Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Leo Gura on Infinite Consciousness, God Realization, Free Will, and Love

Starting point is 00:00:00 Leo is the founder of the YouTube channel Actualized.org and describes himself as a psychonaut and a mystic. Leo is a proponent of idealism, that is, that consciousness is fundamental rather than material, and also a proponent that you listening to this, you watching this, you are God. You've simply forgotten that you are, in a similar vein to Rupert Spira, though there are differences between Rupert Spira and Leo. Click on the timestamp in the description if you'd like to skip this intro. For those new to this channel, my name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics, interested in explicating what are called theories of everything. Predominantly from a mathematical physics perspective, as well as delineating the possible connection consciousness has to the fundamental laws,

Starting point is 00:00:43 provided these laws exist at all and are knowable to us. This is an episode that you'll benefit greatly from watching twice, perhaps the second time at a much higher speed, mainly because many may be turned off by the certainty at which Leo expresses some of his views. However, around the four hour mark, Leo expresses the doubt that he has, the skepticism he has, which not only humanizes him, but makes his propositions more palatable. Often people reject propositions thinking that they're dispassionately assessing the arguments, when in fact they dislike the person professing those statements, or they dislike the manner in which they're professed, or

Starting point is 00:01:18 they dislike what they perceive to be, what their perceptions are of the types of people that would glom on to those ideas, rather than the ideas themselves. Disentangling these is a non-trivial act, but an exigent one, given our tendencies for dismissal, yet simultaneous longing for acceptance. Leo and I had so much to talk about that around the six hour mark, we realized I hadn't even gone through half of my notes at that point, so in about a week or two weeks we'll be uploading a part two mainly focused on him whereas this episode is focused on his ideas if you enjoy engaging with others in real time perhaps

Starting point is 00:01:51 just witnessing perhaps not engaging on consciousness physics and psychology then check the description for the theories of everything discord in the description is also a link to the patreon if you'd like to support so that's patreon.com slash kurt jaimungal c--U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. The sponsors and the patrons are the only reason I'm able to do this full time. It would be near impossible for me to have conversations with fidelity on consciousness, non-dualism, loop quantum gravity, even geometric unity, if not for your support. Thank you. And that link again is patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal. With regard to sponsors, there are three for this episode. Algo is an end-to-end supply chain optimization software company with software

Starting point is 00:02:35 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 named 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. Brilliant's courses explore the laws that shape our world,

Starting point is 00:03:07 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 referenced when people say that the standard model is U1 cross SU2 cross SU3. Those are Lie groups, technically. Visit brilliant.org slash toe, T-O-E, to get 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 now comprehend subjects that were previously incomprehensible. The third sponsor is joining us for the first time. It's Project Transcend.

Starting point is 00:03:38 Project Transcend makes its debut here as a method of transmitting and storing the most meaningful, not only moments, but aspects of your life, such as your values. The founder of Transcend, Matthew Phillips, had such an inspiring story about why he created the app and how the goals espoused by Leo Gura are aligned directly with this app and with Matthew Phillips' goals for his life that I appended an interview with Matthew toward the end of this podcast. More on Transcend later. Finally, I'd like to thank Jess Palmer for turning me on to Leo's content.

Starting point is 00:04:14 Thank you, and now enjoy the podcast with Leo Gura. I watched a few of the UFO ones, which are amusing. But I mostly focused on the sort of theories of everything ones like Chris Langan and what else was there? Bernardo Kastrup, Rupert Spira. Oh, yeah, I watched the Wolfram one. That's the last one I watched. Great, great, great. Okay, why don't you briefly outline to the audience your worldview, as well as the disclaimers that you'd like to say, and how it contrasts, your worldview contrasts with non-dualism and physicalism. these topics. These are very serious and challenging topics. In fact, these are the most challenging questions and topics that the human mind can try to answer. It's like,

Starting point is 00:05:11 what is existence? That's what we're basically asking when we're talking about toes and these sorts of things. And so what people don't appreciate is that these questions can be answered conceptually or they can be answered in deeper ways that actually start to involve your psyche and your personal life. And so some disclaimers are warranted here in that you have to be careful if you have a history of mental illnesses, if you have a bipolar disorder, if you have schizophrenic tendencies, if you are depressed or suicidal or you're prone to panic attacks and you're generally struggling with mental stability in your life,

Starting point is 00:05:50 then probing these kinds of questions in the way that I like to do, not just in a theoretical way, but really trying to get at the nature of consciousness, this is going to involve your own mind and your own psyche, and it could lead to a destabilization of your mind. It could lead to derealization. It could lead to depression. It could lead to spiritual emergencies. What Stan Grof calls spiritual emergencies. It can lead to a psychotic breakdown, you know, in the worst case scenarios. case scenarios. So you have to be careful. And it can lead even to suicide. So just watch out if you have those kinds of tendencies. The other important disclaimer here is that the things I'll be saying will strike many people as very radical, crazy, or impossible. And you have to understand that I'm not coming from a place of ideology, and I'm not asking you to believe me or to take on beliefs. This is not what it's about.

Starting point is 00:06:53 And even though we're going to be talking about religious topics, a lot of people consider any kind of spiritual or religious topics or new agey topics as just wishful beliefs that people take on. But that's not the issue here. What we're going to be doing is we're going to be probing into our direct experience. So, for me, direct experience is king, and

Starting point is 00:07:11 if anything that I say, you cannot validate within your own direct experience. If it's not true for you, then it's not true at all. This is what prevents these ideas from getting turned into a toxic ideology or a cult, which there is a tendency for the mind to want to do. Even if you

Starting point is 00:07:33 like the ideas, it's still dangerous. All these ideas are very dangerous, which is why they're not talked about very often in mainstream media or even in universities and academia or in religious mainstream religious circles is because they are psychologically threatening and they're very easily corrupted and turned into all sorts of ideologies the ego will want to co-op these ideas and use them for its own selfish purposes and so it's very important that any ideas that I share with you today, that these are not used to harm yourself, anybody else, and that they are not used to start any kind of cult-like organization or to turn into any kind of ideology. Just for you, Kurt, as you're communing with me over the next few hours, I know I look human to you, but treat me as though you're speaking to an alien intelligence. Like, you're not speaking to a human. It's like, my worldview is so radically different from an ordinary human's worldview.

Starting point is 00:08:50 I'm not claiming to be an alien or anything. I'm just like you. There's nothing really different between me and you. But my worldview is so different from yours and from the other people you've interviewed that we have a communication gap here, right? And so we're going to be working past this communication gap with our language. And so just try to imagine, I mean, you've had guests on who talk about UFOs. Try to imagine that you met someone from a UFO, like they beamed you up into a spaceship, and there you are face-to-face with one of these aliens, and you have to communicate with them somehow. And they have a totally different worldview than humans have. So how do you communicate with them? How do are a total they have a totally different worldview than humans have so how do you communicate with them how do you bridge

Starting point is 00:09:27 that gap and if anybody can do it it's you because of how open-minded you are in fact you really deserve praise for that because what you're doing for your audience is you're modeling what I have taught for a long time which is called radical open-mindedness the idea of if you want to explore truth and reality and you really want to get to a deep understanding of what's going on in life, you have to be way more open-minded than most people are willing to be.

Starting point is 00:09:55 And I don't see that as being a problem with you, but for your audience, they also need to keep that in mind. And you guys should be very grateful to Kurt, because he's modeling for you exactly the kind of attitude you need in order to get answers to these big questions that I know you guys have. The toe question. I'll put an asterisk there, because I think you give me a bit too much credit. In some ways, I wish I was what you suggested, but I'm not on an unadulterated, sauntering search for the truth, because the truth can be mercilessly eviscerating, and I'm too selfish to accept it in any form that it's willing to take.

Starting point is 00:10:42 most people underestimate how serious truth is. Most people try to treat truth or even the idea of what you call developing a Weltanschauung, a worldview, you know, the ultimate understanding of reality. People treat this as just like an academic armchair pursuit. It's like, oh, we can just sit around a coffee table and just kind of shoot the shit and get some answers and, you know, just kind of speculate about stuff. That's one pursuit. And then the things that I'm going to be talking about, you have to understand, these are not going to be speculations. These are not things that I've speculated about. These are not theories that I have. These are things you can become directly conscious of.

Starting point is 00:11:21 And that is a very significant difference. A lot of what you see from very intelligent people, people with really high IQs at academia and in universities, they tell themselves that they're pursuing truth, but they're really not. They're theorizing. They're lost in a conceptual terrain, going deeper and deeper down conceptual rabbit holes without really getting to the bottom of what reality is and it becomes an avoidance mechanism and people who tend to be very intellectual have a serious problem here is they assume that oh well reality can just be figured out using my rational intellect and that is an assumption you have to realize that needs to be

Starting point is 00:12:02 questioned maybe that's not true. Maybe there's something deeper than just your rationality that is required for you to really get to the bottom of what reality is. I agree. I also would say that with regard to the open-mindedness of this channel, it's more like I'm not incurious. I wouldn't even call myself curious because I'm curious only about a certain subset of subjects, reality, physics, and philosophy. So I'm exceedingly inquisitive about those. And I use my intuitions and my judgments, which they are judgments, prejudgments to guide myself. If you're not curious and you're not open-minded, I don't know who is. So I basically am treating this like a professor during office hours. I'm going to voice my concerns in real time as much as I can. But I'm I'm pretty much here to learn and prepend in the here and now, like an immediate mentation, which is why I'm

Starting point is 00:12:56 often going to be serious. I often am serious because I'm thinking. Sure. Yeah, we need to have a dialogue because because he also as much as I would like to give you all the answers, I literally could. So the shocking thing about what you'll, if you ultimately crack the final nut of what existence is, the shocking thing is that you will have virtually every answer to all of the big questions. You know, why does reality exist? What is it doing here? Where did it come from? Who created it? How does it work? What is life about? What is the purpose of all this? Why is there something rather than nothing? Like all these questions, the crazy thing is you can answer them definitively, but the problem is, will you be able to communicate them to others? And that's the thing that's going to kill you the most is that you will have all these profound answers, but it's not as simple as just telling them to somebody. I can't just write them in a book. It's a very deeply personal process that you must go through to awaken yourself to these answers. And a lot of these

Starting point is 00:13:57 answers are emotionally difficult to accept. And so my job is to guide you in that, not to give you the answers. Okay. We've just got through the disclaimers and almost like about your worldview rather than the worldview itself. But before we get to the worldview, I'm curious, it sounds like what you're mentioning is one needs to embody one's philosophy, which I'm a proponent of, but I'm unclear as to what exactly that means. So can you give me three examples of what, or two examples of what that means? What does it mean to embody a philosophy? Well, I don't know if I would even, I think that even that is too shallow a way to put it. To embody one's philosophy is to take these things as philosophy or still as some sort of theoretical framework that one adopts,

Starting point is 00:14:48 a set of beliefs or set of principles one adopts and that one lives by. Now, by all means, that's important to do in order to develop yourself at a practical level in the world. You know, for example, truth is an important principle. And so in general, you should try to be as truthful as possible. Try to be intellectually honest. Try to be honest with yourself. Try to be honest with others. Try to have high integrity. Try not to cheat, not to steal, you know, these sorts of things. This would be in alignment with truth. Other aspects of philosophy that one might want to actually embody. Well, okay, forget about that. Forget about what people should embody. What I mean is what's the difference between intellectually knowing something and then living it?

Starting point is 00:15:35 So Peterson often says that you may say that you're an atheist, but you live as if God exists. So that's an example. I get you. Okay. as if God exists. So that's an example. I get you. Okay.

Starting point is 00:15:53 So it's very easy for the mind to adopt any kind of belief system it wants. Like literally people around the world have all sorts of crazy belief systems, religious ones and secular ones. And so it's easy to tell yourself that you believe in God or you believe this or you're an atheist or whatever. You're a materialist. You can even call yourself a scientist and fancy yourself a great scientist. These are ideas. And the mind is so self-deceptive that it loves to concoct fantasies about itself. That's how it builds its identity.

Starting point is 00:16:22 That's how it gets a sense of who it is and what it is so you know oftentimes we we portray ourselves in our mind as these really good people who are very truthful and very selfless and very honest but in reality we're not that we're very selfish and so it's a constant process of of holding your own feet to the fire and really being honest with yourself, like, am I living up to my own ideals? Whatever they are. Like, if you believe in God and you're a religious person, and maybe you tell yourself that, you know,

Starting point is 00:17:00 Jesus, you know, cared for the poor and the sick, you might have these sorts of beliefs. And you might say Jesus is the highest savior, like if you're a Christian. Okay, that's fine. But then in your own life, do you actually behave like Jesus? Do you actually care about the poor and the sick? Or are you voting, for example, for politicians who are giving tax breaks to giant corporations and cutting welfare programs? Right? You see, so there's going to be a disconnect there. And a lot of people, they live their life in one way. And then in another way, they have all sorts of lofty ideas about how spiritual or how good they

Starting point is 00:17:35 are. And even scientific people do this. For example, in science, there's a lot of ideals about what the ideal scientist is. The ideal scientist is open-minded and mentally flexible and willing to entertain all sorts of ideas. But then you sit down with the scientist and you try to talk to him about something a little bit woo-woo, and all of a sudden his mind just shuts down. And no longer is he that kind of open-minded scientist that he is supposed to be. Or she. She, of course. Okay, let's get to your worldview and how it contrasts with non-dualism and physicalism as well which means you may need to give an an explanation at least a brief one of

Starting point is 00:18:11 non-dualism and physicalism as well before giving your worldview okay right so i would contend that i don't even that that what i'm going to be talking about is not a worldview um uh there exists such a thing as absolute truth, and you can become directly conscious of it. The absolute truth is that there is only one thing that exists, and that is infinite consciousness. What you are is infinite consciousness, and that's the only thing that exists or could ever exist, and you can become infinitely and absolutely conscious of this fact. could ever exist and you can become infinitely and absolutely conscious of this fact and what this means is that you are god what this means is that literally you have imagined the entire universe and you're imagining it right now so this very physical experience that you believe

Starting point is 00:19:00 that you're having right now this is actually a hallucination within your own mind. You are dreaming an infinite dream which involves infinite other beings, and this is all your own creation. It's a complete illusion, and if you ever stop dreaming it, it will all disappear, just like the dream you have when you sleep at night. And in fact, there is no distinction whatsoever between the dreams you have at night and this very experience you're having right now or any other experience that you could ever possibly have. And so ultimately, what I teach is I try to guide people towards the realization or the awakening to the fact that they are God. And then there are questions of what is God and how did God come about and many, many nuances that come with that. And we can elaborate upon those.

Starting point is 00:19:50 But fundamentally, that would be my worldview. It's actually a very simple worldview, if you put it like that. The only thing that there exists is infinite consciousness, infinite imagination. And this very conversation and you sitting there listening to me are hallucinating this very experience right now. You use that word hallucination and you don't mind using it, whereas most people would shy away from it. So why don't you define it? Well, I actually mean it in a very technical sense. So if you go to a dictionary and look up hallucination or you look up the definition of what a hallucination is in a psychological textbook, what they'll tell you is something along the lines of like this.

Starting point is 00:20:31 I'm paraphrasing now. It's going to be like an appearance without an input. So it's sort of like you're getting a perception, but there's nothing behind the perceptions. There's nothing sourcing the perceptions. So that's the technical definition of what a hallucination is. And that is literally what your physical body is. Your physical body is an appearance, and there is nothing behind the appearance other than the appearance itself. So in my worldview, you might say, there is no distinction between a hallucination and physical

Starting point is 00:21:05 reality the only difference there though is that usually colloquially when we say hallucination we use it in a derogatory sense it comes with a negative connotation the connotation is that oh it's just an illusion it's not real's not material, it's not physical hard stuff. This is sort of a conventional distinction that we've made, and we use it to smear others. Like, oh, that's just a hallucination, something like that, right? And so the way we made that distinction is that we told ourselves that those hallucinations which are consistent and persist for a long period of time those we call reality and then those which are temporary or fleeting those we call dreams or illusions or hallucinations you see so we've we've actually taken the entire absolute

Starting point is 00:22:01 domain of hallucinations and we've carved it up and we've called one half the hallucinations reality because that's what we live in. It's consistent. And then all the inconsistent ones, we've relegated those sort of to the dustbin and we denigrate those. say, oh, that was just hallucination. But when you see a coffee table in front of you, like I'm looking at back there, you would say, well, that coffee table is real. It's not a hallucination. But the only reason we say it's not a hallucination is simply because it's just a more steady form of hallucination. You watched the CTM, you watched Chris Langan's video, and in the CTMU, he defines reality as the intersection between different observers. So what's wrong with that definition of reality? Well, my view and Chris Langan's view actually have a lot in common. We have some important disagreements, but we have a lot in common. I would say maybe 80% of our worldview is

Starting point is 00:22:59 fundamentally in common. For example, he says that everything is mind. Everything is the mind of God. I completely agree with that. He has a notion called distributed solipsism, which sounds much like yours and Bernardo's point of view, which is that we're all part of the same observer, but we're also all different at the same time. It's distributed solipsism. It gets extremely tricky, the issue of solipsism. We'll want to leave this to ask me again about solipsism. It gets extremely tricky, the issue of solipsism. We'll want to leave this to ask me again about solipsism later in this conversation, because we have to build up to it. Because the solipsism question is like the most popular and the most controversial and the most confusing question for people. And that's because they don't have enough foundation.

Starting point is 00:23:38 We have to build a bit of foundation over the next few hours to get to it. But hold on. I don't want to address the issue. Yeah, distributed solipsism, you could call it that. It really much depends, it's very relativistic, so it really depends on what level of consciousness you're looking at it from. So if you're looking at reality from a low level of consciousness, like from that of a human, then it does seem like you have real conscious agents in the world out there who are separate from you. You have other humans, animals, and so forth.

Starting point is 00:24:10 But as you increase your consciousness, you become more conscious. And as you approach infinite consciousness, what happens is that the boundaries between all those observers collapse until literally they all merge and physically fuse into you. And then at the highest level of consciousness, at God consciousness, you literally realize that there's only one conscious entity in the entire universe, and that is you and nothing else. And then there's many gradations in between that. So it depends upon how conscious you are. And you can erase and play with all of these different boundaries that the mind imagines. So one other additional point that's important to my worldview, we might say, about your previous question, is that in my worldview, every single thing is just a distinction within an infinite mind. So, for example, the difference between a human and an animal.

Starting point is 00:25:23 Most people, most materialists would take that as a physical objective difference. A physical objective distinction. There's humans and there's animals. and that's just how reality is. In my worldview, all of those boundaries, all of those dualities can be dissolved. And so, for example, the distinction between reality and a dream, that can get dissolved. The distinction between a man and a woman, that can get dissolved. The distinction between my body and this room can get dissolved. The distinction between love and hate,

Starting point is 00:25:54 that can get dissolved. So literally any physical distinction or any conceptual distinction that you can make, they are all imaginary and they can either be imagined or they can be unimagined. So there is no distinction that exists objectively as an absolute, which means that reality by itself is infinitely free to imagine whatever it wants. And as long as it's imagining it, that distinction holds, and as soon as it stops imagining it, that distinction disappears. it stops imagining it, that distinction disappears.

Starting point is 00:26:23 So, for example, the distinction between you and me, Leo and Kurt, that distinction can either be imagined or it can be unimagined. If it's unimagined, then literally there will be no difference between Leo and Kurt. But as long as I'm imagining it and you're imagining it, then we can create

Starting point is 00:26:39 that distinction. And then it will appear as though it is real. And remember, reality in my model is imagination. So if you imagine it, it is indistinguishable from reality. So even the distinction between real and unreal or reality and fantasy in my worldview, that's an imaginary distinction. It only exists if you believe it exists. And if you don't, then it disappears. What are the constraints on reality?

Starting point is 00:27:15 None. Not that I'm... That's a very good question. Not that I'm a professor of Chris Langan's point of view, even though I'm bringing it up again. But Chris Langan would say that for people who say physics is illusory, physics is actually an integral part of reality and that there are certain constraints on reality and that in fact consciousness depends on physical matter. Sorry, consciousness depends on physics in the same way that physics depends on consciousness. Right.

