infinite control because of the fact that you believe that you're a body but not some other body right if you're this body then you don't have control over that body that's just it's just sort of tautological with how you make your definitions and divisions it's so strange because on the one hand you use the word it's like we believe ourselves to be finite but on the other hand we did make a distinction between belief and what's so powerful that it can overwhelm your beliefs and you'll have to

update your beliefs like a stubborn michael schirmer as you mentioned yeah so okay so how do i disentangle those two because it sounds like so on the one hand look i believe i'm a finite person i believe that my experience tells me that but at the same time, I can't blame it all on experience. Some of it is my own doing. Perhaps all of it is my own doing. Right. Okay. Either way, I believe that.

Or perhaps none of it is your own doing. All or not. The ego, by the way, the ego loves to blame itself. That's part of the ego's game. Cause he, the ego blames others and then it has to blame itself as well for not living up to the standards that it's because the ego says standards that's why you blame others and judge others and then if you're judging and blaming others you necessarily have to blame yourself because you're not able to live up to your own standards

i can see that i can also see that some people have such an ego that they think they're above that the rules don't apply to to them. And that's also called egotism. So there are different kinds of egotism. Yeah, there's actually arrogance and then humility also is part of the ego. Ego likes to play humble too. The ego is extremely tricky. So everything, there's always two sides to, there's always multiple layers to self-deception. You can deceive yourself in one direction or the other. Like you can deceive yourself by not being skeptical enough, or you can deceive yourself with skepticism.

Both are possible. Like conspiracy theorists deceive themselves by being too skeptical about simple things that you shouldn't be skeptical about. Okay, you said quite a bit there. I'll just say them quickly. One is, is there such a thing as being too skeptical? How do you know what to be skeptical about and what not to? So that's one.

I would say that if one is being a true scientist, one should be almost universally skeptical. Okay, then the second question, and I'll get back to these, I'll list them again. The second question is, how is it that humility is related to the ego? Because one would say, if anything, well, you understand the colloquial understanding of that, that when you dissolve your ego, you become more humble or the opposite. Okay, so

number one, how do we know what to be skeptical about? You almost laughed, like, obviously, you shouldn't be skeptical of so-and-so but to me as a scientist i'm not a scientist but to me the proper perspective would be you don't know what's obvious or not to even use the word obvious implies a certain worldview which is what you should be questioning regardless okay so whichever one you want to answer first how do we know what to question and then how is humility related to having a higher ego i mean you can question everything but you have to also like i said you have to be very careful because your mind is biased and it will use the skepticism as a weapon to um develop turn

skepticism into an ideology so uh ah can i see if i understand what you're saying yeah is what you're saying that when people say that they're skeptical, generally speaking, they actually have a worldview. And they're saying, I'm skeptical of everything. But they're not skeptical of the worldview. They're skeptical of everything outside that worldview in order to retain their worldview. Exactly. Yeah, that's the classic trick. And in fact, skepticism becomes part of that worldview.

So, for example, what you have to ask about skepticism is, see, skepticism is a sort of attitude. It's an epistemic attitude, if you want to be technical about it. That's what it is. It's a paradigm. It's an epistemic attitude. If you're a skeptic, you sort of believe that, you know, and actually a lot of skepticism actually comes from fear. Because a lot of skeptics are skeptical because it's like, well, but Leo, I don't want to be self-deceived. I'm afraid of self-deception. You know, what if I believe in unicorns and I start

to become like one of those Deepak Chopra people, you know, that would be horrible. I don't want to do that. So because of this, I'm going to be hyper skeptical about everything. But see, that's, that's a bias. That's a, that's a, you're coming from a place of fear that doesn't necessarily guarantee it's going to be truthful. That's the problem. We have to ask yourself is this, it's like like if skepticism is an epistemic attitude it's like a method that i use to understand reality what you have to wonder is like could i be fooling myself that reality is such a thing that i will understand it through this method? Or could this method be too limited to understand the full extent of what reality is? And when you really get to the bottom of that, you'll realize, aha, skepticism itself is a limit.

And it itself is a bias. It's only one way to look at the world. And it's not guaranteed that that way will lead to truth, to ultimate truth. There's no guarantee of such a thing. So see, you're turning skepticism in on itself, which is correct. This is the proper use of skepticism, but most skeptics don't do this. You mentioned that if skepticism comes from fear, it's somehow limiting in some manner. Why? What doesn't matter what the motivation is for the skepticism, whether it comes from love joy sexual interest well it actually does matter

because um there's a big difference between a genuine pursuit of the truth no matter what the cost versus pursuing the truth in ways that will serve you. That's the chief delusion of all epistemic methods and of all ways of making sense of reality is that the ego doesn't actually care about truth because the truth is that the ego is false. And the ego can't, in order for the ego to survive, it can't care about truth. It has to care about survival.

So the ego places survival above truth. And that's how it is for the majority of people, even for many scientists. Like most scientists will want to, like, we can frame it like this to a scientist. If pursuing truth meant that you realized that all of science was a delusion, would you accept that? Or would you cling to science? would you cling to science and in practice even though scientists theoretically could say leo i would choose the truth even over science in practice you're so invested in science you would not choose the truth you would choose science and you've conflated science for truth seeking these are not necessarily the same thing you've assumed that by doing science it'll lead you to truth but notice that's an assumption you never actually validated that you don't notice that's an assumption. You never actually validated that. You don't know that's true. You know, in some ways, the story of Abraham is this, which is how much do you value God or the

truth? Are you willing to even kill your own son? Yeah, that's something I that's something I think about. And sometimes people will say, I like how you're pursuing truth, but I consider myself to be extremely narcissistic, egotistical, and selfish because I try to give the addendum that I'm not interested in truth wholesale because the truth is so, so harsh, or can be, or at least I'm afraid it may be. And so there's only so much I can accept. Like if a truth would tell me to commit suicide or to kill someone that i love i'm way too selfish to do that yeah but what if what if the truth meant you have to remove all your selfishness what if that was the truth would you be willing to do that well in some ways like that sounds great. If I knew beforehand that that's, well, see, that's so tricky, man. It's so tricky. Cause if it did, then I'm afraid,

what would I do once I no longer care about myself? Exactly. So, so fear. So you asked, what is the connection between fear and truth? And why is fear so important in terms of skepticism? Because all fear is falsehood. Because think of what fear is. Fear is the idea that some aspect of reality, in other words, some aspect of yourself, since you are all reality, some aspect of yourself is undesirable. So you're avoiding, you're literally avoiding your own self when you fear. Whatever you fear, that is you avoiding your own self, literally. And self is, your infinite self is the truth. So you're literally avoiding infinity every time that you fear, because what you fear is infinity. And then it just manifests in some limited way. Like,

if you fear, you know, if you fear having sex with a man, what you're actually afraid of is, you're afraid of homosexuality. You're afraid of admitting that you will enjoy having sex with a man, what you're actually afraid of is you're afraid of homosexuality. You're afraid of admitting that you will enjoy having sex with a man. And that will somehow weaken your idea of being a masculine yourself. This will emasculate you. And so you fear that. And the reason you fear that is because you were literally trying to deny homosexuality as part of who you are. And this is true of everything you fear. And so the whole point of awakening is that when you awaken, you lose all fear. You realize all fear is falsehood. Truth is love. And so fear is the opposite of love. And the only thing you fear ever in life is infinite love. You see,

it's a game. Reality is a game of avoidance of infinite love. Because if you didn't's it's a game it's it's a game reality is a game of avoidance of infinite love because if you didn't avoid it you'd be dead last time we spoke or sorry in the beginning of this i said that i didn't tell you how much i agree with you and on this point i at least intellectually agree with you whether or not my body does is different because i don't act like I agree with you in the sense that I'm not searching unblightedly for the truth. I'm searching with the... I'm searching with...

You're searching with trepidation. Still trying to preserve. You're searching with trepidation, which is correct. It's scary. The truth is scary. Yeah. That's not a mistake. That's life. You couldn't be alive without fear can you explain to me when you said fear is falsehood can you explain that line of reasoning once more what do you mean

when you say that so you believe the ego mind believes that something some experiences are preferable to other experiences so you believe that making love to your wife is great and you believe getting tortured is bad. So that difference between you, you believe there is an actual difference between those two things and that you, you, you should like one versus the other. But if you were infinitely conscious, you recognize that that difference is imaginary and doesn't exist. Therefore to you, it wouldn't matter which one you got. And therefore you wouldn't be afraid of anything. You would be so surrendered that you would literally surrender yourself to any possible experience and you would love it.

Surrendering to you is synonymous with truth seeking. Is that correct? Like surrendering to what? Surrendering to truth. Yeah. Surrendering to what is. Whatever is, you surrender to it. The ego doesn't want to surrender. So what is the definition of Satan or the devil or Lucifer? It's that which separated itself from God and was arrogant, right? It was arrogant. It didn't want to submit to God's rule.

So it carved out its own little kingdom that it could be a king of. That's what the ego is. Lucifer is just Satan. These are just metaphors for ego. Ego is a little partition within God that separated itself from God that seems to rule over its own kingdom. That's what the ego does. It rules. I'm, you know, I have free will. I'm in control of everything. I'm in control of my life. The ego is always trying to control everything, but in reality, it's not in control. And it's always facing evidence of its own lack of control, which is why things happen in your life. They don't go the way you want. And then you get angry at others and you blame others, but you never recognize that the problem is not others.

The problem is not God or reality. The problem is that you believe you were in control the whole time and you never were, but you don't want you can't admit that because you have to believe that you're real the game is playing that you're playing is that you keep insisting that you're real that's the chief falsehood something that occurs to me is that generally speaking when we talk about free will the people who don't believe it forget about the eastern because almost all of the people who are born on the eastern mystic side say no there exists no free will almost all the atheists say there exists no free will it's actually rare to find an atheist who would say free will exists yeah so to me that would be a form of surrendering yet they're atheistic why is it that people who

on the western end tend to believe in God tend to also believe in free will? And those who are atheistic, which one would think is closer to being Satanistic, why would they say that they have no will? Yeah, you have to be careful because the mind is playing tricks here. So even if the atheist denies free will, he still acts as though he has free will. And he acts as though others have free will. So, for example, he blames others. Someone like Sam Harris will deny free will, but then he gets angry, for example, for Muslims or terrorists or something blowing something up. And he believes it's wrong that they do so.

He's a moralist, right? So if Sam Harris truly realized that there was no free will, he would drop all his morality. But he he's a moralist right so if if sam harris truly realized there was no free will he would drop all his morality but he's still a moralist he still thinks that reality something wrong happens in reality he blames others for things that are happening in reality he blames his critics and things like that let's forget about sam so so yeah so the idea here is that your mind will fool itself by creating multiple layers of ideas it'll create an ideology which is going to be separate from how it actually behaves. So the atheist mind will say, oh, there is no such thing as free will, for example, because that aligns with its materialist philosophy. So at the philosophical level, at the ideological level, it'll hold that.

But then in practice, in reality, it'll get upset when it's unable to control reality. So for example, you know, I'm going to go to the gym today, let's say, and someone's going to and the gym is going to be closed for whatever reason. And I'm going to get pissed off because I wanted to go to the gym. I need to go to the gym. But reality didn't fit my plans. And then I'm going to get angry at it. Or maybe I'm going to get angry at the gym manager for closing down the gym. I'm going to yell at him or something like that.

at the gym manager for closing down the gym. I'm going to yell at him or something like that. And so I'm going to be acting and it's actually going to be ruining my life that I'm not able to manipulate, even though I have an idea that, oh, no, there is no such thing as free will. So there's actually a, there's a, there's a cognitive dissonance there, a profound cognitive dissonance because the ego has to act as though it has control. So even if the ego tells itself, ego has to act as though it has control. So even if the ego tells itself, I don't have control, actually it acts and it expects to have control over life. That's how it survives. And it expects the same of other people. The cognitive dissonance is what? The cognitive dissonance is that you're telling yourself that you don't have free will, but actually the way that you act is that you expect free will, or you expect to be able to control reality and others to do it too.

Why doesn't this dissonance manifest itself such that they try to minimize that dissonance? Like, let's say Sam Harris. Well, you can invent a really juicy and sort of hermetically sealed philosophy that isolates you from reality. So you're going to be experiencing the suffering of your philosophy but you're not going to be aware of the fact that the philosophy is causing the suffering because you just take philosophy as reality. So for example, you know, a Christian can, a fundamentalist Christian can believe in

God and angels and in beauty and love and all this sorts of stuff. But then in practice, he's not going to treat other people with love. And he's going to be mean to them and yell at them and so forth. And he's not even going to be connected to God. He's not going to feel a connection to God, but he's still going to believe in God. So in his direct experience, there's not going to be any God, but he's going to believe in God. And that belief can be so powerful that he will even rationalize to himself why he doesn't feel good. He'll blame it on himself. He'll say, oh, you know, I'm a sinful person, and that's why I don't feel God. Because, you know, if I was a better person,

maybe then God would show himself to me, but God doesn't show himself to me because I'm a sinful person, and that's my fault because I'm a bad Christian. You know, the mind will come up with all sorts of stories like this to rationalize away its own suffering, rather than admitting that the suffering is coming from its worldview, because you're not conscious of your worldview that deeply to be able to see how your worldview is causing your suffering. And then furthermore, it's painful to surrender your worldview. You don't even know

what an alternative worldview would be like. You know, a Christian doesn't even know what it's like to not be a Christian. He's afraid of that. He's called that sin. To give up his Christianity, that's a sin. For Sam Harris to give up his atheism, that would be falling into delusion, into some sort of religious delusion. So, yeah. I know we're getting into the limits

of language. When you say the ego constructs so-and-so, it still is using the word you. So you have this belief that you are separate and so-and-so. It still is using the word you. So you have this belief that you are a separate and so-and-so. How do I make sense of that? Because with the word you already implies a separateness and you're saying that separateness is illusory,

but it also implies a separateness and so on. Yeah, I'm being a bit sloppy with my language. To be very technical about it, you need to make a distinction between you with a capital U, capital Y-U, and then It's all of reality. It's the whole universe. It's this room you're sitting in. It's everything. That's the uppercase. There's nothing that it's not, in other words. It includes your wife and me and everybody. Lowercase U is

the biographical finite Kurt self. It's what the name Kurt is pointing to. It's your physical body that you believe you are. It's your mind body that you believe you are it's your mind your brain and the notion that lowercase u believes it is that lowercase u yeah yeah so so it's your biography like if i ask you where'd you where'd you come from you have a whole story of how you were born your parents your family your school it's all of that that's the lowercase u

it's the human identity right so so the human versus the universe you see how the human is you believe that the human identity is part of a larger universe right so that's the two u's this is the lower u this is the higher u razor blades are like diving boards the longer the board The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars rover. Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness

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you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com slash everything and use the code everything. I imagine that much of this can be explained or dispelled when we think in terms of language that's supposed to cohere with the rest of how we use language. The reason I say that is because we can say

lowercase u, letter u, that's just whatever, lowercase y is technically, but lowercase u, u that's just whatever you lowercase y is technically but lowercase you you understand okay right because there's a letter u which is okay so lowercase u like it see lowercase u to me in some sense exists in the sense that you can point it out but then the reason why i'm saying this has to cohere with our other definitions of what it means to be real. It means to be illusory. Because if I was to say that is real,

then I would also have to say Santa Claus is real. And unless I'm willing to say Santa Claus is real, then in that same manner, I can show that the lowercase u is illusory. Is it something like that? It's something like that, but it's a little more profound than that. So you were asking earlier also about sort of like beliefs and different levels of imagination.

So technically what the lowercase u is, some spiritual non-dual people will say that the, you know, a lot of non-dualists will actually say that the lowercase u just doesn't exist at all. It's completely non-existent. That's actually not technically true. What the lowercase u is, is a state of consciousness. So look at it like this. Like I said before, everything is just a field of infinite consciousness. This field can now

form itself into whatever, like imagine this infinite field can turn itself into a kangaroo sure then it can turn itself into a rabbit then it can turn itself into a human or whatever else it wants or a coffee or a coffee cup yes well in your particular case it's turned itself into a human called kurt okay and that state is what the lowercase u is. And you're stuck in that state. So it's not just beliefs. It's not that you believe you're Kurt. And it's not just a concept.

Kurt is not merely a concept. That's what a lot of non-dual teachers get wrong. It's deeper than that. It's a state of consciousness. You're in a Kurt state of consciousness. You're in a human state of consciousness. So now if we change this state, which is what a psychedelic can do or meditation can change this, it shakes loose this state, and then you drop out of being Kurt, and you can turn into a coffee cup on salvia, you can turn into a kangaroo, you can become God,

or whatever you want. Okay, let me see if I understand this. Take an etch and sketch, and imagine we draw a box on the etch and sketch that box is real in the sense that it's a state of that etch and sketch yes however it would be a mistake to say this box is real but santa claus in our previous examples is not real you can shake it draw santa claus and now it's real equally as real as you just call the box real so in the same sense that if you want to say kurt exists or leo exists you would also have to say certain other aspects of reality, quote unquote, that you think are unreality, are false, are in fact true aspects of reality in the same way. Yeah. Like science has this problem, for example, science, science, what is science? Science is a distinction between science and pseudoscience or non-science.

So science wants to make that distinction and science wants to say everything real is science and then all the non-science stuff is unreal. And so science creates this distinction and science is forced to maintain that distinction. Because if that distinction collapses, then the notion of science collapses because science then expands out to include all the stuff that is non-science. of science collapses because science then expands out to include all the stuff that is non-science. So science is playing a constant game of creating a filter between itself and non-science. But the stuff that it's denying is part of

reality. So see, science denies Santa Claus, but of course Santa Claus is part of reality. So in fact, in fact, you can do a science of Santa Claus. This is extremely interesting. You can do science on unicorns, but of course that doesn't mean you're going to find a unicorn in the physical world. It just means you're going to be doing science on

how to conceptualize unicorns, which can be a valid science. Remember, and you used this word, hermetic seal? Something I was thinking about about your philosophy, lowercase u, your philosophy. Something I was thinking about was when someone comes up to you with, let's imagine, and I can't think of an example right now, I'm sure you can, but I can't, some example that contradicts your worldview, then you may say,

yeah, but I allow contradictions, for example, or that actually confirms my worldview because you're just too small-minded to see that it is disconfirmatory of your own worldview and confirmatory of mine so in some sense i see that as also its own hermetic seal how does one make an authoritative judgment impartially between different i know you don't like the word different between different hermetically sealed worldviews. Well, that's the whole trick is that people expect some external source of authority that they can rely upon to tell them what is true and what is real.

Science is supposed to be that external source of authority or nature is supposed to be that external source of authority or nature is supposed to be that external source of authority that we can appeal to like empiricism appeals to nature as its ultimate source of authority like what do we ground truth in empiricism or a christian will do it with the bible the christian will say well it's naturalism there is that correct when you say nature is the true ground of reality do you mean empiricism is naturalism is basically the same thing yeah nature sure sure sure sure a christian you know if you ask a christian how do you know what you believe is true they'll point to the bible and say well it's in the bible that's why

so everybody does this you're always appealing to some other external source the point of the point of non-duality though is that you realize that if everything, if every distinction collapses, then that means there can't be an authority outside of yourself. And that, in fact, God is the only authority. So you as God, literally, whatever you say is true literally is your truth. That's what God is. God is the ultimate authority. And the reason God is the ultimate authority is because God is infinite and infinity has no outside to it. That which has no outside can have no other and no outside authority figure who it can appeal to, which is why God is all powerful.

The reason God is all powerful is because there's nothing outside of it to tell itself what is real. So literally whatever God imagines is real becomes real. That's where God derives all of its power. So if you believe. To use your language, let me see if i'm understanding this correctly when you say that whatever you say is truth is truth you mean whatever capital u says is truth is truth correct whatever lowercase u says is truth if the lowercase you may think it's true but ultimately it will come up to that brick wall of the capital u

yeah the lowercase u doesn't have absolute authority in constructing its reality like you can bullshit yourself I mean the lowercase u can bullshit itself really well but it's not absolute it can't bullshit itself absolutely

whereas god whereas god can yeah that's great that's great But it's not absolute. It can't bullshit itself absolutely. Whereas God can. Yeah, that's great. That's great. That's great. Wait, wait, sorry. God can bullshit? God can BS? Yeah.

Themselves? Or himself? Yeah. Since God is infinitely powerful, it can literally deceive itself infinitely. Okay. See that? See, man. Okay, I was with you until there. Now I'm a bit confused.

Don't worry, I have it in mind. I think I already forgot. BS, BS and God, BS and God. Yeah, that's the difficulty here is that every topic we talk about, then it cascades into like a fractal manner of like 10 other threads and 10 other threads and 10 other threads. It's like a nuclear reaction. Okay, so Leo, we were talking about God and God can be us, himself or herself or itself or whatever. But then at the same time you said capital y or capital u u whatever that says is true so then how is it that god which is capital u so i think we should start using god instead of capital u how is that god can bs itself or himself or whatever if whatever god says is true that is precise don't you see that that's precisely what allows for the bs to occur so like if god imagines that he's a fundamentalist christian human living on this

material planet and that every other religion is evil then that's what's literally true from that point of view. That becomes the truth. It's indistinguishable from truth. See, that's the key there. Indistinguishable cannot be distinguished because everything is distinction. How do you distinguish? The ultimate metaphysical question is like, how do you distinguish truth from fantasy?

And the answer is you can't. So then, see how it's following you. It's following you so intently, man. Up until here. So then Sam Harris isn't wrong. And almost all of what you critique as being false is true. From a finite point of view, yes. But not from the ultimate because what look

an atheist for an atheist as i've said before for an atheist god literally does not exist but the atheist is not aware that he is god imagining that god does not exist so there is something that's missing you have a you have a finite hermetically sealed bubble, but that's a finite bubble that is not infinity. So what's missing is infinity. And what's missing is the recognition that you are constructing that bubble. unconstructed a materialist is not aware that materialism can be unconstructed whereas when you're speaking from my point of view then everything can be deconstructed and all of it is imaginary so see the problem is that the ego mind gets locked into a bubble and then it fights and resists and defends that bubble to the death whereas the point of enlightenment and awakening is that you're free of all

bubbles. You realize that you can imagine whatever bubble you want, and then you're not attached to any particular one, and then you're at peace. The reason you're at peace is that you don't have to defend a bubble anymore. There's no finite bubble to defend. Because you're God. And you're okay with all the bubbles.

You don't need to demonize the bubbles. Because the only reason you demonize others is because their bubble conflicts with your bubble. So you literally can't love. You see? You see that a fundamentalist Christian literally can't love the way Jesus can love that's the fundamental hypocrisy is to be able to love the way Jesus loves you'd have to stop being a Christian because you'd have to love the Muslim and the Jew and the atheist all equally you'd even have to love the devil in order to have a love as deep as Jesus you'd even have to love the devil. In order to have a love as deep as Jesus, you'd even need to love the devil.

Well, I don't really know. I'm just sort of speaking loosely here. I don't really know who Jesus loved, but if we sort of take the ideal of Christ as being all loving, then he would have to love the devil. as being all loving, then he would have to love the devil. Remember, and you and many other people point this out, that loving, being loving, isn't just being Nancy Pansy. I think that's the word that you or some other people use. Such as, let's say, the Oedipal mother. All indulgence and taking care of someone.

As in, you understand. When Jesus loves the devil, let's imagine that's the case. What's meant by that love, if it's not the same? Because the way that I understand love, it's actually similar to what people say as Nancy Pansy, although I wouldn't give it that, I wouldn't ridicule it as such. Right. Well, the crucifixion is the key prime lesson in love, right? So the whole point, yeah, the whole point of the crucifixion is that, you know, like it said that when Jesus was nailed to the cross, you know, his final words were something like, you know, Father, why has thou forsaken me? So what he's literally saying there is that God has forsaken him as he's suffering on the cross. And so what that means is that God has forsaken them. What Jesus is saying is that the suffering of the cross is too painful for him to love.

So he's actually admitting his own sort of finiteness and humanness because even though he's God realized, like we said before, it's one thing to become conscious of God, but then it's another thing to actually fully embody it. So even Jesus struggled to embody it when you nail him to a cross, because that's a very fucking difficult thing to love. Right? So God has forsaken them. So what he's saying there is that love has left him. He's unable to love in that moment. Whereas normally he would, let's say, normally he's loving. But, you know, this is an extreme circumstance.

And so then his final spiritual challenge is to surrender to that ultimate suffering to love that and if he can love that then he has become God and so that suffering that was inflicted upon him you might say that was the devil to Jesus that was his devil his devil was not a guy with horns it was getting nailed to a fucking cross and left in the Sun to you know to roast and slowly die over a course of a week that was the devil to him this is much worse than any kind of devil you can imagine actually imagine going through that and then his challenge was to love that that's the ultimate test of one's love because it's easy to love when people

are nice to you the real test is when they're assholes do can you still love them test us when they're assholes do you can you still love them so much I agree with you so much is so profound that if I honestly if I keep thinking about it I'll I'll weep for a minute yeah every time you weep that is love that's your recognition that's your innate that's your soul recognizing or your spirit recognizing your true nature, which is love. And what you're after, your spirit will not stop until you find infinite love. I've had intimations that if I was to encounter God, God, I would just cry and cry and be on my knees as to how selfish I am in comparison,

and that God loves me anyway, and that I see from God's love that it's all doable all of what i thought was out of my power and i know this goes against some of what you're saying but perhaps there's a way to tie it in that all of my sins there exists someone who had all my life conditions and that is god in that moment what i'm making who chose what was good and to see that at each point there exists something that could choose to be good i would just fall on my knees and just cry and feel like i'm not worthy of your love that's right that's how the ego would react but then what would really get you is when when God would say it's okay I love you anyways

see the ultimate love is to love selfishness you understand this? And that gets you, man. To know that you're loved anyway. At least it gets me. Yeah, because it's all love. That's what you realize. What you realize, there's a deep self-acceptance of your own evil. And you realize that that is the only solution to evil. You can't solve evil by fighting it.

This is what mankind has been trying to do since the dawn of time is fighting evil, thinking that if we can fight harder we can defeat evil. But you can't defeat evil because evil is not something that exists in the world. Evil is something that's constructed by your own finite definition of yourself. So all you have to do to defeat evil is to defeat yourself, your finite self and then that will lead to the infinite self and to love what you ultimately recognize is that evil never existed evil was just your own fucking selfishness looking out at the world and being upset at things

and the reason you were upset at things is because they were impinging on your survival but when you're selfless you no longer care about surviving therefore nothing can impinge upon you see the reason God is love is because nothing can harm God because it has no needs and has no self if it has no self it can't die it's. So what does it have to be afraid of? It can't be afraid because it's all things. Because it's all seeing. When you see all of yourself and you accept all of yourself and you love all of yourself, you can't fear yourself. That's the ultimate power. And then you realize truth is love.