Starting point is 00:27:43 There's some partial truth to that in that everything sort of is a two-way street. So I kind of hear him on that. But my fundamental criticism of Chris Langen would be, and I mean, he's a brilliant guy and I would consider him, he probably has one of the best models of consciousness and reality that i've ever seen of all the sort of other mainstream academics and scientists it's the most rigorous of all that are similar to non-dualism yeah so there's a lot of similarity there but fundamentally what i would still say is that even though he's like maybe 80 90 right uh in the end it's just a model it's just conceptual so what he's done is he's he's had a remarkable conceptual achievement end it's just a model it's just conceptual so what he's done is he's done a remarkable conceptual achievement

Starting point is 00:28:26 but it's just still in the realm of concept and I don't consider him to be awake or to be God realized so there is a difference between having a really good model of God and then actually realizing that you are God or being infinitely conscious these are two radically different

Starting point is 00:28:42 things and so I mean I think he's done about as good as you could probably do in the conceptual domain if you're going to stick to like the sort of, he's playing the academic game. His writing is very academic. You know, he's writing almost like a physicist would write. So as far as that goes, I mean, it's fine. But there are way, way, way higher states of consciousness that you can reach and there is much deeper understanding that you can have than what you would get through chris langan's models so what was your question again about his model his model

Starting point is 00:29:15 doesn't say that physics is illusory or that physics could be whatever it likes there are actually bounds on physics there are bounds on consciousness right what are called mutually defining parameters i believe so right one definition depends on the other um so um so all of physics is purely imaginary um and the way you can verify that for yourself is when you're dreaming when you're dreaming none of the laws of physics apply right isn't that right okay now chris langan would say no there's a certain syntax that's still there even though there are even though a rock may float or uh or fire may be water there's certain it's more more than logic it's more like meta logic there are certain logical principles and i hear that i understand why someone would say that and um and in you could you could say that

Starting point is 00:30:14 in a certain sense um it depends on like you it's we start to get into very kind of like niggly territory where we're splitting hairs um but I would just say that what humans, what ordinary humans consider logical and logically necessary, you can experience states of consciousness where all of that flies out the window. And I would actually even suggest that most of you have in your dreams. A lot of illogical stuff happens in your dreams. Now, you can still say that, well, you know, in your dreams, if you're dreaming that, let's say, let's say you're dreaming that there's a chair in front of you. Well, you can't also, if there's a chair in front of you in your dream, you might say, well, it's there. That means you can't also say that it's not there at the same time. That would be like a logical contradiction, right? So maybe that's what you're saying with Chris Langan's work.

Starting point is 00:31:06 No, no, no, no. Because I believe that he has interesting views on logical paradox and that imagine there's a physical realm and then a non-physical realm. I believe he would call it the terminal and the non-terminal. That in the non-terminal, so more the non-physical realm, this is an extreme dilution of his ideas. But in the non-physical realm, you can have paradoxes. And there are what are called self-resolving paradoxes. But to perceive an object

Starting point is 00:31:30 in his model would imply a syntax, even to perceive. So even if you're perceiving what's illogical, that's fine. That's fine. That's illogical in the terminal realm, in the sense that it's not what we ordinarily perceive. But the fact of perceiving implies what's called a cognitive syntax. And there's something with regard to this syntax that's universal. Yeah, I mean, I'm not aware of all the technical details of that model, but I've read his work a bit. But the bottom line is I would probably agree with much of that.

Starting point is 00:32:04 bit but but the bottom line is I would probably agree with with much of that it's just that you have to understand that there are still deeper there are deeper layers beyond that so ultimately if we're going to talk about the ultimate absolute highest level what I can tell you absolutely that you can personally become conscious of is that reality is ups absolutely unlimited in that it has no constraints on it whatsoever. This leads to paradoxes that will completely shatter your mind. Like we're talking about paradoxes that Chris Langen can't even fathom. So like it's an arrogant way to say it, but I mean...

Starting point is 00:32:39 Okay, let's talk about the dream analogy. I think I brought this up to Rupert Spira. I'm not sure. In the dream analogy, many people who are enlightened or use the word even enlightenment or or that they're awake now awakening even it implies that this reality is somewhat of a dream state they've gotten some higher realization and now they're awake or at least they're closer to being awake however if it's analogized to a dream in a dream when you wake up you're now in a different place completely and in the dream once you wake up the people in the dream disappear however you're still here i see you and let's let's imagine that you're awakened it's not as if

Starting point is 00:33:16 i as a dream character who's not awakened have seen you collapse like you've just fallen or my entire world has disappeared because you've been awakened right so the analogy doesn't hold precisely and i'm curious because you're dreaming that's why okay why is it that you're awake the analogy is perfect and in fact it's not an analogy it's literally identical so right now you are dreaming that you are interviewing somebody named leo and as long as you keep dreaming that it's going to feel real to you and in fact you're you're dreaming the fact that i dream and you're dreaming that i have a conscious experience of my own and so when you realize that that is all something you're dreaming you can pop out of that dream and then leo will

Starting point is 00:34:02 disappear for you from your point of view. And there is nothing but your own point of view. Because you're God. And your point of view is absolute. Why is it that we have a shared dream? Who said we do? Okay, why is it it seems like we have a shared dream? You imagine that we do.

Starting point is 00:34:21 Right now you're imagining that we have a shared dream. That's what you're telling yourself. Isn't that what's happening? Have you ever experienced anything but this dream of yours? Let me ask another way. The problem here is that it's so radical that your mind is unwilling to accept it. Okay, let me ask another question

Starting point is 00:34:46 how does one falsify this view the reason is that it sounds like it's exactly right the reason is it sounds like well look anyone who's listening you have experiences and i can say what your experiences are even me speaking right now is being willed either consciously or unconsciously we can dissolve that divide at some point either way it's willed by you and then they say well no because look we can verify and so on but i say yeah but even these verifications are within the realm of your experience there so in other words there's nothing outside your experience that seems to be the core claim yeah of course yeah look the bottom line here is that you have to ask yourself what is ultimately true and so um it might seem like to some people who are who are just listening to me for the first

Starting point is 00:35:39 time it might seem like this guy just sat down one day and came up with some crazy ideas but that's not how i got started the way i got started is very much the way that you guys are. You guys, I've, I've looked at your whole community, you know, the theories of everything community. Um, you guys are very academically oriented, intellectually oriented, scientifically oriented, rationally oriented, but you're also open-minded, you know, you're open-minded to UFOs and things like this, into UFOs and things like this, which is good. But, but, but the, and I was like that too, you know, in my education was academic philosophy. My education was engineering. So I was very academic, you know, straight A student, all this sorts of stuff. But for me, the thing was, and I was extremely skeptical. I was skeptical about everything. I was an atheist from, from birth base. Basically I was very rational. I wanted

Starting point is 00:36:28 rational answers for everything. And, uh, in my youth, I would actually debate with religious kids in my school. I had a, I had a friend who was a, like a devout evangelical Christian, and we would argue about God. And to me, it made no sense. How could this guy believe there's a God? Like it's just stories in a book. Like, well, what are you doing? These are just beliefs. You don't actually know if there's a God. And in fact, your direct experience tells you there is no God. There's no God in your direct experience right now for you atheists. So, um, uh, so I was like that. Uh, but then I started questioning and I started to really like ask myself, how do I know that science is true? How do I know that materialism is true? And I started

Starting point is 00:37:09 questioning and questioning and questioning. I started questioning so deeply that I even started to question my own skepticism. At one point, I started to ask, wait a minute, how do I even know that all this questioning I'm doing, even that is valid? Like, how do I really know anything? Eventually, what you realize, if you question deeply enough, and you have to question really deeply, is you will realize that the only thing you have of reality is this bubble of experience right now that you're experiencing. You have nothing else. Everything else is an idea or a belief that is also happening within the present moment. And that includes all of science. So if you think science has proven that material objects exist, that external physical reality exists, that atoms exist, that you're made of atoms,

Starting point is 00:37:58 science has never proven any such thing. Science is something that is happening within your experience. And if you die tomorrow all of science will disappear just like before you were born science did not exist okay there's so much man that i want to pick apart and yeah because when you say that right right right okay but let's get back to this falsifiability notion and the dream notion i'm i'm curious in the same way that one can't falsify that they're in a dream, can you falsify that you're not in a dream?

Starting point is 00:38:30 So can I not make the counterclaim? I'm saying, Leo, you're not in a dream. You think you're in a dream. So falsify to me that you're not in a dream. Right, well, this is a common point of attack that many materialists and rationalists make. And I'm not saying you're attacking me. I'm just saying that.

Starting point is 00:38:49 Please don't take the finger pointing as a demonstration of attack. Yeah, yeah. Attack as much as you want. I welcome it. But it's a common point of criticism. But what you need to understand is that absolute truth can't be falsified. So there's actually a deep fundamental error within science about the notion of falsifiability. Okay.

Starting point is 00:39:13 Well, hey, man. Right. Okay. Your claim is that you're in a dream and I'm in a dream. Right. All that exists is simply dream. Right. You can't falsify that.

Starting point is 00:39:23 That's not falsifiable. Now, I'm making, I i'm potentially i'm just hypothetically making a counterclaim you're not in a dream falsify that and i can say well that is what is true reality and that is unfalsifiable because it's within true absolute reality oh but except it is what you're saying so basically you're saying materialism is true is that what you're saying so basically you're saying materialism is true is that what you're saying i'm saying the claim is something like look you're in a dream this is all being dreamed up now i'm imagining another world that's something similar to the matrix where you're just being fed input okay so there's this leo fetus somewhere just a fetus form of leo and all of these are just being you're just being inputted in the same way that you would in the matrix falsify as your fetus that you're having input in you from some other objective world. Let's imagine that other, or some other world.

Starting point is 00:40:10 Let's call it other world. Yeah, so you can easily falsify that by becoming more conscious. See, there's no way around consciousness because consciousness is everything. Okay, come on, let's have some fun here. So what do you say? Look, I can falsify that by becoming more conscious can i not make the counterclaim that your dream like state or sorry your dream like theory whatever it is i know i don't try not to demean it by calling it a theory but your dream like proposition is is is seen to be true because you're at a higher

Starting point is 00:40:43 level of consciousness well can i not say that there exists leo an even higher consciousness in which you would see that that dream analogy is false right so you're basically falsified from your level right so you'd be you'd be claiming in this case that i'm self-deceived so basically your objection so you're taking the skeptic position you're basically saying no matter how conscious you become, there can be an even higher consciousness in which one could realize that the previous level was just a self-deception, which would undermine the entire thing. Great. Great summation. So it's very easy to counter that from my position, because what I'm talking about is infinity.

Starting point is 00:41:26 And so I'm talking about is infinity. And so I'm talking about absolute infinity. I'm talking about a level of consciousness beyond which there is no other level of consciousness. So what I'm talking about is a level of consciousness which is infinitely expanding forever in all directions, in all dimensions, that is imagining all possibilities, occupying the entire possibility space of everything that could ever possibly exist, including all simulations, all physics, all dreams, all fantasies, absolutely everything. And that is what I'm claiming is absolute truth. And it's from that position that I'm speaking and making claims about truth. So how do you disprove that? At the level

Starting point is 00:42:08 of conscious, just so you realize how radical this is, at the level of consciousness that I'm talking about, absolute infinity, you are so conscious that every idea of falsifiability that arises, even the notion of self-deception, even the notion of being

Starting point is 00:42:24 wrong, is already part of self-deception, even the notion of being wrong, is already part of your consciousness. And therefore, since you incorporate it, it can't apply to you and it can't debunk the very thing that you are, which is infinite consciousness. Infinite consciousness includes infinite self-deception. It includes infinite number of people being wrong. It includes infinite fantasy, infinite dreams. In one dream, you're dreaming that you're in a material reality. And that's true for you in that dream. In another dream, you're dreaming that you weren't a material reality, but then you awoke from that reality. And now you're in some new reality. And that too is part of infinite consciousness. And this goes on forever. So you can never actually, so it's infinitely meta. Like I mentioned before we

Starting point is 00:43:03 started talking, I'm not treating you at all skeptically in my head. I'm treating you like you're a... Or I'm treating myself as if I'm an imbecile. And I just need to listen to you and learn. But I'm going to voice all the... Skeptical is good. There's no problem with skepticism. Sometimes people think that I'm anti-skeptical.

Starting point is 00:43:23 No, no, no. I'm the most skeptical person in the world. My only suggestion for you is be truly skeptical if you claim to be a skeptic. So if you're going to be skeptical, be skeptical about your own skepticism. Also, be skeptical about science. Be skeptical about logic. Be skeptical about mathematics. Be skeptical about your own ego mind. Be skeptical about every thought that comes into your mind. Because like you said, you know, you can imagine that you are this, you're in a matrix sort of simulation and you're being fed from the outside, right? You can imagine that. Well, but notice you're imagining that. of reasoning that you were giving me as sort of an attack against my points. Notice that that's actually something you're imagining, which is exactly what I'm saying. You're imagining that. That's imagination. Okay. Well, see, to me, it all simply comes down to a tautology, which says you're experiencing experience at the root of all of what you're saying.

Starting point is 00:44:30 And there's like almost by definition, you're experiencing experience or you're imagining imagination. Well, sorry, what you're imagining is imaginative. Well, as Chris Langan says, and I would agree is that reality has to be an absolute tautology. So when you get to the highest level of what reality is, it has to be a totology. It just literally is what it is. It has to be that in the same way that, you know, one has to equal one. One is one. And in that sense, it's profoundly simple, but also it's very easy to overlook because you see it as like, well, one equals one. That doesn't tell me anything new. That doesn't help me understand anything, right? And maybe we should get back to the point of your idea of, you know, trying to develop a Weltanschauung and developing a toe, because there are a lot of methodological questions about what a toe is and how do you develop one. For those people who are wondering, like, what the heck did you just say? A word that I reference

Starting point is 00:45:20 frequently on this podcast is Weltanschauung, which is a German word. It literally translates to world vantage point, something like that, which sounds like world point of view. But the way that I use it is more of an all-encompassing world view, rather than simply, because almost all of us have world, well, it seems like to live, you have to have a worldview, you have to have a model. But not all of us have a consistent model that is based in ontology. And that's what I mean by Weltanschauung. And I make an analogy between that and theories of everything because most physicists think of theories of everything as a grand unified theory that takes into account gravity.

Starting point is 00:45:54 And I take it a bit further to incorporate some philosophy and even psychology. So that's just an asterisk. See, some materialists would say that non-dualism is so far out there that it either can't be true it's unfalsifiable or whatever they may say but for me i view non-dualism as not outrageous enough because it takes into account consciousness which is so direct to our experience takes that as fundamental and i'm not even sure if consciousness is fundamental there may be something epi conscious something that's even outside consciousness that's not material. No, there can't be because consciousness is infinite. So this is a very common trap that

Starting point is 00:46:34 materialists fall into. And people who start to study consciousness is that they start to imagine things beyond consciousness. But while they're doing that, they're not conscious of the fact that they're imagining and that itself is that itself is conscious that doesn't matter to me because in the same way you had a great video which i i don't i don't believe i've watched in quite some time on girls incompleteness theorem in the same way that a formal system can't see outside now this is false what i'm saying is diluting it but in the same way that a formal system in some sense can't see outside its own formal system like a first order logic can't see second order logic in the same way that a formal system, in some sense, can't see outside its own formal system, like a first-order logic can't see second-order logic in that same manner. It doesn't matter that consciousness can't see outside consciousness,

Starting point is 00:47:12 therefore nothing outside consciousness exists. Also, it doesn't matter that consciousness is infinite, because, to say that there's nothing outside consciousness, because consciousness is infinite. What is the R2 plane, but two copies of infinity? You have R r1 that's infinite doesn't mean anything no uh here's the mistake uh the mistake is that in terms of goodell's incompleteness theorem that actually that actually buttresses my point

Starting point is 00:47:40 because goodell is talking about finite formal systems consciousness is not a finite formal system and therefore of course what Google's basically says is that if you have any kind of sufficiently complex finite formal system that can

Starting point is 00:47:59 that is capable of self reflection pointing back at itself it will always lead to a contradiction and it will always be incomplete. If you don't take certain precautions to modify the system to prevent self-reflection from happening. Because truth is always a larger concept than provability, which is part of the reason why provability and falsifiability is not a good way of going about developing your ultimate understanding of reality. Because what you're really after is truth, not proof. And there are many things that are true that you cannot prove and will never be able to prove.

Starting point is 00:48:32 And that is, in fact, what Goodall proved, which is so brilliant about his proof, is that he was able to use proof and turn it in on itself to basically prove that proof is not the end of reality. There's always more to reality than anything you can prove. I'd more like take the Penrose point of view and say that what Gödel showed is that our mind is not a formal system, rather than that proof lies outside of provability. The space of all that is true lies outside a formal system provable notion of truth. That's what I would say. Yeah, okay. Yeah, we agree. So, but back to the more important point. So, basically, you're assuming, the problem is that

Starting point is 00:49:11 when I tell you infinite consciousness, you have a picture in your mind of what infinite consciousness is, and that picture you must realize is finite. So, all your ideas of infinite consciousness are not infinite consciousness, they're finite consciousness. But I'm talking about actual infinite consciousness. Now, what that is, you actually don't have access to it at this point. conscious, you realize that literally nothing can exist outside of consciousness because imagine that you can see the entire universe, everything. Imagine everything that could ever possibly exist. Imagine you're conscious of it all at the same time. Now ask yourself, could there be anything beyond that that I'm missing? And if you say yes, there could, that means you weren't conscious of that thing and that you weren't really infinitely conscious. And when you realize that, then you realize, aha, consciousness is absolutely all that there is and there is nothing

Starting point is 00:50:10 ever outside of consciousness. And then you realize that there cannot be any kind of simulation, there cannot be any kind of self-deception, there cannot be any kind of wrongness about the fact that consciousness is infinite and absolute because it it in fact is, and in fact you are absolutely conscious. My objection was not to consciousness imagining something outside itself and that still existing within consciousness. It was more about the use of the word infinity. Look, I'm a stickler. I'm a persnickety stickler for words. And so usually when people mean infinity, when someone says, see, I see this as a linguistic trick. Look's infinite therefore there's nothing outside it that's not what infinite means if you're using the word infinite and i gave the example of the r2 plane and the

Starting point is 00:50:54 reason why so here's here's the twist yeah i i know exactly what you're saying but yeah go ahead for the audience there's an r2 plane you understand what you understand what r3 plane is oh that's the real line is infinite but that doesn't mean there doesn't exist something For the audience, there's an R2 plane. You understand what the R3 plane is. The real line is infinite, but that doesn't mean there doesn't exist something outside that real line because you can have the R2 plane, and it's a forgetful functor, technically speaking, to go from the R2 plane to the R plane. You've forgotten some information.

Starting point is 00:51:19 So the R1 plane is embedded in the R2 plane. So you can have something that's infinite, but still not all encompassing so maybe the word that is trying to that the word that people would like to use instead of infinite is all encompassing so that's different than the word infinite so yeah there's definitely a problem here with language um and the problem here is that people don't have a proper understanding of what infinite is because nobody virtually nobody you know none of none of your professors, none of your teachers, none of the books you've read, none of the people who wrote them were actually infinitely conscious. Therefore, they have no idea what they're talking about. Everything they're talking about is actually finite. So let's, for those of you who are math nerds and logic nerds, hopefully you've heard of Georg Cantor.

Starting point is 00:52:00 And Georg Cantor was the developer of set theory. What has become modern set theory basically and he was one of the first in the last century, in the late 1800s he basically came up with the idea of multiple orders of infinity so you have the natural numbers or just like the integers the integers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 that's one order of infinity. But then you can take every integer and you can find an infinite number of decimal point numbers

Starting point is 00:52:33 in between the numbers 0 and 1. And so Cantor basically proved that that infinity is actually larger than the infinity of all the integer numbers. And so he made some ingenious proofs that basically showed that you can have higher and higher orders of infinity. And that's all right. And what you're talking about with your R1, R2 planes and all that, that's just infinity order one, infinity order two, three, four, five. And that's all within the mathematical symbolic conceptual domain. You have to understand that's a conceptual infinity. Then, uh, Garrett

Starting point is 00:53:05 Cantor, if you studied his work, ultimately, you know, what's the natural conclusion? If you say, well, there's one size of infinity, then there's a second size of infinity. There's a third size, fourth size, even a bigger size and a bigger than one than that. What is the natural conclusion? You say, well, surely there must be an absolute infinity, an infinity of all the possible infinities. So it's an endless list of all infinities which keeps growing forever. And Georg Cantor called that absolute infinity, and he gave it the symbol omega. And, by the way, by the way, he was a deeply religious man, and he, if you read his biography and stories about his life,

Starting point is 00:53:44 he called omega, he called Omega, he called it God. And a lot of people at the time, his colleagues, mathematicians, scientists, logicians, and so forth, they thought he was crazy. They did not accept the idea that there were even multiple

Starting point is 00:54:02 orders of infinity. He thought he was doing pseudoscience. Until eventually, you know, finally he won over after his death. I mean, he died in ill repute. He did not die happy that everyone accepted his set theories and all this. Most of his colleagues didn't accept it. He died and then it took

Starting point is 00:54:19 some decades and centuries and then people came around to it and opened their minds. But look, even what Georg Cantor called omega absolute infinity, that was still all within the domain of concepts and numbers. So that is not what I mean by absolute infinity. That's peanuts compared to what I mean. What I mean is the following when I say infinity. So imagine all of mathematics, imagine all of current mathematics and all the mathematics that will ever be done ever in a trillion years of human existence. So, imagine that our universe goes to its heat death, right?

Starting point is 00:54:53 Like in, I don't know, 80 billion years there's a heat death. Everything dies in this universe. All the math that humans do up until that point, that will be an infinitesimally small chunk of absolute infinity. But that's just mathematics. Now I want you to imagine all of physics that humans will do in that entire span of the universe. That will just be a grain of sand within absolute infinity. Now I want you to imagine all the movies that every human can possibly invent. So I want you to imagine the entire possibility space of every movie. That means Star Wars, The Godfather, Jurassic Park, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the movies.

Starting point is 00:55:34 But I mean even more than that. Imagine, for example, every possible way that Jurassic Park could have been filmed but wasn't because Jurassic Park is just one way to film a movie, right? You could have had a million different Jurassic Parks with different actors, different dinosaurs, different settings, different colors, different framing, different shots, different words, different dialogue,

Starting point is 00:55:54 different story, different length. Like imagine a million different Jurassic Parks that are just different from each other by one second. Like each movie is just one second longer, one second longer, second longer one second a million of those i understand right so so if you look at it just the domain of what jurassic park is can you see how that itself is its own sub infinity because you can literally have an infinite number of different jurassic parks that's just jurassic park so that is a sub

Starting point is 00:56:23 that's sub infinity within the i of the entire film space, right? So imagine every possible film that could ever be made that could be displayed on a screen. I mean, we're talking about crazy numbers of complexity here, right? That's the infinity of film. Now imagine the infinity of music. Every sub genre of music. Jazz is the infinity of jazz. Rock is infinity of film. Now imagine the infinity of music. Every subgenre of music. Jazz is an infinity of jazz. Rock is an infinity of rock.

Starting point is 00:56:50 Rap is an infinity of rap. Hip-hop is an infinity of hip-hop. Now imagine every possible genre of music that could ever be imagined. So that would be the infinity of all possible genres of music. And so basically now we see where this is going. It's going larger and larger and larger. And now imagine the possibility of every single possibility that is ever possible to exist. That is absolute infinity.

Starting point is 00:57:15 Okay. And now ask yourself the question, what exists outside of that? Right. And the answer will be nothing. Why? Because you, what would exist what would there be outside of everything everything that you have given me right now are examples of imagination or example like imagine so-and-so imagine so-and-so now

Starting point is 00:57:39 let me play i'm putting on the hat of someone who's beyond a spiritual guru. Let's say, I can't even, I don't have a word for it. An alien? Let's say the Tellurians, which are the regular people, the Hylix. And then we have the spiritual gurus. And then I'm putting on the hat of a mountaineer. I don't know why I'm calling it a mountaineer. Whatever.

Starting point is 00:58:02 I'm thinking of a mountain that has a hat. Okay. I'm thinking of a mountain that has a hat. Okay. Let's imagine that this person says, there exists something outside what you could perceive, what you can imagine, what's consciousness. Prove me wrong. Right.

Starting point is 00:58:23 Now, your proofs of proving me wrong lie within the realm of consciousness. No, no, no. But no, that's what girl told you, is that you can't prove that. You can't prove truth. Truth literally cannot be proven. Because truth is larger than proof. So when you come up with that objection that, oh, prove to me, for example, that God exists, you're being stupid, excuse me, but you're being stupid because you haven't grasped the profound metaphysical and epistemic implications of Goudel's The Completeness

Starting point is 00:58:50 Theorem. You can't do that. You can't even do that within mathematics, let alone within the larger system. Okay. Sorry, Leo. I don't mean to become bad of it all. No, no, go, go, go. And don't hold back. Sure, sure, sure. I'm not trying to become bad of it all. No, no, go. Don't hold back.

Starting point is 00:59:05 Sure, sure, sure. I'm not trying to say that God doesn't exist. I'm saying that the arguments that you've given about consciousness being infinite and therefore all that there is, I'm saying there exists something outside consciousness. Prove that incorrect. So I'm saying there's something epi-consciousness

Starting point is 00:59:21 that consciousness is not aware of because consciousness can only be aware of awareness or experience. I'm saying well, no, I'm sorry, I'm saying there's something epic consciousness that consciousness is not aware of because consciousness can only be aware of awareness or experience. I'm saying, well, no, I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm putting on my mountain hat. So I'm saying as the mountain hat, as the mountain guru, prove that wrong. Here's the problem. I'll tell you, I'll tell you what the problem is. The problem is that when you say consciousness and the way people use the word consciousness, they don't really know what they're talking about.

Starting point is 00:59:43 When you say consciousness, you're assuming a finite thing. For example, your notion of consciousness comes with metaphysical and epistemic assumptions and baggage. It's extremely loaded. from living beings. At least when I say you, I just mean in general people, us as a culture, we assume that we assume that animals have consciousness. Maybe plants have conscious, although some people would even deny that. But then like we say, like a rock doesn't have consciousness. And so therefore, when you have this sort of picture in your mind, then it seems like, well, yeah, of course you can be conscious of everything, but then, you know, a rock is conscious of nothing and a rock still exists outside your consciousness. But the problem is, is that that's an assumption. You're bringing that metaphysical baggage in with your idea of consciousness.

Starting point is 01:00:33 That is not what consciousness is. Consciousness is not something that arises from neurons. It is not something that comes from the brain. It is not something that living beings have. not something that living beings have. It is absolutely transcendental, which means that consciousness is not limited by any physical constraint or any logical constraint of any kind.

Starting point is 01:00:53 And literally anything that exists must exist within consciousness as a form within consciousness. So the problem is that you're not conscious enough to realize that. And so really what our conversation yeah where our conversation breaks down is sort of like this imagine that you have a donkey and then we come to the donkey and we bring him a mirror and we show the donkey the mirror and we try to get the donkey to we like we

Starting point is 01:01:18 point the donkey's face at the mirror and we say this is look this is you do you see that this is you in the mirror and and then like we hit the donkey and we keep this is look this is you do you see that this is you in the mirror and and then like we hit the donkey and we keep hitting the donkey the donkey's looking at the mirror but he doesn't understand what we want because he doesn't literally have the enough consciousness to recognize what we're trying to show him to be able to recognize his own reflection in the mirror right and so trying to explain consciousness to somebody who's in a low state of consciousness, not an infinite state of consciousness, is literally impossible in the same way as trying to get a donkey to recognize himself in the mirror. The donkey cannot recognize himself in the mirror because he's locked into a state of consciousness that is not high enough to allow for that degree of self-awareness. of self-awareness. So likewise, right now, you are locked into a state of consciousness that is not high enough to allow you to have enough consciousness of what I'm saying, which is that

Starting point is 01:02:10 literally nothing can exist outside of consciousness. You are imagining things that you think could exist outside of consciousness as a possibility, and then you're using that to be skeptical, but you're not conscious of the fact that that is within the realm of consciousness. See, all skepticism is a function of consciousness. Are you getting that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hope that you don't think I'm being unnecessarily captious. But when I say that, look, let's take this analogy, the donkey can't see a level above it.

Starting point is 01:02:43 And because of that, you can't explain some. Look, let's take this analogy, the donkey can't see a level above it. And because of that, you can't explain some, it has no way of understanding or comprehending that there's all encompassing consciousness. Well, in that same way, can I not make an analogy and say, I'm not claiming to be a God enlightened at all or above God enlightened, obviously. Imagine I put on my Plato hat. I should have said Plato instead of mountain for some reason, because Platonic sounds interesting. So imagine I put on my Platonic hat and I say,

Starting point is 01:03:07 there exists something even above consciousness, Leo, that you, within your consciousness, you're only looking at your own mirror in the same way that you gave me an argument about the donkey. I'm saying the same is happening to you. There's something epi-conscious. You cannot be aware of it. Right.

Starting point is 01:03:23 Yeah. You're saying that, but I'm saying that to you. There's something epi-conscious. You cannot be aware of it. Right. Yeah. You're saying that, but I'm saying that to you. You see? You see how this game is played? So it really is a game of trickery. So there can be an infinite number of arguments that we can build back and forth to try to jump over each other. And that's exactly what happens within the conceptual domain, because we're in the conceptual domain. So yeah, you can make an argument that I'm self-deceived and then I can make the counter argument that no, you're self-deceived. You're self-deceived that I'm self-deceived. And then you could say, ah, but I'm going to go meta and I'm going to say that Leo is self-deceived that I'm self-deceiving myself about Leo's

Starting point is 01:03:58 self-deception. And so we can go up for infinity. That's what infinity means. We can keep going. Right. Okay. So who is right in this circumstance? Platonic, the guy with the Play-Doh hat or the girl with the Play-Doh hat or the, or the God realized person of the God consciousness, God realized person. Well, you have to, you have to understand what God realized is. God realized is not sort of a static state that you reach and that you're there. Um, God realized is infinitely meta. So what God realized means is that you're conscious of the fact that this is an infinite regress of self-deception that we can keep going down forever until we're both dead. Right?

Starting point is 01:04:30 That's what God realized means. So it's a meta function. So God can't be locked into a single form. So one of the problems here is that you're trying to lock God into a form. Like, well, God is what Leo says it is. It's like, no, God is that plus more. God is always infinitely meta. It's infinite means it's endless. That means you can't ever encapsulate it into any kind of model. So

Starting point is 01:04:50 everything that Leo is saying is just a finite portion of what God is. Any description of God that I give you is always going to be a partial aspect of God. I guess what I'm saying is it's actually extreme. It's more simple than that. It's more like someone is claiming something that's true, but unfalsifiably so. And you're also, you're saying, I agree. Kurt's more simple than that. It's more like someone is claiming something that's true, but unfalsifiably so. And you're also you're saying, I agree, Kurt, I agree with that. And then I'm saying, right within this realm of us arguing over here, over Zoom, over words, even you can't convince anyone. You've said this, too, which is like I'm agreeing with that you can't convince anyone with justification but in some sense we're trying to and so in any way that you're convincing me i can put up a counter argument that you can't prove and then you can say well i can't prove but you

Starting point is 01:05:34 can't prove slightly above so it's like anytime you give me a number a i can give you a plus one and then you could do the same right just that alone is evidence of infinity because you can see that it goes on forever that's just a minor infinity within absolute infinity but uh look um do you agree that one equals one is that true yeah well it equals it by definition by definition of what equals means and by definition of what one means however however the reason like look i'm so i'm such a carp But but prove it prove to me that one equals one

Starting point is 01:06:10 How would you do it? Is it falsifiable falsify to me that one equals one the way that I can falsify that As if you take some other claim that you claim to be true Okay, so let's say you take that there. There's another claim that you claim to be true. Okay, so let's say you take that there's another claim that you claim to be. It could be any claim. So let's say that there exists a paper here. Okay, actually, let's make it a more numerical claim. So you claim that 329 doesn't equal 300. Let's say you claim that. That's a claim. So then I can prove to you that 1 equals 1 in the sense that if 1 were not to equal 1, I can prove to you what you claimed

Starting point is 01:06:45 was not true. So a proof by contradiction. Are you saying like a reductio ad absurdum? The reductio ad absurdum, they have a connotation that's more, I don't like the word ad absurdum because it implies that you already have an idea as to what's absurd. Of course, yeah. Absurd. The notion of absurd is completely relative. The notion of absurd is absurd. It's more about if you were to take... Right. There's so much loaded in what I've just said, which is classical logic.

Starting point is 01:07:14 So you have to have the law of excluded middle. You have to accept that you can have proofs by contradiction, which is actually contested in mathematics heavily. So what I'm saying has so many aspects. Prove to me that reality isn't contradictory. Prove to me that there's not a single contradiction within existence.

Starting point is 01:07:33 I mean, see, there are so many things that are absolutely impossible to prove or to falsify. And, you know, the most difficult things to falsify are the ones that are true. You see, it's not an accident that truth can't be falsified. So 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,

Starting point is 01:08:02 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.

Starting point is 01:08:39 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

Starting point is 01:09:07 with the founder, Matthew Phillips, of Transcend. See, the beauty with truth is that it's completely unshakable. Once you are conscious of the truth, nothing will shake you. Now you could say, well, that's just, you're deluded. And that's right, you can be deluded. So, don't get me wrong,

Starting point is 01:09:23 the idea and the problem you have here is basically you're saying to me, Leo, self-deception is a really big problem within epistemology. How do we know anything at all? Shouldn't we be more humble? You know, you're here saying that God is this and you've reached the end of infinity on all that. Like, but shouldn't you be more humble? I mean, what if you're, what if you're in a simulation? What if you're deceiving yourself? What if you're fooling yourself? What if you're just hallucinating? Whatever, right? So I totally get you. I am the biggest proponent of studying the mechanics of self-deception. So when you are saying that maybe, Leo, all the stuff you're saying is self-deception, my counter to that is to say that from your point of view, it can certainly seem that way, and you should take that possibility seriously.

Starting point is 01:10:13 So your audience members, they don't know me. They have not experienced what I've experienced. They don't know what I've become conscious of. So from your point of view, I could be self-deceived. I could be a grifter. I could be a cult leader. I could just be mentally ill. Or I could even think that I'm saving the world, but just be fooling myself. From your point of view, that all could be true. Which is why you need to investigate

Starting point is 01:10:37 for yourself what is true and ultimately get to reach your own conclusion. That's the difficulty about absolute truth is that you can't give it to anybody. It has to be reached by you, which can take 10, 20 years of deep investigation. And the most important aspect of that investigation is studying self-deception. But you have to be very careful with self-deception because within self-deception, there are deeper self-deceptions. And one of the chief self-deceptions that tricks people up is the self-deception of skepticism. I don't know why it all tends to be self-deceptions that tricks people up is the self-deception of skepticism. I don't know why it also has to be self-deception. Why can't it simply be nescience?

Starting point is 01:11:11 And I prefer nescience to ignorance because ignorance... What do you mean by that? So ignorance is like you... Almost like you willfully choose not to know. But nescience simply means you just don't know. It's almost like obliviousness, but obliviousness has a connotation too so i would say so you're saying it's ignorance or what or or nescience no i'm saying it's nescience because nescience is more like you just simply don't know nescience no no no no no but but it's way it's way worse than you simply

Starting point is 01:11:41 don't know in fact the problem is not that you don't know. The problem is that you know. The problem is that what you know is wrong. So see, let's talk about the epistemology here because we kind of jumped right into the deep end of the pool about infinity and all this. And we basically jumped into metaphysics. But before you can do metaphysics, first you have to do epistemology. Because if you get your epistemology wrong, none of your metaphysics is going to be right. And epistemology is just the how do you know anything at all question. Like, literally, how do you know anything?

Starting point is 01:12:21 And so if you're not taking that question seriously, you cannot develop a toe of any kind, and you cannot have a metaphysics of any kind, because how would you know your metaphysics is true? Right? Yeah. Are there hierarchies in nature true like i know there seems to be hierarchies at our level but then at this god realized level let's say the most true level are there hierarchies what what do you mean by hierarchies well give an example good versus bad up versus down okay that gets us into metaphysics, but I can quickly answer that. So, hierarchies are imaginary, so they exist as imaginations, but at the absolute level, what happens is that consciousness realizes its own oneness so deeply that it realizes that all distinctions are imaginary, and all those distinctions dissolve, and then all you're left with is just a pure unity. It's a pure formless unity of pure consciousness in which every distinction is basically blended together into a unity. And so, by the way, you know, for those of you who are trying to figure out your toe and all that, one question you should be asking is what is the substance of reality?

Starting point is 01:13:31 What is the substance of what everything is made out of? Is it energy? Is it quarks? Is it atoms? Is it molecules? Is it information? Is it whatever else, you know? Maybe it's a charge. Maybe it's strings. Yeah. Maybe numbers. A lot of mathematicians believe it's all formulas and numbers at the bottom, right? Or maybe you believe it's a computer. Or maybe you believe it's something like that. the bottom, right? Or maybe you believe it's a computer or maybe you believe it's a something like that. Um, so see, it can't be any of those. That's what you have to realize. So this is,

Starting point is 01:14:09 this is something I can help you guys with because this will solve, this will save you 10, 20 years of your life right here. If you realize this one point is that the actual substance of reality, you can become directly conscious of what it is. Uh, and what it is, is it's nothing. The substance of reality is literally nothing. And the reason it has to be that way is because everything you call a substance is actually a distinction within consciousness. So, for example, when you say reality is made of matter, you're creating a distinction between matter and non-matter. And you're creating both of these. And you're saying reality is this thing but not that thing.

Starting point is 01:14:51 Consciousness is doing that. When you say reality is information. You say well it's information. But then it's not the opposite of information. Whatever that is in your mind. And so you make that distinction. Or you say it's strings. Well if it's strings.

Starting point is 01:15:04 Then it's also not strings. It or you say it's strings. Well, if it's strings, then it's also not not strings It's not the opposite of strings And so you're always thinking in these opposites and this is the fundamental problem with science and with Academia is that it's always thinking in these in these opposites and these do I call these dualities literally every single scientific notion is a duality and because of this you're never able to access the actual substance of anything because all you have are distinctions and you're not realizing that what reality is is it's not one particular distinction that grounds all other distinctions but rather what

Starting point is 01:15:35 reality is is nothing other than the sum infinite total of all possible distinctions reality is not made of atoms your body's not made of atoms strings energy quarks none of that reality is made out of distinctions which is in other words to say differences literally literally the literally the difference between any two things is what makes that thing a thing. Yeah, I agree. So why does that mean that the substance of reality is no thing, nothing? Sorry, by the way, when you say nothing, do you literally mean no thing, or do you mean something else? Well, it literally can't be spoken.

Starting point is 01:16:24 So what is meant can't be spoken, right? Because even, you see, even nothing is a distinction because nothing is relative to something. That's a distinction, and that is not what I mean when I say nothing. When I say nothing, I'm talking about the thing that actually can't be spoken. So let me explain your question of why does it mean that the substance has to be nothing. The reason the substance has to be nothing is because, so if everything is a distinction, ask yourself, what are the distinctions made out of? Other distinctions?

Starting point is 01:17:03 No. Because even the idea of a distinction is already involved in this problem. It creates a circularity problem, a self-reference problem, and a paradox, because a distinction cannot be made out of a distinction, because distinction itself is a distinction. agree and then where i find it muddling when you say that this can't be spoken about i'm in such agreement with you that if what you're saying is to be believed in spira as well then rupert spire that is then all of what we're doing right here is so fruitless because look one of the ways we say the individual doesn't exist that you have the person who's listening is because well let's take the materialist point of view and that your collection of atoms, while those atoms are blurred. Okay, so where do you begin in the universe? Where does the universe end and you begin? And then you say, well, okay, well, I can't put a distinction.

Starting point is 01:17:56 And then because you can't place a border, then you can say that essentially that the words themselves are meaningless. And I can't convince you that the words themselves are meaningless and I can't convince you. All words are relative. So one of the problems here is that we're entangled in language and language is an absolutely relative and distinct and dualistic rather, not distinct, but dualistic scheme. So every word in the English language, including every word in the English language, is a distinction. See, you can't get around this problem with language because language itself is constructed from distinctions. Everything is constructed from distinctions, so we can't use language to understand what a distinction is.