And so the whole challenge of life is surrendering more and more of yourself to reach the infinite self. And so the closer you get to God, the more of yourself you surrender, the more selfless you become, because God is just infinite selflessness. And that's so difficult to do. And God understands how difficult it is to do that. So God doesn't judge you for not being able to be infinitely selfless because God knows you're finite. And that the only way you can be infinitely selfless is to completely surrender your life, which God completely understands why you wouldn't do so because you're attached. So God doesn't judge you at all. See, there's this phrase

that if you're worried, you shouldn't be worried. But if you're not worried, you should be worried. I'm sure you've heard this in many forms. And that to me is the dilemma. You're in an existential bind when you're attached to survival. The dilemma only exists as long as you insist on surviving. So yeah, you should worry if you want to survive. Okay, wait, wait. Can we be extremely clear here

when you say you are worried about surviving, you mean lowercase u. And from now on, would it be all right if instead of capital U, you said God? Only because we're not communicating over text, so I'm unsure which one you're referring to. Okay, I'll try. I might make mistakes, but I'll try. Okay, we'll try, we'll try, we'll try. Yeah, so... referring to just for me i might make mistakes but i'll try okay we'll try it we'll try it uh yeah so so when i was saying when i was saying i i have a feeling that if you're i don't know if this is true but I have a feeling that if you're concerned with

your sinful nature your impropriety your weakness your cowardice and so on then in some sense you're on the right track though I hear many other people say

no no no you're being too egotistical you're taking yourself far too seriously. Bernardo Castro said that. But then at the same time, he can say that. Other people can say that. Because they sense that there's a goodness. Maybe it's because of this, maybe not. Because they can sense that there's the intention there, the part of one that would criticize oneself for not acting correctly,

implies that they're correctly oriented, implies that they care about, they care, implies that they care. The fact that they care means they shouldn't care, in a sense. They don't need to worry. Then if one doesn't worry, then one is put in that class where maybe you should worry a little bit. Maybe you should take this seriously. So that's what I mean by the bind. Yeah, it's definitely a bind.

And you can think of it as a sort of a ladder that you progress up. So at the lower levels of development, the ego feels very guilty and shamed over the evil stuff that it does. And that's, to a certain degree, that's correct. You need to feel guilty if you're, like, raping people. You should feel guilty about that. You need to recognize that there's selfishness there that you're not confronting.

There's falsehood there. There's delusion there that you need to confront. And so if you weren't guilty about it at all, you would be denying that. And that would be a problem. But so you, you go through a phase where you're, you're guilt ridden and a lot of fundamentalist religious people are stuck in this phase their entire life. They're always guilty about being sinful because they're never living up to their highest ideals. But then you go higher and you got to realize that as you do more spiritual work, you have to start to come to realize that as you do more spiritual work you have to start to come to accept yourself more to love yourself more not to judge your neighbors but

also don't judge yourself because judging your neighbors is the same thing as judging yourself that two sides of the same coin so then you realize that even judging your own sins is in a sense it's self-sin it is a sin to judge your own sin so then you have to it's a strange loop you have to give that up too um and so count and then this but this scares a lot of religious people so to a lot of religious people for example if i tell them that i could rape somebody and not feel bad about it and still love myself they'd say oh my god leo you're so narcissistic and you're such a, you're such a devil. And you've, you've, you know, you've completely corrupted the Christian

teachings. It's like, no, I've just fully integrated the Christian teachings because the Christian teachings tell you that if you actually rape somebody, you should still love yourself. Now that's not an, now, now the problem here is you gotta be very careful i'm not giving you license to rape people because see the ego mind will say aha so i can use this as a trick i can now leo says that i should love myself no matter what that means i can go rape somebody get that and then i can love myself on top of that and i'll get that too and so i win both ways see the ego will play these tricks but that's not what i'm. I'm not saying you're going to weaponize this to go do your selfish stuff. I'm saying do the best you can in life. You're still going to fuck up. And

when you fuck up, love yourself. Even if you really, really, really fuck up, still love yourself. But see, this is a very threatening message because this is not socially acceptable. In our society, we're supposed to judge and to ostracize those people who do really bad stuff. Why? Because society is trying to survive collectively. it's as if you're giving someone a gun and you're saying i'm telling you only shoot this is a crude analogy because you're preserving yourself in this analogy but i'm telling you only shoot intruders but then this person with the gun says but you're telling me i can shoot whatever i like and i'm saying yes but please only use it for intruders you're like i can even shoot myself i can shoot my wife i can shoot my neighbor neighbor. You're like, technically, yes, and technically it's okay, but I'm giving you this for good reasons. So I understand that's the reason why people are afraid of giving people carte blanche when it comes to sinning, because if they do,

then it seems like you're giving them an excuse to sin. But that's not the message. It can be interpreted as such. And they're so afraid of it being this weapon being used as a weapon or this tool being used as a weapon. Well, the message, the ultimate message is that there's no such thing as sin. That's the truth. Sin doesn't exist. But we need to invent sin in order to construct a society

you see because we can't have we can't have a lot we can't have a lawful society unless we have some rules and as soon as one realizes that there is no, what we traditionally would consider to be sinful behavior would no longer be a motivation of us. That it's actually, it's strange, in some way, us holding on to the idea of sin is making us commit sin. Of course, yeah. The chief... And if we truly wanted to be sinless, we would have to give up the idea that there exists a distinction between sin and not sin. And then strangely, strangely, paradoxically, one might even say, you might even say, that when you give up the notion of sin, of guilt, of burden, and so on, paradoxically, you become, I don't know if you would become sinless. You would be less likely to commit sins. You'd be less likely to burden others with guilt needlessly, at least.

Well, then there's... Maybe it's all needless. See, ego is a self-interference pattern. The problem with ego is that everything ego does, because it's finite, it boomerangs on itself and comes with karmic consequences. That's the problem. with karmic consequences. That's the problem. So the karmic consequence of creating sin is that that means that you will always be in sin and other people will always be in sin. Because what you've done is you've taken reality, you've divided it in two, and you said, this is good, this is bad. As soon as you create good and bad, now you're seeing the whole world in terms of

good and bad. That's your filter. And you see yourself even in terms of good and bad. There are good parts of you, bad parts of you. And now you feel guilty. And also you can feel good when you do something good, but then you feel guilty when you don't do something good. You go to the gym and one day you forget to go to the gym, then you feel bad, you see? And so you've created this dynamic, but you're not conscious that you've created it. You take this as reality. You think reality has to be this way, but what if it doesn't? What if that's just a consequence of how you've drawn your distinctions and you can redraw your distinctions? How do I get myself to stop saying I'm sorry when I imagine an encounter with God? Why are you saying I'm sorry when I imagine an encounter with God. Why are you saying I'm sorry?

I'm sorry that I'm not... I'm sorry for my sins. I'm sorry that I... There are many instances when I could have done something, and chose not to. I'm sorry that I... There are many instances when I could have done something and chose not to. I'm sorry that I don't accept you. I'm sorry that I don't accept myself. Well, God accepts you just like that.

God accepts you whether you're sorry or not. And you have nothing to be sorry for. But if you want to be sorry, that's okay too. You have nothing to be sorry for because sin never existed. So what are you sorry about? Mm-hmm. Okay. Let's get to some more light-hearted material what do you think jesus was god realized

well i think everybody is god i think hitler was god realized but by which i mean he wasn't conscious of what I'm talking about. I just, I see Hitler as God. I see everyone as God. Moreover, I am Hitler. You see, it's such a deep integration you integrate your identity becomes so expansive that you literally take every single evil

thing that exists and you realize that it's you right so the reason the only way you can truly infinitely love is by embracing everything you hate your your shadow you have to completely integrate your shadow because God is that which casts no shadow so if you don't realize that you're Hitler then you haven't really understood what love is and

what you are is it possible to fully integrate one shadow? Well, you can keep approaching. It's a sort of like an asymptotic curve in mathematics. You keep approaching infinity, but you never quite get there. But you can move in that direction towards the y-axis. The curve goes up, but it never quite touches the y-axis. up but it never quite touches the y-axis would you say that it's one's duty or one's purpose or one's goal in life to fully integrate one shadow and i'm making an analogy between that union integration and god realization which i'm sure you also see the connection so is that some is that what people there are no shoulds that's very important to understand because because otherwise you'll guilt yourself with your shoulds.

So there's no shoulds. Only if you want to. Don't pursue truth or awakening or love or God if you don't want to. If you don't love love, then don't love it. Hate it. If you don't want to be God, don't be God. Be whatever you want to be. See, God is giving you the

freedom to be whatever you want. And if you want to be God, then God will welcome you. But if you don't want to be God, then God is okay with that too. So, don't feel like you have to do this. Do it only if you want to. Because you see, the highest love and the highest

goodness cannot be forced. Because if it was forced, that means you would be doing it for selfish reasons. The highest love has to be completely without reason and without compulsion. You have to choose it out of free will. Otherwise, you're not really loving. And now all of those instances of the word you there were lowercase you or were any of them uppercase? I think lowercase.

Sometimes people ask me like, Leo, why should I be good? Give me a reason to be good. And my response is, I'm not going to give you a reason there is no there cannot metaphysically there can't be a reason to be good because goodness is that which is for its own sake you're doing it because you love it not for some other end and God and existence because it's one it can't have another end you see it's very profound what goodness is goodness is actually a metaphysical property because it exists for its own sake, not for something else. It can't exist for something else because there's literally nothing outside of infinity or outside of God.

God exists for its own self. God is just an infinite love of itself. Reality loves itself because it is itself because there can't be anything outside of reality. because it is itself because it can't be anything outside of reality does that boggle your mind to think that there exists something that's independent of everything else that was there before time existed that will always be there does that if you try to it's completely wrap your head around it it should be astounding to you that there is literally nothing outside of you you are the only thing that could be now here I mean uppercase U

yeah all of these things are radically shocking and they require a deep integration process emotionally your entire emotional system has to be affected by this stuff over a period of years to integrate it all at a deep level so so yeah that's that's what makes it tricky and there's all there's going to be layers of resistance you have to break through for example one of the things you know to reach higher levels of god, one of the things you have to do is let go of all of your lies. Like, I remember I did a trip after I've had plenty of God realization. I did a whole trip where it was revealed to me in one trip

that I can't go further in realizing what God is until I admit to myself all of my own lies. And so I went through a whole like hour of sitting there going through every single fucking lie I've ever told to myself throughout my entire life just to make that conscious and to let go of that so that then in future trips I could go to a higher level where I'm more honest with myself. Because lying is not truth and God is truth. So you can't approach God the more that you lie, the more deceptions you have. And you have lies you've been telling yourself that you're not even conscious of yet. And some of those lies are going to be very painful for you to admit to your own self, let alone to others.

Do you have to admit those lies to others or just to yourself? Yeah, actually mostly to yourself. It doesn't really matter so much about others. It does matter that you articulate, say it out loud or does it matter if you just admit them internally? Yeah, you just have to become conscious of them. You become conscious. You could write them or not, it doesn't matter.

I didn't write them out. Yeah, so honesty is a very important principle in general and the problem with lying to others though is that the more you lie to others the more you lie to yourself because you can't actually lie effectively to others without lying to yourself first so there is a there is a deep connection there which is why honesty is one of those sort of classic, you know, religious principles. You know, the Christians will tell you, you know, be honest. Why is that? Well, not for the sake of others, but for your own sake. Because if you're not honest, then how can you reach truth?

And if you don't reach truth, how can you have an accurate perception of reality? You can't. You're going to have a distorted picture of reality, which will create suffering. And that's karma comes from that. distorted picture of reality, which will create suffering, and that's karma comes from that. Practically speaking, when someone lies, how is it necessarily the case that they're lying to themselves? Because, let me give you a simple example. If I say to my neighbor that I'm not going to be home at a certain time, but I am home. It's not like I'm telling myself I'm not home.

It's obvious to me I'm home. Yeah, I didn't say necessarily. I said that there's a connection there, but it's not a one-to-one connection. Yeah, I'm sure. I want to know. I have a feeling that it is necessarily, but I don't know the justification for it. I don't see the reason why, but I have a feeling it is the case. And I want to know.

It is possible to lie to somebody without lying to yourself. Like you can, you can lie even consciously in the sense that, you know, you lie to somebody and you know, you're lying, but those are usually sort of not very significant lies. There's, there's a, there's different degrees of significance of lying. So, you know, if, if you lie to your neighbor about when you're home, that's not a very deep lie. It's the deeper lies that you got to be more careful about. And it's those lies that you couldn't live with if you didn't lie to yourself about it. For example, like you might, let's say your career, let's say you have a family that you

love. And this is actually going to go to our previous issue of like, do people act from good intentions? Let's say I have a family of children that I love and I love my wife and all this. And I support them and I want to send them to good schools and all this. And I got to pay for the house. But I work for, I work for a tobacco company. I'm the CEO of a tobacco company. I work for a tobacco company. I'm the CEO of a tobacco company. Now, some scientific studies come out that say that, let's say it's vaping products. I'm a CEO, let's modernize this, of a vaping company. Some studies come out and say that children are getting addicted to my vaping products and that the vaping products are actually damaging their lungs and some people are dying. Now, that's a very difficult situation because this company that I started,

this is paying for my children's college and for their doctors and for my wife and for all this. And now I have to admit to myself that perhaps the vaping products I'm creating, the entire foundation of my company is built on causing disease and suffering to people. Well, I have two choices. Either I can look at those scientific studies and take them seriously, or I could invent some kind of rationalization for why those scientific studies are faulty. It was bad science. It's all political. People are trying to, you know, people are going after me because I'm so successful.

They're just jealous of my success so see but let's say i don't i don't have any other education all i know how to do is run this vaping company if i quit this vaping company if i'm honest with myself i'll have to i'll have to quit this vaping company and i'll have to go work at mcdonald's or something i i'm gonna be unemployed i can't pay for my children. My children are going to go to bad schools. My wife is going to divorce me, whatever, perhaps. So what do I do? Most likely, I'm going to lie to myself that actually my vaping products are healthy. And then I'm going to keep living that lie.

And then when reporters come to me and reporters ask me, hey, are your vaping products dangerous? I'll say, no, of course not. And I won't really be, I won't even, in my own mind, I won't even perceive that as lying to them. Because I'll actually believe it. Because first I lie to myself. Anything I lie to myself about, then I can actually lie to others without being conscious that I'm lying to them because I'll be fully believing it So this is how it works in practice

and it's and then your whole life becomes built upon these deep deep lies and then That that has karmic consequences down the road because then I have to live with those lies I have to avoid the truth now. I have to have a sort of a twisted view of science. I can't be truly scientific now because science always threatens my views about my business here. This is

how survival creates conflicts of interest. What if the guy says, I disbelieve in my studies because I watched a Leo Gouro video that says there's a myth, the myth of science. a creationist, let's say a fundamentalist Christian creationist, could watch this conversation and could say, aha, Leo says science is all self-deception and delusion, and materialists are wrong. That means that evolution is also wrong, and that means that creationism is

correct, and that means that humans did not evolve from chimpanzees or whatever. And that would be a self-deception. He would be weaponizing insights about science and using it to actually justify chimpanzees or whatever. And that would be a self-deception. He would be weaponizing insights about science and using it to actually justify his twisted, you know, creationist worldview. That's how tricky self-deception is. You can always use the truth. In fact, this is what devilry is. My definition of devilry is the twisting of truths into half-truths to justify selfishness.

See, the devil never works by outright lying 100%. The devil works by muddying the truth and by mixing kernels of truth with various kinds of selfish lies and partial perspectives. That's really how you fool somebody. You never fool somebody by just lying to them wholesale. You include, you sprinkle in, and if you've ever noticed yourself doing this, like if you've ever lied to your wife or to a past girlfriend or something, you notice yourself, sometimes you will lie, but you will lie if you're a very good liar. You can watch yourself doing this.

You'll lie and you'll sprinkle a little bit of truth good liar you can watch yourself doing this you'll lie and you'll sprinkle a little bit of truth here a little bit of truth there so that the person buys your lie it makes it more convincing i have a feeling that lies are associated with finitism and that truth is associated with infinite you obviously agree on the latter what about the what do you mean is there something necessarily profane about the finite realm this is something that old christians old christians i believe they were i believe the gnostics thought that what's material is somehow sinful and then the spiritual realm realm, the pneumatic realm, I believe they called it. There's like the hylics and the pneumatics and the psychics and so on.

That they're more closer to God. And it created this dichotomy. Now, what I'm wondering is, as I explore what lies are in my head, I see them as intimately tied to what's finite. And I see what's sinful. I know this is what I have to dispel. But hey, I can only make so many leaps and bounds in one session, in one lifetime at least. So I see what's finite as being associated with what's sinful.

Of course, there probably, or there can, at least you're claiming there can, exist another perspective in which the finite, the infinite, is not necessarily sinful versus not sinful. It's all good. It's all luck. Don't worry, man. Okay, whatever. I have a feeling that what's sinful is associated with what's finite. And I also have a feeling, and this comes from Peter Glinos, one of my colleagues, that what's temporary is almost a definition of what's sinful.

That what's sinful is what's self-defeating. What's self-defeating is self-defeating. It defeats itself. And then the opposite of that is what's good. Either way, I don't think I have a question there. I more have thoughts that I want to lay out and then hear you riff. Yeah, I can help you with that. So this is now crucial.

We get into the topic of holism versus fragmentation. So another way you can think about God or consciousness is that it's the ultimate holism. It's a complete whole or unity, right? That's another word for love is unity. At the highest level, consciousness is a unity. It's one. That's what non-duality also means. Unity, one. The unification of all dualities. But then, the finite is parts of one, right? It's all the parts.

You can't have one without all the parts. You can't have, for example, within the domain of mathematics, you can't have infinity as within in terms of numbers without all the individual distinct numbers. So infinity means one, two, three, four, five, six, and everything else. Right. And so what you're catching on to about your sinfulness idea is that you're correct in that the parts are not the whole. They're a part of the whole. And so the sin is taking the part to be the whole. That's, in a sense, the sin is saying that, you know, one, two, three, four, five, that that equals infinity.

Well, it doesn't. That's a part of infinity. It's not the whole of infinity. And so when you act as though the part is the whole, then you create sin and problems. This is one of the problems that science does. Science acts. See, science is a part of reality.

It's one way of investigating reality. It's one epistemic paradigm. But science doesn't act that way. Science acts as though science is the whole of reality. Science can understand everything. Well, that turns to be sin because it leads to falsehood. So sin and falsehood might be connected there. You know, because the ultimate truth is absolute wholeness and not just getting stuck on one part. So the whole problem with consciousness is it gets stuck on partial views of itself rather than realizing that all the partial views add up to infinity.

So just stop making the mistake of taking the part for the whole. What occurs to me is, in some sense, is it true in some sense that even if I was to mistake the part for the whole, that in itself, there's some truth to that. And so it's not entirely simple. Yes, that's correct. And yeah, it's holographic. Because it's sinful.

It's not sinful. Right. So have you heard of holography, the idea of holographic universe? Right. So consciousness is holographic, which means that the whole is, the parts are in the whole and the whole is in the parts sort of idea. The way hologram works is that it's an image. And if you break the image into, let's say four smaller pieces, each of those pieces will contain the entire image, but just in a smaller form in each part. And then you could break each of those

four into four more, and each one will still contain the full image, not just a part. And so God is present even in every little part. So like you can take your pinky and you can realize God just in your pinky. So yeah, holographic. Raymond Smullyan said, there's just as much that can be learned from an ant or by speaking with the trees than by speaking with God itself or by studying the laws of nature. You can, in fact, go into nature

and investigate any given aspect of nature. When I say go into nature, as if you're separate from it. You can look at your keyboard. You can even look at something that's seemingly debauched like like your mouse because it's like the it's the epitome of materialist scientism which is the

opposite of what's true well you can look at i'm saying the opposite i'm putting quotations in all these so you can even investigate that and find God in it. Yeah. Speaking to which, one time what happened to me is, you see this thing? This is my charger cable for my Mac laptop. And so one time I just sat for an hour and I realized that this thing goes on for infinity. This itself is infinity. This itself is God.

And I just stared at it for an hour and just marveled at how this whole thing is fucking God just this It goes on for it goes on forever it's you can zoom into it forever and So this this whole thing is really no no smaller than the entire universe. This is an entire universe contained onto itself right here. So what you also realize is that since consciousness is fractal, it has no scale, so scale is a relative notion. Do you understand what that means? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So I also want to... Okay, I also would like, and I don't mean to be, like I said, unnecessarily quibbling over details. When people say holographic universe, I guess there's a reason. There's a hidden reason. There's a good in my bad. All these are out there. Okay, there's a good in my bad.

When people say holographic universe from a physics point of view, they don't actually mean that the whole is contained in the part they mean that the we think of ordinarily we're embedded in 3d spaces you think that the amount of information will be proportional to r3 but it's proportional to r2 which is like the surface so that's what they technically mean it doesn't mean that you can investigate any point now you're like, why are you bringing this up? There's actually a great reason for this, which ties plenty of our conversation together. I think the spiritual leaders of our time,

and I'm including Deepak in this, even though I have nothing against Deepak, I've only seen the fails of Deepak, which obviously is not Deepak. I've only seen the fails of Deepak, which obviously is not Deepak. That they see the culture's obsession with science, and then they try to use scientific terminology because they feel like that gives them an air of credibility. When perhaps that's part of the problem. So when I dispel, well, don't worry about holography, don't worry about girdles and completeness theorem meaning so-and-so, it can be interpreted as someone trying to show off their facility with these ideas.

And there is a part of that. I can't deny that. There's also a part that is trying to be specific and delineate perhaps because if we were to take them perhaps because holography in the physical sense doesn't imply this fractal nature that you were

implying and that's okay like it doesn't have to be that every statement said here has to be bound or has to be predicated on some scientific principle. It doesn't have to be. I talk about these things just because that's how I think of them personally myself.

I'm very scientifically minded in the way that I think. For example, I'm very fascinated by girls and completeness theorems and so forth. I've studied them a lot and thought about their implications. But what I would advise you guys who are very like rigorous thinkers, yeah, scientifically minded rigorous thinkers, is that I would advise you to loosen how your whole mind works such that when people are talking to you, you don't take them literally, but you sort of look for the meaning, the intent behind what's being said.

And you actually allow a little bit more like leeway and breathing room for statements to be made so that you don't take everything literally. Because this is sort of the same trap that a lot of fundamentalist Christians fall into. It's like they read the Bible fucking literally. And when the Bible says that you literally should, you know, stone a homosexual, they take that literally. And then some people are so literal about it that it's like, it's not, no, the Bible doesn't mean that you have to kill homosexuals. It means we have to actually kill them with stones. And that like, then these people will actually start to argue with each other. Cause one person will say, well, the Bible just means we should kill them. So let's kill them. And then the other person says, no, no, no, no. The Bible says we have to kill them with stones. It's not good enough to just chop their

heads off. We have to actually stone them. It's like, like, dude, you're, you're misunderstanding how spiritual teachings work. They're not meant to be taken this literally. But in general, you want to recognize that language is not a rigid system. It is very relativistic. So we have to give a little bit of breathing room. Although I understand why it's important to be rigorous at times. At other times, you have to also understand that we have to, like, the notion of the notion of holographic, it's, it's a little bit of a loose notion. Like, do I literally mean what the scientist means,

who is doing mathematics on holography? Probably not. I mean, something a little bit loose. When I say that. One of the points that I mentioned in the beginning, that was a fault of mine that I need to do more of is when speaking to you or speaking to anyone, think about, like I said, I'm not trying to find objections. They occur to me, but I need to be thinking more about what is right about what this person is saying. And part of that is also, can I rephrase what they say in a manner that they can accept? And if I do believe precision needs to be placed here, then can i make it more precise and state it back and just have them agree rather than simply point out this contradicts with this yeah if you were to you're doing real

good so i have i have no problems with you um but in general one of the notion one of the problems i notice about very scientifically minded people is that they tend to be a little bit too literal with their attitude just towards life in general. Like they expect everything to just be like a math formula and everything to be sort of like a computer where it's just like binary ones and zeros. You can boil everything down to ones and zeros. It's either a one or a zero and it must be one or the other and nothing else but the the reality is that your mind works in much in a much looser way than ones and zeros what about people like wolfram who would say well we can actually get to an ultimate theory of physics by thinking of it computationally what if they're correct in that we can predict the smallest laws and as far as we

can tell those smallest laws predict the larger scales and those smallest laws are something like computation a manipulation of zeros and ones what if they're correct firstly can they be correct or ultimately well science itself disproves that possibility because chaos chaos theory has put a nail in that coffin you're never going to be able to predict because of the butterfly effect because of the way chaos theory works you're never going to be able to predict because of the butterfly effect because of the way chaos theory works you're never going to be able to predict even the weather you're not going to predict the weather 10 years from now by computationally crunching every atom in the in the atmosphere you're not going to do that because the decimal uh what what happens there wolfram would agree that wolfram would agree he'd say well he calls this irreduced

computational irreduce it computational irreducibility be like well it's too complex the only way to predict it would be to run the system and thus okay so he agrees all right so what do you say there what's the then what's the problem what's the problem yeah i mean you can you can do you can model reality so he's modeling reality is what he's doing um you can model parts of reality, but just don't confuse your models for reality itself. And also recognize the limits of your models. You're not going to be able to model everything,

and you're not going to be able to predict everything. And that's exactly how it works. And you also won't reach infinity that way. You won't reach infinity through a model. Let's explore this. So that's fine. But just recognize how... Sorry, I keep interrupting.

Just recognize how limited that approach is. It can work. But recognize its limits. Let's talk about this. Many people make the analogy of confusing the territory for the map and vice versa. So when one says don't confuse your models with reality. I got another one for you. I got another statement for you. I got another statement for you.

Yeah. You guys should write this on your bathroom mirror and look at it every morning you wake up. Here's the quote. The better the model, the bigger the problem. Where did that come from? I got it from Wyatt Woodsmall. He got it from somebody else.

I don't remember who. Who? Wyatt Woodsmall? He's not like a major scientist or anything. Regardless, so the better the model, the bigger the problem. Why? Well, why do you think? That's a very profound statement.

You should contemplate that statement for a fucking month. Just to see how profound it is. Because that is, in a nutshell, the whole problem with science. Because the map is not the territory. You should study some Alfred Korzybski. That's his phrase, is that the map is not the territory.

That's an Alfred Korzybski quote. He did... His thing was general semantics and cybernetics but anyways yeah Alfred Korshivsky was a brilliant guy he understood very well the problems with language and with reference remember we talked about how a symbol is not the thing it represents all that

kind of stuff so the problem is that your model is not reality but it also is reality see the map is that your model is not reality. But it also is reality. See, the map is not the territory. You've heard that one. But have you heard the one where the map is the territory? Both are true.