Starting point is 01:18:40 You have to go underneath language. The problem is so profound. what a distinction is. You have to go underneath language. The problem is so profound. You guys, when you're trying to figure out your toe, what you don't understand is that the problem is so fucking profound. It's way more profound than you realize because even the language you're using and the thoughts you're thinking to construct your toe are all distinctions you're creating. So literally you're imagining your toe into existence. Imagination is nothing other than the imagination of distinctions. That's what imagination is nothing other than the imagination of distinctions. That's what imagination is.

Starting point is 01:19:07 That's the technical definition of imagination. So that means that, for example, the difference between a chicken and a coffee table, that difference is something you're imagining. That's what I'm saying. I'm not just saying this in the mind. I'm saying that if you take a physical chicken and you take a physical coffee table and you put them next to each other. See, you as a human have been trained to believe that these are two separate and distinct things that exist independent of your mind. And what I'm telling you is that your mind is constructing the physical difference between a table and a chicken, and that's why they look different to you. And if the chicken and the table were not different,

Starting point is 01:19:51 they would literally be one thing. And that thing would be nothing. And that nothing would be infinity. Because infinity is nothing. Because the distinction between something, or rather everything and nothing, is itself going to collapse into a unity which is prior to our word nothing and something. I agree that if your worldview is to be taken seriously and inspired, whether or not you want to call it a worldview or a

Starting point is 01:20:16 Weltanschauung or whatever it may be, because even to give it a name implies that there's a delineation, which implies there's something it's not, and so on and so on. We have objections there. But let's say you're to be taken extremely seriously. What the heck is the point of speaking at all? Like, what is the point of argumentation? It gets to nowhere. Well, first of all, speaking was not designed for philosophy. Speaking was designed for simple things like, I want to eat chicken. That's why you speak. You want to eat a chicken, you know? You want to buy a coffee table. That's why you speak. And in that sense, it's practical and it's useful. Just like, you know, classical Newtonian mechanics, what's the point of it if it's false? I mean, we know it's false.

Starting point is 01:20:59 We know there's no such thing as absolute velocities and absolute distances it's all relative right these are gross overall these are gross oversimplifications though i would have objection there would you yeah i object to the notion that there exists how how tall how tall are you if you don't mind saying oh yeah no i don't i don't mind i'm five eight five nine or so i'm five i'm five eleven on tinder so okay so you believe so you believe that that's your that that's objectively true no no no what i mean is i imagine that the way that you would go about dispelling the notion of length would be using special relativity however there's a contradiction between special relativity and the plankck length. Because look, if you have a shortest possible length in which we know that

Starting point is 01:21:48 physics breaks down, then what are you going to do when you accelerate at a velocity higher than that? Can you have smaller than a Planck length? So there, so there, I, that's false, by the way, there is no, there is no bottom to reality. There is no, there is no minimum length. The reason we can talk about that, but the reason I'm objecting is only because I'm being you're being rigorous rigorous, petty fogging physicist most people would say

Starting point is 01:22:14 well, relativity and Einstein but actually if you examine that, you'll see that special relativity contradicts well, not contradicts, but it's unclear okay, forget forget relativity in the giant einstein sense but just let's let's really think about this existentially do you understand that there is no such thing as length unless you have two objects which are

Starting point is 01:22:39 relative to each other without which length does not exist as a thing i don't know i don't know i don't know about that look what you're saying is look the word length has units attached like you are five meters well what is a meter a meter is uh somewhere in france and then we go with that and we take that and we place it five times next to something okay so you have this conformal scaling and you can't have well actually length length is more fundamental than units. So I'm just talking about the abstract notion of length regardless of units. So even to have a notion of what length is,

Starting point is 01:23:13 you have to understand that this is a relative notion. You need to have a start point and an end point to have length. Right? You agree? Yeah. Okay. So length depends on how you choose your start points and end points. Yeah. Without which there is no such thing as length.

Starting point is 01:23:33 Yeah. So, length is a distinction that we imagine or create. Wow. And you're a model. But in Einstein's model, your length differs depending on how fast you're moving. Right. Right? Right.

Starting point is 01:23:49 Right. I mean, like. Right, right, right. Right. So, so your height is literally not 5'8". Your height is 5'8", assuming relative to us, me and you being in the same reference frame of moving at the same velocity relative to each other. There's something, so there is, there are invariants, not all that exist as relative in Einstein's point of view. There are invariants, there's rest mass, there's even,

Starting point is 01:24:12 it's not quite true to say rest length, but you can come up with something called rest length. Einstein wasn't infinitely conscious. So take Einstein's general relativity and now expand it out to make into what I would call absolute relativity, which means that everything is absolutely relative. So everything is relative to every other thing, without which you have nothing. So what I'm talking about, look, I'm actually talking about a profound notion here called ontological relativity. This is actually a notion from Willard Kleinine, a famous philosopher from analytic philosophy. This is not some woo-woo guy. He has a paper called Two Dogmas of Empiricism.

Starting point is 01:24:49 Really good paper. I recommend you guys read it if you're serious about toes, especially the last two pages of that paper where he talks about his conclusions on ontological relativity. So basically what ontological relativity means is what I just told you. So if you have a chicken and you have a coffee table, and this is now my interpretation. This is not Quine saying it, but this is how I just told you. So if you have a chicken and you have a coffee table, and this is now my interpretation, this is not Quine saying it, but this is how I'm framing it. If you have a chicken and a coffee table, ordinarily we assume that there is such an object as a chicken and a coffee table. These are just like objective things that exist independent of our minds, independent of how we look at the world, independent of who we are, independent

Starting point is 01:25:25 of consciousness. There is something there. And what I'm saying is that there's nothing there at all outside of how your mind perceives that thing. And that difference that you imagine there is between a chicken and a coffee table is literally what a chicken and a coffee table are. And if you ever realize that there is no difference between a chicken and a coffee table, that's something you're imagining, that difference will disappear. And literally, you will not be able to see a chicken and a coffee table, they will merge

Starting point is 01:25:51 into a single thing at the physical level. I don't even think you need to go that, that advanced. I think even a scientist, well, maybe not the traditional scientist, but a true scientist, one who doesn't take a stance on philosophy would say that the distinction between an electron and a proton is merely one of predictivity, that we have a formula for this and we can predict so and so. But in reality, it's not as if there exists something separate between a proton and an electron, other than ours, placing a certain framework on it so that we can predict and have formulas. But I'm saying something more profound than that scientist.

Starting point is 01:26:28 So while we might agree that science is all instrumental, that idea is called sort of basically instrumentalism, this idea that it's sort of a pragmatic notion of science, which is like what science, all that science really is, if you want to be technical about it, is just measurements. You're making measurements between different things and then you're comparing them. And then as long as your measurements are being used consistently, then you've got something like a science and you can make certain predictions. That's essential. And

Starting point is 01:26:51 then on top of that, you add a bunch of conceptual baggage too. So there's plenty of that going on in science. It's not just measurements. But you can boil it down to measurements if you want to be extremely rigorous about it. But what I'm saying is something much more profound than that. What I'm saying is that even though at a conceptual level, you can understand this idea of distinctions and you might even agree with me and you might say, yeah, Leo, it's all distinctions. But what I'm saying is that you're not conscious that this is the case. You're thinking it's true, but you're not conscious of what a distinction is. So you can actually have an awakening into what a distinction is.

Starting point is 01:27:26 And when you do, you will actually be directly conscious of the one true substance of existence, which is nothing. This is where language is so tricky, Leo. Because if I'm, like I said, I believe or I agree

Starting point is 01:27:44 with much of what you're saying, but we can't use language because so much of what you're saying, there are caveats to it. And then, and contradictions within it. But then you would say, well, of course, like the word, the realm of language is the improper domain for this experience, or perhaps psychedelic experience, whatever it may be. Because even there you can, one can say that. Sorry, continue. But that's exactly how it should be i mean you would you would you should you should intuit that this must be the case because after all language is not fundamental to reality now this is also where i would disagree with langan right says that it is um language is a language is a distinction within reality to have language you need to have non-language so you can't say that reality

Starting point is 01:28:29 is language because you also need to have non-language without which the notion of language doesn't even exist to have non-dualism do you have to have dualism yeah you do actually as a non-dualism when you say non dualism,

Starting point is 01:28:48 what you're saying is absolute infinity and absolute infinity entails every possible finite thing, which includes every possible delusion and fantasy and non dual and including all dualities. So the reason we have duality is because we have non-duality which encompasses it so this is the yin yang symbol right the yin yang symbol is the white half and the black half with little dots in each half showing that there's a little bit of white in the black and black in the white right and then the you can also what people don't see about the yin yang is that it's it's a unity it's not just white and black together. You can imagine a circle that combines the two together,

Starting point is 01:29:30 and that would be non-duality combining the duality. So yeah, non-duality necessitates duality. Razor blades are like diving boards. 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

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Starting point is 01:30:27 The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything. If you use that code, 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. Does God necessitate non-God or does existence necessitate non-existence? It's a little tricky because your concept of existence is a relative notion of existence.

Starting point is 01:31:13 So there's existence that's absolute existence, and there's existence which is relative existence. At the absolute level, there's no such thing as non-existence. There's only existence. Existence is an absolute. Existence is infinity. Existence is consciousness. There's no difference between consciousness and existence. So literally, the only thing that can happen is existence. Does consciousness necessitate non-consciousness? It does if you have a relative notion of consciousness. So this is also a problem, is that most materialists and scientists and academics,

Starting point is 01:31:47 when they talk about consciousness, they're talking about it in a relative sense, in a dualistic sense, consciousness and non-consciousness. So like, they talk about anesthesia or losing consciousness when you get hit in the head or stuff like that. This is a relative notion of consciousness.

Starting point is 01:32:01 Then there's an absolute consciousness which cannot have an opposite. So the definition of what an absolute is, an absolute is something that has no opposite. So God has no opposite. Consciousness has no opposite at the absolute level. Can you explain your two levels of love, at least briefly to the audience? And also why, because I've heard you articulate that love level one love is what's rudimental but then at the same time you just said nothing is rudimental so there must be an equivalence between love and nothingness but either way explain the two levels of love yeah

Starting point is 01:32:37 love is nothingness so love is a very profound concept Most people think of love as some hippie new age idea or a human feeling. See, again, love is one of those concepts that we bring a lot of metaphysical baggage into. For example, when we say love, we assume, here's what the materialist assumes, is that love is an emotion that is created by neurons in the brain that is a property of higher order mammals and living beings. And there would even be doubt in this model, there would even be doubt whether like a cricket has love. Do you think a cricket has love? Can experience love? I don't know. I would imagine it's an extremely low form of love if it does. Right.

Starting point is 01:33:22 And then would a rock experience love? You would say no. I'd imagine it's like 1% of a percentage right i mean and and that would already require you to to be in the woo-woo territory because because if you because if you if you tell a serious scientist that a rock experiences love they'll kick you out of the university you know it's so strange because leo these ideas that you and i are talking about they seem to be gaining more and more acceptance in a strange that is with that is true at least with itt integrated no it integrated information theory of well because we're talking about it that's why that's almost like panpsychism

Starting point is 01:33:57 so in some sense every single part of the universe is conscious it's just at different degrees and that's a more scientifically accepted theory of consciousness so it's so strange that much of what you and i say to the traditionally skeptical debunking materialist mindset it seems like all of it is so false that it's ridiculous we're even talking about it but that's even that's that's not true from a scientific perspective i just want to put that it science is always evolving so of course the ideas we're talking about if they are true if what we're doing here actually has any kind of validity or merit we should expect that science every decade will become more open to these ideas because they're inevitably true oh yeah let's get to these two

Starting point is 01:34:40 levels of love right um so what was i saying about love yeah so so usually we levels of love. Right. So what was I saying about love? Yeah. So usually we think of love as an emotion. Love is not actually an emotion. Love is a metaphysical property of existence. So what we really mean by metaphysical love, of which the emotion is just a little offshoot. It's just like a little bit of like, almost like, think of a volcano, you know, where does the lava come from in a volcano it comes from the core of the earth it's a very deep thing the lava it literally the insides of the earth are pouring out but if you're standing on the surface you only see a little a little bit of lava popping out and you can't fathom how deep it goes so likewise with love

Starting point is 01:35:20 us humans you know when you love an object let's say you love what do you love you love bacon i don't know what's your favorite i love bacon man you know just between you and i my goal for one of my goals for life is to make enough money that i can buy what's called ready made bacon and not feel bad about it because i don't i love bacon but i don't like to cook it because of the mess and i would love it if I could micro... I don't think I've bought microwavable bacon once in my life because it's $8 when regular bacon is $4. And I would like to get to the point where I can buy ready-made bacon and not feel bad about it, at least not at the level of spending money.

Starting point is 01:35:56 I feel bad that there's extreme suffering that goes on behind the scenes to produce that bacon. But let's put that aside. Yeah, I wouldn't buy that because it's like in plastic. Isn't it wrapped in plastic or something? Yeah. The ready-made bacon. What's the distinction between plastic and non-plastic? It's all life. It's all life at the end of the day. Your body will ask you that later. Your body knows the difference. But anyways, but yeah, so see, you love bacon what what does it really mean to say

Starting point is 01:36:25 you love bacon we we say it but we don't think about it think about it very metaphysically like when you love bacon what's actually happening is that you're you're tasting it and it's salty and it's crispy and it's crunchy and it's it's got the you're it's a phenomenological experience right eating bacon just like imagine it you're having an orgasm in your mouth and it feels amazing relative to other experiences you normally have. Right. And, and so you fall, you were literally in love with that experience while it lasts. It's so good. You can, your, your mind, your mind is biased. Like for example, if we put a, if we, if, if, if, if I tell you to eat a cricket, you're not going to have the same experience because your mind is biased. It likes bacon, but it doesn't like crickets.

Starting point is 01:37:13 Agreed, agreed. So what you're doing is you're comparing, your mind is comparing these two experiences, consciousnesses, and it's, it's being biased towards one rather than the other. And when it's doing that, it's recognizing the innate beauty of that experience in a biased way. Because you could actually train yourself to eat a cricket and to fall in love with the taste of a cricket as much as bacon. You could do that. And certain animals experience it that way. Like maybe a snake or a frog it will prefer the the cricket over your bacon okay because i understand because it's it's neurology is built such

Starting point is 01:37:50 that it loves that thing it has a bias yeah right so how this connects to love is uh is that that's how we experience as humans but at the level humans. But at the level of God consciousness, at the level of being as conscious as possible, there are no distinctions between things. Therefore, there are no biases towards one experience over another experience. Therefore, what you have is you have a love of all experiences,

Starting point is 01:38:20 which is equally suffused throughout the entire universe, so to speak, throughout the entire field of consciousness. Consciousness, imagine it like an infinite field. Anything that arises in that consciousness, consciousness can either embrace it and accept it as itself, or it can reject it. It can say, no, I don't like that experience.

Starting point is 01:38:40 I want to get rid of that experience. And so we as living beings, as humans, we have preferences for certain experiences over others. The ones we prefer we love, and the ones we hate we call those evil and bad. And we call that pain and suffering. But from the absolute point of view, because there literally is no difference between anything, why would you love one thing over another thing? Why would a cricket be worse

Starting point is 01:39:05 than bacon? So when you're infinitely conscious, you are so conscious that all distinctions collapse into a unity and that actual collapse is what love is. So the technical definition, my technical definition of metaphysical love is the realization that there is no difference between anything. When you're that conscious and you realization that there is no difference between anything. When you're that conscious and you realize that there is no difference between anything and you realize that everything is you, you actually fall in love with yourself infinitely. And you love all parts of reality infinitely. At that level of consciousness, you can love being tortured as much as you can love eating bacon and it makes no difference.

Starting point is 01:39:42 Because in actual truth, there is no difference between eating bacon. And being tortured. But your mind thinks there is. And as long as you believe that. Then that's what you're going to experience. And you're going to have a limited form of love. So the two levels of love. Is the absolute love.

Starting point is 01:39:59 Which is completely unbiased. And then the biased form of love. Which you need to have in order to survive as a human being. Remember, everything you think and do and feel is conditioned by your need to survive as a finite form that you are, that you're attached to. You're attached to being human. That means that you can't love being tortured. You can't love eating poison because it'll kill you. But God doesn't have that problem because at the level of God consciousness, it has no body. It has no form. It can't be harmed by anything.

Starting point is 01:40:34 And it's completely selfless. It has no self. It has no identity. Its identity is everything. When your identity is everything, do you care what happens to you? No, because you're equally happy being in any way that you could be. Now, what's the difference here between, okay firstly this is presuming some absolute

Starting point is 01:40:50 relativism, is that correct? Well I'd want to know what you mean by that exactly but I would, I'm inclined to say yes. Yeah, yeah, what I mean is that it's almost like a blank sheet of paper that's of infinite extent privileges no point. Exactly. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:41:14 Well, here's the deep intuition. I'm actually releasing an episode about this in the next week or two. The deep intuition here is this. Why wouldn't the universe be perfectly symmetrical in every possible way? Why would it have any kind of biases? For example, do you think that the universe cares whether you, like, have sex with a goat? Do you think it cares? Part of the universe that encompasses my wife would care, but I'm unsure about the universe as a whole.

Starting point is 01:41:44 Exactly, part of the universe but i mean like the universe as a whole right well no man like there's so see there's so much about what's being said that people who are listening are like kurt why are you not objecting well firstly i might my job here isn't to simply object for the sake of objecting but the number two it's that there's so much here that belong in the realm of linguistic tricks, though I'm not saying you're using them as tricks. It's just that it's so difficult to speak about because as soon as you speak about it, you degrade it. I think, of course, Wittgenstein, I'm sure you're aware, had such huge injunctions about speaking, firstly, about what you can't be precise about. And second, even though people thought Wittgenstein was a hard-nosed atheist, he actually profoundly loved the more mystic sides of reality and would say that consciousness is not a something, but it's not a nothing either.

Starting point is 01:42:42 It's a famous quote. I love that quote. It's not a something, but it's not a something but it's not a nothing either it's a famous quote i love that quote it's not a something but it's not a nothing either because to say it's a nothing implies a implies the delineation that we're enjoying because he was talking about the two the yeah because that's a relative duality so he intuited that yeah that's that's smart of him to do he all you know what else he said my favorite quote of wittgenstein's is this uh the aim of philosophy is to show the fly out of the bottle and that is what we're doing here my job is to show the fly out of the bottle. And that is what we're doing here. My job is to show you how to,

Starting point is 01:43:14 because you are literally lost inside an infinite labyrinth of your own mind. Concepts and ideas and science and toes and theories. You've studied so many of them. And I can totally empathize because I've been there myself. And so the trick here is how do you go through all of that and come out to truth in the end? Because there are so many ways you can get lost. There are so many dead ends and cul-de-sacs. You can explore your mind forever.

Starting point is 01:43:35 You can explore the mind for a billion years and not get to the bottom of it because it's infinite. Have you heard of Wittgenstein's Ladder? Yeah. Okay. Well well it seems like possibly what about it possibly what i'm doing is is going up the wittgensteinian ladder and for the people who are unaware uh i believe his tractatus or whichever he had only pretty much two publications whichever one yeah it's at the end of tractatus he says like the last

Starting point is 01:44:02 lines of the tractatus yeah once you climb up the ladder of philosophy, you throw it away. The whole point was to just throw this away. To get you to the point where you could realize this is all to be thrown out. And by the way, when you awaken, if you ever awaken, if you ever reach his God realization, what you'll realize is that absolutely every single step in your life was necessary to get you there, including this conversation, but not just this conversation, your conversations with your wife, the fact that you married your wife, the fact that you went to school, the fact that you were even deluded, all the evil shit you did. You will realize in retrospect that all of

Starting point is 01:44:38 that was necessary for you to bust through all of the resistance you had towards realizing that you were God. Would you say that it was necessary or would you say that it helped? Like, what is the difference? Well, obviously there's a difference between those two, but why are you saying it's necessary? So let me give you an example. Is it necessary that... Well, everything is necessary because everything is of absolute tautology. This will take us into the free will question that I know you want to answer well we can get there are we done are we done with love yet or no no no i'm i'm just see i'm not a fan of explanations that use

Starting point is 01:45:17 the same word in a polysemic matter manner because it's like the i think that different words should be given instead of saying level one love and then level two love i think that you should give a different word to it so say level two love is called love because we traditionally understand it to mean a certain to have a certain connotation and denotation and then you give the level one love a different word rather than calling it level rather than calling these underrived elemental blocks level one love you call it something else and the reason is that when you're explaining you or anyone else whenever they use like i mentioned the same word in an equivocal manner it gets confused yeah yeah and then you can take someone through these logical

Starting point is 01:46:01 sequential reasoning steps and at each point someone can agree because the reader, the listener or the watcher has a certain meaning in their head but it's different than what you have and then at some point you arrive at a different place so I guess in some sense it's at the essence

Starting point is 01:46:20 of this channel I'm going to give a brief math analogy, and then I'll give a Peterson analogy, which more people would get, but for you, you would probably get the math analogy. If I was in math, in group theory, there's something called the, well, there's the group operation. It's denoted with a circle, but you call it circ, but you can also call it plus. And if I was to use the generic group operation plus to mean the plus of the integers, which is commutative, but the generic group operation is not, then I can prove fantastic theorems. I can prove Golbach's conjecture like this. And that's because I'm using the word plus equivocally, not specifically, indistinctly.

Starting point is 01:47:02 So that's why I think one should outline relationships separately okay now for those who aren't mathematically oriented i'll give you a different analogy people accuse peterson of jesus smuggling and part of the reason is that he'll bring up the word right he'll bring up the word logos which has a religious connotation but it also has a secular one and he'll give or at least in some people's minds he'll give the impression of speaking about the unsacred phenomenon which is logos and then all of a sudden you arrive in Jerusalem and you're like how the heck did I

Starting point is 01:47:32 get here and it's because one is using the same word in different manners and you can agree at each point and then arrive at a completely far off place and I'm a proponent of being as precise as one can possibly be, especially when talking about fundamental reality,

Starting point is 01:47:50 not to be unduly persnickety or to deride or to pick apart, but somewhat precisely the opposite, because I think that one should build one, or I don't know how one can build a top shaky foundation. And this scrutiny breeds solidity. Yeah, two points about that. So, of course, we're entangled in language and this presents enormous epistemic challenges for us. And even metaphysical ones because the metaphysics is tied with the epistemology.

Starting point is 01:48:21 The metaphysics is tied with the epistemology. So the problem is that all language is relative. And even your notion of what Jesus is is not the same notion as my notion of what Jesus is. Literally every human mind on the planet has a different idea of what every word means. So even if we take the word chicken, your idea of chicken is not the same as my idea of chicken. If we sit down and we make a list of all our ideas about what a chicken is, like ultimate definitions of chickens there's gonna be differences and we can disagree about those not only in the list but in the perception like if you were to take psychedelics and somehow transport bodies you may realize man i thought i knew what a chicken was but i had no idea that you thought a chicken was this yeah exactly so this is just language is extremely tricky in this way. It's very relativistic in this way. And you can even change your own ideas of what a chicken is like. And in fact, you do that as you're doing science and as you're doing this philosophical work is that part of the problem here is that when you start off, you adopt all these labels. Where do they come from? You didn't invent them. You got them from indoctrination from your schooling. You never questioned what a chicken is. They just told you it was a chicken and you just accepted it.

Starting point is 01:49:28 Likewise, they never told you really what an atom or an electron is or energy is. You just accepted these just intuitively, had some intuitive vague sense. And then as you do the work, it gets refined. And then you change your idea like, oh, I thought energy was this and now it's this. And then, oh, no, I was wrong about that, too, and now it's this. And you keep expanding and refining your idea of energy. And the problem is that it's endless. You can do this forever, basically. And you're playing these games.

Starting point is 01:49:59 And, yeah, people use different definitions for different things. And so you have to take all that into account as you're listening to me. And also as you're thinking about your own definitions, and you have to also realize that maybe my definition of what love is, isn't right. And by me, I don't mean me. I mean you. So like, um, maybe Leo is wrong about his ideas of love, but maybe the way you define love, maybe there's a lot of fuzziness there and maybe it's not being defined very well. Uh, or maybe there's a lot of fuzziness there, and maybe it's not being defined very well, or maybe there's a misunderstanding there. I actually have a really good analogy that I invented. I'm writing a book. Is it about the Lego blocks?

Starting point is 01:50:35 No, it's a different one. Okay. We'll talk about the Lego blocks. So let's hear the- Yeah, okay. So this relates to the love question. All right, so imagine the following thought experiment. We take a small child, a baby. We build a special facility in which we're going to raise this child. The child will only live on this campus. Let's say it's a university campus. The child can only live there as a baby, and we will teach that child everything that, you know, it's like a lab experiment. We're going to teach him only the words we want him to know and only the concept we want him to know or her.

Starting point is 01:51:08 And so anyways, we have a little backyard area there where we have ducks. And we take the child out there every day and we show him duck, duck, duck, you know, these ducks. And when we do that, we point to the duck and we say energy, energy, energy. And every time he sees a duck, he associates that with energy. And then we have classrooms that we put him in and we talk about how energy works. We give him some equations for energy and we explain energy. But all the time we tell him that duck is energy and only duck is energy that's what that's what we teach him then what we do let's say he's 20 years old finally we let him out of this compound into the real world he goes to a real university and he goes to a physics classroom and he's sitting there in the you know physics 101 class and the professor is talking about how everything is energy the table is energy

Starting point is 01:52:08 the stars are energy the the light bulbs in the room are energy food is energy and the kid is sitting there and he's he's completely dumbfounded and he's he's furious at this professor like what kind of nonsense are you talking about? How can the table be energy? How can the stars be energy? How can light be energy? Only ducks are energy. Now, how do you train that person to have the proper concept of energy after 20 years of that brainwashing? So my claim is that this is exactly what has happened with love

Starting point is 01:52:47 we've been trained on what love is with pleasurable experiences that we've been getting and how adults around us have told us what is appropriate to love and what is not appropriate to love like it's okay to love bacon but it's wrong to love having sex with goats we've been trained this is part of our culture this is baked into us and now when someone like me comes along and says everything is love when i say the coffee table is love uh you look at that and you look at me and you say leo is fucking crazy now here is where i would say that we need a bit more sophistication with the language rather so there's like two points we can take it one can say one where we need a complete

Starting point is 01:53:36 dissolution of the language like language is actually holding us back and i'm inclined to agree and the other point is that our language is not articulate or delineated or demarcated enough and there are some arguments to be made there now one would be like let's talk about our friend wittgenstein he would say that language is simply use so when you say book the reason i understand it to be book is because we've used it in our culture to mean so and so and when this person has been told energy, it works for them in the previous, I believe it was a university in that example,

Starting point is 01:54:09 like a low-end university. And then the second end, the higher-end university, or whatever hierarchies we want to give it, the higher-end university, the more true university, the scientific university, energy was associated with atoms and so on.

Starting point is 01:54:23 Well, the point was that different words should have been used and that you can see the conflict because they're now being used differently. So rather than, I would just say, rather than saying you need to untrain people or disabuse them of their notions of love, I would say perhaps you just need to come up with a different word. Why call it bagaboo instead of love? No, that's precisely what my example is meant to disagree with and demonstrate why that's a bad idea. That there's something about the traditional word love that you're trying to retain. Because if it was completely independent, you wouldn't have any qualms calling it bagaboo. It's hard for me to explain why it's important. I mean, I get

Starting point is 01:55:16 the same argument. People tell me the same thing about God. They say, Leo, why do you call it God? It's so stupid. Why don't you just call it, like, nothingness? To make it more scientific and acceptable to atheists? You know atheists atheists will accept the that that reality is made of nothing atheists will accept that but they won't accept God Yeah, what's your answer to that? There's actually a deep problem the resistance to the fact the resistance to the use of the word God or love is itself the problem that needs to be tackled and

Starting point is 01:55:43 addressed head on. Because see, there's a reason why you're objecting to the use of the word love or God. It's because you're resisting it. You actually don't want to realize that everything is God or everything is love. You would want it to be called some other word. That would make it easy because then you can disconnect your direct experience with love with some just silly concept. You see, what needs to happen is that you need to recognize that the thing that you actually love in your life, let's say you love your wife. You need to recognize that that is an arbitrary bias.

Starting point is 01:56:18 Your love for your wife is as selective as it is to call a duck energy. You're missing the connection between the love for your wife. And the love for some child in Africa that you don't care about. Or the love for Hitler. Like in your mind these are disconnected things. And the point of calling it all love is because now it interconnects. In the same way that like why do we call everything in physics energy in a certain sense because it tells us that everything is interrelated and that everything can be converted into something else like your

Starting point is 01:56:55 body is energy when it dies it will turn into energy in the grass that will grow from your corpse and then that grass will be eaten by some cow and that will turn into energy in the cow. And then someone will eat that steak and get energy from the steak. And it's a, it's a cycle and it's all interconnected. And this is profoundly important for physics because it's the unity of all of physics and science is basically, you know, E equals MC squared. It's, it can all be converted and there's a conservation of energy that's going on well likewise when i say everything is love i'm trying to point you towards a profound realization of how love manifests in the universe and i can't do that if i call it bugaboo or whatever you wanted

Starting point is 01:57:37 me to call it i hear what you're saying as being as agreeing to what i just said because what i was saying before was that we have some ideas as to what love is. And then you have a refined version of what love is. But it bears some resemblance. And that's why you're trying to save. It's almost like you're trying to recover the word love. If the word love has been lost, in some sense, literally,

Starting point is 01:57:59 because we've forgotten that we're God in Spira's words. Same for God, by the way, and same for truth. All these words have been corrupted deeply. Love, truth, reality, all these words are very corrupted. So part of our process here is to rehabilitate these words and take them back and to purify them, to give people a proper understanding of these words. Could someone say that hate is what are these primitive components rather than love?

Starting point is 01:58:27 Could someone use the word hate? Like it's all made of hate. Yeah, I get that often. It's like people say, well, Leo, if everything is infinite love, why can't be infinite hate too? If God can be all loving, can't God be all hating? and the answer is no because the source of hate

Starting point is 01:58:51 itself, hate is a finite thing hate is a reaction you have to some aspect of reality you see some experience that you don't like and that's hate, it's a rejection of some aspect. So God can hate, of course.

Starting point is 01:59:07 That's what human hate is. But it's always going to be finite and limited. It's not going to be infinite. Hate can't be infinite. Let me see if there's a better way to say it. Because, look, you have to understand that here it gets really tricky because the notion of love,

Starting point is 01:59:24 see, again, love is, we have two notions of love. We have a relative notion and an absolute. If you're talking about the relative notion of love, which is what most humans talk about and what you're thinking right now, probably, then that is a duality between love and hate. That's the duality. And so in this sense, you can have love and hate and they can play with each other, whatever. They can be in different degrees. But what I'm talking about is I'm talking about absolute love.

Starting point is 01:59:46 Absolute love is a love so deep that it incorporates even hate. So what you call hate, I would call absolute love. It's incorporated. Like that yin-yang. So hate is like the black part of the yin-yang. Relative love is like the white part of the yin-yang.

Starting point is 02:00:04 And then what I call absolute love is the entire white part of the yin yang and then what i call absolute love is the entire yin yang man there's such there's so many great analogies here to math there's something called item potence yeah speaking speaking of i just speaking of math you know i'm actually not very good at math um um and i don't really enjoy doing it but um i i watched a movie yesterday. I found this movie by the title called The Man Who Knew Infinity. It's actually a movie. I'll be posting it on my blog over the next few weeks,

Starting point is 02:00:34 but it was about Ramanujan. You know this guy, this brilliant Indian math prodigy who died when he was really young, but the story with him goes is that he had this divine connection to his God, and God was delivering these amazing mathematical proofs to him, and theorems and stuff. And it's called

Starting point is 02:00:53 The Man Who Knew Infinity, which is exactly correct. Yeah. Let's move on to free will. How can it... Firstly, why don't you explain your ideas to free will? Do we have free will or not? It's very tricky. Because again, you have to notice that every question, so notice this meta issue, every question you have about existence is going to be corrupted with a sort of duality. So already, when you say free will, what's that in opposition to? Determinism or non-free will, right?

Starting point is 02:01:30 And so you should notice that that itself is already an imagined distinction, which is already problematic. So if you think it's going to be one or the other, you're probably going to be wrong, right? In general, here's a little simple way for you to avoid a lot of confusion and problems in this quest to understand nature, is that any time you find a duality and then you

Starting point is 02:01:52 side with only one half of that duality, you can be sure you're going to be ultimately wrong. Because nature has to incorporate both sides of the duality. For example, consider science. You have science on the one hand, and then you have pseudoscience on the otherity. For example, consider science. You have science on the one hand, and then you have pseudoscience on the other hand. Everything that's not science, you might say. If you think that science is where all the truth is, and that there's no more truth to be found in pseudoscience, you can be sure you're wrong.

Starting point is 02:02:19 On the other hand, if you think all the truth is going to be found in pseudoscience and not in science, you're also wrong. It's going to have to somehow incorporate both because both are aspects of infinite consciousness. Consciousness can't imagine both and therefore both have to be part of it. But anyway, so back to the free will issue. Perhaps you should define free will, whether or not you're going to say it exists or not. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:02:46 How should I phrase this? It's relative. So it depends on what perspective you're looking at it from. So I can't give you a, well, I can give you an absolute answer, but the absolute answer is not going to be something you like. And that itself, you can consider sort of a perspective. So basically let's say that you're at the level of ordinary human consciousness. If you're at the level of ordinary human consciousness, that's one situation. We can give an answer for that. And then let's say you're at the level of God consciousness, infinitely conscious. That'll be a totally different answer. So first I'll start with the God consciousness.

Starting point is 02:03:17 Great. If you become infinitely conscious, what you will realize is that what God is, God is an infinite mind. It's a mind that is completely free of any restrictions upon itself. And the reason that is, is because it's a singular mind, therefore there is nothing that could restrict this mind in any way. Because every restriction upon this mind would have to be imagined in order to exist. You see, the reason God is omnipotent or has infinite power can literally create anything.

Starting point is 02:03:49 God can imagine an entire planet out of thin air. Requires no energy, has no cost, no physical limitations, no logical limitations. There are absolutely no limitations. And the reason that can be is because what would limit God? I mean, like, the question is more like uh how would this infinite mind be limited what would limit it and and then you have to think about that and you have to say well something outside of itself has to limit it but how can there be something outside of itself if it's infinite if it's infinite there literally can't

Starting point is 02:04:22 be anything outside of itself therefore it has no limits literally any limit it has is imagined by itself so god can have limits but those limits have to be self-imposed through its own imagination therefore god has to trick itself in order to limit itself that's why self-deception is so important because if god is not deceiving itself then it's omnipotent then it's unlimited i don't understand that part but do you mind okay i'll make a note on that because i would like yeah we can come back there's a lot more to say about that limitation implies self-deception or is equivalent to right right okay so think about this way look if imagine imagine you have all imagine you have no limitations whatsoever you

Starting point is 02:05:08 can literally spawn things into existence by thinking them a couch a chair whatever you want so uh imagine if you let's just assume you have that power so now ask yourself this question do i have the power to surrender this power if god is all powerful this least so interesting paradox if god if god is all powerful can god create a rock that he himself cannot lift is it possible for God to not be God? Something less than God. And the answer turns out to be yes, but only by deceiving himself. Not in actuality, but through a deception, through an illusion. So he has to fool himself into thinking that he's not God.

Starting point is 02:06:05 Then, like for example, if he imagines that, if God imagines, so how would God remove all his powers? He would imagine that he was a human born on a rock circling around the sun with logical laws and physical laws and pain and pleasure and all these things and fear and all these things that need to be avoided, all these predators and animals, all these dangers.

Starting point is 02:06:26 And then, you know, when he imagines himself in this finite body, this finite body is not infinite. This finite body cannot do many things. This finite body can only lift rocks up to a certain size. You cannot lift a two-ton rock with your body. But if you had a bigger body, you could maybe lift a two-ton rock with your body. But if you had a bigger body, you could maybe lift a two-ton rock. But then you couldn't lift a 50-ton rock.

Starting point is 02:06:51 So see, by the fact that you have a finite body, your powers are limited. So that's why self-deception is so crucial. So at the highest level, since you're completely unlimited, literally, and God is consciousness, it's an infinite intellect. So this infinite intellect can literally imagine whatever it wants and it is using its will to do so. So literally God can will anything it wants into existence, but there's a catch. And the catch is because at that level,

Starting point is 02:07:22 God is completely infinite, unlimited, it's completely selfless. It has no sense of self. At all. If it has no sense of self, that means it has no capacity to do anything selfish. This is why God is absolutely good. It's absolutely good because it's absolutely selfless. If it's absolutely selfless. If it's absolutely selfless, imagine this. Imagine if you had

Starting point is 02:07:47 all the power in the universe. You could create anything. And you were completely selfless. What would you create? Imagine if you could will anything into existence. Literally, you will it, and you will get it. Like, if you will to have the biggest house in the world, you can have it. if you will to have um uh the biggest house in the world you can have it if you

Starting point is 02:08:07 will to have sex with whoever you want you can have it if you will to have beautiful children you can have them instantly what would you will for i can't i can't imagine what it would be like to be completely selfless because then and and create at the same time because to create i would have to imply a bias somewhere and if i'm saying that i'm unbiased i don't know how i would choose a point so let's say let's imagine that's good that's good that's well let's imagine i said i would create a tree well why would i create a tree and not a microphone okay now okay now keep going keep going yeah that's that see well you you're you're about to answer how all of creation was created do you want to know why the entire universe exists sure the entire physical what we think of as a physical universe or the

Starting point is 02:08:58 entire universe with a capital u as in all that. Yeah, both, both. Okay, right, let's hear it. Or even anything. Sure, sure, sure, I would like to know. How could anything, so I mean, isn't that the ultimate question that you want to know? I mean, if your toe cannot explain why anything exists and why it must exist, then you really haven't answered anything.

Starting point is 02:09:23 Your toe is not a toe right i mean i don't know i don't know about that i mean because it depends on the definition of theory of everything some people take it to mean like gravity unified with gravity unified with well but everything you're trying to explain where everything came from you have to explain where everything came from yeah yeah yeah the reason why i'm saying i don't know about that is because it seems like there will always be parts of reality that I will not know. Okay.

Starting point is 02:09:51 That's correct from your point of view. But now, notice what happened. Now a possibility has been opened in your mind that you could know. Open your mind to the possibility and take this possibility seriously that you can actually reach a point where you will know everything does that happen upon death well that's a secondary question let's let's let's just tackle one thing at a time the reason

Starting point is 02:10:18 why i say that briefly is because in some or many religions as as soon as you die, even in a secular place, a secular religion, let's say, of Pixar in the movie Soul, I believe it's called Soul. Okay. So even in there, it seems like what death is, is unity with God.

Starting point is 02:10:36 Well, that's basically correct. Yeah. So in some sense, when you die, you being the self, when the self dies, you become unified with God and God is all that there is and god is omniscient and so in some sense the the quest for a toll is futile in a living

Starting point is 02:10:52 being as far as i can conceptualize what a living differentiated being is like a self so then you're saying well kurt imagine you could know everything. Right. Okay, so please continue. Well, but are you open to the possibility that there... I'm not even imagining... I'm not asking you to imagine you know everything. I'm just asking you, are you open to the possibility where you could know everything? Yeah. Is that possible? Or do you believe that's not possible?

Starting point is 02:11:20 Because a lot of scientists and academics and such, they will literally tell you that's not possible. possible because a lot of a lot of scientists and academics and such they will literally tell you that's not possible well i see it as impossible from certain perspectives like if you believe yourself in the materialist sense to be can can you do it can you do it i'm asking you very personally can do you believe in your lifetime in this lifetime you will do it no right now i would say i believe no okay well then notice that if you believe that, then that just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. How can it ever happen if you already believe it's impossible? In the same way that, for example, if I said I believe it's not possible to build a vehicle that travels faster than 100,000 miles an hour, that's it.

Starting point is 02:12:03 Then it's literally, even if it's possible, I won't ever build that vehicle. I don't know about that. And the reason is that there are plenty of surprises that happen. People surprise themselves all the time. They thought, oh, I never thought I could run a marathon. And then I did. Or I never thought I could do so-and-so. And then I did.