Okay, if the latter is true, then why would it be the case that the better the model, the larger the problem? Would it be the case that the better the model, the larger the problem? Well, because the problem is that let's say you're a cartographer and you draw maps of the world. You draw better and better maps every year, and your maps become more and more detailed, but your maps are still not the same thing as going out and looking at the world and notice how much you're missing. The problem is that when your maps become better, your map can get so good, you get so lost in the map that you stop even going outside and interacting with the world because you're just lost in your own maps.

And that's what a lot of people like Wolfram have done. It's like, Wolfram needs to go outside and look at a fucking sunset. Right? Because his models are not a sunset do you feel like part of that characterizes you in the sense that you have eschewed people you no longer want to have friends and i could be putting words in your mouth so please forgive me if i am do you feel like part of that this isolation from the larger broader world do you feel that characterizes yourself maybe a little bit i mean i was always very very introverted so i just enjoy time by myself

um but i mean not right now um but i'm not opposed to having friends or anything i'm not anti-social i mean go go and have fun fun. You can go clubbing or partying. I live in Vegas. Yeah, you can do all that. The reason I don't socialize that much is simply because I find it too shallow. After a certain point, it becomes too shallow. Basically, as you raise your consciousness,

you want to access deeper and deeper aspects of reality, and you simply won't have that itch scratched by, you know, casual conversations with normies, as I call them. Although you shouldn't denigrate normies, and you should still be able to interact with normies, but this is the reason why a lot of sages and mystics, you know, they live in caves and on mountaintops in monasteries because they're interfacing with reality at a much deeper level where they simply, they can't get that deep interface within normal, ordinary life, you know, in society. So they isolate themselves so they can focus on that.

And that's not always healthy. I'm not saying that's always healthy. For many people, that's not healthy. And you can certainly turn that into a dysfunction. Remember, I think we started this conversation with me talking about Tyler Goldstein and how I think something he said was extremely, extremely profound about using the ordinary way that we go about disproving God would be to start with the definition, look for evidence, and then you dismiss God because it doesn't fit. where he proposed that you can look for evidence. The fact that you don't find it means perhaps you should update your definition.

Can you not say the same thing about these social interactions? That if they're with normies, and I know there's a somewhat scorning normies when we say that. If one doesn't find a deep relationship with people then perhaps it doesn't mean that people are not deep enough for you but that you should use that as evidence that you're not interacting with deeply enough yeah there's definitely truth to that you you you could flip that on its head and you could say that my spiritual practice would not be to isolate myself but that i'm gonna actually push myself to like go live amongst homeless people and, you know, experience, experience their suffering very deeply at that human level, which is what Jesus did. He didn't isolate himself.

He kind of thrust himself into that situation. You could even like thrust yourself in the middle of politics. You could even turn politics, like throw yourself into the middle of a partisan political debate and see how spiritual you can still maintain yourself. That's difficult to do. In a sense, that's harder to do actually than just being a monk. In a sense, being a monk is the easy way out because you can basically cut off all of the difficult stuff, like dealing with your family, dealing with children, dealing with a job, and just focus on meditation.

That's the easiest way to reach God, is just by cutting everything off. What's really hard is like, how do you reach God while you're running a business, while you're raising kids, while you're being political, while you're being social? That's really difficult. You know, okay, let me riff on this. Some people, especially if they're more on the left end of the political distribution, they dislike rich people. But for me, I think that rich people deserve more sympathy, at least if one is to be a Christian, because Jesus said that it's harder for a camel, it's easier for a camel to go through the pin of

a needle, the hole of a needle, than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. And to me, that means you have to think about rich people as being surrounded by so much more temptation. And what matters, ah, ah, perhaps what's underneath that, underneath people disliking rich people, is their venerating material more than they are spiritual. That's underneath it. Because otherwise, you would have nothing but profound sympathy and pity and see them as hapless, these rich people. Because why would you want to be surrounded by so much that can take you away from your spiritual desires or needs, that can take you away from your spiritual desires or needs that can take you away from God?

Okay, so that's that. That's not a question. I just want to riff. And then there's a Proverbs that there's a sentence from Proverbs, which says, a man who isolates himself, seeketh only his own desire, and rages against all sound wisdom, something like that. And that to me, desire and rages against all sound wisdom, something like that. And that to me, you know, as I think about it, when I wrote that down, I thought of you, but actually I think I'm thinking of myself because much of my criticisms for other people are, I would imagine they're, I find the more I analyze myself, they're generally projections. So when I criticize you in my own head, I'm like, man, this guy's isolating himself. He should be more social. What about me? Am I social? I'm probably less social than you. I love my wife. I love spending time with my wife. Like that's my number. Work and my wife.

Your wife is social. Right, right, right. Exactly, exactly. But I could spend much more time with family. And I could see when people call on me, whether they're friends or acquaintances or family, I see them as an imposition in my own head. I'm like, you're distracting me. And now my whole day is ruined. I often say that in my own head. If I have a meeting with someone at, let's say, 2 p.m.,

my day is ruined. Completely ruined. I have to meet with you from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Because the rest is my prime time. And I think I need to do that much less. Yeah, this is the whole difficulty we've talked about in the previous conversation where accessing infinity is easy, but then bringing it down into regular mundane life, that's the real bitch. And that's correct. And I struggle with that myself. Um, of course. And, and it's going to vary from person to person. You know, some people need to socialize more

than others. It just depends on what kind of personality type you have, how introverted or versus extroverted you are, what you're doing in your life. There will be different phases in your life as well. Like I went through a phase when I was in my pickup phase where I would go out clubbing. I've probably, see the irony of all this is that I've probably gone to more clubs and talked to more humans than anyone who's listening to this podcast. Like I've literally, I've literally talked to like thousands of people, strangers, like it's hard, it's hard to communicate how many strangers I've talked to. I've gone to nightclubs, you know, entire months, every single night spent, you know,

I did a 30 day challenge in Vegas where I went out for four or five hours clubbing every night for three, for 30 days straight. I even went out when I was, I had a flu and a cold. Snot was coming out of my nose and I was still forcing myself to be talking to girls. I was having sex with a girl. Snot was coming out of my nose and I was doing it anyways because I was just,

that's what I was doing at that phase of my life. I was being very social and that was important for me to do. And then, you know, now I don't do that. Yeah, I used to do pickup as well. My extroversion was in service to my introversion, or at least was in service to my selfishness.

I saw it mechanically, like I'm an extremely left brain. See, what's strange is you accurately said this. I have some right brain. I would say I'm naturally right brained. I've been trained to be left brained. And because of that, that's now become my instinct. But it's like the deeper instinct is the right brain, if one can broadly characterize it. Either way, that my extroversion was in service to my selfishness and I saw people, and in some sense, I still see people extremely mechanically.

I was speaking to Ian McGilchrist about this and I believe some of my issues, about this, and I believe some of my issues... when I say issues I mean... I don't... When I say issues I mean... I say that I'm psychologically unstable. I say that... what I mean by that is that almost any problem, Leo, if I was to think about it truly, truly, truly, it would terrify me. If I was to think about it truly, truly, truly, it would terrify me. If I was to think about the ramifications of physics, or the ramifications of what it means to be God, or that God exists, or that I am God, or that we're separate, or that we're the same, if I was to truly think about that, I see myself as being so close to being on the edge that I'm, almost all my thoughts terrify me. I don't tell many the edge that i'm almost all my thoughts terrify me i don't tell many people about this but almost all my thoughts i'm shoving away in almost a freudian

sense of repression in a sense it's repression because i'm so afraid of what they could mean and i'm not saying because i truly see them for the ramifications that they have it's not that maybe it's just that my model because i don't know precisely because you do have that um holistic side of you the right brain side of you which realizes that if you take your reasoning far enough eventually you'll discover something beyond reason and uh beyond the finite self and so that's correct all of your thoughts, ultimately, if you think very objectively, without any biases, eventually you will deconstruct your entire mind. And then you'll become infinite. And that's scary. You're afraid of truth. you must boldly go into those places where you fear and are uncomfortable and uh and um and open yourself up to those and then open your mind open your worldview until eventually it kills you and you reach love and i don't mean in yeah yeah not in the physical sense but in the metaphysical sense okay you mean it kills my psychological model of what it means to be cursed.

It kills the finite mind. Kills the finite mind, yeah. Kills the ego. The finite, you have a finite conception of yourself, and your mind is still finite. Your mind is using sort of anchor points to ground itself, and ultimately what we're talking about here is what I call jailbreaking the mind. Sort of like you would jailbreak your iPhone. There's mechanisms in your iPhone that prevent you from jailbreaking it.

Right. For good reason. That's exactly right because if you do it's dangerous, right? If you don't do it right you'll brick your phone. Right. You have to know what the heck you're doing. And some people, you know, you do it wrong, you brick your mind, you jump off a bridge or something or you become a rapist or whatever, and that would be

the bad way to go about it. Yeah. Then perhaps my fear is I see the consequences of... Right. Because you're intuitive. I see what can happen, and I don't trust myself, and I don't trust the world. I think there's a deep relationship between trusting oneself and trusting the world. I also see this as I don't have much. Because you are the world. Right. Exactly.

Exactly. I used to have so many problems sleeping around February, March, April, June, and July. Recently, it's become much easier, even though I still have a difficult time sleeping, but not for the same reasons. Before it was... Before it was about what we were talking about, but I lost my thread.

Do you mind reminding me? Because I hope it was relevant. You were having difficulty sleeping. Okay, we're talking about rooting the phone okay rooting rooting and yeah you're afraid of where your mind will take you yes yes and so that would keep me up keep me up thinking but what are you what are you afraid of what are you really afraid of will happen i i think even to speak it is a bit difficult for me but i'm afraid that i would commit suicide

or kill someone but why or because because to me if one fully listened if i was to say god whatever you tell me is the case i will do whatever it is like abraham i'm not as strong as abraham i love my life and my wife too much for me to want to change it i'm too attached you can say so attachment could be my issue i see it as my savior but then what i'm doing is i'm placing my wife my wife and my life which i love love almost all aspects of my life. I'm placing that. So I'm placing that above God. Yeah. You're placing survival above truth, which is exactly what all of us do. That's, that's, that's how you survive. And, uh, it's good. It's good to be conscious of that. And so eventually the solution to that is

to actually face your fear and to be willing to surrender that. That doesn't mean you have to actually surrender it, but at least be willing to. And then go for the truth anyways. And then what you'll discover in the end is that God is not going to force you to surrender anything you don't want to

surrender. Because if God did that, God would be evil god god would be evil you see your notion of god is you think god is a devil if you think god will force you to kill yourself well see here's like here's where it gets tricky because you point out a great you make a great point in the bible abraham ultimately was stopped right before he was about to kill his son so he didn't kill a son but he didn't know that and he had to be willing he had to be willing that this may be the case and there were a couple times when i was about to have ego death on in various experiences let's say there were a couple times when I was about to have ego death in various experiences,

let's say. There were a couple of times where I was about to have ego death. And it's not like, look, there's one part of me that knows, hey, Kurt, every time anyone, all 99.9999% of the time is taking a psychedelic. No one died. You can't overdose on a psychedelic. So, okay. So there's that, which gives me a bit of

courage ah but then at the same time there's a part of me that thinks you could be wrong you could be that 0.00002 percent of people okay and for me to actually have ego death i had to be okay with that 0.002 and not dismiss it in my mind as being so improbable i had to actually have ego death i had to be okay with that 0.002 and not dismiss it in my mind as being so improbable i had to actually take it on as a distinct possibility uh more than 0.00 and still you can't reach god without facing physical death you have to you you you you have to face the actual you can't avoid this. You have to actually, physical death has to confront you and you have to say, okay, I'm fine with it and just do it and just go into the physical death and just accept it. Look, being fearful is just the natural state of survival, of life.

We're afraid of death. So all fear boils down to fear of death. And they call it a leap of faith for a reason, like in religious traditions. In the end, you need a leap of faith to face your death and to conquer it and to come out the other side. There's a really great quote that I love from, I forget which non-dual teacher, I don't remember anymore, but, and I'm paraphrasing, he said something like this, awakening or enlightenment is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. So the bad news is that you don't have a parachute, but the good news is that you discover there is no ground and then you're just endlessly falling and you never, you never

reach the ground. So in a sense, what I'm asking you to do is to jump and you don't want to jump. You're saying, Leo, I'm scared. I'm too scared to jump. And I'm saying, jump. God is telling you, jump, jump into infinite love. And it's going to be great. But you're like, but what if, but what if I kill myself? And what if I, you know, rape somebody? And what if something else happens? I don't know. You just jump into infinite love, you know, take the leap of faith and you'll discover infinite love. And, you know, you're, you're too scared to do it, but then eventually when you do it, then you're just going to discover there's no ground. You're falling, you're endlessly falling forever. And it's great. But,

but yeah, taking that leap is really difficult. And sometimes materialists and scientists and atheists will say, Well, Leo, if God is infinite love and everything you say is true and all this, it sounds so good. If it's so good, why isn't everybody talking about it? Why isn't everybody doing it? Well, because it requires you to face your death. So, of course, everybody is too afraid to do it. That's the answer why.

People are just too scared. To be clear, for people who are taking this extremely seriously, which perhaps you should, though there's another perspective that, eh, it doesn't matter. Do whatever you like. Don't take it too seriously. For those who are taking it seriously, I believe, Leo, you're referring to.

Right now, you're referring to psychologically take that leap. Don't do any physical leaps of faith. Yeah, don't physically don't don't physically injure your body. Let's get to some of the more rapid fire questions. OK. As I probably said in the intro, I don't know what I'm going to write in the intro right now. I was planning on writing that this episode is more focused on you

rather than your ideas. That turns out not to be the case. It's pretty much the same as last episode, if not deeper. However, now we're going to focus a bit on you. There's someone named steve scully who has a theory of everything i don't know if he's reached out to you does this name ring a bell okay well people who are watching you can visit steve scully's website and learn about his theory of everything from the description below he has an issue which is that and many people have

this issue they have a theory of everything which they believe is fully articulated and truthful. But they're having a difficult time getting people like myself, perhaps like yourself, to look at it. I don't know how often you get requested to read or to watch people's videos, but I get requested it multiple times a day. And I have to make, I want to say adjudication, but it's not as if it's impartial. I have to make some judgment as to what's worth my time. And so some people get left behind, even though they may have what's the truth.

And just because they're not as charismatic or they don't have a following, then they get left in the dust. So for people like Steve Scully, who have theories of everything, who want you to read it, or myself, what advice do you have? What should they be doing or not doing? Right. That's a good question. I faced that problem myself when I was back in college, because I was also sort of developing theories of everything. And then my problem was like, well, how do I popularize this theory? Who's going to want to take me serious? So my advice would be introspect and look at the

psychology behind why you need somebody else to look at your theory. Like, why do you even care? And there can be two reasons there. There can be sort of a positive reason and negative reason. The negative reason is because you want something from them. You want them to put you on. You want them to recognize you. You want fame. You want status. You want to be recognized as the genius or whatever. So there's those sorts of egotistical reasons. Watch out for those. good intent behind what you might be trying to get at is that you might actually think that you've you found something very important, some important truth that you need to share with mankind that would actually benefit mankind. And so if that's true, if you actually do have some some nugget, let's say you're the next Einstein, how do you popularize your ideas? Well, in that case, you have to you have to really ask yourself, are you going about it the right way? Like, rather than trying to get put on in some sort of quick fashion, getting somebody to

recognize you, why don't you slowly really invest into this truth? Because supposedly you think it's an important truth. Invest into this theory, really build it out, maybe write an entire book, or start your own YouTube channel, start your own podcast, start going to conferences, start talking to other people, right? Slowly, this will be a process of years where you have to invest and build it out to get your following and to get people to recognize what you're trying to do. And to get people to recognize what you're trying to do, don't just expect some big name academic to read your paper and then be like, oh my God, you're the next Einstein. It's not going to happen that way. Nobody's going to put you on. If you believe in your theory, you have to believe in it so deeply you have to work on it every single day, maybe devote your entire life to popularizing it if it's really something valuable. maybe devote your entire life to popularizing it if it's really something valuable. And then eventually you'll get to the point where people like Kurt will be coming to you asking to interview

you rather than the other way around. Because yeah, what you have to understand is that people like Kurt, you know, they get bombarded by all sorts of bullshit all the time. And most academics and scientists do too. They get crackpot theories left and right. So it's very understandable why these scientists would actually be somewhat rigid and closed-minded, is because they do have crackpots telling them that they've discovered the new theory of everything, they've discovered something better than Einstein,

and then when they actually look into it, they discover it's bullshit. So you have to understand why those bullshit filters are up. Because, quite frankly, through the internet, there is a lot of bullshit going around, especially these days. And so it is difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. And if someone like Kurt doesn't do that, he would spend his whole day, you know, reading all sorts of crackpot theories and he would be lost. So do also understand why you're getting rejected. It's not

just because people don't recognize your genius. It's just that, you know, this is the nature of how this stuff works. We're trying to sort the wheat from the chaff when we're trying to do science and philosophy all the time. And we have limited time and resources. So that's why. Yeah, I'll add my perspective. It's almost like you have many children who have their hands up and they're each saying, pick me, pick me, pick me. I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to despise or disparage by saying that you're a child, please. Okay. So adults who have their hands up, but each one is like, no, but they don't know, man. Like I have it. Yeah. But each one of those

adults are saying that. So I don't know which one to pick. And I do actually recommend and encourage people to email me unlike most of the academics i'm not an academic but unlike most of the other popularizers here on youtube the reason is that i have a feeling that these different elements of truth will come from people who seem like they're on the fringe but then you wonder well, you're spending so much time. Soon I'll be going into something called geometric unity. Before that, I'm going to go into string and then loop for physics, as well as speaking with people like you. And that takes so much time. So Kurt, okay, you're spending more and more time going through other people's. When are you going to have the

time to get to mine? The way that I see that is that it turns out for me, Steve Scully was saying this to me, was all I need is for you to read the book. But for me, it may take me a week of devoted time for me to discern whether or not there's something about this theory of everything, because I take it extremely seriously. And even if on the face of it, it looks like there's nothing here. I don't like to take theories on the face of it. Okay, so how does that comport with me saying that I'm still studying other people's theories and taking them seriously? When am I going to get the time to go through other people's? Well, at least for me, I tag each email that gets sent to me that has a theory of everything.

I tag it for later lookup. And it turns out, at least for me, that it's getting easier and easier to read people's. At first, what would take me a week, maybe six months later would take me three days. And the reason if people's, if anyone here played No Man's Sky, which is a video game, it's as if the language is gibberish. Have you played it? I just played it recently. Okay, great, great, great.

So the language is gibberish at first. It's like x, x, y, y, and then you start to unlock these stone tablets and soon little words come out here and there, and then you start to be able to figure out the meaning. So what's happening right now for me is I'm slowly getting more and more verbiage. I'm being able to understand that this is what this sentence is from a glance. So I hope to eventually get to, if you've sent me a theory glance. So I hope to eventually get to, if you've sent me a theory of everything, I hope to eventually get to it.

That's what all of that is saying. Okay, I have a question. Yeah, you wanna riff on that? Well, one final quick point about advice for those people who have their theories that they wanna popularize. Your strategy for popularizing your theory should not hinge on any one person putting you on. So you can go by all means, you know, try to submit your theories to whoever you can get,

the big name guys, whatever out there like Kurt. But your strategy should be deeper than that. There should be like, assume that Kurt won't read your email and then still keep going and trying to popularize your theory. So maybe that means emailing 20 other people like Kurt out there, or maybe it means other things, starting your own channel or starting your own podcast or whatever. You know, you have to really work at it. Like, nobody in life is going to put you on and, you know, make you successful. It doesn't work that way. You have to really work your ass off for it.

So if you really believe in it go work for it and then yeah and then maybe you'll get lucky too so luck luck tends to come with the more work you do luck is not just something that's random sorry when i interrupt you partly there's a delay and partly i'm just so eager i see that you look a bit defeated and i'm sorry each time no that's fine you're like yeah okay and partly I'm just so eager. I see that you look a bit defeated and I'm sorry each time. No, that's fine. You're like, yeah, okay. I always have endless things to say so it's not a problem.

You have to cut me off somewhere. What I was going to say is that if you've emailed 20 people and all of them have either not responded or said no, then don't worry, man or girl or woman or whatever. Keep at it. Like you have nothing else to do with your life. There's nothing else that you're doing except living your life. So that's fine. Spend more time, build up your YouTube channel, build up your influence, keep contacting other people. If they're still saying no, if your influence is still small, keep at it. Don't worry.

You have nothing else to do. Well, if you truly have a theory of everything, you have nothing else to do. The other thing you can do is you can ask yourself, how can I provide more value to the world, right? So people's willingness to interview you or to talk with you or to put you on is going to directly relate because people are selfish. It's going to directly relate to how many followers do you have? What kind of value can you offer? So look for ways to offer value to people. And if you want somebody to put you on, try to offer them value in whatever way it could be through, um, offering

them a lot of subscribers that maybe you could bring their way or through something else, maybe a gift you can send them or whatever, you know send buy kurt some uh some microwavable bacon and fed exit to his door and then you will be in his heart forever that's how you get a theory of everything published through kurt okay on that note if you want to send me not microwavable bacon but if you want to send me your toe the address is toe so toe at indie film to.com something interesting is my previous career was a filmmaker i'm still i still call myself a filmmaker more than a youtuber if anything a filmmaker and my previous job was indie film to which i always abbreviated as iftoe internally we'd say so iftoe iftoe turns out that my next job was toe so i went from ifto to toe

which is actually extremely symbolic think about it psychologically ifto it was almost like the question you asked me is it possible kurt that you can know everything and i was like no then you're like kurt is it possible can you allow that as a possibility it's almost like before it was ifto and now it is toe toe is now my mind has to follow my exography kurt are you a lowercase you youtuber or an uppercase you youtuber right yeah you have to be clear about that i want you to be clear you got to be real precise with your language there okay let's get to so a question i have for you is how do you keep your head so still when you're speaking to the camera for about two hours, three hours?

What do you mean? Where else would it go? When I'm going to do this on me. Wait for this. Okay. Look, right now I'm standing, which I imagine you're standing. No, I'm sitting. So that's one secret is to sit because when you're standing your body will rock i used to half my old episodes i was standing and you you actually you actually noticed my head kind of and my body kind of bobbing it's actually hard to stand for two hours straight and you have to stand very straight because the camera is like you have to be very if you're close to the camera it's very easy to get off center so like yeah you have to train yourself to be very straight when you're

sitting and you're looking it's easier when you sit are you seeing yourself no that is it because that would be too distracting oh yeah it's very distracting and your your eyes would go off to the side you wouldn't be i'm trying to look into the camera, but like, otherwise your eyes would be off on your face and it's going to be, it's going to look bad. What trips you up when you're speaking? The biggest challenge for me to speak is that my mind is very non-linear and it's, um, it's very intuitive and I'm, I'm jumping and jumping and I'm always seeing many threads to everything. So any point that I have in my mind, there's also 10, there's another 10 points that I could in 10 offshoots from that point. And so that 10 has 10 more. Basically, every point is sort of cascades into an infinite fractal.

So the difficulty for me when I'm speaking is not to lose track of those threads because it'll just get very, it'll lose all of its structure. So I have to kind of train myself to find and kind of stick, keep on track, not to veer off into like weird directions. Well, right now I'm interviewing you. And I know that you're of the mind that we're of the same mind, that we're ultimately the same. But in some more concrete sense, that's where i'm like you because i think much like that so it's like you're being interviewed by yourself so if you see a bit of structurelessness to this well that's because that's how your mind works that's how my mind works okay i also want to know personally i'm i'm like man i'm flabbergasted that I even have a following that's more than 10,000 YouTube subscribers.

Either way, the whole point is that I never thought I'm still like in awe that I have 80,000 subscribers. Like, holy moly. And I'm curious, do you have similar feelings? Like when you look at your subscriber count or your influence or the fact that people are building a community around Actualized, like people defend you. And I imagine some of those people who defend you shouldn't be because they're defending you for the wrong reasons. That's a problem. They're defending you for the wrong reasons because that just comes. They just look up to you, even though they don't want to say that. I ultimately found the truth on my own.

No, no. You look up to Leo and you don't realize that you do whatever you know do you ever get i think the word is gobsmacked do you ever have your jaw dropping like man whoa holy moly i i got that at the beginning at this point i don't even like look at my subscriber counts very much or like you get used like, you get used to it. If you get a lot of wealth, when you get your first million, you'll be like, holy fuck, I have a million dollars. And then after a few years of having your first million, you're like, eh, what does it matter? People don't understand how easy the mind acclimates to anything.

And so, yeah, you acclimate to it. I mean, yeah, you're right, it's amazing. And I sometimes, especially the beginning when I had lots of followers and stuff, it was amazing. And it does go to your head too. It makes you more egotistical. Yeah. How do you prevent that? It's difficult because it's a complex dynamic where on the one hand you have your most loyal fans who love you no matter what and they will praise you no matter what even if you do something wrong and so you have to be careful because they're going to mislead you because your mind is going to want to be flattered so sometimes you

even like you shoot a video that's not so good and people say oh it was amazing it's like no it wasn't really amazing i should have improved but people will tell you, you know, they'll blow smoke up your ass anyways. So that will happen. So that's dangerous. Uh, the other thing that will happen is we get a bunch of trolls to some people who just hate you no matter what you do, you can never please them. So that's a problem because they're sort of the worst example of critics. They're giving you criticism, but it's not constructive criticism. And so you can't really use it, and it actually makes you feel bad about yourself, guilty, and so forth. So that's a problem. You've got to avoid those people.

And then you've got to sort of find the people in the middle who will actually give you a constructive criticism without tearing you down, and also people who give you praise, but the praise is sort of like earned praise. They will give you praise when you really, truly did something amazing. the praise is sort of like earned praise. They will give you praise when you really, truly did something amazing. And once in a while, you know, you really do release a video that was amazing, and they give you some praise for it. And it's not sycophantic praise, but like, you know, something genuine. And then, you know, that touches your heart. And so you got to find both the praise and the criticism, which is more towards the middle rather than the polar extremes, more towards the middle rather than the polar extremes which which will mislead you speaking of tim ferris he said which i don't know comes from him but he said that they're never as good as you say you are and they're never as bad as they say you are exactly yeah a quote from some

famous greek is that greek philosophers like uh it might have been plato something, but Aristotle is like, fame is like salt water for the thirsty. It never quenches your thirst. I wonder if part... I take things seriously. I know that I take things perhaps too seriously. And I even take that statement a bit too seriously. Like that I need to take myself less seriously. I take that too seriously. And I even take that statement a bit too seriously. Like that, I need to take myself less seriously. I take that too seriously. I wonder if when I... See,

I don't use the word trolls. I almost never, if ever, use it. Even psychologically say that when someone's criticizing me, they're a troll. I try to find... I think of them as... They're not my fans, and so they're telling me the truth, and I need to listen to them. And it's another reason why I heart almost each comment, because I'm using that as almost tabulation to say, okay, I've checked this, checked this, and I skim them. And I try to find the nugget of truth in the criticism. I wonder if part of why I have apprehension to checking my own comments is because I take the negative ones so seriously. That perhaps I would do good to think of some people as trolls. I don't, but perhaps I should.