Starting point is 02:12:19 Or I never thought so-and-so was possible. But then it was. Well, they have to change their mind, of course. Yeah, you can change your mind. I mean, you see the problem here is that what you're saying while you believe it's not possible it's from your point of view it's not possible because as soon as you believed it in the examples that i just gave you changed your mind so no longer so with a correct statement that i said the, to amend my statement more specifically, it would be that previously you believed it was not possible

Starting point is 02:12:49 after a certain point, let's say with your eyes, you saw, you saw a platypus and you never thought mammals could be like that. You've changed your beliefs. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And also, and also notice, um, usually to verify something like that that or to change your mind requires an investment, a significant investment of resources. So for example, let's say we were talking about a skeptic who never lived in Australia and we were trying to tell him that a platypus exists. There's such a thing as a platypus. And he says, no, there isn't. Prove it to me. And we show him photographs and videos and he says, no, those are just doctors. You just Photoshop those. to me and we show him photographs and videos and he says, no, those are just doctors. You just Photoshop those. That's like you took a duck's head and you put it on a beaver and that this stupid Photoshop, obviously it's Photoshop. And we show him a video and he says, oh, well, they have deep fake videos of anything nowadays. He said, that's a 3D generated, you know, computer generated thing. You know, they, I've seen Jurassic Park. They can make dinosaurs. I mean, they've made monsters in movies. So of course, platypus, you can make that into a video, but it doesn't really exist. And we say, okay, but are you open to a platypus

Starting point is 02:13:50 existing? And he says, no, it's too ridiculous. I'm not even open to it. It's just preposterous on its face. Well, we would say, okay, but are you open to actually traveling to Australia to hunting down this, this platypus? They live there in the rivers, in the ponds, you can find one. And he says, no, why should I travel to Australia? That would be a waste of my money. And in a certain sense, he's right. I mean, like from his point of view, if this is a preposterous thing, why invest energy into it to chase it down? It takes a lot of time, energy to fly to Australia, go into the ponds and look for this platypus. He has to be motivated. He has to be motivated. Yeah, you have to be motivated to do it. And all science works this way. I mean, look,

Starting point is 02:14:35 the Large Hadron Collider that they built cost like $10 billion, I don't know, $10 billion or something to build. All of that was done to try to prove the existence of some hypothetical Higgs boson particle that may or may not have existed. That's 10 fucking billion dollars, 10 years of building this thing, hundreds of scientists involved, hundreds of engineers, hundreds of laborers. That was very risky and there was no guarantee that it was going to produce any kind of truthful result. It could have just been a waste of money. And so part of what it means to be a truth seeker is that you're willing to actually invest energy, which is why what you're doing is so good

Starting point is 02:15:15 is because I can tell you're preparing for these interviews. You're researching, you're reading, you're studying videos, you're being open-minded, you're actually putting your own ass on the line. You're losing sleep over this. And that's exactly what it takes. You can't reach the truth. You can't reach God and love and all these things.

Starting point is 02:15:33 You can't reach the ultimate toe by just sitting around and navel-gazing and just kind of doing what's comfortable for you. Because the truth may not be comfortable. Oh, that's definitely true, man. If anything, it's true. That's true. Do you think... See, I don't know if I can... To me, truth is so not trivial.

Starting point is 02:15:59 Some people think of it as simply statements that need to be accepted, written propositions. But the truth can be so harsh and so... We got to talk about two levels of truth, too. Make a note of that. But before we get there, let me finish my thoughts. We have so much to talk about.

Starting point is 02:16:17 Yeah. Oh, yeah. We haven't even touched on self-deception limitation. Okay. We can talk for a week. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, we can leave some of these for future times.

Starting point is 02:16:26 And people who are watching, if you would like to see a second part, please let us know. And we have still hours to talk, so we can pace this out. Anyways, but actually, let's pause right here for a second, because I want to restart my camera, just so that we're safe with the file. Go ahead. All right. Oh, no, I can feel you've prepared. How?

Starting point is 02:17:11 Well, first of all, I can feel your authenticity, so i can trust your words to a certain degree but also just like i mean it's just obvious from your work like with chris langan you were asking very technical questions about this term and that fucking nerdy term that he used and so just even the fact even the fact that you care just even the questions you kind of ask already show the level of interest you have and all right let's get to this if you can remember where you were yeah so so yeah i remember exactly where we were so we were talking about um uh oh yeah i remember so the question was like if you were infinitely selfless and powerful what would you create and you and you said i don't really know like why would i create maybe why would i be biased towards creating a tree or something else, right? That's what you said. And then I told you that here now we're going to answer the origin of all of existence.

Starting point is 02:17:54 Right, right. Why anything exists. Okay, so here's why. So look, if you're all powerful and you're all loving and you're completely selfless, and you can create absolutely anything just by willing into existence, what you would create, and you're completely unbiased, you're right about that, you're completely unbiased, what you would create is absolutely everything. every possible form, every possible being, every possible thing that could be imagined you imagine. And why, and why, and look, but why do you do that? So that you can give others a sense of the beauty and love that you are.

Starting point is 02:18:49 So the entire point of God's creation is to create finite forms of itself so that those forms can then reunite back with itself to realize what it is, which is infinite goodness. So it's an infinite sharing of goodness. Why does it create all possibilities? Look at what's really going on. The genius of what's going on. God has infinite goodness, but because it is one, it has no one to share the infinite goodness with. Who would you share it with?

Starting point is 02:19:15 There's nobody else but you. So what you do is you deceive yourself to create an other who you could give that gift to. The gift of yourself, of God. The highest gift in the universe is the realization that you are God. But you can't share that gift with anybody. I can't share that gift with you until you realize that you're me. The realization that you're me is the gift I'm trying to give you. Why does God care about sharing? Because embedded in that is the valuing of sharing. It's love.

Starting point is 02:19:52 Right. Why do you love? Why do you give your wife a present on Christmas? You're you're you are literally sharing. You literally have chosen to share your life with your wife. Why? you literally have chosen to share your life with your wife why you're asking me a question about motivations i don't know i could just give you a superficial answer like why i think not it may not be why i do it but why i think i may do it i'm not interested in those the answer is love it's very simple the answer is love all your motivations boil down to variations of degrees of love that are that are filtered through your mind let me tell you what

Starting point is 02:20:34 occurs to me so one we said god is not self-conscious because there is no self to god in the right there's no self to god before god creates a multiplicity it god god is self god is infinite self god is all possible selves so isness is prior to self-reflection in this case so So God can self-reflect, of course. God is not. But self-reflection is already a dualistic dynamic, you see, because there has to be a self and then a reflection that you're reflecting off of. So God is prior to God is just self, infinite self. And then it can also reflect in infinite ways.

Starting point is 02:21:20 Is it okay if I tell you just rapid fire some thoughts that occur to me? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, sure. So, at first, it's like God is selfless because God doesn't have a conception of self. Okay, so then God creates infinite types of selves. But then, and in order to share. But then, I'm curious. Number one, why is it in order to share?

Starting point is 02:21:40 Like, okay, well, God is made of love. Okay, but God is not aware of God. So, God is not aware of sharing being a preeminent factor of himself or itself uh love is so love is is such a metaphysically profound notion that it's prior to i'm a little bit anthropomorphizing god here so we have to be a little bit careful so So the notion of like God sharing, it makes sense from a human perspective. From a more like if you want to be really strict about it, strictly speaking, love just is an endless flowering of creativity. So literally what God is is creativity. It just endlessly creates because that's what love is. creates because that's what love is. You see, there's such a profound unity between goodness,

Starting point is 02:22:33 love, omnipotence, intelligence, consciousness, oneness, and creativity that literally, and love is that what it means to be infinite love is to just spontaneously create everything that could possibly exist. That's what love is. It's not just something love does. It's what love is. You can't be love unless you're everything. Love is everything. Two thoughts that occur to me right now. I've always found, probably you the same as when you were, when you would consider yourself to be someone who was planning to be a scientist. I've always found the multiverse idea and the anthropomorph sorry the the universe that uh i forget the type of oh i'm forgetting the name of it but there's a why are the physical laws the way that they are because they're fine-tuned because there are multiple universes and okay i forget oh yeah yeah anthropic is that is that the anthropic principle or something always found those to be

Starting point is 02:23:24 lacking because they they're just they're non-explanations you're asking well why is it so and so the answer is because it's everything at the same time okay sure i don't know how to i don't know how to work with that i don't know how to use that well that okay so that so that's one thought one thought like it seems to me to be the easy way out, even if it's true. It could be. Absolutely. Everything you say could be 100% correct. But I find it to be somewhat of an easy way out. And then number two, it's interesting that creation is so tied to love.

Starting point is 02:23:58 So love to me is about unifying. But creation to me seems to me to be about distinction. If anything, destruction would be closer to unifying because as you destruct as you destroy you reduce down to zero which is the same but as you create you proliferate good okay um so now notice the following what is creation and destruction? Duality. In fact, this is a classic duality of the yin and the yang. So God has both aspects. You actually, what you should

Starting point is 02:24:32 notice is that you actually, you can't create without destroying. Because like, let's say you have one sheet of paper on which to draw. You're going to draw some painting. Let's say you have an etch-A-Sketch. You draw on the Etch-A-Sketch,

Starting point is 02:24:47 and then you got your sand painting, but now you want to paint something else. Well, you got to shake the Etch-A-Sketch, destroy all this stuff, and then you can paint some more. So the two are intimately tied together. I mean, it's a circle of life if you want to think about it that way.

Starting point is 02:25:03 Like, you can't have... It's sort of like you're saying, well, Leo, isn't life good but death bad? This is a very naive way of thinking about it because if you go and actually look at how ecosystems work in nature, you realize quickly that the only reason you can have life is because of death. It's because the

Starting point is 02:25:19 gazelle died that there could be baby lions and because of the baby lions, some of them die and then because of that there could be baby lions and because of the baby lions, uh, you know, some of them die. And then because of that, there can be worms. And because of worms, there can be grass. And because of grass,

Starting point is 02:25:29 there can be gazelles. And because of gazelles, there can be more baby lions. And so it goes around in a circle forever. So it's both. I see it as being, yeah, I also,

Starting point is 02:25:38 I shouldn't have a naive point of view to think of death as evil. And then, and then birth is necessarily good, but I also don't see it as i see it as like in our world everything virtually everything in fact i can't think of a counter example everything that we think of good is predicated on something that we would think of as evil let's say you think in those domains already good and evil in the sense that well what do you think is good you think that to give an example of buying a gift for your wife, well, how was that gift made? It probably was predicated on some suffering of some children in some faraway land.

Starting point is 02:26:11 And even if it wasn't there, well, you produced some emissions that weren't good for so-and-so creatures. And in some sense, that's evil. In some sense, it's like every act, every single act, me talking is destroying some cellular creatures exactly of course yeah yeah just for you to be alive you have to be like killing viruses and bacteria in your body every day privilege yours whatever your quote-unquote means right over theirs okay i i understand that i though i don't see a metaphysical necessity in the same way that you do and the reason is the reason is like let's imagine i keep going back to math but let's imagine the natural numbers before they become

Starting point is 02:26:51 the natural numbers so you start with the empty set and you call that zero and then you apply a successor function you get one you don't destroy zero and then you apply a successor function you get two while retaining zero one and two you apply a successor function you get zero one two three and that's i would consider to be an act of creation but i don't see an act of destruction while retaining 0, 1, and 2. You apply a successor function, you get 0, 1, 2, 3. And that I would consider to be an act of creation. But I don't see an act of destruction in that creation right there. Yeah, so there's some profound things that could be said about that. First of all, all of the creation that we know as humans is all finite creation. So you're really just talking about finitude.

Starting point is 02:27:26 The fact that everything you create is going to be finite. It's not going to be infinite. And that's right. Every finite thing has limits. That's what it means to be finite, is to have a limit. And the only unlimited thing is completely indistinct. So every distinction that you imagine is going to be finite. For example, in your

Starting point is 02:27:42 mind, if you're imagining an elephant, there's an elephant. Now for you to imagine a giraffe, you have to let go of the element, imagine a giraffe. And so, literally, for your thoughts to work, you have to destroy and let go of all thoughts. And so it is with all form. Every finite thing interferes with the existence. So, for example, here's the profound way to think about it. Let's say you have a coffee table. For that coffee table to be a coffee table, it has to not be a dining table, not be a chair, not be a chicken, not be your wife, not be whatever.

Starting point is 02:28:21 It has to be that. And by being finite, it excludes all other possibilities. That's literally what a chair or a coffee table is. It's the exclusion of every possibility other than itself, as it is in its finite form. Did you happen to watch the interview that I had with this guy named Anthony Metivier? So he's a memory champion. He's a memory champion who says that memory is intimately tied with consciousness. And to me, I don't, I don't, okay, well, to me, at least previous to about a few seconds ago, I thought that the memory is intimately tied with consciousness and to me i don't i don't okay well to me of course at least previous to about a few seconds ago i thought that the memory is almost irrelevant to consciousness but then what you said to me right now it reminds me of working memory because let's imagine that the average person has a working memory of seven

Starting point is 02:28:58 entities so for you to imagine something new you have to replace one of those seven with something else you don't have infinite working memory in other words. But even if you did it's still a problem. Imagine you have infinite memory. Right? You have infinite memory. Even if you let's say every memory is just like a

Starting point is 02:29:22 slot you have like a little box you can put an item in. Even if you put one item into that box, that space has been filled by that item and not by some other item. That's a finite thing. You've actually created a limit when you did that. Let's say you could have put a frog in your memory,

Starting point is 02:29:38 or a giraffe, or an elephant, but you only put one, not all of them. Otherwise, you'd have a superposition, you see? If you're talking about, like, a quantum memory, imagine a memory slot where you can stick multiple items into the same memory slot over top of themselves, and then you'd get a superposition. And if you put every possible item into that memory slot,

Starting point is 02:29:58 you would literally get infinity or nothingness in that memory slot because it would all superimpose into nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You yeah yeah yeah it's extremely interesting you know okay keep going so look look think about it like this so imagine let's take the domain of all animals all possible animals that could exist ever um so let's take a giraffe a frog an elephant and so forth what happens what happens if we if we literally merge a giraffe and an elephant and a frog and a dinosaur all literally into themselves into a perfect superposition of all possible animals what would you have what would that my what would that look like okay but yeah continue she she she'd be in there somewhere yeah where are you going with this so what do you think that looks like i'm just trying to get you to picture i have no clue i

Starting point is 02:30:53 imagine it looks like a blur well it would it would just be a variable it'd be like x right not your x but just x the The mathematical variable x. Okay, yes, continue. So like, what is a variable? A variable is just, it's like a placeholder that says that literally anything can go in that place. We haven't defined, it's undefined. But that's literally what nothingness is or infinity.

Starting point is 02:31:19 Infinity is literally, it can be anything but we haven't defined what it is yet. It's undefined. And then as soon as we define it or draw a distinction, that becomes whatever we define it to be, whatever we imagine it to be. That's what imagination is. Are there, like, I'm going to ask you a question about paradoxes. And I imagine you'd say, well, there are paradoxes because, see, this is why I call it the easy way out.

Starting point is 02:31:44 Not that that makes it untrue. I why I call it the easy way out. Not that that makes it untrue. I just see it as the easy way out. And maybe the easiest way out is the truthful path. I don't think that's necessarily true, but it may be true. There are paradoxes with thinking of the universe as all that could be. Because you get into paradoxes of sets of all sets and so on. So, for example. Yeah, of course.

Starting point is 02:32:08 That's a feature feature not a bug i think i heard you say that even if there are multiverses let's just call it capital u universe because you just collect them all okay well if god can create everything then i don't see why god can't create universes that are built with properties in them so defined by property so what if a universe was defined by the property so there's a universe it doesn't really just let me finish there's a universe out there it can't we can't imagine it precisely it doesn't look like a physical universe but that's fine god can do whatever you like this universe is defined by the property that this universe, when placed in collection with other universes, negates those other universes.

Starting point is 02:32:52 Okay? So now we say, okay, well, let's collect them all into this big U. Well, you've negated some of them now. So have you truly collected all your universes? Can you truly say that there exists capital U universe? universes can you truly say that there exists capital u universe okay so this this is good this leads us to a very profound question that i want to kind of guide you through so let me ask you this this will indirectly answer your question um so don't worry so let me ask you this do you do are you conscious of why reality has to be one

Starting point is 02:33:27 don't worry so let me ask you this do you do are you conscious of why reality has to be one no okay so so let's go you want to go through an exercise to help you to grasp this spirean okay yeah because yeah we got to do a little bit of exercise here because this is all just mental masturbation, basically, up to this point. So, why must reality be one and not anything more than that? Think of reality as more than one. Okay. Okay. Try to do it. Okay.

Starting point is 02:34:00 Okay. Try to do it. Okay. But the notion of reality, it has to be an elastic notion because everything real has to be inside the notion of reality, right? So my question is, so let's say you're imagining two realities, right? So you have reality A and reality B. Okay. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:34:18 Next to each other. All right. So is A the real reality or is B the reality? Which one? Choose one. Or are you going to reality or is B the reality? Which one? Choose one. Or are you going to say both of them are reality? Okay, so if A and B are both reality, then what's real is that you've got both. Yep.

Starting point is 02:34:40 And that's reality. That's reality. Right? So, now, that's one. So, two become one. By the fact that they're both real or are you saying one of them's not real yeah and right okay okay so let's say so let's say they are both real so then you can you see how that's one reality uh-huh yeah because is the separation between them real what is separating one reality a from b what is the line between them is that line real yes

Starting point is 02:35:12 okay so then so then literally this a is literally fused with this b by the real line uh-huh it's connected right Or are you saying they're separated? Let's take the case where they're separated. Let's say we have reality A, and then B is not real. Well, what does it mean to say that B is not real? It means that there's a line between A and B, which is separating real from unreal. I don't know about that. Right?

Starting point is 02:35:44 Well, how can A not be... If there's no line between them, then isn't B A? I don't see that as necessarily being the case. I don't know. I know this is said quite frequently, but to me, these are again linguistic tricks. Like, look, we can't have what's...

Starting point is 02:35:59 Here's one. The universe can't be spatially expanding, because what is it expanding into? Well, that doesn't have a notion of intrinsic geometry. Or we can't have what's infinite like we talked about. Because if you're infinite, there's nothing outside it. Well, obviously, you can cross product two infinities. Okay. So there's that.

Starting point is 02:36:18 I don't see that for there to the distinction between real and then unreal as having some border i don't know if the proper conceptualization is a border but but but but what distinguishes real from unreal i don't know if i don't well if if you become conscious of it deeply you'd have to sit there for years yeah or a year meditation until event until eventually eventually one deep dose will get you to realize that actually there cannot be a boundary between the real and the unreal and when that happens that's when your mind literally becomes infinite because you realize that all of these there needs to be boundaries but you can't have something you can't have something um you can't have something outside of reality. I mean, Chris Langan actually gave a good

Starting point is 02:37:07 explanation of this early in your episode with him, is that, yeah, he basically, what you need to realize is that the notion of reality is an ever-elastic notion. So even if you say something is unreal, are you saying that unreality is real? something is unreal, are you saying that unreality is real? Let's say we have A and B. Let's forget about the boundary between them. Let's just say we have A and B. A is real, B is unreal. So is the unreality of B,

Starting point is 02:37:36 is that real? Right, yeah, it is. That would be the case, yeah. Well, if it is, then it's real. Then we have a connection between the two well right and if it's unreal if it's unreal then it's nothing there's nothing there if it's unreal it doesn't exist but by definition exists non-existence cannot exist words that have these the how that are laden with connotations that aren't exactly precise,

Starting point is 02:38:05 and so we can get... Yeah, I understand your concern. Then there's a connection between the two. I'm not precisely sure it's the same connection, as in you have a box connected by a string to another box. Of course it's not the same, but... Yeah, I understand. The bottom line I'm telling you is that it's more than just wordplay.

Starting point is 02:38:30 Some of this stuff might sound like word games, but it's more than that. It's way more than that. It's very actually important for you guys, who are trying to build your toes, to actually have a direct consciousness of the fact that reality cannot be anything but one if you think it can be if i think you can have two realities something has those two realities have to be within something what if they say like i understand that my reality can't be anything more than one in the rupert's byrian sense of where what the question where is the edge of your awareness where is the where does your experience end and then and then you say well my experience i can't see an edge to it whatever edge means i can't see it but that doesn't mean that edges don't exist it just

Starting point is 02:39:19 means that as far as i know edges don't exist As far as I can even conceptualize. Right, okay, now... Right, but now what I'm telling you is that you're way beyond concept here. Imagine that you can go beyond your concepts and that you can actually see infinitely. Imagine if you could literally see to the outer edges of the entire universe. You saw everything that could ever possibly be

Starting point is 02:39:40 and you saw it all at once. Now, if you could see all that, would there be anything that you couldn't see well i'll tell you what i can't see is what is unseen what's unseen can't be seen i don't know about that i i can understand that see we're getting this is such a great question like what the heck does it mean to exist and i'm not going to defend like you know me i'm not going to defend a physicalist. I don't even think that that holds water because, like, what the heck does it mean to exist?

Starting point is 02:40:10 But. And you can't answer that. If you answer that, that would be awakening. So there is. So a lot of people think that, well, well, this is just a philosophical question. No one will ever know. No, that's wrong. You can definitively know what existence is.

Starting point is 02:40:26 I'm conscious of existence right now. I know exactly what it is. You can become conscious of it. You're conscious of a part of existence, I would say that. Now, you're saying, well, hey, man. No, I'm not talking about the forms of existence. I'm saying existence itself. What does it mean to exist?

Starting point is 02:40:42 I'm not talking about the forms of it. I'm saying existence itself. What does it mean to exist? Not as a particular thing, but just existence as itself. What is existence? Right, right. You can become conscious of that. And if you do, that non-existence isn't a thing at all it's not

Starting point is 02:41:12 possible only existence existence is an absolute see you're thinking that some things can exist some things can't exist no there can only be existence when you're thinking of non-existence that's you imagining exist something that it's a concept see what you're doing is you're creating a concept of non-existence and that exists but as a concept and you're not conscious that it's a concept rather than existence so there's a there's a very sneaky game that your mind is playing in order to keep constructing these imaginary concepts like non-existence or something beyond the infinite and so forth.

Starting point is 02:41:54 So these are actually self-deceptions that you can penetrate through, for example, if you do a meditation practice. You'll actually notice these are thoughts. Non-existence is a thought. Not anything real. It's a thought. Well, I mean, a thought is Non-existence is a thought. Not anything real. It's a thought. Well, I mean, a thought is real, but it's a thought.

Starting point is 02:42:09 Just a thought. And same thing for something beyond infinity. That's a thought that is not actually beyond infinity. Because, look, infinity includes thoughts of things beyond infinity. But that's part of infinity you're assuming that's not part of infinity but it is part of infinity because infinity is infinite and it's endless and it's see it's an ever elastic thing whatever you think it's not it encompasses and includes that so you can't ever defeat it i would urge you to change the word infinity to all encompassing particularly because of what we talked about earlier.

Starting point is 02:42:47 What you truly mean when you say infinite is all-encompassing. Well, when you realize that you are infinity, you'll come back and we'll talk and then you'll laugh. We'll laugh together at why I said it's infinity. Let's try this here. Let's try a little exercise here. So look, the problems of the mind, the mind goes down all these rabbit, intellectual rabbit holes forever. All this philosophy and stuff, you're lost in a labyrinth of thinking. So look, ask yourself this. Do you realize how profound it is that anything at all exists? Are you conscious of that?

Starting point is 02:43:40 Like right now, try to become, like look at your hands and try to just be conscious for a second that it's just, it's utterly astounding that they exist right now. Like it's astounding. And by the way, can you become conscious, at least try, that these are the hands of God? So, remove your idea that you're a human as you're looking at your hands. Strip away the idea that you're a human. Strip away the idea that there's anything

Starting point is 02:43:57 that these hands are made of atoms. So, remove the idea of atoms. Remove the idea of mathematics. Can I remove the idea of God? And physics. As well, or no? Yes, remove the idea of atoms remove the idea of mathematics remove the idea of god and physics as well or no yes remove the yes yes throw away the idea of god um and throw away the idea that that this is a lit that these hands are a living being part of a living being right and just look at these hands as though you're seeing them for the first time. They're not even hands. And remove the idea of hands.

Starting point is 02:44:26 First time. Or no. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, of course. So almost like raw sensory experience is what you're trying to get me? Okay.

Starting point is 02:44:35 Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Raw sensory experience. So now what I want you to notice is that, so here's a definition of what truth is. This is absolute truth. Your hands, what you're conscious of right now, first of all, notice that you're conscious of these hands. These

Starting point is 02:44:49 hands are literally consciousness. This is what consciousness is. Do not think. Just look at these hands. This is consciousness. It seems mysterious. That's not a mistake. It's supposed to be mysterious. So let it be mysterious that's not a mistake it's supposed to be mysterious

Starting point is 02:45:06 so let it be mysterious let it awe you a little bit like it's awesome that something here exists and you're not sure what it is you don't know what it is but you know it's here it exists so these hands are literally you don't know what it is, but you know it's here. It exists.

Starting point is 02:45:30 So these hands are literally consciousness. They are literally existence itself. They are literally absolute. They absolutely exist. They cannot not exist. They're right here. They are not a function of any kind of brain or neurons or anything else. They're right here.

Starting point is 02:45:58 And these hands are literally God. Infinity. God. literally infinity God you are literally the universe being itself. The universe is these hands. The universe is not some bubble out there somewhere beyond the stars. The universe is these hands. That's what the universe is.

Starting point is 02:46:38 In this particular moment. It can be other things, but this is what it is right now and there is no time these hands exist outside of time there is no time and there is no space in which these hands exist this is prior to space you're throwing away the ideas of space and time

Starting point is 02:47:03 and matter, there is no matter these hands are not made out of matter Prior to space. You're throwing away the ideas of space and time. And matter. There is no matter. These hands are not made out of matter. Also. These hands are not an experience. That you are having. These hands exist prior even to experience. Because experience assumes.

Starting point is 02:47:23 Some sort of ego self. Looking at the hands. These hands are absolute truth. They're absolutely true, and there's no way they cannot be anything but absolutely true. It's completely inevitable. There's no possibility of doubt or error when you are this conscious of your hands. You're so conscious that you're too conscious to have doubt because you realize that doubt is just thought.

Starting point is 02:48:15 And your hands, they are more fundamental than any thought. Notice that your thoughts do not change the existence of your hands. No matter how much you doubt your hand, your hand will be there prior to all thought. You can doubt your hand as much as you want, but here it is. It's a hand. You can even tell yourself that this

Starting point is 02:48:44 hand is simulated by some kind of computer or whatever and none of that matters because the absolute truth is that this hand is right here right now qualia is absolute truth and that's all that meditation is is what you're doing right now Thank you. All right. all right okay tell me tell me yes or well how did that feel it's interesting it's i had to it's strange because I have to tell myself... I have to talk to myself, but then make sure that I'm not talking to myself. So, for example, when you said, look at your hands, I imagine at the same time, I also have to dissolve what a hand is.

Starting point is 02:50:38 Because to look at my hands implies that there's something that's not my hands. So I was just trying to look at sensory experience at the same all just sensory experiences raws can be yeah that's good yeah it's it you're gonna have monkey mind and and unconsciously i'm relating what you're saying to what other people say and you also say what spurs some interesting connections such as the relationship between qualia and all that there is or absolute truth or god the relationship between that because there's oblo not obviously but there's somewhat obviously relationship between

Starting point is 02:51:25 consciousness and god and time as well which is something else i'm exploring i also wonder how much consciousness depends on time consciousness does not depend on time time is imagined by consciousness but but i don't know i know that that's the traditional view, but I'm wondering how intricately is time tied to consciousness. Now, it seems to be obviously tied in the sense that people like Eckhart Tolle would say there's the now, which is somewhat a temporal aspect, even though it's atemporal. Even though it's atemporal. No. No. The now.

Starting point is 02:52:07 What Eckhart Tolle means by now is he means absolute now. This. The absolute. This is the absolute. Everything you see around you is absolute truth. So sometimes people think that when I talk about absolute truth, I'm talking about some sort of far off realm behind the curtain of the universe somewhere behind the scenes. No, no, no, no. This right here is absolute truth.

Starting point is 02:52:26 Look at your hands. This is the easiest way to ground yourself in absolute truth is just look at your hands and realize that they absolutely exist. And same for all of your qualia. So what Eckhart Tolle means by now is this absolute moment here. It's not in time. It's actually eternal. It's not in time. It's actually eternal. So time is an overlay or projection that universal mind is imagining on top of consciousness, you can't easily undo them. You can't unthink them. They're baked into the state of consciousness you're at. So a further

Starting point is 02:53:12 elaboration upon my worldview, as we started off at the very beginning, my worldview is that consciousness is all that there is and that everything is a state of consciousness. So right now you're in a state of consciousness, a particular state. That consciousness is all that there is and that everything is a state of consciousness. So right now, you're in a state of consciousness, a particular state. That state is Kurt, the Kurt state. And also it is the human state. That's what human consciousness is like, the way that it is for you. Now this state can change at any time and it can change through drinking alcohol. That will produce a state change.

Starting point is 02:53:43 It can change through psychedelics. It can change through meditation, through yoga, through getting hit in the head with a hammer, all sorts of ways to change your state. And that will change how your reality flows and behaves. And so if that state changes radically enough, physical reality will literally start to melt and collapse, which is what happens on psychedelics. And then people who aren't, who don't have a good foundation, they start to freak out because they don't understand why reality is collapsing around them and melting away. And the reason that it's melting away is because the walls of your house are literally imaginary. And here I can further add my explanation of what imagination is. So imagination has, again,

Starting point is 02:54:28 two levels. Ordinarily, what we call imagination is we call the thoughts in our mind, images in our mind, imagination. And then when I say something like that, the walls of your house are imaginary, a lot of materialists and so forth and skeptics, they snicker at this and, you know, they say, well, if Leo, if the walls of your house are imaginary, prove it. Show me you walking through a wall. Right? It's imaginary. Why can't you do it? as like that your ego mind

Starting point is 02:55:04 is believing that there are walls around your house and then you can just drop your beliefs and then walk through the walls I'm saying that the actual physicality of a wall is imaginary and this is not something your ego mind has control over in this state

Starting point is 02:55:20 that you're in so when you bump your head into a wall and it doesn't go through like this hand right now cannot go through this hand, that doesn't prove the hand is real. All it proves is that I'm imagining physicality. That's what physicality is. And a really great way to illustrate this is, for example, in your dreams. In your dreams, let's say you're being chased by a serial killer and you're running away from the serial killer. And there's, you know, you're running through your house and then you lock yourself in the closet and you lock the door. Why are you doing all this in your dream?

Starting point is 02:55:58 Isn't it obvious that the walls of your closet and your door in your dream are just imaginary? Why wouldn't the serial killer just go through the walls like a ghost? Why do you believe you gotta lock that door? Because that's what you're dreaming. You're dreaming a dream and physicality is part of the thing you're dreaming. So within that entire dream, you have the dream of physicality and there you believe,, for example, in a dream, you believe that you're not going to fall through the floor. Why don't you fall through the floor in your dreams? It's an imaginary floor. But then again, falling through is also imaginary.

Starting point is 02:56:39 You see? Just like in a video game, why doesn't Super Mario fall through the floor in a video game? I mean, is the floor real? No. No. What if we take Super Mario in a video game and we cut open his skull? And we see a brain there. And then we take a hammer and we bash his brain with the hammer

Starting point is 02:57:08 in the video game and then from that we have a rule we program a rule that if that happens then super mario uh is gonna his body his his body's gonna collapse and he's gonna die argument right hoffman is wrong by the way about important things let's get to that let's get to how your views compare and contrast to some of the important thinkers of our time and even some of those some of our time so sure donald hoffman where do you agree and disagree actually let's just point out where you disagree. I'm trying to remember. Yeah, I kind of need to remember both in order to see. Again, it's a duality. You can't have agreement without disagreement and vice versa. So he's got the right intuition. And in fact, I mean, I applaud him for taking some of the radical stances that he does. I want scientists taking more radical stances with their metaphysics. So I like the fact that he's sort of adopting this idealist and whatnot sort of metaphysics and he's exploring ideas outside the material domain and he's questioning materials and this is all really good.

Starting point is 02:58:24 for him is that even though he meditates a lot and so forth, he's actually not conscious of the absolute. He's not conscious that qualia or experience itself is literally the absolute. So in his model, what he likes to say is that it's like a computer interface, like a GUI desktop, right? This is the metaphor he uses. And he says that, well, you know, I've done some, we've ran some mathematical proofs. You know, he brings math into this. We ran some mathematical proofs and because you're surviving, you know, I've done some, we've ran some mathematical proofs. You know, he brings math into this. We ran some mathematical proofs. And because you're surviving, you know, you grew through natural selection. Your body grew up through natural selection. Your brain evolved through natural selection.

Starting point is 02:58:52 Because of this, we did some mathematical calculations. What are the probability, what is the probability that actually the way that your eyes and your brain perceives reality is truthful? And he says the probability is near zero. He's got it precisely backwards. He's assuming natural selection and evolution and all this stuff. He's not realizing that this is part of the dream. So anyways,

Starting point is 02:59:16 he thinks that reality somehow there's a truthful reality somehow like behind the scenes of the GUI interface. He's not scenes of the GUI interface. He's not realizing that the GUI interface is reality. Absolutely. So what you're seeing right now, the possibility that what you're seeing right now is absolutely true is 100%.

Starting point is 02:59:38 Literally everything you perceive is 100% absolutely true. Otherwise, you couldn't perceive it. Also, part of his model is that there are multiple... Wait, what do you mean that what I see is absolutely true? Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to perceive it. Why? You mean... Sorry, let me see if... Correct my misunderstanding, if it's a misunderstanding if i see glasses here on my table then i see glasses here on my table that's an experience

Starting point is 03:00:18 experience is reality it's i'm not supposed to infer something from the glasses about some independent world that's giving input into my brain which is being translated into a percept yes supposed to see this qualia as is and take the qualia as evidence of the qualia which is what reality is because reality is the qualia. Exactly. So what needs to, so the fundamental problem with science and with thinking is that it's fundamentally indirect. It's always creating something and then it's looking for something else behind that thing that justifies it, right? So like you find an atom and then you say, well, there's something behind the atom to justify the atom. And so you go to a quark and then you find the quark and you say, well, there must be something behind the quark to justify the quark. And then so you find a string,

Starting point is 03:01:07 and then you say, well, the string, there must be something behind a string, it must be a number, and then you justify the number. And then you say, well, but a number is something in the brain, and so there must be something in the brain, there's a neuron, and then it goes around in circles like this forever. And so science never actually directly contacts being itself. What's being missed is being. Would you consider yourself to be a reductionist? Absolutely not. Reductionism is impossible. That's the chief delusion of all scientific pursuit,

Starting point is 03:01:38 is the idea that you can reduce one thing to another thing. You can't. Everything is what it is and not something else. So, for example, if you ask a scientist, what is the color red? He will say it's light. It's photons. Or it's neuronal activity. It's a structure of neurons. It's a network.

Starting point is 03:01:58 It's information. No, all of that is false. What it actually is is it's red. Red is red. You have to bite the bullet. See, what the scientist doesn't understand is that what the scientist is doing is an endless game of tail chasing that never ends because he's always

Starting point is 03:02:13 coming up with some new conceptual construction for some other thing he's trying to describe. So pick anything in science and there's going to be some other thing to describe it. And then some other thing. And some other thing. And some other thing. And then you never reach the end. there's going to be some other thing to describe it and then some other thing and some other thing and some other thing and then you never reach the end and it has to be that way because science must necessarily avoid the issue of substance and being because you can't grasp it through a conceptual process and science is all conceptual process you can't have science

Starting point is 03:02:41 without concept this is crucial to understand for those of you who are trying to develop a toe or trying to do good science. Science is concept. Like, grasp this. No concept, no science. And being is prior to concept. You can exist without having concepts, but you can't have concepts without existence. exist without having concepts but you can't have concepts without existence this is crucial to understand so i imagine that what you're saying is being is prior to concept however however if one was to investigate what the heck concept is i'm like well what is the concept then you say it's so-and-so then it's like well what is that you would eventually get down to being so concept and being are ultimately the same because everything is the same as being. Which also means everything is the same as concept.

Starting point is 03:03:28 Oh, yeah. Because if concept is the same as being, everything is the same as being. Depends on how you frame it. You could say that way, but it gets muddled if you say it that way. Think of it like this. This brings that analogy with the Lego blocks and the two levels. So look, this is really important to understand. This is so fundamental. We have Lego blocks, right? From these Lego blocks, we can build a castle or any other shape that we want. There is no limit

Starting point is 03:04:00 to what we can build with the Lego blocks within the limit of how Lego blocks attach to each other, right? So, if we build a castle out of Legos, the actual blocks, we'll call that order number one. That's the baseline order of reality, is the blocks. That's the substance.

Starting point is 03:04:20 And then we have order number two, which is the shape that is built out of the substance. So, that's order number two, which is the shape that is built out of the substance. So that's order number two. So in this case, all concepts and all of science is second order. It's not first order. And so is a sand, is a castle made, what is a castle made of? Yes, it's made of blocks, but it's not the same thing as a block. You see?

Starting point is 03:04:47 So this distinction is really crucial. I'm having trouble understanding that if one isn't a reductionist, what makes the second order level less important or less fundamental than the first level? It's not any less fundamental really um the problem is that by confusing them you create self-deception so let me give you another example to explain this so for example is real, and exists as a concept. As a concept. That's what Santa Claus is. Now, the mistake people make is, if they, like a child, is when you say Santa Claus, and they think,

Starting point is 03:05:36 ah, Santa Claus means that there's actually a man on the North Pole that I can go see. That is a mistake. That's not what Santa Claus is. Santa Claus is not a man that exists somewhere. Santa Claus is a concept. A unicorn is a mistake. That's not what Santa Claus is. Santa Claus is not a man that exists somewhere. Santa Claus is a concept. A unicorn is a concept. Now, a unicorn exists as a concept,

Starting point is 03:05:53 but that doesn't mean you'll find it at the material level, so to speak. So, likewise, something like a, you know, Hoffman's GUI interface, that exists as a concept. Something behind my hands, atoms, quarks, strings, these all exist as concepts, but the hands are here first. The mistake that scientists make and materialists make is they think, ah, well, strings and atoms, those were there before the hands. But no, the hands were here first. The atoms and strings came second. Look at it like

Starting point is 03:06:31 this. Humans had hands before quark, before there were quarks, before they invented quarks. It wasn't the other way around, but we ignore this. I mean, it's so obvious, but we ignore it. We invented quarkark quarks are not quarks were invented 100 years ago human hands have existed for thousands of years you would you don't like the statement that humans discovered quarks oh we invented them of course meaning to say we invented the idea of quarks or the concept of quarks however what we're trying to what we're trying to represent with the quark did that exist that's the whole

Starting point is 03:07:15 problem is that's the whole problem there's a deep here epistemological problem of representation that's the whole problem is because science uses language and representation so literally you're stuck in what's called symbolic logic. Symbols. But you have to break down and deconstruct what a symbol is. So what is a symbol? This is extremely profound because if you

Starting point is 03:07:38 don't understand what a symbol is, you're going to get all of reality wrong. Like most academics do. What a symbol is is so fucking profound. Look at this. A symbol is precisely not the thing it represents. Yes. So, for example, the word duck, the sound duck, is not a duck.

Starting point is 03:08:09 Why is this something that you think academics don't understand? Because I don't imagine I could find an academic that would think that the formula for a quark is the same as a quark. In fact, it takes many quarks to even write the formula. Well, but the whole notion of a quark is not... There's no such thing as a quark. Quark is a concept. See, you're imagining that the concept quark points to something that's a quark that we can't point to, which is beyond concepts. And what I'm telling you is that that too is a concept.

Starting point is 03:08:41 It's a chain of concepts leading to nothing. that that too is a concept. It's a chain of concepts leading to nothing. You're assuming it leads to something, and I'm telling you what that thing you're assuming it leads to is another concept. It's a concept pointing to a concept. No, no, yeah, I'm saying

Starting point is 03:08:55 the royal you. Us, mankind. Why can't one also say, hey man, you're assuming there's only mental, there's only qualia. You're assuming that. I'm not assuming it.

Starting point is 03:09:15 That's literally what's the case. Tell me one thing you've experienced that isn't qualia. Tell me how you can derive that without assuming it. That's not a derivation. That's absolutely what's... Through experience. No, if you're going to claim, let's be scientific about this. If you're going to claim that there exists something outside of qualia, prove it.