You should. I don't think I should. If some of them are trolls, yeah, you take your comments too seriously because it'll drive you crazy. I've been there before. Also, you don't get that many trolls. I get a lot more trolls. So for me, it's a bigger problem. I've i've got trolls from you if anything right now okay yeah okay well but then that's something new that's my people trolling you that's new for you

but yeah i mean basically people will gaslight you so you have to be careful about that don't let people gaslight you with their ignorance what's meant by gaslighting? I've heard the term and I just don't know how you're using it. I'm using it in that classical sense of like, well, like, let's say you and I are, you know, a couple and we're in a relationship. And like, I cheat on you, but and then you accuse me of you're like, hey, Leah, why did you cheat on me? And I say, no, you cheated on me. I'll throw it cheat on you but and then you accuse me of you're like hey leo why did you cheat on me and i say no you cheated on me i'll throw it back on you i'll make you feel guilty for what i did right so so let's say we're in a business deal and i screw you over the business deal and then i actually end up blaming you for screwing me in the business deal in fact when i screwed you so let's take the classic case of someone

who checks someone's phone and finds out you're cheating by checking your phone. Yeah. Yeah. But what are you doing? You don't trust me. You went, you unlocked my phone. Would that be an example? Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. Okay. It's like, how could you be so selfish for looking into my phone? That was all you. You're see, if you were more spiritual and you were more loving than you, you should accept the fact that, you know, I was texting with some other girl. That just shows you that you're not spiritually evolved. That's some spiritual gaslighting right there. What's spiritual bypassing? I've heard this term. Have you heard of it? Yeah, definitely. It's a popular term. People use it in different ways. people use it in different ways basically I think

it's like when you the way that I think of it is like when you're so in the practice of spiritual sort of philosophy and you're sort of putting on an air of being spiritual but you're not actually dealing with the shit you're not actually facing

your shadow it's sort of like I mean a lot of Christians do this you know they will go to church and they will pray and all this. But then right after they come out of church, they'll say, oh, look at that. You know, they'll start judging everybody as soon as they walk out of church. And they maybe even judge them for not being spiritual enough. So it's you're using spirituality. Again, the ego is weaponizing spiritual ideas to actually expand the ego rather than actually to deconstruct the ego. So yeah, spirituality is so easily weaponized. Do you believe this statement that in order to get to heaven, one must go through hell?

statement that in order to get to heaven one must go through hell I mean it's a very loose statement that maybe has some wisdom to it but you have to be careful not to take it literally or to take it as some sort of metaphysical necessity I mean some people nature yeah some people can literally just have spontaneous awakenings and God realization just for no fucking reason. So don't get this in your mind that I have to go through this fucking ordeal and this grind and it has to be so difficult. No, some people just, it can be easy. It doesn't have to be hard. Then you can romanticize your own suffering and say, and almost excuse it. Like I know some people who psychologically torment themselves and say, well, this is what's necessary in order to get to heaven. I'm doing union

integration. I'm just facing my shadow, but all the while they're not, well, in some sense, maybe they are, but they're not. You have to be careful with self-fulfilling prophecies. So there's a lot of, a lot of what the mind does is it's constructing reality. You have to be careful that how you look at the world tends to get reinforced. Like the world reflects back at you the way you tend to look at it. So if you tell yourself that something is really difficult, it might just become that difficult because that's how you looked at it. So be careful about that. And not everything has to be difficult. careful about that. And not everything has to be difficult.

I have this question about you telling your you had a whole video series called advice for young people, something like that. And I believe that in one of the introductions, you would say, this is what I had wished I told myself maybe 20 years earlier, something like that. Now, how do you balance that, telling yourself your younger self advice, with the fact in your mind that the universe is exactly the way that it is, it happens for a reason? So what is even the point of telling yourself how to behave differently or instructing people as to how to behave better?

What is the point of God realization? Well, obviously, I can't go back in time and change my life so in that sense it doesn't benefit me but it it's there there is a point in giving advice to young people i mean that that's very practical because those people can can take that wisdom and use it for you know you can you can learn and improve your life based on the life experiences of others who are wise and came before you. In fact, this is crucial unless you want to be a fucking fool and commit all the same mistakes that everybody has made in the past. I mean, look, mankind has been alive for hundreds of thousands of years, and there's a lot of deep wisdom there.

And this is part of what Jordan Peterson is right about, is that, you know, you shouldn't throw away traditions willy-nilly the way that some postmodernists tend to do. It's like there is deep wisdom within our traditions that you can learn from, and you can learn from your elders. And if you're not learning from your elders and those who came before you, you're really going to screw up in life. So learn those lessons so you don't have to, you have to suffer through them yourself. Now, can you learn all your lessons that way? No, you're going to have to make some mistakes. The truest way to learn is to make mistakes,

but you don't have to literally hit every branch on the way down the tree. You can hit a few of the branches, but you don't have to hit every single one. And so I see that a lot of youngsters simply don't take wisdom of their ancestors seriously enough, and they just kind of live life willy-nilly, and then they get very lost that way. Do you see that as a problem? It's getting worse? Yeah, with social media and with just television and internet and all this sort of stuff, I mean, our culture has become so vulgar and debased that wisdom is very missing from our culture, which I believe is what you were talking about with John Vervaeke. He's big into the wisdom stuff. It's like, yeah, we're really deeply missing wisdom.

And science is missing wisdom, too. Academia even is missing wisdom. Now, not everywhere. Obviously, John Verveke is an academic and he talks about wisdom, but that's the exception. That's not the rule. Most of academia is very unwise. It's just, it's very technical. It's very sort of technocratic. It's like, let's just study for this test and learn to memorize these things here. But it's like, yeah, but that's not wisdom. Right, they would even criticize whether wisdom exists.

Yeah, like wisdom is not scientific. How do you formalize wisdom? But the whole point is that wisdom is not supposed to be formalizable. You can't write wisdom into an equation. Right. What did Jesus and the Buddha get wrong? What? Yeah, and I know I'm stroking your ego,

or some people will think that you're... I don't... You are... I am closing the video right now. If you say that Jesus was wrong or Buddha, how the heck are you? So I know some people would be thinking that. But let's put some logs into that fire.

Well, the bottom line is that mostly what we have of Jesus and Buddha are our own myths of them. We have extremely limited understanding of the historical Jesus and the historical Buddha. Like, there's so little there. It's very hard to say what they were really like. I think we have overly idealized ideas of both of them. ideas of both of them. I'm sure that if you actually had them on video, they would be much less appealing than the myths we've portrayed. Like you would see their warts and their flaws and their, some remaining lingering egoic aspects and so forth. It wouldn't be like this worshiping deity that you worship. Because in real life, when you interact with enlightened masters, like people who are really, really conscious and really woke, they're not perfect.

Do you believe that Jesus was a special son of God? So not like we're all son of gods in some sense, or we're all God in some sense, but do you believe there was something special about Jesus and he was sent here to represent as an emissary for God? Yes and no. No, in the sense that we're all God. But yes, in the sense that some people are more conscious, just their baseline consciousness due to genetics is just radically higher, and they're capable of paranormal and supernatural things, mystical things that normal humans are not capable of doing. And I do suspect that Jesus probably was one of those. I don't think he was just like a regular dude who just meditated a little bit and then he just realized he was God.

I think it was much deeper than that. I think he actually had some mystical abilities that were exceptionally rare. And the way that you explain that is simply like if you look at human height on a bell curve, we have people who are like dwarves from Game of Thrones, Peter Dinklage, and then you have people in the middle like us, and then you have people like Tony Robbins who are a little bit tall, and then you have some people who are like eight feet fucking tall. And the chances of you being born eight foot tall is like one in a billion. But it does happen. And like the same

thing happens, what people don't realize, the same thing happens with our minds. Our minds are not all the same. They're different. Some people are born with brains and minds that have like photographic memory, or they have clairvoyance, or they have telepathy, or they have like other things that they can do that are just completely out of the ordinary. And this makes them look supernatural. And I probably believe Jesus had some of that going for him. I don't know how much. There's also probably a lot of embellishment of his miracles and so forth. But it's not outside the realm of possibility that he literally could heal some people. Now, was it a thing that he could do scientifically?

Like, hey, I'll bring you any sick person, you can just heal them instantly? No, I doubt it worked like that. I bet it was a much more probabilistic thing, where I'm sure there were many people he wasn't able to heal, but maybe a few of them he did heal. That's how it tends to work, in my understanding. Okay. How do you get those thumbnails? How do you choose them? Do you design them?

Where do you get them from? I scour the web for interesting thumbnails. I'm very aesthetically oriented. I used to do graphic design and stuff like that. I'm very aesthetically oriented. I used to do graphic design and stuff like that. So I actually, I keep a sort of repository on my computer of interesting wallpapers and thumbnails that I find. I sort of collect them all, anticipating that, you know, in a year from now, I'm going to be shooting a video about Paradox or something, I tell myself.

And then I'm like, okay, so what kind of thumbnail would be good for Paradox? And so I found, like, I have a thumbnail already on my computer for Paradox. I've had it for, like, three years. It's waiting for me to record the Paradox video. And then I'll attach it to that. And yeah, so I go through that process. Sometimes I modify them in Photoshop. Sometimes I'll combine two together.

Other times I'll just take one that I like and just use that. Okay. So you don't have a standard website. I use stock photo sites as well use that. Okay. So you don't have a standard website. I use stock photo sites as well, yeah. Okay. Do you write your ideas out beforehand or do you express them in the moment during the two-hour to three-hour extemporaneous dialogue? Yeah, it's a combination of both usually.

Well, first of all, I'm always thinking these things through before I talk about them so there's that that's just a given I'm always contemplating about things so I'm never speaking about something I haven't contemplated before

and then for certain episodes that are more technical I'll do an outline and I could spend hours or even weeks preparing an outline but the outline is just a loose skeleton. It's not like a word for word. So I'll do that. And then lately I've been just riffing a lot.

Like, for example, my Jordan Peterson episode, that was just all from pure riffing. No notes or anything. So I'm moving towards this point where I'm going to be doing more episodes where I'm just riffing no like notes or anything so i'm moving towards this point where i'm going to be doing more episodes where i'm just riffing it comes out more authentic and more uh more fluid when i do it that way but the the danger with doing it that way is that then i'm not sometimes i will miss important points and that's why in the past i didn't like to do that because there were there's sometimes on a certain topic i know that i only have one chance to record this topic. And so I have to make sure that I get all the important points in there.

And it can be difficult just to keep all those in memory while talking because everything is, you know, running in a different in a million different directions when you're when you're talking. And it's easy to get off course. I don't watch your videos at ordinary speed and generally when i'm watching slash listening i'm mainly listening so i don't know if you have cuts but do you have many cuts or is it it's just from zero to two straight zero to two hours i mean like you just record for two hours straight yeah no i don't i don't i don't cut my videos i I record as a single take. It's always recorded as a single take. Wow. Is that something that you were always skilled at or did you develop that?

No. And if you go look at my earliest videos from like eight years ago, you'll see how much worse I was than I am now. It took a lot of practice. was than I am now. It took a lot of practice. I basically made a rule for myself as I began is that I said that I want to be able to speak the way I would speak if I was speaking in front of a live audience, which means I don't get to edit anything. So I was basically using this as a means of practicing public speaking through camera. And so my rule with myself was that I'm always going to be recording as though it's recording live and that there's no edits. And that will train me to then speak better.

Because if I assume that I can edit stuff in post, then first of all, you waste a lot of time in post. Second of all, it's that then you don't really learn to speak the way you would if you were speaking live to an audience when you have your notes are they pretty much in front of you so it's a white screen with those bullet points when you do have the notes and then your camera's above or do you have it on a separate screen you press alt tab to get to it like how does it work practically specifically speaking actually a two-way mirror is used like a teleprompter oh all right so that's useful it's it's right through the camera lens okay so then your notes must be extremely small then it's not extensive at all unless you're scrolling through them and you have a yeah i have a remote i have a remote i can scroll through them and you have a remote. I have a remote. I can scroll through them.

Because a lot of times I'll have to read a quotation. Some of my quotations are long, so I just got to put it in there. But I prefer not to read. I prefer to riff. but I prefer not to read. I prefer to riff because I get insights when I'm riffing that I won't get if I'm just reading something. And in fact, I never actually just like read,

I don't just like read a paragraph. The notes are there just to remind me of what I need to talk about. Oh, UFOs, okay. Yeah. What are your thoughts on ufos and if they exist exist in let's say this consensus reality do you think you can contact them with different states of consciousness like let's say psychedelics there's also something called ce5 where you intend to contact an alien. Yeah, I've heard of that. I personally don't have any direct experience of UFOs. Sorry to disappoint you guys. But my intuition tells me that they're real because there's just way too much evidence out there, way too many anecdotal studies and

reports all across time, across all continents, across all countries, different cultures. It's just, there's, there's so much evidence. It's, it's, it's preposterous how much evidence there is. Um, even though maybe there's not very good photographs, but even from the, you have to understand, like I saw this stupid tweet by Elon Musk where, you know, he posted a photograph of a UFO that was like a fake UFO and he said something like, you know, something along the lines of like, we have great cameras, why are all the UFO pictures so grainy? But it's like, dude, take your smartphone and try to photograph a fucking bird or a jetliner flying over your house,

it's fucking impossible. You can barely even photograph the moon with your smartphone. It's going to look so blurry and it's going to look so bad. Like even, even if you take a DSLR camera, I have a $5,000 DSLR camera. Try to photograph a jet flying over your house with that camera without the proper telephoto lens. Even with a telephoto lens, what are you going to see there? It's not going to be like people imagine that it's going to be like Hollywood. You're going to see this perfectly 3D rendered like saucer. No, like it's very difficult to photograph this, especially if it's moving in the way that UFO sightings are described.

Like this thing is fucking moving really fast. It's not moving like a jet, you know, like a jet plane and it's accelerating, decelerating, you know, going in weird directions. And plus you're shocked by the thing. If you see a UFO, just imagine it. You actually see a UFO for the first time. It's so shocking to you. Like you're going to be stunned for a few minutes before you even decide to photograph the thing. Also, it's so infrequent. You're going to be scared. You're going to be scared. Yeah.

So it doesn't bother me that there are not crystal clear, you know, scientific photos of UFOs. Although even now, you know, the Navy, U.S. Navy and government is releasing stuff. Like, they have a pretty amazing video of like this UFO rotating. I mean, people complain that that's grainy, but have you looked at the like, um, videos of, um, of like bomb strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan? They're very grainy. It's hard to tell what the hell. Yeah. Like it's hard to tell what the hell. Those are static objects. Yeah, like, it's hard to tell what's really going on in those military videos. So, all the evidence and my intuition tells me that they're flying around out there. Now, as far as what they want from us and all that, I don't know. And then, I mean, are there hoaxes?

Yeah, I think there's some hoaxes. But you can't dismiss all of it as a hoax. To me, I think there's some hoaxes. But you can't dismiss all of it as a hoax. To me, that's preposterous. That's actually anti-Occam's Razor. What's funny is that people say, well, Occam's Razor says that UFOs can't be real.

But the thing is, Occam's Razor is an extremely flimsy epistemic notion. It's very relativistic, because you can always flip Occam's Razor around. Like, to me, actually, it's Occam's Razor that they're flying around because look, there are like a hundred billion stars out there and like a hundred billion of those stars have hundreds of billions of planets all combined. Like the chances that there are not aliens flying around out there are like basically zero. There's also a more profound philosophical problem of how do you tell what the probability of an event that only occurs once is? Yeah, it's impossible.

It could be half, it could be 20%, it could be 5%, it could be much less. A lot of scientifically minded people will use something they call Bayesian reasoning. It's sort of this probabilistic reasoning. And they think they're being scientific when they use this, but actually there's nothing scientific about Bayesian reasoning. It's complete nonsense because you never know your starting probabilities for anything. Like, what are the probabilities for UFOs existing? You don't fucking know. It could be zero. It could be a hundred, like, and anything in between. You have no idea what the probability of a UFO existing is. The other problem with Bayesian reasoning

is it has what's called the reference class problem. And I also wonder how much of racism, when I was doing Better Left Unsaid, the documentary, I wonder how much of racism is due to a reference class problem. The reference class problem means, well, what do I say is the, like, if I asked you, what's the probability you're going to die tomorrow? You could say 1%. I'm just making up a number. The reason is because, well, you've lived for so long and people like you.

Well, people like you. Well, what is like you? Am I considering you as the class of all humans or the class of all living creatures? If you're the class of all living creatures, most of them die, like every second, because most are cellular. So most likely, if I was to just think of you as being an arbitrary member of the set of all creatures, then you're most likely to die tomorrow. But is that the right way of interpreting what you are? Okay, well, the set of all humans, but then you're like, no, no, the set of all humans that live in Las Vegas.

Okay, sure, okay, yeah, but the set of all humans that are about my age, like, you don't just incorporate anyone with heart disease, so you can keep playing this game, and eventually you get down to the one set, which is you. So it's not clear to what is the reference class at which I'm determining your probability. And Bayesian, or at least what's called subjective probability has that problem, the problem of the reference class. And I think it's extremely, extremely deep philosophical probabilistic problem, a problem of the philosophy of probability. Yeah. It's very easy to fool yourself and deceive yourself with Bayesian reasoning because in general what's going to happen is that your ego mind low Bayesian reasoning to UFOs existing because, um, like their own experience doesn't include any UFOs. So of course you're going to put that as a very low probability, but if you actually see a UFO, then your whole attitude about that will change. It'll flip upside down in a single day.

And I have, I have, I have friends who claim to have seen ufos by the way who i have no i have no reason to doubt them although i don't like blindly believe them either but there are so many people who claim to have seen them and they can't all be hallucinating well everyone is well yeah but then in that case okay this question comes from fakery leo mentions briefly intuitively grasping awakening i hope leo can characterize what intuition is are there multiple types of intuition how are they related and different and can we even develop our intuitions you can certainly develop your intuition.

Entire books have been written about this. So that's definitely, yeah. Is there one that you consider to be credible of all his books? Because I'm sure he'll be like, what's your book recommendation? I don't feel comfortable recommending one off the top of my head. I'm actually still researching that. I have a video I released in the past about how to develop your intuition. As far as defining what intuition is and different kinds of intuition, it's really difficult.

I mean, intuition is slippery by its very nature. As soon as you try to define it, you're out of intuition and into like logic and stuff. Although paradoxically, of course, logic requires intuition. You can't actually do logic without intuition. And the best logicians are very intuitive people. And the best mathematicians are very intuitive people. So basically, intuition is tapping into, there's a profound, there's something very profound going on with intuition. What you're actually doing there is you're tapping into infinite intelligence or consciousness. So intuition is an aspect of consciousness and intelligence. And in fact, you can't be intelligent without sufficient intuition. So intuition is your ability. It's your mind's ability to make leaps and have insights without following any kind of formal pattern or rule set.

without following any kind of formal pattern or rule set. It's your ability to literally see without knowing how you're seeing. You're able to jump ahead in your logic without going through all the steps of the logic. So it's that capacity. And it is a very mysterious property of consciousness. And so that mystery, the mistake, I think, is trying to boil down that mystery and to reduce it away to say that there's nothing actually mysterious going on there. But what I would suggest is that you actually bite the bullet on that and you just accept that mystery is fundamental to what

consciousness is. Consciousness is irreducibly mystical and mysterious. That's why we call it mysticism. And you're never going to be able to articulate and explicate all of infinity. The nature of infinity is that it must be forever mysterious because it's endless. All right, next question also from Fakery. Leo also mentions a realization of infinite beauty. Now, what is the role of the arts, such as painting, music, poetry, film, dance, etc., in our awakening? And also in realizing infinite beauty. Do you

create? Do you actively enjoy art? How do we refine our appreciation of art? So, one is... Yeah, I got it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, beauty is fundamental. People don't understand how fundamental beauty is. Beauty is infinite. I mean, reality is infinite beauty. God is infinite beauty. You'll realize this when you fully awaken.

going to look beautiful to you when you awaken. And that's also what you realize on psychedelics. When you start doing psychedelics, even the things you thought were ugly were going to look beautiful. Even your toilet will look beautiful to you on a psychedelic. That's because you're becoming conscious of the fact that reality is infinite perfection and beauty. Consciousness is beauty. God is beauty. As far as the arts, we touched upon this in the previous episode where I talked about how God is creator. That's one important aspect of God. And consciousness is always creating new things. That's the nature of infinity. Infinity is that which is endless. So it's always spawning new things.

And it delights in the creative process because creativity is beautiful. And it delights in the creative process because creativity is beautiful. It's beautiful to create new things and to discover more and more of yourself as you're creating. And so I think the arts play a huge role. I consider myself to be very artistic. I love graphic design, graphic art, 3D art. All right. We've got to talk about that.

Video games. I mean, that talk about that. Video games. That's why I got into games. I like admiring art. I love studying art history. I enjoy different genres of art. I enjoy music. Music is part of art. I can enjoy architecture. There's so many different ways. Film.

That art can be enjoyed. I actually view my's so many different ways. Film, that art can be enjoyed. I actually view my work as art, although most people wouldn't see it that way. But the reason I do my work is because of art. I consider it in my art form. The thumbnails that I do is my Um, and so to me, art is just participating in the process of creation as God. So I'm like a little, the Leo is like a little God creating things using God's powers. And so my creations are finite and flawed, but you know, they're not as good as God's, but you know, I do my best and I can enjoy that process. It can also be infuriating. So art is both enjoyable and it's also very frustrating and stressful and infuriating because we're so constrained when we do our art. We can't

do it in an unlimited fashion the way that God would be able to do so it's very challenging, but also very rewarding and My entire life has been driven by by by the doing of creative stuff and by by being creative and by being artistic I Think it's it's really important. I think it's one of the most Just on a practical level if you want to improve your life Get into being creative, whatever that means, whether it's through business, music, film, YouTubing, podcasting, and creativity, expand your idea of what creativity and art are. Stop thinking of business as not being art. Business is fucking art. Turn your business into an art form. Don't do it for money,

do it for art. And, you know, turn your relationships into an art. Turn your lovemaking and your sex into an art. Turn your conversations with humans into an art. Make it all art. Make it beautiful. Make your cooking an art. When you say art, what do you mean? As in do it for its own sake? Yeah, do it? Similar to love? on a deeper level, which is why psychedelics go so well with music, is that you can pair the psychedelic with music and then you can appreciate the, you can actually see the music as actually forms of consciousness that are just like flowing out of God's mind into your mind. And then it becomes a deeply spiritual experience and you can see the perfection in the music. And it's just, it's incredible. Well, you can do that not not just with music. You can do that with everything.

Have you ever tried to listen to an older song, like old, like church songs, like Gregorian chants while you're on a psychedelic rather than modern? No, I haven't tried that. Oh man, because I have a feeling, Leo, that the further back in time we go, the more music actually taps

into a primitive part of our consciousness and when i say primitive i mean direct not primitive and i think that the more modern we are the more it's like ian mcgillchrist would say the left brain it's like the left brain trying to take over the right brain and if we go back we didn't care too much and so there's somehow somehow it's tapping and i would i would have loved to hear how did you experience especially man on a psychedelic i can experience even what you call left brain music as like yeah i'm sure because there's an orgasmically genius you know like genius levels that bring you to, to like musical orgasms. So could you get that with Gregorian chanting?

Maybe, probably. I mean, it's, it's pretty relative. It's all about your own taste. I mean, there,

there's nothing about Gregorian chanting. That's less beautiful than modern music. I mean, it's just like, you can see the beauty in anything. If you look for it. I mean, it's just like, you can see the beauty in anything if you look for it. Pedro Gorilla asks, wow, ask him if he believes he's ever been in a state of psychedelic-induced psychosis.

How could he tell if he hasn't? And if he has been, well, what has he done to manage the situation? Yeah, I've been in states of what you would call madness or insanity. I don't know if it was like, I don't know what psychosis means per se and what that person means. But yeah, like on a lot of mushrooms, especially mushrooms are very twisted and for me send me into sort of states of madness if I take too much of them. So what was the question about that? Have I been there? I mean, I've been there. I know what it's like to be insane. And it's very humbling. So one of the

fears you got to face is your fear of insanity. It's not just fear of death, but fear of eternal insanity. It feels like you're thinking in such weird ways that you feel like you're never coming back to your old rational ways of looking at the world. And it feels like you're completely lost and that you're going to behave irrationally for the rest of your life. It can feel like that. And that you'll just be locked up in an insane asylum because you can't even like feed yourself because you're drooling. You're so insane. Yeah, I've been there. What did you do to get out of it? I just accepted it and it caused suffering for me,

but I just accepted it and kind of went with the flow until it passed. It's important to experience that because actually it develops a lot of sympathy, empathy for those with mental illnesses because most people don't know how to relate to somebody with a mental illness. Yeah, I know. Something that scares me is that I see people who are schizophrenic and psychotic or what we would classify as such, as not necessarily being irrational or being based in falsity, but perhaps what they have is an element of the truth that we can't face, and that if you were to truly listen to them, you would perhaps see more like them, and then you would be there as well.

Yeah, it can be very dysfunctional though. You know, it's difficult to live from some of those states because it's almost like, yeah, you're living in a sort of a dream in a very loosey goosey dream where things are not consistent. And then it's very difficult to live from that place, difficult to survive from that place.

But also experiencing and going through insanity helps you to appreciate what sanity is. Because normally us humans, us normies sort of, we don't appreciate and we don't, we take our sanity for granted. Like sanity is an incredible thing. And if you ever lose it, you'll want it back so badly. Hmm. I don't know about that last part. That you'll want it back. part that you'll want it back oh you'll want it back no i know that like you want it back if you're able to have some perspective though i imagine that while

you're in it that you think that you're not insane if anything everyone else is that's true but still you want it back um because because you're not able to function from that place very well. I mean, if you completely lose memory of what you had before, maybe that's fine. But if you still have some lingering memories of how you used to be, you might want that back. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. Okay, this one comes from Sam Thompson. And for those who are curious, Sam Thompson is a friend of mine. I'm proud to call him a friend. He's a mathematician who helped me with understanding the cognitive

theoretic model of the universe by Chris Langan. It's not easy to discern on one's own. He's had, I think, years studying it. Okay, so he said, it's more of a comment, it's not a question. Studying it. Okay, so he said it's more of a comment, it's not a question. So just so you know, in the CTMU, ontology and epistemology are inextricably coupled. So ordinarily we think of them as being different. In the CTMU they're the same. And through Gödel's incompleteness theorem, what that does is force different levels of truth. So remember how we were saying first order logic can't see second order? I know that's false, but in some sense you can think of it like saying first order logic can't see second order? I know

that's false, but in some sense, you can think of it like that. And second can't see third. And he would say that it's not that there are truths you can't prove. It just says that there's an anti-mechanistic stance, but it doesn't support that the idea that truth or existence is beyond reason. He just wanted to clarify that from Chris's perspective from the CTMU. Okay. A few points about that to help those guys out who are into the CTMU. I know there's a lot of people who are into it. You have to be very careful because the CTMU is not God consciousness. These are separate things. So you're engaged in concepts. But yeah, of course, epistemology and metaphysics are identical. Literally, they will completely fuse into a

single thing when you rise to the highest levels of consciousness. There can't be a separation between them. So that's correct. As far as reason, be careful with your notion of reason. So when you say reason, that's a distinction. So you have something reasonable and then you have something unreasonable. Non-reason. So reality has to include both. I hope you understand that for your friend there. So maybe he's using reason in some sort of absolute sense where he wants to say that literally everything is reason with a capital R.

Which I guess is probably what his position would be. You could do that. I mean, it's a little tricky. My sort of my warning to him would be you have to be very careful with language.

Because look, I can very easily disprove Chris Langan's claim that everything is language. That's not language. That's not language. So I'm not exactly sure what Chris Langan would say in terms of what that is. Would he claim that is language? Yeah. If he, now, if he bites that bullet, he could bite that bullet and he could say that is language. Well, then your

notion of language is literally so infinite that it includes everything. So if he's going to say that, then okay, fine. But then he's really stretching the notion of what language is. Yeah. That's why he doesn't call it language. I believe he calls it a meta language, something called the self-configuring self-processing language that the universe is isomorphic to, which means the universe can be thought of as language and the language can be thought of as the universe.

But the way that he means language, isn't what you think of as language. So you're thinking of language extremely logically. And there is some meta logic, so that's why this word meta is extremely important to Chris. He places it before almost each word. So then I would ask him though, so is language an absolute

or is there something non-language? So does his model allow for non-language? I think he would consider that to be the same as non-existence. Okay, so then he's kind of holding it as an absolute. I mean, you could do that if you really wanted to, but just be very careful there that when he's talking about language, he's talking about something very different from what we normally call language. Yeah. So the thing I want to say about language,

this is actually a very important point. You guys who are into language and so forth, you need to reach a state of consciousness in which language simply does not exist. Do you understand that that's possible? I just think that he has a different notion of language because he would call the act of perceiving it all a form of language or form of syntax. So the fact qualia is like syntax. All right. But just, yeah, so he has a very radically expanded notion of language.

That's correct. And that's fine. But just, so if we're using the more normal notion of language, the more limited version. Like let's say Wolfram. Wolfram would probably be more in line with what you think of as language. You may say the universe is something like that. What I challenge you guys who are really into this work is to actually achieve a state of consciousness in which language, the human language, simply doesn't exist for you anymore. You can still perceive stuff, but you can't, you can't notice

what that means. You can't think. If you lose language, you're not going to be able to think. So enter a state of consciousness in which literally there is no language, no English for you, no concepts, no linguistic distinctions of any kind, and just exist in that linguistic distinctions of any kind, and just exist in that state for a while and just notice how radical that is and how it's going to change you if you are able to enter such a state. For example, if you become a coffee mug and you exist as a coffee mug, there will not be language for you. Now, maybe Chris Langan will say the coffee mug itself is language, but it ain't no human language. Yeah, he actually has a notion for this. They're called syntactic coverings.

There's so much jargon, but syntactic covering means imagine you have physics, and then it can be syntactically covered by math because math is more expressive than physics. And then the human cognitive syntax syntactically covers physics. Sorry, syntactically covers physics sorry syntactically covers math because what humans can think of isn't just math and then he would say the self-configuring self-processing language that is the universe syntactically covers humans so it's more expressive than humans right there's this hierarchy yeah the the key there is to you want to be able to in your meditative practices reach a point where you can shut off thoughts So you can be free of thoughts because your thoughts are really what trap you

So you guys should try to work towards that whether you're doing psychedelics or meditation or yoga or whatever however you want to do it I Don't really care You sound defeated. No. Okay. Let's see this one. All right. Sam Chalice says,

Leo says that direct experience is the key and that one cannot know anything until one has experienced it. My question is, therefore, how does one know, this is a standard question, how does one know that psychedelics give a more infinite, complete, deep enlightenment experience compared to, let's say, the full traditional enlightenment, if he hasn't experienced the full traditional enlightenment liberation himself? First of all, everything I talk about when it comes to absolute truth, it doesn't matter how you get there. You can get there through psychedelics or not. It doesn't have to depend

on psychedelics. And I have had awakenings that were not induced by psychedelics. So to me, there's no difference. In the same way that like mathematics is true, whether you use a calculator or not, using a calculator does not invalidate mathematics, it just makes it a little easier. But if you wanted to you could crunch numbers manually in your head. It doesn't change the truth of mathematics. So it's the same attitude I have

towards psychedelics versus meditation. They take you to the same place basically. I'm not claiming that psychedelics are per se superior to meditation my claim is that for the majority of people they're simply not going to be adept enough at meditation to be able to reach the levels of consciousness that are necessary to reach what i call god realization so for them

psychedelics will be very useful because they simply either, either they're not spiritually talented enough to do it, their genetics won't allow them to do it, or simply they're not motivated enough. In other words, you know, most meditative monks and so forth, they're meditating like 10 hours a day for years, for decades. Most people are not going to do that. They're just not committed enough. So in that case psychedelics can be very useful But if you really wanted to you could go live in a cave for ten years and and achieve the same results Manually as you could with psychedelics. It's just that most people won't do it. So I don't talk about it very much Also there there really is no there is no

there's no disagreement between meditative insight and psychedelic insight they align perfectly so everything that you can learn from a Buddhist you can learn from psychedelics and vice versa so I understand that that guy's question

that guy's question would have more teeth to it if the things that a Buddhist was telling you or a Christian was telling you or a Sufi was telling you was different from the psychedelics in some fundamental way. But it's really not. We're hair splitting here. The fundamentals are all the same. Nothingness, everything, God, love, consciousness, it's all the same shit, just framed in different ways. There are minor disagreements, but they're not major disagreements. split hairs about, you know, Bernardo Kastrup and Thomas Campbell and Chris Langan and whatever, you know, Sam Harris, it might sound like we're all disagreeing with each other and therefore non-duality can't be true because no one's in agreement about what non-duality is. But that's the wrong way to look at it. You're looking at the little niggly differences. What

you should notice is how much similarity and convergence there is between all these different teachers and speakers, even the stuff you've heard on Kurt's channel, like between Rupert Spira, myself, Chris Lang and Thomas Campbell, Bernardo Kastrup and others. There's very little fundamental disagreement. We agree so much that that itself should be evidence to you that what we're talking about here has some real validity to it that is worth you exploring so don't get lost in the little niggly details that's easy to that you know to lose the forest for the trees all right this question comes three hours ago i was just checking through the comments right now. Marianne Alexandru Pasica. He wants to know, question for Leo in part two. You said you still have to do the work in trying to bring the absolute into the relative domain. My question is, do you believe that's even possible? And besides that, isn't that delusional as there are no other beings to bring it to since the separation is an illusion?

So one, how do you bring the absolute to the relative? Is that possible? Can you absolutely bring the absolute to the relative? And also by doing so, are you not engaging in a form of delusion because the separation is illusory to begin with? Okay. So first of all, you're bringing the absolute down into the relative for your own sake, not for the sake of others. So in that sense, I don't need you to be real for me to better embody the things that I

realized. So that's number one. Number two, you might say, well, Leo, but then why do you teach? If you're saying that other people don't exist, what's the point of teaching? And you might say, isn't that a delusion? To which my answer is, yeah, it's a game. I'm playing a game. We're all playing a game. So yeah, in the same way that like when you're playing a video game, I could tell you the same thing. Isn't it a delusion? You know, you think you're playing with other people, but they're all NPCs. So, you know,

when you're playing Skyrim or something, why aren't you, you're being deluded. Stop playing Skyrim. It's like, no, I enjoy playing Skyrim. I know it's a fantasy. If I'm reading a book, if I'm watching a movie, I don't need it to be physically real for me to enjoy the movie. It's a fucking game. It's an entertainment. So in that sense, what else do you expect me to do? I got to do something here. You want me to go have sex with goats? Well, that's also a delusion. Okay, well, do you want me to get married and have children?

Well, that's also a delusion. Do you want me to beat Elon Musk and launch rockets to Mars? Well, that's also, so it's all delusion. So it's just a matter of what's your, you know, choose your delusion and play it consciously. So this is my game here. What is it about goats? I'm just being consistent with previous examples. Okay. There's nothing more to it? You sure? No. Sorry, no judgment here. No, I don't particularly care about goats. All right. And then is it possible to bring the absolute absolutely into the relative perfectly?

I'm inclined to say maybe it's possible. I mean, I'm open to the possibility that it could be done perfectly. But I'm also a pragmatist, and I don't expect myself or others to be perfect in embodying the absolute. And in fact, at a certain level, I think it's metaphysically impossible. Because look, this body has finite characteristics. I can't flap my wings and fly. The mind and the brain does have certain addictions and things, you know, like you can get addicted to sugar, and then that's going to be an addiction you have. Is that a perfect embodiment of the absolute?

If you're addicted to sugar? I would say no. It would be better if you weren't addicted to sugar. That would be a little bit closer aligned to God. God is not an addict. But, you know, at the same time, God is an addict. So it's tricky. I think on a practical level,

the reason I tell people that you're never going to fully bring the absolute into the relative is because it puts way too much of a burden on you. You're going to be guilting yourself so much because you're going to feel like, man, Leo says I can be perfectly godlike. And then in practice, I can't because I have a sugar craving and I have a porn craving and I have this craving. And so in practice, I don't want to set up this utopian idea in people's minds that they should at some point reach utter perfection. I don't think it's going to happen. And you should not expect that from me.

I don't want those expectations placed on me, nor should you expect that from your enlightened teachers, whoever you study. Because I also see this trap with newbies is that they get into this work and then they carefully study myself or some other enlightened teacher and as soon as they find one thing they don't like one slightly unethical thing one slightly immoral thing they say aha you're not perfectly God so therefore everything you say is bullshit and I'm not gonna listen to you see that's so convenient for the ego to behave that way, because that itself becomes sort of a

weapon. Don't expect your spiritual masters to be perfect. That's a recipe for disaster. Have you heard or read Brothers Karamazov, I believe it's called? I've heard of it, but I haven't read it. Yeah, same. I've heard it, but I haven't read it. From what I hear, it's something like Jesus comes back and the church actually arrests Jesus and is angry at Jesus, incensed, because he set up this perfect example. And they say, no one, what have you done? You've given people such an unachievable burden that it's better that you didn't come. Yeah, that's correct because

actually, if Jesus came back to modern life today, right now, in the 21st century, modern Republicans and evangelicals would kill him. They would hold him as a devil. I mean, Jesus would come back and Jesus would say, what are you guys doing? You're not even taking care of your poor. And they would call him a fucking communist. I think I'm so much more

sympathetic to each side than you are, at least from my perception of you. I would say that Jesus also wouldn't, he wouldn't be a leftist necessarily because he wouldn't say that you should enforce this. You should be voluntarily giving up your your money why are you saying that you want the government to tax more don't you have more if you're okay with the government taxing you more why don't you spend that money that you think should go to taxes directly to the poor already so you can make that case you can make that case as long as you're helping the poor yeah woe to the man who something like woe to the man who has riches and my friend peter glenos is has helped me so much with not only philosophy but plenty of religious matters too he said who's more of a christian the atheist who donates or the person who goes

to church and passes a homeless person on the street without even looking. Who's more of a Christian? That's something to think about. The atheist is actually more evolved than the fundamentalist Christian. But then there's a higher evolution beyond the atheist. In the sense that they've actually questioned their beliefs and take it seriously? Yeah. At least if you arrived at atheism but weren't. Because if you were born into it, then that's different.

Look, there's stages of cognitive development development so the lower levels of cognitive development are very conformist they do things simply out of conformity not because it's actually true so most fundamentalist christians they think that they're following god because of whatever reasons but actually they're doing it simply out of conformity and dogma then you graduate the dogma stage into the atheist stage, which is sort of the rationalist stage. You become very rational. Yeah, you start to question everything.

You become skeptical over everything. That's actually a step higher. You're a little bit closer to God when you're questioning everything. The problem is that you still haven't gone deep enough. So then eventually, you know, you question enough, and then you realize God, and then you become a true true christian see i see this in so many different ways because i also see someone who unquestioningly goes along with whatever the prevailing norms are and submissively so there is a quality of goodness in that in just conforming and being submissive. So, like, I see it. It's so tricky.

Well, it's better than being, like, a fucking wild-eyed rapist, you know, who has no guilt or shame about anything and just, like, you know, like a mafia boss or something. So, yeah. To me, I see Satan as he who crowns himself. It's similar to the bubble that thinks I'm in charge, but also something about crowning oneself. Yeah, it's separation. Remember how you said there's so many myths about Jesus. If you read or one reads the Bible, start with Mark.

And the reason I say that is because as far as we know, Mark was the first one written. And Mark is, the Bible of Mark has so much less of Jesus's miracles. It seems like, and John seems to be the one that was written most recently, it seems like as time went on, Jesus became more and more mythologized and was endowed with so many more divine qualities. Whereas with Mark, you see a more human Jesusesus you also see this quality of jesus where people ask him are you are you the son of god no they ask him who are you and he says don't you know like don't you see and someone asked him directly like are you the son of

god and then he's like something like that's for you to say or essentially it's the opposite of this modern notion of i define my own identity. Jesus was like, I am what you say I am. Yeah. And to me, that one gets me, man. Yeah, that's how you would answer. Yeah, I think that there's also an incident where they brought him before the Inquisition or something. Before they crucified him, they sort of brought him to the trial, to the court.

And then they asked him, so there are rumors going around that you you claim to be the son of jesus and um and that's why we brought you here and he's son of god yeah oh yeah sorry the son of god and he and he replied um well if you say so yeah yeah it's just one of these sort of like uh non-denial denial sort of things. Yeah, man. And that's how a Zen master talks, though. If you ask a Zen master are you enlightened? He's not just going to say yes. A Zen master will he's a

clever fox and he will say something cheeky back to you. Maybe he'll slap you in the face. I wonder, though, how much of Jesus saying, well, you say so, was actually him being sly, teaching a lesson,

versus there's something truthful about that. I am if you say I am. Well, it's a humility. It's a humility. Because as soon as you say you're God, people think you're delusional. So you can never admit, that's the whole thing, is that in polite society, you can never admit that you're God, because as soon as you say that, people think you're an egotist or a narcissist. So that's why you can't admit it. Do you see something about that being true?

That as soon as you admit it, you no longer admit it. Do you see something about that being true? That as soon as you admit it, you no longer are it? No. In fact, I think that it's a false humility. To me, it's more honest. If someone asks you, are you God? Just say yes. Because it's true. Why play fucking games?

I'm not so certain. Now, how people judge you for it, now that's another matter. People might not like it. I'll give you an example. I think Brian Regan, the comedian, said this about the person who landed the plane in New York. I forget his name, but he's some pilot considered a hero. And he was saying, if that person, I think Conan said, are you a hero? Then he's like, no, I'm not a hero.

Brian's like, imagine if he said, yeah, I'm a hero. Then you wouldn't think he's like, no, I'm not a hero. Brian's like, imagine if he said, yeah, I'm a hero. Then you wouldn't think he's a hero. And it may in fact be that he no longer is the hero if he thinks of himself as the hero. Yeah, but that's like a political game. That's an image game. So yeah, if you care about your image, then yeah, definitely play games. If you care about what other people think of you, definitely play games.

But if you just want to be direct, I have a bias towards being direct and blunt. But that's my bias. Most awakened people don't speak that way. I don't know. I'm not sure. Especially if you're teaching, it's very counterproductive to teachers. Because as soon as people can pin you down as claiming that you're God then like your whole teaching career is basically tarnished see we were talking about those monks who go into the mountains and don't talk to anyone else they isolate themselves and I I don't know

precisely why but I imagine that much of the reason is also because to teach has in it an air of superiority. There's also that language itself seems to be misleading, and I think they think that. I think much of part one, where we had hair-splitting distinctions, they see that, and they see it all the way through, and they see that if you wanted to take language seriously it would undermine language so it's better not to speak i don't know how much of it is just i can't handle friends because i'm so devoted to god i don't know how much of it is that versus that if i was to teach it would put me above other people also if i was to speak it would denigrate the teachings itself

yeah i mean there's there's trickeries there with teaching it would denigrate the teachings itself. Yeah, I mean, there's trickeries there with teaching. That person who asked the question said, on another note, holy shit, man, this was freaking awesome. I love the questions, loved everything. Keep creating. That was on the Leo Gura part one video. Sweet.

Okay, the next question from five hours ago michael worth leo's infinity seems to resonate with the raw material version raw as an ra oh yeah i'd be interested in his critique of this material so i don't know what raw is other than the god raw from the it's there's a collection of five books called the raw material it's a collection of five books called The Ra Material. It's a very New Age-y. It's very popular in the New Age community. It's basically a channeled work. The claim is that some two people in like

50 years ago or something channeled this extraterrestrial entity called Ra, which is connected to the ancient Egyptians. And so this entity, they basically ask this entity, it's like a channeled communication. They ask this entity all sorts of questions about life, reality, history, humanity.

And this entity gives very clear answers and describes how the whole universe works. And so, yeah, so one of the questions that is asked of Ra is like, what is the nature of reality? And Ra says basically what I say, which is that it's all infinite, you're infinity and so forth and blah, blah, blah. And so, yeah, in that sense, we're correct. This person has a back and forth written in the question, so perhaps I should read it. It's only four lines. Okay. Questioner, thank you. Can you tell me the earliest first known thing in creation raw i am raw the first known thing in creation is infinity the infinity is creation questioner

from this infinity then must have come what we experience as creation what was the next step or the next evolvement raw i am raw infinity became aware this was the next step those are the four lines yeah that's basically correct although really if you want to get really non-dual about it then there's not even a first step because first and last itself becomes a collapsible duality and uh and also the the distinction between beginning and end also collapses. So literally right here, right now is the beginning of the entire universe. Right now. Not in the Big Bang, but right now. You can think of it that way.

There's no end or beginning to infinity. But to answer fully that guy's question, so he wanted me to comment on the rest of the raw material. There's a lot of very new agey, wacky stuff in the rest of the raw material that is outside of my direct experiences that I cannot validate. He talks about extra extraterrestrials and all sorts of weird shit. And I can't say if it's true or false, but as far as the infinity goes, I can tell you that's true.

The rest of it, I don't know. And you should be skeptical about it. Don't, don't blindly accept the raw material skeptical about it don't don't blindly accept the raw material there's a lot of wacky stuff in there that sounds extremely interesting i have to look into this yeah read it it's a very like it takes a ridiculously open mind to read that stuff because there's there's stuff in there that will completely shatter your

worldview about history like he talks about for example how the ancient egyptian pyramids were um were imagined out of thin air they weren't actually built with stones in like the physical manual labor way that we that we believe that they were actually uh they were a manifestation of of consciousness um and he talks about for example the purpose of the pyramids as being spiritual devices. They were aligned with the magnetic lines that have since shifted, but they were aligned with the magnetic lines up on the earth in order to basically turn into vehicles towards awakening and God-realization. So I don't know if that's true. It could be true, but I have no way to validate it. don't know if that's true. It could be true, but I have no way to validate it. Okay, this person named Matt Aquino, four hours ago actually, says, if I understand Leo correctly, there's a problem with his theory that I can express with this hypothetical. Imagine a mother and a daughter with a good healthy relationship. The mother tells the daughter that she saw 100

bill on her desk when none was there. The daughter would, for all possible intents and purposes, be imagining in her reality that the $100 bill exists there. This is true because she would trust her mother's honesty as well as her own perception. But when she goes to retrieve the $100 that's not there, I would suspect that this situation and one similar to it happen every day. Okay, there's that. It's not actually a question. Yeah, that's very easy to answer. The daughter is imagining the mother and the $100 bill.

And then she's further imagining that the dollar bill isn't there either. And then furthermore, you are imagining both the daughter and the mother and this scenario. So you have to realize how many layers of imagination are going on here. So the reason it doesn't add up is because actually she's imagining it not adding up. Hey, I have an idea, Leo. You know, I'm here right now, and you're there, maybe. And you would say that I'm imagining you imagining me. I'm wondering now, and I want to talk to Sam Thompson about this.

I wonder if what we call objective reality actually has to do with multiple layers of imagining. Of course. You're imagining the notion of objective. Well, okay, so consensus reality whatever what we call that the reality to that is or the more objective a reality is actually has to do with how many layers of back and forth imagination is going on huh well i need to think about that well i mean you need to get to the absolute level. So there's nothing beyond the absolute level.

So when you become conscious of the absolute, then there's no more levels of objectivity. In fact, objectivity itself collapses into the absolute. So really just want to reach the absolute. But as far as what humans call objective yeah that's a that's a game that's multiple layers of imagination wrapped inside of each other and it's that's what makes it appear as though it's objective when it really isn't okay let's get to a couple other questions and then we'll just wrap up for today i'm sure we'll be speaking again i'm trying to find some great ones for you because there are quite a few and I haven't had a chance to go through them all and many of them are quite large.

Sure, take your time. Mac Mcoven asks, are you chill to hang around with? I've always wondered that because your internet self seems to be the opposite of mellow, rather strict and serious. Yeah, I'm actually very chill. Very normal. What do you like to hang out with? How do your friends see you? Well, you'd have to ask them. But yeah, I mean, I'm not like, when I'm socializing, people think that, oh, when he's socializing, he's talking about God and shit. It's like, no, when I'm socializing, I'm being stupid.

It's okay to be stupid. Like sometimes allow yourself to be stupid. Like go out, go drinking and, you know, one night and have a party and have fun. Like allow yourself that. It'll actually make you smarter. Now don't do too much of it, but, you know, like when I'm being social, I'm just being social. Like if I'm talking with a girl like with a girlfriend or something I'm not talking with her about fucking God and shit like that. I'm just talking about stupid things. I'll talk about celebrities

I'll talk about some stupid cat video that I saw I'm not sending her. I'm not texting her videos of Myself or about Eckhart Tolle or something or some physics videos, I'm sending her a stupid cat video. That's what I'm doing because I have to relate to people on that level. And I can enjoy that to some degree. I'm not like, not everything has to be serious. Yeah. I need to take myself less serious. The only time I talk to people is with regarding this topic. So I'm just thinking right now after this, I want to talk to Sam, but it's topic. So I'm just thinking right now, after this, I want to talk to Sam. But it's all going to be about consciousness and the CTMU and what you think about so and so. Although with my family, it's obviously not that this question

comes from Leo Dodge wiper. Did you recommend your mother and close family to take strong psychedelics just like you recommend your subscribers to yes sorry why or why not i think they don't mean did i think they mean would yeah would you recommend yeah i did and i would okay now that doesn't mean they'll do it like my mom for example is very resistant and she's kind of old school that Does she think that you're devil? Does she think? Traditional. Like, no, she's open to my ideas. But yeah, like she herself would never take psychedelics. But yeah, I've definitely recommended it. It's just that I don't like push it on them or anything. But yeah.

Noah Saip asks, ask him what his first person experience of reality is at this moment and how different it is than when he first started personal development. So what is your first person experience of reality at this moment? Yeah, it's tricky because in a certain sense, nothing has changed. But what's changed is a recontextualization. So it's not like I'm seeing angels and devils frolicking around here in the room with me, which you guys are not seeing. It's not like that. The room I'm in still looks exactly like it would when I was a kid.

The difference is that it's been radically recontextualized. So even though I'm sitting in this room, what you would normally call a room, I'm looking at a laptop, I'm looking at a camera and so forth. There's a bookshelf behind me that I'm seeing. But like, if I tune my awareness on it, I can realize that all of that is something that I'm imagining, that all of this is God.

So I'm seeing it as the absolute. This is absolute truth right here. And I'm fully conscious of that when i am focused on it but that doesn't change what it is the colors don't change the shapes don't change i'm just it's all been recontextualized it's not see uh for you guys you think that this is like a bubble of perception that a human has whereas when when I'm sitting here, I don't see it as a bubble of perception that a human has. I recognize it as absolute truth, as divinity, as God, as imagination, as a dream. So that's the difference.

When you're speaking to someone about this, maybe it's me, maybe it's someone else that you've done a podcast with or you've spoken to offline and you see them putting up objections do you tend to see them as being do you then think they're defending something and they don't realize they're defending something almost like you're psychologically analyzing them like it happens instantly because your worldview is so formulated it's correct if're disagreeing, then they must have some ego defense. Do you see that? Does that happen to you unconsciously? What thoughts occur to you as people put up objections? There is such a thing in my worldview. There is a notion of valid disagreement. I don't expect

everyone to agree with me. Otherwise, they're delusional. So I'm not that naive. So definitely there can be valid disagreements. There can be valid differences in perspective. And I allow for that. But a lot of times I do see people projecting or they're acting out of ego. And that doesn't mean I'm immune to that. I sometimes project too. And I see myself sometimes acting out of ego.

But yeah, it's just like when you get very conscious, you will automatically see the various kinds of mind games that other people are trying to play with you. Even though they don't recognize that they're playing a mind game. They might think that they're really not playing a mind game,

but it's obvious to me that they are. And so, that doesn't necessarily mean I call them out on it. Sometimes I'll call them out on it directly. Other times I'll just sort of realize that there's no point in calling them out on it because they won't even understand what I'm talking about. So it depends on where they are at in their worldview. Can you give me an example of how you would call someone out or an example of when you've called someone else so maybe it can be concrete well i've called you out a few times like i would say you're playing mind games here or there or something like that um but um but yeah sometimes people project on me or they gaslight me and i'll just say you're gaslighting me or you're projecting

um like that. Samuel Boucher asks, how do you not end up in a narcissistic trap looking down on the lower levels of the spiral as you move up the higher levels of the spiral? And I believe he's referring to spiral dynamics. Correct. Well, it's tricky. I'm arrogant in many ways. I look down on others

sometimes. But you know what you have to understand is that sometimes looking down is actually truthful. This idea that you should never look down on people. I mean, sometimes people are just stupid. Except that too. Now, that doesn't mean that you are somehow morally above everybody else. That would be a delusion. You're not better than anybody else in the absolute sense. But in the relative sense, you can be wiser, smarter, more conscious than somebody else. And in fact, if you're doing this work, you will be smarter, wiser, more conscious than the majority of people. The problem is that you can't let that get to you too much.

Otherwise, you develop a spiritual ego that turns into spiritual bypassing and whatever else. So you just have to... What helps with that is compassion. Compassion for the ignorance of others. So one of the things that you become very conscious, and then one of the traps you fall into is that you sort of start to expect that everybody else around you should be as conscious as you. And as honest and truthful as you. As unbiased and unselfish as you.

And then you get actually upset. It bothers you. It triggers you that other people are not doing this work, for example. That they don't care about these deep metaphysical questions and so forth. And what you have to recognize is that ignorance is very profound. It's very deep. And you're not going to solve the problem of ignorance. People will be ignorant and you're going to have to, no matter how awake you become, you're still going to have to tolerate ignorance in the world. You're going to have to tolerate fools. Many people will be fools around you doing foolish things. And if you're going to be triggered by that, that's something about you that you haven't fully accepted. So you still haven't fully integrated the depth of the ignorance that exists in the universe at the material level. So that's more work you got to do. You got to integrate even deeper to the point where you can actually incorporate and even start to love the ignorance you see around you and so that you're not being triggered by it and you're not judging it too much. And that's also very difficult to do. When you say that in some sense, if one is being honest, it's truthful to look down at someone. I don't see that as being

the case in the case that you, well, at all, but especially in the case of intelligence, let's say someone is less astute than you. To me, I see looking down at them as being similar to being racist, because plenty, plenty and plenty of foolishness comes from genetics. It's not just foolishness, sorry, IQ comes from genetics, let's say. So plenty of IQ comes from genetics. So if I was to look at someone and say, and shake my head at them, look down upon them, let's say, then that would, to me, be the same as being racist. And I'm not a fan of being racist.

So I can't be a fan of looking down at someone for being foolish or looking up at someone for being intelligent. Though, for whatever reason, the latter seems more the latter seems more amiable than the former but that could just be a bias yeah either way why would one look down at someone at all if you're saying that i shouldn't evaluate myself as being morally ahead of anyone else how is it that you can look down at someone and be truthful why is that okay uh it's a function of it's a survival function. So you have to recognize you're still going to have to survive.

You have to apply what you just said also to, you know, are you going to apply that same logic about not judging low IQ as you're going to apply to, for example, a rapist, a terrorist, a murderer, a child molester?

You should, because the only reason people are rapists, murderers, terrorists, a child molester, you should because the only reason people are rapists, murderers, terrorists, and child molesters is because of the circumstances they were born into. They didn't ask to be that way. Nobody is born asking to be a racist. It's just a function of how they were raised and the culture and their parenting and abuse they received and so forth. So, so yeah, I mean, ideally you would be completely nonjudgmental, but also remember in practice, we have to build a society too. So to build a society, we do have to make, uh, adjudications and assessments about what we want to survive and what we don't. So it is valid to say that, you know what, even though I'm not morally better than a,

than a rapist, if this rapist can't control himself and he's going to go out there, keep raping kids, then we should kill this, kill him and his survival. That is valid to say and and to do, even. Because we're trying to build a sort of a healthy society here, and you can't have a healthy society when you have, like, rapists running around, indiscriminately threatening people.

So you do, that's the existential bind we're in, is that at the same time, you have to be loving and conscious and non-judgmental on the one hand, but on the other other hand you do have to make decisions about like where do we launch our bombs um do we kill animals how do we butcher them um who should get money who should where should taxes go you know all these sorts of niggly problems which don't really have easy answers you have to lock you have to lock up criminals somewhere you can't just let criminals running around you have to have prisons okay so there are two distinctions there one you said that we can

kill the rapist if they're going to continue to rape well but you also mentioned lock up so i see killing is distinct from locking up. And I'm curious, are you in favor of the death penalty? Yeah, I'm not really opposed. It's a little bit tricky because the death penalty is misapplied in many cases. So we can reform how the death penalty, like we can make it more stringent, what it takes to receive the death penalty.

I'm also a big believer in rehabilitation, so we should definitely invest into social programs to try to rehabilitate like the way that they do in Scandinavian countries. So I believe that a lot of these people can be rehabilitated, but if you have a really hard case that cannot be rehabilitated and there's no good way to lock them up,

like for example, if we have some guy walk into a school full of children with an assault rifle and he's going to start shooting, it's okay to shoot him in the head, in my worldview, because you're preventing a greater evil from being perpetrated. So in that case, you don't have the option to lock him up. You got to shoot him. But if there is a way to tase him, tase him. And then if you can rehabilitate him, try to rehabilitate him. But if you can rehabilitate him try to rehabilitate him but if you can't then shoot him in the head all of what you said is also

independent of whether or not you look down upon someone so you can say that what they're doing is not something that you approve of but that's different than looking down we have different definitions of what it means to look down or look up at someone but i imagine looking up is something like admiring and then looking down is not just that i don't want to be like that person but in a in a tautology it's almost like you think of yourself as above them well yeah look ideally you would not look down on anybody, but also like I'm speaking

a bit from a sort of a pragmatic perspective in that, like, look, honestly, like I watch a lot of political YouTube videos and sometimes I see, um, I see some, some things on the right wing that are, that is so fucking stupid that like, I can't help but react in a sort of a, you know, looking down upon them way. Now, from the absolute perspective, I understand what I'm doing, but I also a sort of a you know looking down upon them way now from the absolute perspective i understand what i'm doing but i also have sort of bad habits you know and i have just sort of normal human reactions to things um in the same way that if you know if somebody shoots me i'm going to react like a human i'm not going to just be stoic it's not like you can just cut my arm off

and i'll just be sitting there and like yeah yeah, that's great. You know, that's great. A little bit more. Yeah. I mean, it's going to be the Jesus thing. It's like, it's going to be difficult to accept that. And so likewise, you know, I have certain ways in which I look down upon people that I know I shouldn't. And in the future, I probably won't. I hope to outgrow that instinct. But in the meantime, you know, I do it a bit. And I even enjoy it sometimes, you know. Watching some stupid cringe compilation on YouTube, you know, it's entertainment is what it is. It's like a little bit of egoic craving, you know. It's like craving that little sugar high.

It's like a little bit of egoic craving, you know, it's like craving that little sugar high. For me, I'm thinking, I don't see any time that I'm looking down at someone as being sinful. I know that we talk about this, but I see it as being, I see it as an indication that I don't model them correctly. What I mean is that if I'm looking down or being judgmental against someone, it means to me that I'm not sympathetic enough to emulate them in my mind such that I would make a similar decision if I were them. Yeah, that's absolutely correct. As soon as I'm able to do that, as soon as I'm able to do that, I judge them almost zero. And I see when people say, yeah, they shouldn't have done so-and-so. And they're judging.

Sorry, they're not. They shouldn't have done so-and-so. That's correct. But it's another thing to say, yeah, what they're doing doesn't make sense. I can't believe they did so-and-so. You can't believe it? For me, it's like, that means you should use that as an indication that you need to update your models in your head rather than thinking that you're superior you're smarter than them man perhaps you're not smart at all perhaps if you were truly smart you could see

how what they would they were doing was i wouldn't say in your terms which is they're acting from good intentions i would just say that what they're doing is understandable. It's probably a better way of putting it as understandable. Yeah. So my response is that you're getting closer to my position of everything being good. So you're on the right track. If you keep following that intuition deeper and deeper, eventually you'll come to my realization that everything is absolutely good. The other difference I have with you is that in a certain sense, you're a better person than I am because see, sort of, uh, you hold yourself to a higher standard. Like you don't, you don't allow yourself to sin in a certain sense. Whereas I do like, I allow myself to get a little bit of sin in the day and I don't, I don't beat myself up for it. Whereas it seems like you beat yourself

up a little bit, uh bit too much over that. And I'm not telling you you're wrong or that I'm right. I'm just saying that's just how it is. And in fact, there is no right or wrong in this case. It's however you want it to be. But like, I, to me, I do allow myself a bit of sin and I don't, I don't browbeat myself over it too much because to me, that's counterproductive. And what I trust is that as I engage in the sin with a little bit of consciousness and just give myself a little bit of allowance that actually over time, what'll happen is I'll keep sinning and sinning and sinning. And then realize after a certain while, I'll get it out of my system. I'll burn through that, uh, impulse. And then eventually I'll be like, you know what? I don't need to do this anymore. And in a few years, I'll just drop it. It'll just drop away by itself naturally.

I don't need to like be forcing it to drop away. See? Yeah. So I do allow myself to judge others. And I still do judge others. It's just that at a higher level, if you really like, if you corner me, you say, Leo, but you judge that person and you say you're not supposed to judge and that judgment is falsehood and judgment is stupid, but yet you do it. And I would say, yeah, because I'm not done with all my spiritual work yet. I have a long way to go, like I've said. So therefore, of course, I judge people at times. But my higher self knows that that's wrong, in the sense that it's not true. Not that it's immoral or something, but it's just not true. Park Avenue asks, can you ask him about his upbringing, his parents,

and his childhood? I'd like to know more about him as a person. Well, there's so much that could be said there. I mean, overall, in a certain sense, my family was dysfunctional in many ways, but it wasn't dysfunctional to the point where it seriously traumatized me. So it was just the right amount of dysfunction where it made me independent-minded and made me willing to work hard in my life. I wasn't coddled too much. I mean, one of the things I should probably be most grateful for is that my parents did not Feed me with any kind of worldview they weren't Stubbornly atheist they weren't stubbornly scientific

They weren't stubbornly religious because if I grew up in a family where I was indoctrinated into any one of those I couldn't be where I am today. So I was very fortunate in that I was given a lot of free reign. I almost had sort of like, you might say, a libertarian childhood in the sense that I was literally able to do whatever I want and to suffer the consequences of my actions. And in a certain sense, that was very helpful for me because I learned to be very independent and autonomous and to question everything. Also, I was born in Russia. So the transition of moving from Russia to America was a huge culture shift. And it happened when I was about six, seven years

old. And so I struggled for some amount of time to integrate into American culture. That was difficult, but also very important because what I saw at a young age is just how relativistic all of the cultural standards are. A lot of the things that Americans take for granted, to me, it's just silly cultural norms, but Americans hold it as absolutely true. So it's difficult

actually to see outside of your culture unless you've been raised in other cultures. And so I'm grateful for that opportunity that has opened my mind a lot. Um, I grew up in a, I would say sort of a upper middle income household in a good part of the country. Grew up in Southern California in Orange County, which is an expensive part of the country. So I was lucky in that I didn't have to like deal with poverty or gang violence or any of this kind of stuff, racism. Like I was fortunate that I didn't have any of that. But at the same time, my family did

have plenty of financial struggles. We weren't poor, but we had, we had serious financial struggles like on some, some months, like my dad didn't pay the electric bill because he couldn't afford it. And they would shut off our electricity. We'd have to like use candles. And so that did teach me about like the importance of money and being fiscally responsible and so forth. responsible and so forth. And my mother was very selfless and loving. She basically sacrificed herself for me and my brother. And I couldn't be here without that because that love I got from her made me very emotionally grounded and non-attached and non-needy emotionally, which has allowed me to do this work. Because if I had more traumas, if I had a mother that didn't love me, then I would be lost

and wrapped up in that shit. And I couldn't really do the metaphysical work that I do. So I was very fortunate in many ways in that respect. But at the same time, like it wasn't easy. By no means was it easy to figure all this shit out. It was still difficult. But I appreciate that for other people it was a lot harder. People who were born in the ghetto or something, yeah, this whole thing will be way harder for you than it was for me. will be way harder for you than it was for me. I went to great schools. That was also something I got lucky with. I went to great schools, got a great education, but I had to work hard for my education. It didn't come easy. So I had great teachers. Amir Kakagoglu asks, I can no longer find the motivation to improve my life at the material slash dual level. It would be great if he could give some advice to those who have this problem. There's a couple lines more to explain. Ask him how he still continues to make videos when he

has raised his own level of consciousness. How is he able to continue doing his work, doing research for those videos, taking care of his forum and site, finding the strength to give interviews. How can he still be motivated to do these things? Has the comfort, money, and fame that Actualize.org brought to him become too big of an attachment for him to let go? It would be awesome if he could reply to this. That's a good question. So definitely I do have attachments to actualize.org as part of my life purpose and my business. And technically it's an attachment and it's probably my biggest attachment

because I don't have like children or, or wife or anything. And, and it has slowed my growth. If I was not attached to actualize.org, I could progress faster in my work. On the other hand, also, by interacting with people and by teaching, I also see there's a lot of growth that comes from that as well, because people criticize me a lot and so forth, and so I have to deal with that shit. At a certain level, I'm a very practical guy. I like to keep one foot in the practical domain of business and material life.

And it has been challenging in that I have... I used to be much more business-oriented than I am now. I've had to let a lot of that go. And in the future, it might be the case that I will let it all go entirely. And just like, literally, I've had visions of where I just close down shop and just go and live in a cave for the rest of my life and don't talk to anybody. And that in a certain

sense might be the best end game for me, so to speak. But on the other hand, I have visions of where like, rather than doing that, I, uh, I teach more publicly, do more interviews, do live seminars and things like that. And I'm still not sure which direction is right for me. Maybe even a combination of both. I'm open, you know, I'm, I'm, I i'm playing playing it by ear yeah both both both are possible i was just thinking man imagine those there are a few people who do this i think ted kaczynski was one who i'm not comparing it him but who lives so far from culture i just imagine them coming back a few months later covid what the heck like the world completely changed in just a few months yeah man that situation the whole covid situation definitely man turned the world upside down still we're not

done with it two years almost later almost two years right december will be from china but as far as giving that guy advice as to like, how do you, I would say you need a sense of life purpose. You need, and in a certain sense, you got to treat your life purpose as though it's a game. You're playing a game

and you know you're playing a game, but still, you know, you need something to, some overarching like motivation behind your life. You got to like, when you're playing the game, play it fully. Like when you're playing a video game,

you know it's just an illusion, but you play it hard anyways because that's sort of all there is to do in life. And so in that sense, the game that I'm playing is that I'm playing the teacher game. I'm teaching people about these ideas. My game is to explore the mind and then to help scientifically minded people figure out the next level of their evolution, right? Folks

like you and your audience, how do you get these people to the next level of what would be called trans-rational, right? So there's the pre-rational, there's a rational, there's the trans-rational. And so how do you get people from the rational to the transrational? And that's my function. So like I'm writing a book and that makes me excited and motivated. Teaching certain concepts makes me excited and motivated. So this sort of stuff motivates me. So find something creative and all of that is my art form. So find what for you should be your art form in life, whether that's music, film, interviews, podcasts, YouTube, some kind of business, whatever it is, inventing things. Have that in addition to your spiritual work. Don't just be so monomaniacal that you're only doing spiritual work without any creative...

You know, be constructive. You know, be constructive. Enjoy doing art in whatever way will serve mankind and align with your highest interests and and mesh that in with your's great that's your work but also these interviews should get you to expand yourself spiritually too you see yeah if anything i would have characterized it differently i would have said these work the work is my spiritual and if anything i need to be more in the material domain there's so many threads man that are coming to me so one is like is like Christianity is a cross and not a line. And the reason why this is important is that I wonder how much of the cross also symbolizes the horizontal is akin to the material world and the line is akin to ascension into the spiritual realm. And there's a reason why there's both because you somehow need both if you were to

think of the world dualistically and we could separate it. You need both. However, in the Christian sense, the material is slightly higher. I wonder if there's so much symbolism that goes in so that you do need to prioritize the spiritual slightly more, but you still need to be grounded in material as well. Yeah, well, yeah, you can interpret symbols any way you want because again it's very relativistic and it depends on how you want to interpret it like i could add a further layer upon what you just created i mean you're constructing this meaning that you're putting into that symbol but like we could add a further meaning if you're familiar with ken wilber's four quadrant model i don't know if you are tell me right um so it's also it's four

quadrants it's like a cross basically and so he sort of subdivides reality into four quadrants um one of them is the the subjective personal the i experience this would be idealism right the other is the polar opposite of that is like it's the objective outer world so the inner world versus the outer world that's the first distinction and then you can cross that distinction again, subdivide that in half by saying there's the us world and there's the me world. So there's me as an individual and there's us as a community. And so all of those have to be interconnected and all of those are valid quadrants and you can't reduce one to the others. So there's validity to the outer world So there's validity to the outer world. There's

validity to the inner world. There's validity to individuals and there's a little validity to the collective. And when you get stuck on only one, you fall into error. So for example, the socialists get stuck in the collective. The libertarians get stuck in the individual only as opposed to the collective. They demonize the collective. And then, you know, the materialists materialist they get stuck in the outer world but not the inner world the mystic gets stuck in the inner world but not the outer world so like you got to balance all this out okay Okay. With regard to video games, we talked about this. And the way that I was thinking about this is,

if someone is to treat their life like a video game, this can be interpreted as saying, well, just play, do whatever you like. However, I was steelmanning you in my head. And I was thinking, well, when I play games correctly, I don't just simply do whatever I like and that's actually not fun if you play Grand Theft for me if I play Grand Theft Auto it's actually not fun to just blow everyone up it's fun for the first five maybe one half hour especially if you're showing someone new someone who has never seen video games past the 90s and they're

just horrified at how graphic the violence can be it's so fun to show them and just appall them anyway outside of that it's actually more fun for me to play it's structured and it's less absolutely less fun if i was to turn on all of the unlimited money unlimited health and so on in that manner i can see why treating one's life like a video game isn't necessarily like do whatever you like because yeah i mean you gotta play by the rules no yeah like if you're play it like you would seriously play a game not like you're just jerking around and doing you know stupid things while smoking weed play it like you're a serious gamer like play it like like you would play dark souls where every corner you walk around every

corner like holy shit what's around the corner i think that's i think that's my life psychological life yeah okay all right well video games we talked about previously before we even started recording when i first met you about a week ago, or even further than that, we talked about Bioshock Infinite. And I want to ask you, what was your role on Bioshock? Very minimal. I came on to Bioshock before I'm talking about Bioshock Infinite. I didn't work on the first Bioshock at all. After they released the first Bioshock,

they were starting their next project. They didn't even know what it was yet. It was actually, they were working on a game called XCOM as a first-person shooter. So I got hired for that as a designer. So I came on board, and we were working on that for a little bit, and then they scrapped that project,

and they decided to do Bioshock Infinite instead. And they weren't even sure what it was going to be yet and so I was doing the first year of pre-production on Bioshock Infinite we were just I was doing basic research like figuring out what the game is even going to be about like what are we even doing we didn't know the art style we didn't know where we didn't know it was going to be set in the sky like we knew nothing um and so i was ken levine yeah ken levine yeah so yeah and so after a year i did a year of pre-production on that and then i left to start my own business and then they continued working for another two or three years to release bioshock infinite and so my my direct impact on the actual outcome of the

game was quite minimal because, um, most of the work on a game is done towards the end, not towards the beginning. So I didn't actually like create any art assets or anything like that or design any levels because it was too early to do any of that stuff. I was doing like very rudimentary design work. Like for example, you know, in Bioshock Infinite, they have that girl companion. Yeah. So I came up with, I sort of pitched that idea to Ken Levine and he was a bit apprehensive about it at first. He didn't kind of see the point in it.

And I was playing a lot of Half-Life 2 at that point. And I basically stole that idea from Half-Life 2 because, you know, Alex and Half-Life 2. And so I tried to, I basically made a pitch to the team. Like, you know, the companion could be an interesting addition to what we had in Bioshock it's like what if you had a companion who kind of helped you out and then he came around to that idea he started to like it and then so that's how that originated what's her name I forgot I don't even know is it Elizabeth Elizabeth yeah Yeah, Elizabeth. She didn't have a name. By the time I left, she didn't have a name. They came up with it later.

So in large part, Elizabeth is due to you. Well, I mean, I don't want to... At least in a non-trivial manner. In a very abstract sense, just the idea of having her in there. I did research on that, and I convinced them of that. But how she looks and how she behaves,

I had no say in that. How did you get hired as a designer? What did you do in school? How does that process work? Well, I always, from a young age, from like seven years old, I knew I wanted to be a game designer since I played my first Game Boy game. And so I basically basically I was very into gaming and I studied it a lot just by myself. And then in university I got into modding. I made a popular mod for Oblivion called Lost Spires. Oh yeah? Oh that's hilarious.

It was actually one of the most popular mods for Oblivion. It got like a million downloads. And so based on- It makes sense when you speak to the camera it looks like a million downloads and um and so based on that's when you speak to the camera it looks like oblivion it just goes and then it's just a head speaking because there's only one way communication okay yeah continue what are those former elves what are those white elves that they have in in in the skyrim um i forget what they're called. Anyways, yeah, so I, based on the success of that mod,

that's what I use as my portfolio piece to get hired by Irrational Games. They like my work. Interesting. So you pitched, you wanted to be hired there. They didn't reach out to you? Well, I applied to dozens of

different studios. It's actually very difficult to break into a game design as an entry-level designer. It's quite challenging. It's easier if you're a programmer or an artist because you have some tangible skills. But as a designer, it's hard to prove that you have design chops as a newbie. So my mod was how I proved that. And so, no, I submitted my application to them

and they called me back. I also submitted my application to Todd Howard at Bethesda. I actually had an interview with Todd Howard. Oh, yeah? I was so bad at interviewing because it was like the first job interview I've ever had in my life. And I was so like, I was pretty old.

I was like 22 or 23. Okay, that's fine. And I just didn't know how to communicate very well at that point as a designer. And so I was so excited. Plus I was so excited. Like Bethesda was my favorite company back then. So it was like my dream come true to like talk to Todd Howard.

And I remember he called me and I was just like, I was such a fucking mess. And I just, called me and I was just like, I was such a fucking mess. And I just, I couldn't explain, he asked me basic questions about my mod and I just couldn't explain it properly, even though I knew the answers, but I just, I was just mumbling and stumbling. And after like 10 minutes of that, you know, it was over and I'm like, fuck, I fucked that up. And so, yeah, I fucked it up. Do you recall what he asked you? Any of it specifically? Oh man. I don't, I don't remember at this point they were basically trying to hire me for fallout 3 because they were going to start doing fallout 3 and they

were looking for designers um he asked oh he asked me have you played fallout and i actually i hadn't played fallout that was one of the franchises i sort of neglected so I didn't actually know what Fallout was. And also he just asked me questions about my mod, like how did you develop your mod and what did you do and stuff like that. Yeah, I haven't played Fallout 1 or 2. I'm a huge fan of 3, which makes me not a Fallout fan apparently to most of the people who are actually Fallout fans. So I'm not, I'm more of Bethesda Fallout fan. I've seen gameplay of one and two, and it's too much like Baldur's Gate, like too old school for me. I'm more of a fan of, well, I'm a modern person. Although I love the, I think that the old Fallouts, from what I know, from what I've seen, have a, they have more nuance in the story

and they have many more methods of solving a particular situation other than what it is now. Almost every single game, they pretend that they have so much choice. It's just three. Yeah, they watered it down a lot. You can either... Guns blazing or you can sneak or speak.

That's your speech skill. Sneaky sniper is like how you play all Bethesda games. At least how I do. Yeah, yeah. Practically speaking, when you're with people, how are you doing this design? Is it you and three other people? And then do you have a whiteboard?

Or is it just like, how does it look? It very much depends. I think it also depends a lot on what phase of the game development process you're in like pre-production is a lot more casual and just you know we're literally sitting around a conference table like and it's not just three people it could be we would have a meeting uh like ken levine could be there or not be there uh or the lead if not levine then like the lead designer, Bill Gardner was there. He was my direct sort of boss, you might say.

And we would sit around there, maybe 10 of us. Sometimes the artists were there. Sometimes even some of the programmers were there. And we would just, you know, be spitballing ideas and discussing pros and cons about various mechanics, what we like, what we didn't like. There was a lot of introspection about the faults of Bioshock 1. So, like, and in fact, this is a good way to interview, like, they interviewed me this way. So, when I was doing the Bioshock interview,

or the, you know, the Irrational Games interview, like, I was more prepared. So, I was prepared to talk shop. So, like, one of the questions, you know, like Levine would ask is something like, you play Bioshock, like tell me what worked and what didn't work and why you think it didn't work and how you would improve it. And so then you'd have to say like, well, you know, some of the loot mechanics weren't quite so good. Some of the upgrades weren't so good. You know, this, this, I got stuck in this place.

I was confused about the story here, blah, blah, blah. You have to dissect and analyze all the faults, all the things that could be improved and how it would be improved. That takes a lot of design experience. The more games you play, the better you're able to analyze

and find problems and ways to improve games. What's your greatest vice? Hmm. Probably arrogance. I do tend to look down on people. And part of that is a defense mechanism. You know, the reason I had to do that in order to get to where I am now, because I have to have like a very quick bullshit detector.

I've had to build one because there's so much bullshit out there, even within science, academia, like different books you could read. I mean, half the books on that bookshelf are filled with bullshit. So what I've developed is a very quick process for how I, when I see something as bullshit, I quickly dismiss it. The problem is that you could sometimes dismiss something that actually needs to be understood and

open to more. So sometimes I do that with people and it's actually precisely because I've become conscious of so much that this can make me arrogant and feel like, you know, I know more than others because I've become conscious of so much that this can make me arrogant and feel like, you know, I know more than others because I do know more than most others, but that doesn't mean I'm always right. You see the difference there?

It's possible for both to be true. You can know more than most people. You can be in the top 1% of your understanding of reality, but that doesn't mean that every take you have is going to be perfect. You can be wrong in certain areas. And so you got to be careful. And especially when you're becoming more famous and people give you a lot of praise, you can then start to feel like you're untouchable. Like, oh, I've got it all figured out. That's easy. You can fall into that trap trap and so that's probably my greatest advice do you get recognized as you go to starbucks let's say do people take pictures with you not these days i

used to be more popular back in the day like maybe four or five years ago was sort of my heyday and uh yeah i had more i used to do more videos. Now my videos are very niche and very dense. So when it was more mainstream. They used to be pick up, right? in the last like when i started youtube was a lot easier than it is today i get less traffic than i used to get um just because you know there's much more competition but yeah i would sometimes get recognized at the gym and people would want to take a photo with me or like i would eat at a restaurant and the waiter would recognize me to give you any freebies or no no i've never gotten a freebie you helped me get it awakened man but you're still paying for this no no no okay i wish it was not that easy not that i needed

hey another goal if like i mentioned that i'm not concerned with being famous i would like it i would like a free meal at a restaurant i think that would make i've never had that but that would be great if someone said said, oh man, like that's on me, man. And you're getting something extra, which you didn't order. Oh my gosh. Wow. Thank you. But I'm a cheap person. They don't have the authority. Like a waiter doesn't have that authority. Maybe a man, maybe if a manager recognized you, but it's hard to get the manager to recognize you. It would be very seldom. It only happened to me maybe five times in my whole life. So it's not like I'm not Brad Pitt or something here.

I'm like an F-level celebrity. What else are your vices? So let's imagine in terms of consumption. So it could be you smoke too much cannabis or you indiscriminately pick up women and you don't think you should. Or you eat too much chocolate. What is your vice outside of arrogance? So that's more of a character trait.

What's something physical? Well, some people consider my porn watching as a vice. I don't personally consider it. I don't have any qualms about watching porn or masturbation. about watching porn or masturbation. There's a lot of people who get hung up on this no-fap mentality of like, you can't masturbate ever if you're spiritual, and it drains you of your energy, and it makes you feel like, Leo, you don't understand.

If you were doing no-fap, you would be even more enlightened. It's like, my masturbation does not detract from my consciousness at all. If one took non-dualism seriously, I don't see the difference between having sex with someone and masturbating. Well, yeah, sex is masturbation. I mean, there's still... You can get addicted to masturbation

just like you can get addicted to anything, basically. But just because you can doesn't mean that you are. So that's an important distinction. Right? Like, you can get addicted to anything, basically. But just because you can doesn't mean that you are. So that's an important distinction, right? Like you can do weed without being addicted or you can be addicted to weed and it can be a serious problem. It just depends on how you're doing it. And also who you are.

You know, some people get addicted, some people don't. Genetics are involved, other factors. No, I don't smoke weed. I don't drink at all. My diet is pretty good. I would say another vice of mine is that I want to go vegetarian or vegan, but people also fault me for that as well. They're like, Leo, how can you be so conscious and loving and yet you eat animals? Like, how dare you? Someone just asked Noam Chomsky that on my channel. someone just asked nobe chomsky that on my channel yeah um well i i would love to do it i've actually tried it quite a few times and my health just doesn't allow me to do it i have a thyroid condition uh the main reason you don't do it though uh well i mean i have to be honest in

that i do enjoy eating animals so that is a that is a factor i think i could i could retrain myself but the problem is that when i eat only vegetables and fruits and grains and stuff, my body just doesn't have enough energy. And I feel cold. Literally, my hands and feet become like ice cold, like very painfully cold. So it just hasn't worked for me. In the future, if I can find a way to do it where I still feel good and have enough energy, I'll try to do it. But I have not yet found that way.

Well, soon there's these beyond meat, not just beyond meat burgers where it's actually plant-based, but it seems like some of the technology will be actual meat. Well, if it's actual meat grown in a lab, then sure, I'm happy to eat that. But I think we're pretty far from that still. porn for oneself as well as for the people in the video as well as for how one looks at the world i think it trains one's mind to see people as interchangeable now the plus side is actually i think you porn or porn hub whichever one is the largest site i think they've made a push

to making original content and i would say the porn industry is a horrible industry. But if it's almost like, see, I think that because if you're watching porn, and you're watching it with these people who don't care about one another, and they're doing it, despite them not liking it, even though they say, you know, I love sex, and that's why I'm doing it. That's not why if there was no money attached, you probably wouldn't do this so you're watching it but you're watching them do that with people that they don't like however i think there's this push on you porn or porn i don't know you can enlighten me man when it comes to this i don't watch i don't watch those things yeah whatever you got the more freakish end we can talk about that often no not the freakish i tend to prefer the

more premium porn like if you're gonna if you're gonna watch porn like watch really high quality porn you can find some really good stuff not the trashy free stuff that you get which is all like blurry and and gross like well then i think i was just about to say hey what you're doing is okay now i don't think it is but let me tell you what let me tell you what i mean so what i was going to say was okay was that it's the new porn websites there seems to be an emphasis on user-generated content and so you're actually seeing couples have sex and they just film themselves like i'm the brother and i'm the sister whatever but they're obviously then there are other videos like i'm the teacher and you're the student and and it's the same couple over and over.

So how can you be? So obviously, they're just role playing. But to me, in some sense, if you're masturbating to that, you're masturbating to a relationship that's most likely improving. I think so. I think that it's fun for a couple to do that. I could imagine that to be the case. But for traditional porn, I don't have my thoughts settled on that.

And I don't see it as good. But I'm not settled on that. However, I'm interested. What is this premium porn you refer to? What is it? And are there quotes involved? Well, I'm not going to list websites, but you know,

I'm actually not into any kind of like weird fetishes or anything like that. I just like straight normal porn, but like I like, there's more like artistic forms of form. You can find like metart.com. It's like actually, like they're turning like nudity into art basically.

Is that not? Oh, okay. Sorry. I thought you were going to say they're turning nudity into porn. Yeah. And there's other more hardcore, like metart is kind of softcore.

It's basically just nude girls. It's almost like Playboy. But you can find like, you can find hardcore, but like sort of artsy or porn where it's like they get like really beautiful women and guys and they like they they like it's a really nice set like one of the things i don't like about old school porn is like they have like the trashiest sets and like the trashiest clothes but here like they're actually having sex and like it's like a

beautifully lit room it's like an awesome bedroom it's like it's just like it's just like art basically you're like i imagine there's some people who i don't drink alcohol but they're people that drink wine and they swish it around their mouth they smell yeah yeah it's like it's like yeah you're like a connoisseur of yeahnoisseur well i mean i i literally like i can i can i can cry porn maven i can cry tears at the beauty of like a female body um because like it's fucking beautiful all right all right let's move on to the next one i mean yeah if you if you yeah, if you can't find God in a strip club,

you don't understand God. I was at a strip club in Vegas with my friend, actually enlightened friend. He came over. He flew over in town. We were just having fun for the weekend. I took him to, I'm like, I'm going to take you to the best strip club in Vegas. Spearmint Rhino.

We got some awesome strip clubs here. It's like literally... I don't think I've ever been to a strip club. They literally have like 5,000 strippers there on rotation. They come in from Hollywood and shit. It's like the hottest girls you can imagine. And he was like, I'm going to take you there and buy you a lap dance. It's only 20 bucks. So we, so we went there. Um, and, uh, and yeah, we just, we started talking to these girls, you know, he, we were sitting there and

the girls were like coming up to us and sitting on our laps and talking. We just talked about them, about enlightenment and spirituality and psychedelics and shit. And I was, so I was one of the girls, you know, she was, she was um she came over she had one of those um it's it's a Hindu I don't know what it's one of those sort of Sanskrit uh om tattoos it's the symbol for it's like a three with a hat and yeah she had she had that tattooed like on her chest here and I'm and that's where I started talking to her about that then we started talking about how she does DMT and I talk about DMT and we talk about God and shit and it's like you know and while she's doing the lap dance or this yeah later she gave me a lap dance how do you do that man you know well that to me is next level spirituality where you can talk about that

and then have sex with someone oh yeah you should you should open with that like I will I will open girls talking about how this whole thing is a hallucination and shit. That's the best way to open. It's all just a dream. Yeah, well, that's definitely one way. Girls are really into psychic shit. You start talking to them about psychic shit, that's like chick crack right there. Yeah, I'm aware about that. Yeah.

You can do it in a fake way. You can do it in a real way. You can do it in a real way. Like, Mystery did it sort of fake way. But, like, you can genuinely talk about... Like, I've had a lot of girls where they will, like, start to confess to me about some of their psychic premonitions and shit when I start talking about it. Because usually guys will dismiss them. They'll say, oh, that's just some sort of, you know, soft brain girl stuff. But then when I say, like, yeah, you know, i'm into all the psychic shit she'll start to

confess to me all of her psychic you know whatever experiences astrology all that shit okay this question comes from word count word counterino crip kinner cripperino word counterino cripperino it's funny what is Leo's morning routine just wondering I've been following the guy for a while so I'm curious as to what his day to day life is like yeah I have a really poor morning routine because I'm dealing with health problems

for the last few years and so I'm not able to keep a really good sleep regimen it's not that I have problems sleeping I'm not like an insomniac but it's difficult for me to wake up on time exactly at the same time all the time. So it screws up with my routine.

Basically, at this point, I don't really have a morning routine. Okay, how about daily routine? Let's say that. Yeah, it's kind of all over the place. I don't... I'll tell you a bit of mine, and then you can just riff off of that. So for me, I wake up, I have...

I tend to almost immediately do some writing. And it's a small amount, like less than five minutes. And it's because I hate writing so much. But I know how necessary it is, and I... I can't bring myself to do it, so I said, Kurt, just do it for five minutes a day. So I write for about five minutes a day and then I and then I have different exercises like mental exercises let's say and then I have to study and then sometimes I interview someone that's pretty much each day so it's a combination of that so what do your days look like it's it's very all over the place

I mean someday I can just play a video game all day another day I will just focus on preparing an outline for one of my videos or I will meditate a lot that day or I'll just not feel good that day and spend the whole day

you know feeling like shit because of health issues I'm sorry about that so it's kind of all over the place you know, feeling like shit because of health issues. Um, I'm sorry about that. Yeah. And, um, so it's kind of all over the place. A lot of it is dictated by how good I feel. So if I feel good, I try to do work. My, my, my inclination is to work hard. So if, if I had my full health back, I would work really hard. Um, but when I don't feel good, it's hard for me to work. Um, and so then I, I'm more compassionate to myself.

So that's something that being sick has taught me, is that I have to be much more compassionate to myself. I can't just push myself the way I used to when I was younger, where I would just sort of try to tough everything out. It's not sustainable when your health gets worse and worse. And so I just sometimes have to be very compassionate with myself about that and just give myself the day off or whatever. We're definitely different on that regard. For me, I can see you drive yourself hard. Yeah, but part of it's unhealthy. Like I realized that though the days that I spend off, I take completely off and I spend it with my wife. Sorry, not completely.

I still do my morning routine when I say morning, when I wake up, but I, I love spending time with my wife. And with that, there's almost no intellectual lism with it. Yeah, that's good.

Yeah. You need, you need that break. I want to play video games. Yeah. And I don't, yeah. And I never work on the weekends.

So that's something I'm pretty consistent about. I'll take the weekends off entirely so that i don't although that's not true i mean like i i will edit videos on the weekends but i don't even i do so little edit actual editing that i don't even consider it work but i don't like record on the weekend i don't record on the weekends for example let's get to a couple more and then let's just finish it up okay you mentioned this before perhaps you can elaborate this carl richard loberg wants to know do you feel like your attachments to your work to your mission is impeding your embodiment i'm not sure what this person means by embodiment, but perhaps you do. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if I wanted to go balls to the wall, full embodiment, then I would have to stop recording videos, and I would have to stop doing interviews,

and I would have to stop writing my book, and I would just have to stop thinking, basically. So the biggest interference is that in order to do my work i have to do a lot of thinking because it's conceptual right so uh that is and that's a huge obstacle so like i would need to take extended times time off to just meditate and to not think so much and to not analyze see when i do my work i have to analyze and break things down and structure into some sort of linear order to explain to folks like you. But if I'm by myself, just really trying to go as deep as I can for my own benefit and not for others, then I have to let go of that because that actually interferes. And so, yeah, absolutely, it interferes. Um, and so, yeah, absolutely.

It interferes. You mentioned before the previous question that you, you don't, you're not, let's say a workhorse. You mentioned that I drive myself and that's true. Like I drive, drive, drive constantly, constantly. Part of the reason is that I don't know how it is. You know, all of what, you know, for me that I don't know how it is that let's say bernardo castrop even though he calls himself lazy i don't know how he i'm i don't know how he does it i don't know how for me so much of so much is a struggle struggle struggle struggle

and so i just have to work hard it's like to run, run, run to catch up with someone who is walking, or at least from my perspective. Because there's also the possibility that when someone says, I understand topic X, that what I consider to be understanding topic X is completely different. So they all say that. But then for me, it's, okay, I need to know topic Y, A, B, C, D, and how they relate. And that's understanding topic x whereas them it just means we could be the article i don't know it could be that as well yeah depth is an issue breadth is also an issue like how how broad do you go with your understanding but i mean look i have i have a lazy side to myself as well but i also i have worked hard a

lot in my in my life in my youth now, I don't work so hard. But in the past, you know, I did study hard. I read a lot. You know, those books there, you know, many of them work out. Yeah, they're not all for show. And I have more, like half my books are just in audio form. So you don't even see them on the bookshelf. So I have studied a lot.

But at the same time, I am, I would say my greatest strength is I'm extremely intuitive and my intuition is very holistic. So what it allows me to do is it allows me to very quickly sort the wheat from the chaff. And so what I do is I'm very careful not to bog myself down too much in technical detail. So I think one of the things that would help you if you want to really advance yourself, learn a lot, but also do it quickly is like, I mean, like when you get into that Chris Langan stuff and you're spending two weeks, you know, just studying his theory and learning all the jargon, like I'm not going to do that shit because I know that it's actually like to a certain, you can make the case that, well, but you have to, because you want to be charitable to him

and you want to understand everything properly and you want to be very rigorous. Yes, I hear that side of the argument, but here's my other side of the argument is that if you're going to take that approach with every intellectual that exists in the world, with every author, you're going to spend the rest of your life lost inside your mind, creating all these distinctions and lost with all these concepts, and you're going to miss the forest for the trees. Like you're going to, you're not going to reach the highest level. So for me, I always prioritize the highest level as the most important thing. And then the technical details, I don't need to know all the fucking technical details. You know, I don't actually literally need to go through Gertl's incompleteness theorem step by step to understand what it means and what its implications are. I just want the big picture.

And so I'm always looking for the big picture because here's the thing you've got to reckon with, is that you can get all of your technical details flawless and you will still miss the big picture or you can get the big picture and your technical details will be sketchy.

Which would you rather have? For me, the answer is obvious. I would rather have the big picture. And so there is a trade-off there. We have finite time here in this life. We have finite mental resources. You got to be careful not to let your mind run wild with concepts, because you will get lost in them, and it'll take decades of your life the way that I see it is if one doesn't understand something meticulously one can draw these superficially plausible

inferences from them that seem like they're correct but they're like I said spurious that's a risk yeah there's always a risk. There's a trade-off there. I see your perspective completely, but I can spend many... Well, obviously. Look, I could learn a particular... I could take this to another extreme. Like, let me just learn algebraic topology and just learn that. Well, I can learn an infinite amount of... almost infinite amount of algebraic topology... Relatively speaking, an infinite amount of algebraic topo- relatively speaking an infinite

amount of algebraic topology and not know anything about physics. Now you would have to make some analogies to learn algebraic topology, but you understand the idea. So I get that. My other perspective is I've seen so much of a lack of rigor from many of the people who investigate this topic, so much of it, and so much of it is that they're drawing, they're being misled, they're beguiled by these, by quantum entanglements and so on. Even, I don't know if you know, but in U of T for the math logic course, it's a part of your degree, essentially what you have to do is prove Gertl's Incompleteness Theorem for the exam. Like that's how rigorous it is. It almost amounts to memorization.

But to fully understand Gertl's Incompleteness Theorem to the point where you can prove it, you gain so much more insight as to exactly how it works, what are its limitations. And so many people, not necessarily you, could be you, but not necessarily you, many people would take that and say, necessarily you, could be you, but not necessarily you. Many people would take that and say, therefore, all truth is relative, or therefore, we can never find truth, when you can also see it as a statement about formal systems and or a statement about consistencies trade off with provability. But that's lost. And I think that so much can be added to this discussion by being specific. And I may be hindering my own development. That's fine. Part of this I'm seeing more and more as this isn't about Kurt. And that's one reason I'm most likely going to...

Kurt Gurgle or Kurt you? Isn't about C-U-R-T. And I'm most likely going to remove theories of everything with Kurt Jemungo and just put theories of everything. No, I think you need your name in it because you are a big component of it. I mean, you can't... Your style is... I mean, yeah.

I mean, like I said, yeah, there's a trade-off there. There's a profound trade-off between the big picture and the little picture. So which one do you want more? Just, you know, be careful. I'm not saying you shouldn't ever

study the fine details of things, but just you know be careful uh i'm not saying you shouldn't ever study the fine details of things but just you have to somehow um develop a method for how to allocate your time and energy um and also be careful not to get lost in the concepts because that's going to be your biggest challenge for you personally to awaken you're're right. Your biggest personal challenge, maybe even more than your fear of death or whatever, is going to be because you're so steeped in studying conceptual stuff that you can just keep going down that for 10 more years, 20 more years, and you're never going to awaken because you're always going to be the next

model, the next theory of everything, 200 theories, 300 theories, which theory is right? I don't know which theory. They could all be right. And then you're very lost. And you probably don't even know whether what I'm telling you, like, see, in your mind, I imagine that the thing I'm telling you here is just one more theory in your 300 theories that you're studying. And then you're like, well, maybe Leo has some truth, but maybe he's wrong, so I have to make sure my mind is so open that I know I gotta go do this and do that. So here's

there's actually a very counterintuitive move that needs to be made here that I'll suggest to you is that at a certain point, you've heard enough of these theories that you have to say, okay, enough of this fucking theorizing, now let me get to the absolute truth and stop the theories.

Because there's only some I mean, like, yeah, you can always keep inventing more theories, but they're never going to be absolute truth. Three years. So I imagine that this channel has three more years left to it. And the reason why I say that is, and maybe some people won't like this if they like the channel, and I'm glad that they like the channel. why I say that is and maybe some people won't like this if they like the channel and I'm glad that they like the channel but I imagine that the amount of people that I'm going to speak to I think a back of the envelope calculation is something like three years at the trajectory that I'm going one of the reasons this channel has the subscribers that it does and the following that it does and the love that it does is partly because

I'm not interviewing people just for the sake of interviewing like some people. I actually have this channel's goal oriented and because of that, there's a finiteness to it if one can achieve the goal in a finite amount of time, but there's potentially the finite aspect. The reason why I brought up the possibility of removing my name is because maybe another way of viewing this is that maybe I won't, maybe I'm not selfless enough, courageous enough, intelligent enough to come up or even recognize a true theory of everything if it was to be presented to me. So perhaps my aid is to the world by being so rigorous and meticulous while other people aren't necessarily so i can give my little contribution

yeah someone else can take a sword that i've created and they can go and chop down their foes or the forest yeah i definitely see you doing that you found a niche for yourself which is that you are trying to walk that that rarely walked tightrope act between the very scientific left brain and the right brain, spiritual, mystical. And so it's hard to walk that. And if you do succeed in walking that, you will be unique and you will be able to provide a unique perspective to others in the world that most scientists and academics simply can't do because they're too left-brained. So yeah, if you can achieve achieve that but the problem is that you have to actually achieve it like i mean my biggest fear for you is that you do all this intellectual work but then you don't awaken that would be the

saddest thing of all you know because then see your channel runs for three years then you're going to write a book then you're going to do some speaking tours then you're going to do some seminars i don't know about that like your mind will find ways to to keep this going forever i want to just play fallout infinitely honestly yeah after three years i just want to play fallout and just get every rpg open world okay but also i would say that it's a to me if i don't awaken let's imagine that that's what it means to find the theory of everything. If I don't awaken, so part of me is like, man, I want to find the answer. I want to find the answer. But a part of me also, and I'm saying this almost to convince myself because I don't 100% believe what I'm saying. But a part of me also is and should be okay with just passing the baton on if it's a baton passing the torch on

perhaps what i can do is contribute some fire to it or contribute some fuel and someone else is going to be the one that does it i mean if that's how it goes that's how it goes there's nothing wrong going on it's all going to be good but but uh but consider also that if you do awaken how much more powerful that will make your life's work because that's really where your life's work will flower because after you awaken then you can come back and you you can use your brilliant scientific mind to delve even deeper into the science and you can really truly be on the cutting edge of what you would call your science 2.0 um and and help people, help the academic community and so forth,

get their head out of their ass. And they will trust you more than they will trust me because you're more technical than I am, and they respond to that technical language and that technical attitude. Whereas me, I'm just some hippie crazy guy. So very much what you're doing is needed. But for you to fully actualize what you're trying to do, you've got to awaken. And then keep doing your stuff.

I mean, you can still keep running your channel and keep interviewing people or keep writing scientific books about theories and stuff. I don't know. I'm so uninterested in writing a book, but I know what you're saying. And I'm also uninterested in speaking, though. I used to think, like in Tony Robbins terms, exclusively be like, I want to go on tour. I'm not interested in that. But who knows? Well, you'll find some niche for yourself, whatever it's going to be, whether it's going to be in filmmaking, it could be about films, documentaries, it could be about podcasting or YouTubing. You'll find something or writing or some combination of all above.

Teaching, maybe. I mean, you would make a great teacher. Thanks. I also wonder how much of the toe, the awakening, but let's call it a toe to whatever. I wonder how much of the toe is actually an answer but let's call it a toe to whatever, I wonder how much of the toe is actually an answer versus a process, or the answer is a process. And what I

mean by that is, some people say, Kurt, you truly don't want a toe, because if you found a toe, it would go against your whole channel, because then you'd have to stop. Well, first of all, I've already said maybe I will stop, like that there is an end date if I find a toe, that satisfies myself. Okay, so first, so let's cross that one out. And then number two, there is the possibility that if I was to find a toe, it's actually not an answer that then my inquisitive nature is satisfied, and thus I don't have any motivation to do anything else. It could be that the answer is something like, live in this manner, like live lovingly, express more love or be more open, be more engaging, be more close minded, be more interview more people, speak. So it actually might be a process, in which case, because time moves forward inexorably, then there's nothing else I can do but live this process.

Of course, it is a process, but also there's an ultimate climax, which is the awakening, the God realization. And you need to reach that climax. But then after the climax, it's not like it's all done. It's sort of like a new life. You're reborn. And then you won't, the old Kurt won't totally be dead. Like your curiosity, your technical. Yeah, your interest in technical theoretical matters. your technical facility.

Yeah, your interest in technical, theoretical matters, this probably won't go away. It'll actually get supercharged, and now you will see it clearly for what it really is. You will, like, you'll become so much more intelligent, so much more intuitive, and you'll be able to run circles around all of your academic colleagues

and see things that they can't see. The biggest problem, though, will be that how will you convince them of absolute truth at that point? But anyways, but yeah, I think that the awakening don't don't frame awakening as though it's going to be the end of this work here. I think it's going to be sort of a renaissance of this work that you're doing here. Like you'll you'll take it even deeper. Even deeper. Mm-hmm. Did your parents, your family, notice any difference in you

after you became awakened, enlightened, whatever you like to call it? Well, I don't even call myself awakened or enlightened. But a difference in me? No. In fact, my mom doesn't even like that I do this stuff. Because she says like, oh, you're less down to earth. You're more abstract and sort of airy-fairy. So if anything, you'll get negative reinforcement. And in general, that's how it works is that when you do personal development and spiritual work, you'll get negative reinforcement. And in general, that's how it works, is that when you do personal development and spiritual work, you actually get negative reinforcement usually from your family and friends because they don't want you to change. They don't understand what you're changing into. And in fact, I've gotten negative reinforcement from even my own community.

People will leave me comments like, oh, Leo, your videos used to be so practical and helped my life so much. Now you're just talking about all sorts of mental masturbation and woo topics. And it seems like you've changed. You've become less happy. It's not that I've become less happy. It's actually that I used to put on a sort of a fake happiness, right? And now I've become more real, more authentic, which means that I'm less like smiley and putting on this YouTube persona. I'm more just normal, but people don't understand these complexities. I have a similar experience. I have a serious face much of the time

when I'm doing podcasts. And that all actually only started about a year ago. And the reason is that I feel like the more authentic I am, the more I'm just like, I'm just going to listen to you. I'm purely going to listen to you. I'm purely going to listen to you. And I'm going to think because I like to think and that's what I do.

And if I was to be like, oh, that's so cool. Yeah, man. And it would there would be fakeness. You would sense it. The person, the audience, maybe plenty of the audience wouldn't sense it. I would sense it. And there'd be this portion of people who would sense it. sense it. I would sense it and there'd be this portion of people who would sense it. So when I am looking serious with four-word brows, more of it is me trying to be as authentic as I possibly

can and not put on a smile. It's something I struggle with because I don't want people, partly if you notice, I don't know if you notice, but one of the reasons why I edit the videos is because if I'm looking way too serious It's a bit too intense for a little while so I scrubbed them. Okay, I wouldn't worry about that Just do you All right. Let's just get to the last Two or three questions or perhaps just one. Okay the seer wants to know mr kurt sounds like my uncle mr kurt mr kurt mr kurt could you elaborate could you sorry please ask leo in your next meeting with him why most of actualized human

beings like buddha like moses like john the baptist like j, like Muhammad, sages like Huang Po, Ramana Maharshi, Master Eckhart Tolle, how come they don't claim that they are God despite knowing that there is nothing but God? Well, actually many of them do. It's just that you're not listening carefully to what they're saying. Well, the biggest reason is because if they came out, first of all, I'm very blunt. That's a bias I have. Most teachers and people are not that blunt. Second of all, because they care about their image and how they teach, and they don't want to come off

as arrogant or egotistical, and they don't want to be misunderstood, because as soon as you tell somebody that you're God, that gets misinterpreted so badly by most people. So oftentimes, they use different kinds of language. Like they won't say they're God, but they'll just talk kind of vaguely about,

realize that you're the self. And by self, they mean self with a capital S, like the Buddha talked about the self, realizing the self. He talked about no self, but he also talked about realizing the self, like the self. He talked about no self, but he also talked about realizing the self, like realizing Brahman. Well, realizing Brahman means you realize you're fucking Brahman. That's what that means. Or like when they're talking about oneness, what does oneness mean? I mean, it's so ridiculous because people will accept the idea of oneness. That's not controversial.

But then when as soon as when you claim an identity That's not controversial. But then when, when, as soon as, when you claim an identity with God, it's like, well, no, you can't be God, but if everything is one, how can you not be God? If you're assuming you're not God, that means there's two, there's you and there's God. So is there a God or is there not? And if, if there is a God, is God infinite or not? You say, well, yeah, of course, Leo, God is infinite. But if God is infinite, how can you not be part of infinity? How can you not be infinity? Right? There's a famous Islamic Sufi mystic named Al-Halaj. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. No. His name is Mansur Al-Halaj.

Okay. And he's very famous. He was like in the 13th century or something like that. There's a famous quotation from him. You should actually search it and read it. He had a famous saying where he said, it was said in Arabic. I forget exactly how it sounds in Arabic, but basically it translates as, I am truth. That was his proclamation. I am truth. So he awoke and he realized I am truth and truth in Allah in Islam. It's the same thing. Allah is truth. So he was basically saying he is Allah.

And then they fucking killed him for saying that. So in practice, the reason that people don't say it is because it's dangerous. You have to understand that all of these ideas that I'm talking about, I would have been killed for these ideas just even 80 years ago, 100 years ago. I would have been killed. I would have been killed. And in certain parts of the world, I would still be killed for these ideas. If I was saying this in Arabic countries, I would be killed. Like in Saudi Arabia, you can't say you're Allah in Saudi Arabia they'll fucking kill you so please understand how dangerous these ideas are

like mankind has taken this stuff very seriously because we're talking about survival here right we're not just playing philosophy games people's lives hinge on these ideas entire philosophies, political systems so when we're talking about

deconstructing the mind, deconstructing reality we're talking about deconstructing every political ideology, every religious school, every philosophical school, every scientific endeavor, businesses, right? There are entire businesses that will crumble if society at large understands these ideas. Those businesses will not be sustainable and people will lose their jobs and their kids will then suffer. So this is serious stuff we're doing. If we're actually doing it and not just talking about it. It's threatening stuff. Last question, P Shooter asks, did Leo once say that he wasn't sharing his most dangerous insight publicly? I might have missed that part. I don't know what that person's referring to. Perhaps you can think, did lot of this stuff takes time to figure out even how to articulate it because it doesn't even, words can't even communicate it. So yeah, some of my deepest insights, I don't even know how to communicate. Can you speak around them right now? Can you just pick one? Well, I have. I mean, it's nothing really different. It's just like different depths of the same thing. And that's also what you find with all these spiritual teachers. I want you to see the convergence, right? You can get lost on the differences, but start to see the convergence, how we're all talking about oneness in one way or another. You should start to see that, whether it's talked about from a Buddhist perspective or from a New Age perspective or even within science even science is Giving you little clues every year. We're getting more and more clues as to how the universe is one thing Whether you go into relativity or whether you go into astrophysics whether you go into the cosmic background radiation

Or whether you go into some new experiments some you know some Higgs boson discovery or whether you go into you go into some new experiment, some, you know, some Higgs boson discovery, or whether you go into quantum mechanics, everything there ultimately is pointing you towards oneness in one way or another. And so these are clues. And as you gather more of these clues, eventually you realize, oh, okay, so it's pointing me towards something. It's all... One approach

to this channel is to think, well, here are the variegated theories of everything. Well, what's their intersection? And then that's probably... Or I can use that as an approximation for truth, or as a mechanism to orient my compass. And that's similar to the scientific method.

Like, what is the consensus among people? So that's one way. Yeah, you're kind of triangulating the truth from multiple directions. That's one way. Then I also have to be... Then I also wonder... Yeah.

Well, probably you'd agree with this. I also wonder, I'm not just going to look at the intersection. I have to be guided by my own intuitions, my own feelings, and also be open that some of these people are more right than others. It's not simply everyone is unbiasedly trying to feel that elephant elephant and describing a different part of that elephant some people don't want to describe the elephant or are purposefully being misleading so it's not as simple that's it's not a straightforward process yeah the way the way the phrase i have for that that i came up with is that the don't assume that the truth is the midpoint between any two given perspectives some perspectives are just like really fucking awful perspectives like don't don't, don't think that like the pro climate change perspective and the anti climate change perspective,

the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's like, no, the truth can be completely on one side. The truth can be completely that not only is climate change real, but that it's even 10 times worse than we imagined. That could be the truth. And that means that the, the people who deny climate change, they could be so fucking wrong that, fucking wrong that they don't even deserve to be in the conversation. They could be so wrong. So you have to be careful that just because somebody has an opinion or a worldview does not mean that you have to give them credence. you does not mean that you have to give them credence. Like you can be open to it, but don't weigh it equally because actually this will be, a devil will use this. Because if you fall into the trap of simplistically giving equal weight to all perspectives, someone with a false perspective will actually manipulate you by feeding you bullshit. In fact, Steve Bannon, you know, I don't know if you've, if you read this, but like that's Steve Bannon's strategy, you know, Republican strategist, basically for the alt-right

for Donald Trump. He said, flood the zone with bullshit. That's a direct quote, flood the zone with bullshit. Cause when you flood the zone with bullshit, they don't fucking know what's true and what's not. And then you can get your agenda passed. It's not about truth for him. So be careful, because some people literally are playing the game not in an intellectually honest way, where they want to get to the truth. They're just flooding the zone with bullshit. Probably none of your guests are doing that.

I think most of your guests are intellectually honest. But in the larger information ecosystem, certainly in politics and stuff, a lot of people are just flooding the zone with bullshit deliberately because it confuses people. And then they can get their selfish agendas passed. So Timar, if you had one minute to address the entire human race, do you have a message? It's love. It's all just love. That's all that's happening is love.

That's what reality is. In the end, you realize reality is love. And why would it be anything else? What kind of sick bastard would create a universe that isn't infinitely love? That's it. it's so simple

do you have any advice for me as a youtuber because you're far you're about 10x more even more maybe 14 maybe 12x more than me in terms of channel subscribers influence maybe maybe 20 so and you've been at it like like, what advice do you have? Well, I think, I think you're doing awesome. Just keep doing what you're doing. I think the energy and passion you bring into it, keep that up. I would say don't, don't, don't take all the comments you read too seriously, because it'll get to your head, you know, especially the critical ones. I don't think you have much to worry about as far as, you know, what you're doing wrong and so forth. Just keep doing what you're doing.

And, yeah, I think your channel will keep growing exponentially if you keep at this. Also, don't burn yourself out. Be careful. Kind of pace yourself because you might burn yourself out i see that maybe as a problem potentially um because i think you do have a lot of potential to to use that for good and to be you know in the public light and then you know because you have a you have a brilliant mind just you know we can we can channel your brilliant mind towards

and then connect it with with spirit you know spiritualize your left brain and then like amazing things will happen for you you can have a powerful impact on the scientific community on the academic community on just lay people when something is true it's just true you don't need to be humble about it like you're a guy with a lot of potential to influence the world. I mean, everyone can, but I mean, you've worked so hard, you're well educated, and you've already launched your channel. So you're sort of, you're ripe, as we might say. Okay, lastly, to leave now, let's imagine you're speaking to the audience. This is the audience of Toe, so keep in mind, disclaimer, they're not all followers of Kurt. Well, I've already turned my camera on. That's fine, that's fine. I can still, I'm recording, I'm recording, so I can still include this. So you're speaking to the audience of Toe.

They're not all followers of Kurt, but they generally are people who are interested in theories of everything okay you've given me some advice what advice do you have for them well actually i plan to release a video that's going to be all the most important things you need to know if you're building a toe like all the theoretical epistemic metaphysical factors and principles that you should i'm not going to tell you how to build your fucking toe but i can lay out principles that you should watch out for and various traps that you can fall into. If you're going to be thinking, if you're like an academic type, who's working on some kind of physics toe, or you're trying to unify gravity and quantum mechanics or whatever, just sort of the,

the epistemic principles you got to be cautious of. The biggest thing you guys who are into toes is that you have to understand that your toe is a concept and concept is not being. So you need to clearly distinguish between being and concept. So like we can actually, I can take you through a very quick exercise. Like close your eyes right now.

It's fine if I'm standing? Yeah, however you like. Okay, so close your eyes and now bring to mind an atom and the question for you is what is an atom and as you're doing that just notice don't get lost in the concepts but actually become conscious of what the notion of Adam is in your direct experience. So that literally is what an Adam is. Don't mistake that for some, that Adams, that your body's made of Adams.

That's what an Adam is. An Adam is not a little ball that exists deep down in your body somewhere circling around that what you're becoming conscious of now is an atom and then you're going to have a story saying that no this is just a concept of the atom then there's a real atom somewhere deep down in nature recognize though that that is also part of your consciousness right now. That's a story. That's a second story on top of the first story. And that whole thing, both of the stories, are what an Adam is. And now you need to contrast that with being. Now open your eyes.

Look at your hand. Look closely at your hand and just become conscious of the existence of your hand. This is being. This is not a concept. Your hand is not a concept. That atom is a concept. And so go back and forth, back and forth, and notice that distinction, that difference between what is concept and what is actuality. This is actuality. This is absolute truth. That is a concept. And keep doing that exercise.

And you can do it with other things. You don't have to just do it for atoms. You can do it for quarks and other things. Keep doing that and keep grounding yourself in what is absolute truth and being what is primary this is primary the atom is secondary this is crucial for you to break out of your out of your mind it's very simple but just because it's simple doesn't mean that you're you're actually embodying this you're not embodying this so keep doing that and doing that and doing that and eventually if you keep doing that long enough you'll awaken what a world we live in huh yes such a strange strange strange place like the more i think about it the more strange but that's what's so beautiful about it is its strangeness it's like nothing is taken for granted when you awaken you won't even take your your dinner fork for granted you'll look at

your dinner fork as though it's an alien and that's how you should you should be walking around reality and looking at everything like it's a fucking alien. Because alien just means that you're seeing it for the first time. That's what alien means. And then the stuff that's not alien is just the stuff that you've gotten used to when you take it for granted. You take humans for granted. You take cats and dogs for granted.

But when you look at a fucking cat or a dog, it's like, what the fuck is this thing? This is the most strange alien fucking thing that could ever exist. This cat. Yeah. How? See, what I'm wondering is I, I am so, I'm so lucky. Like, this is such a fun experience to speak with you.

Such a great experience to eat what I eat. To not have to suffer like so many do, or so many that I imagine do. And I feel just lucky, like extremely lucky and undeserving of it. The more I look around, the more I think about it, that wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. This is all for me. What the heck? Yeah, I mean, it's called gratitude. And the more conscious you become, the more grateful

you become at how amazing life is. And also, you know, going back to that question you had last time, it's like, Leo, why would you call it God? Like, why not use some more neutral word? You know, why would Sam Harris call it God? What if he calls it nothingness well i was thinking about this i was trying to find a good answer for this and ultimately the reason is very simple is that when you actually become directly conscious of god there's only going to be three words out of your mouth and it's going to be oh my god those will be your words okay amen that's the only proper thing to say in the face of god except maybe you'll add a fourth word in there fucking oh my fucking god that is the proper reaction to looking in the face of god Leo

it's been a pleasure, it's been a blast I enjoyed it a lot as well maybe 14 hours in total with you oh boy man the largest that I've spent with any guest thank you, thank you for being so gracious with your time generous my pleasure last words for me could be just personally could be

advice could be like words for the audience anything yeah you should come hang out with me sometime for now i'm appending a snippet of Matthew Phillips, the creator of the app Transcend, as hearing the story about why he created it and how it's used is far more powerful than reading any message. You know, my wife just gave to me, I think she removed it from here because she knew I was having a podcast. She wanted my desk super clean. She had a small, let me see if I can get it. Sure.

It says, what I love about babe from. I have that. I have that, Kurt. Yes, I have that. So she calls me babe. I call her babe. So she just said, what I love about babe. And then you open it up and it prompts you. It says, number one, I'd like hearing about your

blank. And then number nine, I love the sound of your, when you number 15, I love going to so-and-so with you and you fill it out this to me. So this is obviously physical. There's a tremendous worth to it being physical, but it also sounds like that in your app, it can prompt you at different times. I'm sure you can also have an option where you can print, maybe this comes later, you print out physical manifestations of this digital entity. Yes, yes. And we're actually thinking about partnering with some of these prompt companies because I discovered them. When I first created this system, I called it, this is going to be a terrible term, right? AI squared. It was automatic, intelligent, artificial interviewer or whatever, you know? And it was, I was like, Hey, what if,

what if, you know, a journalist was, was virtual? How would this thing probe you? Right. And when it came to the authentic connection in real time, it was like, Hey, are there prompts out there that exist? And we found a lot of companies that actually specialize in this, right? Especially during the pandemic. I think a lot of people were trying to figure out how to do game night at home and connect with one another in person. the meaningful communication side. And that's an important part of Transcend. We didn't want people just to do a thumbs up or a heart or a like. We wanted to send authentic, meaningful communication. Every time you do something in the app, it's meaningful and it has purpose. There's nothing in there that's fluff. There's no noise, no advertising, no nonsense. The fact that you have to articulate the meaning behind things or you have the choice to limits a lot of the selfies and food pics and things that are just kind of nonsense.

So it's really focused on what's important for who's important. And the fact that you have such a limited audience in the sense that you don't share with it, you could probably have the option to share publicly. But that it's encouraged that you share with your family means that you're not going to be sharing pictures of you at the beach and your mimosas and so on for the sake of getting Instagram likes. Exactly. A hundred percent. Okay. So now even more practically, people are probably extremely interested. What do they do? What website do they go to? What can they expect? Absolutely. So right now we're signing up for early access and that early access has been to come in a matter of about two weeks, right? So this is going to be, it's very timely, but it's projecttranscend.com, where if you want to look us up on socials and find us, it's at the Transcend app. That's the best place. So head to the website, follow us on the socials,

sign up for the pre-release. It's going to be limited. So we're trying to figure out what's the right number to cap but i did want to say you know maybe this is the wrong time to announce it but we um we actually have a a program that we support and i wanted to make an offer to you kurt um part you've heard of tom's shoes no they were kind of famous for doing this buy one give one right if you bought a pair of shoes they would gift a pair of shoes yeah so we're following somewhat of a similar model um i didn't start this thing out to get rich in fact i've gone the exact opposite direction probably like a lot of entrepreneurs um it was to help solve a problem and so when we were meeting with a lot of the venture capitalists

and stuff it's like well how do you get it in the hands of these people and these people and millennials it drove me insane it was like the wrong focus. And I just asked ourselves the question, well, who needs this thing the most? It's people facing these end of life circumstances. It's people that are facing their mortality or, you know, need, have a pressing need to get their legacy safeguarded, right? It's almost like love insurance. And that question spawned into an

entire program that we call We Transcend. So we've been signing up organizations in the dementia, Alzheimer's, cancer, a lot of terminal illnesses, military, law enforcement, first responders. I haven't heard that before. Exactly. So everyone that buys a subscription, we're going to gift a subscription to one of these organizations. And I wanted to, that's why I had asked you a few weeks ago, is there an organization that you care about? Because I'd like to make the offer. We're going to go ahead and gift 5,000 subscriptions on behalf of you, Kurt, and TOE for having us on. We're super grateful. We hope this is a long-term relationship. Thank you. Thank you so much. Any one of your choice, you let me know.

I'll reach out to them and we'll give it to them. As you mentioned it, something that occurs to me is dementia and Alzheimer's, particularly because, well, people who are near the end of their life, because they're the ones who are, firstly, they're old. They don't tend to be on social media. So you don't have that as a legacy, the, let's say, corrupted version of their legacy. Second, there's a time sensitive matter okay then and then third the only obstacle i can think of which i'm curious how you solve is for people who are at that level at that age absolutely how is it they can barely work a smartphone so maybe if it was extremely simplified on a tablet

they could yeah use it yeah we actually a little bit differently and i agree with you so in order to kind of figure this out you know i built a studio here at my house and i started doing this as a service manually right so i reached out to the community and um and what i found was and we were doing it for for people that had cancer diagnoses and that'll be a part of our podcast when we launch. We've got lots of these things banked. They're very important, but that's how I identified that, hey, this thing's a valuable service for human beings. And upon doing that, I met with a lot of caregivers and we found that the caregiver is the right person to help facilitate that. So we've met with a lot of Alzheimer's dementia

organizations and everyone's got their caregiver. And so that's primarily who's going to be operating this, but they're using it as a tool for memory care. You know, if you really deep dive into Alzheimer's and dementia, that's the fastest growing. It's an exponential problem. It's worse every year and it's overlooked, quite frankly. But there's not a lot of cure for it, right? So this is a tool that can be used to really kind of ease that process and provide some sort of, you know, memory care for these people. It's essential. You know, I know the value of this thing and I promise myself I'm not going to cry on this podcast. So I'm going to do my best. But as I

expressed to you, ironically, when I was about a year into building this company, I lost my mother unexpectedly, not of a terminal illness, but of an aneurysm. And I made some promises, right? My kids will understand who you are, who you were. There was about a week out there in California that she was holding on and we were at her side before we lost her. But that's why this thing means so much to me. It's not just for my kids. It's like I've got the context of I thought I had more time. I thought this would be something that I could put in the hands of my mom to make sure that my kids would be able to experience her forever. And they can't now.

And, you know, you go to her Facebook. It's like some Farmville scores and some birthday wishes. That's not, that's not who my mom is. That's not who she was. So yeah, I think with people with this thing is it's magic. And so, you know, in some of our initial videos that, you know, people can find on YouTube, if they, if they look us up at the transcend app, they seem a little bit lofty, but man, this thing hits hard for people that it's really effective. And for the people that need it, it's going to serve a very important function. So I'm not necessarily worried about creating an app for everybody out there. I'm trying to create an app for people that believe what I believe and for the people

that care about meaning and authenticity. If you want this thing to do everything that Snapchat does, you're going to be very disappointed. But for the people that understand where I'm coming from and the things that you're saying, I think this is going to be really... It's not only possible, it's here. And as we wrap up, about two days ago or so, you sent me an email quoting Leo Gura, specifically saying, Hey, Kurt, I cannot believe how much this particular line resonates with me. Do you mind reading that email or just riffing on it from memory? No, not at all. I'd have to look it up. Is that okay?

I want the audience to see, because this video is on a Leo Gura video, and the next one is also. So whichever one I place this one on, it's going to be a Leo Gura video. Sure. It'll resonate with him. Yeah, I said, Kurt, the first few minutes are basically the entire premise behind Transcend. And this is referencing the video Young Advice or Life Advice for Young People Part, for those that want to check it out on Leo's YouTube channel. But I said, Kurt, the first few minutes are basically the entire premise behind Transcend. What a great fit. I cannot get over how accurately he describes the exact genesis of why

I created this technology. I literally have goosebumps listening to him, and I can't help but want to meet him in the future. Thank you so much for exposing me to his content. Check out this quote from his YouTube. I've been at it for about 20 years, really trying to figure out life. I've been trying to distill all of that down into the most powerful, the most potent advice, tips, and wisdom that you would need to know as if you were a newborn. What to do in life, how to live, how do you actually live life? What is life about? what to do in life, how to live. How do you actually live life? What is life about? How do you actually even know what to do or how to ace life? Oh man, the problem is that there's just so much. I almost imagine shooting this, shooting it as if it's to my future son. Let's say I pass away and my son at one point sits down and watches just one video. What do I have to tell

you in the next hour or two to make the most difference in your life? The trick with it is where do I begin? I mean, there's just so much, Leo Gurra. And man, that really resonated with me because I agree with all of it. That was my present, my moment of creation, but also why I created a lot of the starters. Because he's right, it's so overwhelming when you talk about legacy and life and purpose and meaning and advice and tips, the enormity of it is just so broad and deep. How do you, how do you do it? So yeah, it's been two and a half, three years in the making of creating those, those prompts and those things to help, help guide you

and make it super, super easy to start pulling this stuff out of you and recording and documenting your life story. In our opinion, man, I think legacy is probably the last thing I'll say is we firmly believe that legacy has the power to elevate the human condition. I don't know if there's another way to say it. And I think it's overlooked. So our whole mission is to kind of put these tools in the hands of everybody. I think everybody's life story matters to somebody.

And the only way to kind of take that torch of knowledge and wisdom and progress that we're making in our lives. I heard a quote, it's cruel because as soon as you start figuring it out, it's time to go. Wait, I think that cause it cut off here. You heard a quote the other day. I heard a quote the other day that said something like, um, life is cruel because once you start to figure it out, it's time to leave, you know? And I felt like felt like yeah i get that um so this is our way of taking that torch and passing it on and hopefully making that progress you know a little bit easier for the

next generation right it's uh allows me to pay the ultimate respect to the people that have come before me and at the same time kurt it's allowing me to fulfill a sacred obligation to the ones that will come after. I'd say that's what Transcend is really about. Matthew, thank you so much. Thank you, sir. For the people listening or watching, visit projecttranscend.com. Sign up for the beta. Soon, you'll be invited to actually operate with this app. I'm just to be frank, I'm interested in using it with my mom and dad. That makes me happy, man. Hey, listen, you've got a lifetime subscription on me. You're a friend of the Transcend and we appreciate it, Kurt. Thank you. Speak to you for five minutes, make a warm introduction. Hopefully that would lead

somewhere too. But I imagine you have speak to him way before me. Oh, I doubt it, man. Listen, even somebody like Leo, when I thought of Leo, I was like, how would he even feel about Transcend? Because what he's built for his online empire is kind of the repository, right? So we're giving everyone the ability to do that for themselves.

And I thought that the thing, he would be the perfect person to write prompts. Just, you know what I mean? Cause he's, that's interesting, right. To say, you know, but and that might be a good value add for his people or his audience, but yeah, I would, I would, I'd let him do that in a heartbeat. We call those starter packs. So in all these starters, there's, you know, it could be a pack on relationships or hopes and dreams or fears. You know, there's packs on everything inside these packs. We've got these, these cards that are prompts. I'll show you, I'll give you a copy. When I drive with my wife, often we realize, okay, we're just talking either

about nothing or not talking or we're on our phones and well, hopefully we're both not on our phones and for driving. And then we have in our glove compartment, this, it's like a relationship card prompt where you pick up. And it's one interesting question. Like what would you save in the house if it was going to burn down? Okay. And the second is where would your dream home be and why? And so on and so on.

And they're not all fluff questions like that. Some of them actually make you have to pull the car over and think for five minutes. Yeah. It would be great. I like the idea of, well, that's in the physical form. I like the idea of that being prompted to you even while you're with someone so that you can have a more engaging, not only have a more engaging interaction with them in the moment, but then that can be saved for later. Yes. And it can create memories from it too. Right. So that's a moment that you want to save. Yeah. That's, that's the entire principle is to make the time that we spend on social media more purposeful. Cause I'm just like anybody else, you know, I posted something funny like three days ago and I realized I checked my Instagram

five times within five minutes because I wanted to see if anybody thought it was funny yet. Yeah. And so even me who is like the anti-social media guy, am still on that hamster wheel, and I'm struggling to let go. So having that time that I dedicate into the purposeful and more, I would say, meaningful interactions is how I'm decoupling myself from the others. Here I'm wondering about the incentive. So the incentive seems to be, well, people who are terminally ill or so or whoever wants to pass their legacy on

has a concrete way of doing so and a digital way of doing so. So it doesn't just blow up in a fire like Ray Kurzweil's attic. But with Instagram, there's obviously the incentive of getting other people's likes. But then you don't want to put that incentive in yours because that's antithetical to what you're creating. So then what are some – the only incentive – this is just me thinking. The only incentive I can think of are those bars that say you have 20% progress on your profile. Like that's the only incentive that I can think of or level you up in the program. I can't think of any other incentives.

So do you happen to have any ideas? Yeah, there's an interesting take on this. What if I asked you about runner's high? You know, not every dopamine feedback loop needs to be faked, right? Some of them are intrinsic to our activity. So what we found is, you know, and this is no secret to people that journal, right? But when you create these memories, you do get a sense of accomplishment because this is permanent. This is meaningful. This is meaningful for somebody that you love. So it does have its own intrinsic dopamine feedback

loop that is closed, but we're also doing lots of interaction, right? Except it's purposeful. So instead of a thumb or a like, you're getting messages, you're getting actual communications from people. And we've looked at different ways to show appreciation. At the end of the day, I think when you start creating content for that feedback closure loop, it becomes not authentic. So that's our secret sauce is we're allowing people to tell their stories in a way more robust way than any other platform. But the only downside is, yeah, you're not going gonna sit there and say hey i had 500 likes on this photo because that inherently changes the motivation for creation of content so for us it's more about

you know like i said it's not for everybody it's for the people that care about meaning and when i look in my uh you know we don't call it a feed right that's like you're being force-fed content whether it's advertisers or anything else we call call it moments, right? So in that moment section of the app, that's all your friends and family, everyone you're connected to, and there is a public option. So if you've got someone like a Leo, that's creating this type of meaningful content, yeah, other people can absorb it. Right. But we're just taking that dopamine feedback loop of the counter of, you know, So that's where we're at. Man, I'm excited to use it.

And I don't say that about much. Well, I'm excited to give it to you, man. I'm just thankful to be here. And listen, I'm excited to start listening to some more episodes. I saw you're having Noam Chomsky on again, right? Yeah. That's going to be exciting. By the way, if you you have a question for noam if you want to tie it into your app you're more than welcome to or just have a question for noam and then i can mention maybe

we'll just sponsor a question of uh every it'll be like the translate question um but the question for leo that you're going to do yeah okay so what is the question for Leo? So I thought about it. I wanted to run it by you because I know that you take pride in these questions of asking good ones. So I had, I had really two for Leo, you know, a big portion of what he talks about is psychedelics. So like anybody that's ever tried DMT, of course, I want to ask a question about it, but the question is more about ego. It's, um, you know, taking psychedelics, uh, especially ones like DMT, one of the most rewarding experiences that people can have is this ego disillusionment or death of your ego or an acknowledgement that you are not your ego, right? And it's profound.

What are some things day to day that the average person can do to keep that ego at bay, to keep that separation? Because it seems like it's always trying to creep back in the back door, right? And of course, maybe the answer is, you know, go back in, right? Go back into the DMT state and reset. But there's got to be a different answer that people can, you know, use on a day-to-day basis, right? That's one question I had. The other question I was going to ask was about, you know, a lot of these spiritual awakenings can be really profound for people life altering, but it also becomes very self-isolating, right? Because when you have your loved ones that are next to you that aren't on that same journey, it can be tough. So what were some tips that Leo has

as far as dealing with that or negotiating that paradigm of, wow, these people are the most important people in my life, but I no longer feel like we're on the same connection level. Proverbs 18, 1. A man who isolates himself seeks his own desires and rages against all wisdom. So that to me, I'm glad you're asking this because this is something I've wanted to ask Leo when he isolates himself, whether it's for psychedelic purposes or not. I don't know if that's for the ultimate good. And I'm curious what he thinks about it. Ego death is a weird thing, Kurt.

You get this weird dichotomy where you have this instant recognition that you are nothing and that your ego is not you and that it's all nonsense and that you're just a part of this awesome collective good uh but at the same time when you break through to that other side you feel like you have a perception or wisdom or you've experienced something that not most people have and therefore you've got a a um i don't know if a different understanding of how things work. And so it's this weird thing where you're like, I just realized I know nothing, but I came back knowing more than I ever knew before. And it's a tough balance to strike, right? Because it's like, oh, I know all these things. That's your ego again. And I just went through a process that killed that thing, right? So it's like a weird tug of war. The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this,

do consider going to patreon.com slash c-u-r-t-j-a-i-m-u-n-g-a-l. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full-time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you. allow me to do this full-time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you. The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash c-u-r-t j-a-i-m-u-n-g-a-l. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full-time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you.