Starting point is 03:09:36 Or at least even demonstrate one example. I'm not even asking you to prove it. Just demonstrate one example. Point to one example. Because look, if I was telling you unicorns existed, you would tell me to point to one example because look if i was if i was telling you unicorns existed you would tell me to point to one or if i told you that uh dark energy exists you'd have to you'd have to say point me some dark energy or some dark matter or whatever where is it we get back to what we were talking about near the beginning so it's almost like the tautology of saying you're

Starting point is 03:10:02 essentially asking by saying prove to me so-and-so you're essentially asking give me an experience that isn't experience right yeah it's tautology you can eat you can you can either assume that's a mistake or it's not let's steal man the materialist for a bit let's imagine on this wall behind okay there are some buttons yeah and one of these buttons one of these buttons says pleasure one of these buttons says pain one of these buttons says tickle or actually laugh one of these buttons says insight and there's another button that says real real and you're like well what the heck does that do okay so you press pain

Starting point is 03:10:40 and then the person you hear someone scream like your next door neighbor. And then you're like, oh, that's interesting. Okay, so then you press pleasure and then you just moan. And you get them to come in here. You're like, dude, I want to see this. So they come in. And then you're like, let me press pleasure and pain. And then they get one of those erotic, 60-ish orgasms. Okay, you're like, oh, that's interesting.

Starting point is 03:11:01 And then you press pain and the button unreal. And then they're like, oh, well, then you press pain and the button unreal and then they're like oh well i felt pain but i didn't feel like that was real and you're like oh that's actually interesting well that can happen like i can see something but you also get a sense that it's unreal that's what happens sometimes when you learn horrible news and you feel like in your dream state okay so so you get derail derealization is another word for that okay so then you're like oh there's a derealization button which is the same as the unreal button but then there's a real button so let me press pleasure and really like oh that was the most real pleasure i've ever had okay then

Starting point is 03:11:34 then let's imagine there's a button that says atheist you press atheist and and unreal and you get someone who says i feel like i had this impression that there is no God, but I also had the impression that that was a false impression. Okay, now let's press the button that says God and unreal. And then you get the reverse impression. Okay, now how about we press the button that says God, pleasure, and real. And then you get this sense that all that there is and it's real it's absolutely real and it's and let's also associate with some pleasure okay now let's now let's imagine so i'm steel manning the materialist case okay please emulate the materialist i imagine

Starting point is 03:12:22 you're like okay well i am simply pressing these buttons and this person is feeling so-and-so. Now, what happens if I give them this psychedelic or this meditative experience? It's almost like a pill meditative experience in this example. It changes their neurons. I find that their neurons correspond. That's pleasure. Oh, that lights up. That particular pattern.

Starting point is 03:12:49 That particular pattern lights up for real, unreal. Okay unreal okay now what happens if i take a psychedelic and i and i notice that when the now what i see is instead of me pressing these buttons i give them a psychedelic and i see the buttons light up because i'm not i'm not pressing i would just see that one lit up and it said pleasure after After their experience of psychedelics, they say, I had a pleasurable experience. Another one, pleasure, God, and real. And then they say, oh, I had a feeling of profound oneness, unity, and it was love. And it was absolutely more real than this. Okay. Then you give them the opposite.

Starting point is 03:13:21 Okay. So now let's imagine we get to some place in the future where we're far more sophisticated neurochemically and with brain imaging. And we can see that this analogy is more apt than what I'm saying. Would you say that someone who's had the experience of God realization has had that experience? Or would you say that it's simply the neuromodulators and neurotransmitters? Well, if I was a materialist, I would just excuse all that away and say that it all boils down to just chemistry. just assume it's you know you basically have to assume some kind of static structure to a unit to a to a static structure to a universe whether it's atoms quarks strings numbers computers information and and then just everything reduces down to that and you just kind of keep reducing

Starting point is 03:14:21 and reducing and you know the point that I'm getting at is, then how do you trust whether or not the insights from someone, let's say they get the opposite, the atheist and then real and pain. Maybe it could be pleasure, right? So real and pain. Atheist, real pain. It's pervasive hate. And that's it. But it's secular hate. And then you're like, well, you know what?

Starting point is 03:14:43 Yeah. It's secular hate. And then you're like, well, you know what? I don't know if any of that is real per se, because every single time you come back with a report of an experience, it just corresponds precisely to these lights and to these patterns. Okay, well, I would just ask you or this person with all these buttons, is the Unreal button real? You have a button that says Unreal. Is that button real? You have a button that says unreal. Is that button real? I'm going to pretend I'm going to put on my materialistic hat and say, I don't know.

Starting point is 03:15:13 I wouldn't even use the words real and unreal. All I would say there are reports of real and unreal of this phenomenon that people claim to be real. Right. Yeah. Yeah, so there's a possibility that what you consider unreal and real, you don't know what you're talking about when you're using those words. Yeah, so that's doubt. Doubt. Yeah, so. But also notice that for your thought experiment to work you need that unreal button to actually be real so you're actually contradicting yourself in your thought experiment you're

Starting point is 03:15:55 imagining an impossible thought experiment because you're imagining something unreal and then you're making it real so like you you're imagining unreal pain, but in fact, pain is real. Even if you say, well, you know, I experienced some pain and it felt like I was in a derealized state. Yeah, but that derealized state is still, aren't you yourself claiming that it's real? Is there a derealized state or not?

Starting point is 03:16:19 Because if there isn't, then why are you talking about it? And if there is, well, then it's real. It's just the problem is the confusion. You see, concepts create this multiple layers of confusion. That's what symbols do. You know, like we start talking about a duck and we confuse, even though logically, if you ask a professor, like, is the word duck the same thing as a duck? He'll say, of course not. I'm not a fucking idiot but then in practice he's gonna go playing with his math formulas and start talking about how reality is mathematical but your

Starting point is 03:16:52 mathematics are not reality in the sense that yes you can you can project them onto reality you can do mathematics you can conceptualize you can talk about ducks but your words about ducks are not a fucking duck and they never will be so you are not allowed to make a leap from the fact that like max tegmark for example makes all sorts of claims about how reality is mathematical the only reason it's mathematical is because he's sitting there and he's so steeped in conceptual mathematics that that's how he sees the whole fucking world when uh when everything what all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail right and a christian who's who believes in christ sees everything as a symbol of christ you know he looks at his morning toast and he sees christ christ's face in the morning toast

Starting point is 03:17:36 somebody on my forum recently some christian person posted a picture of him um looking up at the clouds and he saw the face of Jesus in the cloud. That's how a Christian thinks. That's how every mind thinks. A physicist thinks that reality is made of information or quarks. And a string theorist thinks it's made of strings. And a mathematician thinks it's made of numbers. And then some new age person thinks it's made out of energy, you know, woo-woo energy, and somebody else thinks it's made out of something else.

Starting point is 03:18:06 And what I'm telling you is that it's all of that. All of your fucking buttons are imaginary, and God is imagining all of it, and he could imagine infinitely more. You can keep imagining what reality is forever. And in fact, I'm telling you something even deeper. I'm not just saying that imagination is so relative that if you imagine it deeply enough it literally becomes your reality so for example for an atheist literally there is no god for an atheist god doesn't exist for an atheist his reality is that there is no god that's what right god is imagining god is imagining there is no god likewise for example for a materialist, a materialist literally lives in a material reality.

Starting point is 03:18:46 But the difference is that he thinks it will always be that way. And what I'm saying is that that's just a temporary state that can change at any time. So a materialist assumes that his whole life will be material. And what I'm saying is that, well, maybe it is now. But in the future, you might change your mind or you might take a psychedelic or whatever. You might have a divine mystical experience and then you'll realize that, oh, all of that was just imaginary.

Starting point is 03:19:10 And also, by the way, this explains why another, here's an issue within epistemology that a lot of people who are studying toes don't take seriously enough and that is, why are there people all around the world, throughout every continent and across all of human history, that believe the most ridiculous fucking things as though it was true?

Starting point is 03:19:31 Have you noticed this? Like, you've got terrorists, you've got radicals, you've got cult leaders, you've got materialists, you've got idealists, you've got cult leaders you've got you've got materialists you've got idealists you've got philosophers and all of them believe that their worldview is the way that reality is how could and it's not like they're just it's not like they're stupid we're talking about some of the most intelligent people in the world for example Isaac Newton believed in. So you have to believe that Isaac Newton was stupid. How do you explain that? How could someone who was so smart in other ways was so stupid in terms of God? Now, I'm not citing this as evidence of God. I'm just saying that as one example,

Starting point is 03:20:18 because most scientifically minded people will recognize the intelligence of Isaac Newton. By the way, the majority of world scientists in the past people in the past believe in god up right um and there's actually good reason for that well i'm just saying that that like that's something that claimed by many but but but anyways right but but but then right but a suicide bomber believes that when he bombs some civilians he's going to see Allah. He really believes it. He believes it so much, he's willing to blow himself up. Fathom for a moment the sincerity of that. That's not just a belief.

Starting point is 03:20:58 That is a whole reality. Talk about Weltanschauung. He's living in a different reality. So why, why do you think that some people believe that there is free will? If you believe there is no free will, let's just, why do you think that some people believe there is free will?

Starting point is 03:21:23 Why do you think that some people believe in a fairytale notion of God and so on. Well, we haven't really even talked about ego, which is a huge... We really should have started this discussion with ego because it all revolves around ego. But I mean, ego is literally a state of consciousness which believes... It's a finite state of consciousness which believes it has control over reality.

Starting point is 03:22:06 That's what ego is for. Ego is there as a sort of mediating control mechanism within your psyche. It it's like an assemblage point around which you can then manipulate reality. And so that ego, of course, necessarily believes it has control. It has to because that's what it needs to survive as a finite self. Okay. So there's an incentive to believe in free will. Let me see if I can say it some other way that would help you. In a sense, I'm not necessarily saying there isn't any such thing as will. There actually is infinite will. God has infinite will.

Starting point is 03:22:38 It can will anything it wants. We didn't really finish this discussion from earlier. We jumped topics. But let me finish this because it's actually very profound. So God has infinite will, but God allocates all of its will because it's completely selfless towards the most selfless thing it can do, which is love. So in a very twisted paradoxical sense, God has no choice but to be love. God cannot use its will for anything but love. It has to be selfless, because that's what God is. In its most highest,

Starting point is 03:23:10 absolute, infinite state. You're using the word will as distinct from free will. Is that correct, or are they the same? It's going to be very difficult to define what will is, because you can only define it by looking at it. You have to be conscious of it. See, physical manifestation literally is what will is. Will, just like imagination, you see, imagination can occur inside the human mind as mental images,

Starting point is 03:23:44 but then imagination is also the physical walls of your house. That's just a deeper layer of imagination that your ego has no access to. Likewise with will. Will is what you can have in your little human mind. You have a very little bit of will in your human mind. You can do a little bit. And then at the absolute level, will is literally the couch that you're sitting on. The physical hands that you're looking at, they are literally will precipitated. It's God's will

Starting point is 03:24:12 precipitated as physical form. So for example, I have become so conscious that I literally became conscious of how I am willing my hands into existence as I'm looking at them also I've become so conscious this other aspect of God we haven't discussed yet there's many aspects we haven't discussed yet that I call self-design it's when you become so conscious of yourself as God that you literally become conscious that you are using your will and infinite intelligence to design every hair on your on your arm you can look at a single hair and you will become conscious of how you designed it using your own intellect another example

Starting point is 03:24:56 is that I I was so conscious I became conscious of how I wrote every book ever written by humans. So normally we think that other humans are writing these books. But when you collapse the boundary between self and other, you will actually realize that you personally, you, wrote every book on your bookshelf back there. Does time exist in this realm? No. This is eternal.

Starting point is 03:25:26 Can you then be conscious of something in the future make a prediction and then verify it uh future doesn't exist in this realm right okay can you be conscious it's it's it's imaginary like how you said you at least for historical books you were conscious of the fact that you've written them or why you wrote them or how you wrote them and i'm wondering if the same is true about some future event and thus you can presage something write it down and verify that this was indeed some truth because well you were in some more truthful state it gets extremely tricky and i know why you're asking these questions because materialists always ask for like proofs you know like yeah if you're on if you're on, if you're in a state of omniscience, why don't you just guess the lottery numbers and become a millionaire? I'm not even asking for proof. I'm saying some evidence even that this is not something more than simply you telling yourself

Starting point is 03:26:16 this convincing yourself of this. There's a very deep metaphysical problem here. It's a bit like the sort of quantum uncertainty principle. Like when you try to pin down where a particle is, you actually lose its definition of being a particle. And so you kind of can't really pin it down exactly. There's something like that, analogous to that going on in really high states of consciousness. When you're in a really high state of consciousness, you become so conscious that material reality literally collapses and the notion of a future that you can predict itself starts to break down and melt away okay and there and there is um and because what you realize is that you're imagining the entire future. Does the notion of the past also?

Starting point is 03:27:06 Yeah. Okay. Like, for example, you're imagining your birth. Your human birth. Yeah. Well, I don't see why. Please tell me why. And I don't mean to be poking and prodding where I shouldn't be.

Starting point is 03:27:18 But why is it that what's historical, you mentioned historical documents and your birth which is in the past as we ordinarily conceive of time why is it that those events come to to you fairly readily but if there is no distinction between past and future it's all illusory why isn't that you can't have an a premonition of something that's going to occur two days from now or four days from now and well first of all many mystical folk do claim such premonitions it's called clairvoyance it's actually extremely common in mystical circles and communities and amongst spiritual masters and teachers i personally don't claim any of these abilities. You have to also understand that I'm not done with my work. In many ways, I'm just a beginner in this work.

Starting point is 03:28:11 And so what kind of abilities I might develop in the future, I'm still exploring and experimenting with that. So maybe in the future, I will develop clairvoyance. I don't know. I love that you're saying that, because so many people will dismiss you. I hope to dissuade them of their dismissal of you because they'll think that judging by the conviction of which you say your statements, which are large,

Starting point is 03:28:32 they can be seemingly egotistical, especially if you're claiming equivalence with God. And it seems like there's no modicum of, or there's at least a modicum of self-pride in you when you say that. Perhaps there is because everyone has some ego everyone and you're not claiming to have zero ego but either way i like in even one of your videos which i've time stamped i like that you said or expressed some doubt as to your entire velton shaung i, I have the timestamp here.

Starting point is 03:29:05 To me, that made you much more human, even though obviously the claim is that you're not, but we are not as well. So it's not as if you're above us in some manner. I'm certainly, so a couple of clarifications. I'm certainly not immune to self-deception. Like I'm really big on self-deception. And I even say that even if you become fully enlightened, you will still not be immune on self-deception and i even say that even if you become fully enlightened

Starting point is 03:29:25 you will still not be immune to self-deception because self-deception still happens at the relative domain you have a finite domain or what when you say yeah like yeah the sort of just the earthly domain of living okay here like like for example you could still be wrong about covid whatever your beliefs about the vaccine are you could still be wrong about that whether you're enlightened about the vaccine are. You could still be wrong about that, whether you're enlightened or not, because enlightenment and awakening, the absolute truth, there's actually sort of a trade-off. When you go so high in your consciousness, you're actually losing connection to the fine details of this dream. Sort of like, look, like let's say you wanted to see the entire planet earth. The more you you the more to see the entire thing you have to zoom out really really far the further you the further you use them out the few details you see so like when so um we might

Starting point is 03:30:14 phrase it like this like if i tell you i've seen the entire earth as a whole and you say oh yeah really prove it tell me tell me how many uh how, uh, how many, uh, how to look there are real. Yeah, exactly. It's like, well, but, but you're not seeing that there's actually a profound trade off there. I had to zoom really far out to lose the detail, to see it in its totality. And then, you know, if you want specific details now I have to zoom back in, but then I lose the totality. So there is a profound trade off there. So I am not immune to self-deception because most self-deception just happens at the ordinary sort of earthly level, material level. And I can certainly fool myself. And I do, I do fool myself about things and I have to change my

Starting point is 03:30:58 beliefs. And I hold false beliefs about certain things, but the app app but the absolute infinity that is not a belief and i and i would say i can't be wrong about that but everything else i could be wrong about what's something you recently have self-deluded yourself about that you have come to the realization that um something non-trivial yeah i like not about peanut butter and jelly like oh i actually thought i liked the creamy peanut butter but i never tried the chunky kind so um for a long time i intuited that paranormal abilities are possible, such as healing, clairvoyance, other such things. A lot of what is the woo of the woo-woo New Age stuff, right? Even though I was never really into it, per se. But then a few years ago, I started developing some serious health problems with my stomach.

Starting point is 03:31:58 I was having a bacterial infection, and it was really difficult for me to even figure out what it was. It took me a year just to figure out what it was so it caused me a lot of suffering and misery what are those symptoms just pain uh basically i have a very limited number of foods i can eat without causing me lots of pain because it feeds the bacterial infection i'm sorry so i've been dealing with yeah so i've been dealing with that um it's kind of been a thorn in my side and i went i exhausted I'm sorry. these higher dimensions of consciousness and i intuit that this sort of paranormal stuff is probably possible even though i don't have these powers myself so why don't why don't i go to yelp and just look at in in town in vague i live in vegas look first look for some paranormal healer type of people look for some um clairvoyant like i actually went to some fortune tellers whoa man i was thinking i was thinking like if i can go to one of these fortune tellers and and

Starting point is 03:33:03 all i want from the fortune tellers like like I don't want a lottery number. Just tell me what the actual root cause is of this stomach issue. So I actually went to some of these fortune tellers and they weren't just these hokey fortune tellers. Some of them were like Reiki master type people that do like energy healing work. You could you could find. Yeah. And so. So anyways, and then what i decided to do i'm like well but i don't know can i trust these fucking fortune teller people i mean i'm very skeptical that's too bad the reason i say it's too bad is i i wanted i would have i want to know what was

Starting point is 03:33:36 that experience like going in believing them or at least being so open-minded that you're open well i well i'm gonna get to that because i mean, I was a bit desperate. And this is part of how people deceive themselves is that you've got to have some element of desperation. So ordinarily, I'm very rational, but when you're under... When you have a serious health condition, that's one of the things that makes you very desperate. I mean, you're willing to believe anything at that

Starting point is 03:33:58 point. If you've got cancer or something, you'll try anything once you exhaust all the traditional stuff and it doesn't work. I mean, what do you got all the traditional stuff and it doesn't work. I mean, what do you got to lose? You got nothing to lose because your life is going to hell. So anyways, so I decided, ah, what I'm going to do is I'm going to schedule like five different of these healers and fortune teller type folks. And I'm going to go to all of them in the same week. And I'm not going to communicate what each of them told me. So I'm going to play them off each other like you like to do with your guests. So I'm going to play them off each other. Like you like to do with your guests.

Starting point is 03:34:26 So I'm going to play them off each other. I mean, this is a technique I've used for years with science and all sorts of stuff. So anyway, I'm going to play them off each other. So that's what I did. And I went to these different folk. And I want to make sure I'm understanding. What do you mean when you say you played them off one another? You're trying to manipulate them or you're trying to see if one is telling the truth or what do you mean?

Starting point is 03:34:48 Well, I was basically like, for example, I wanted to go to like a fortune teller and say, I have this health condition. Can you tell me what the root cause is? And she would tell me, oh, it's because you did something bad in your past life. And so I would say, okay, maybe it's that. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe. Then I would go to a different one. I would say, okay, I got this health condition and I wouldn't tell her that I went to the previous one. Yeah. Okay. I see what you're saying. Tell me what the root cause is. And then she would say, oh, well, it's because you masturbate too much or whatever. Right? And then so we're going to compare

Starting point is 03:35:20 all these and see. I mean, supposedly, if it's true, they're all supposed to align. I mean, that's how science works, right? The answers are supposed to align. So what I found in the end is that the answers didn't align very well. And in fact, I actually, I got so desperate. But also, so you got to understand, I was also doing this not just out of desperation. I was also curious.

Starting point is 03:35:42 I knew that I could use this to refine my epistemology so um i was hoping it would work but also um so one of the ladies basically says um i have this uh friend who works with dark energy he might be able to help you okay so i call the so i call this this fucking guy he says he says200, I can remove dark entities that are inhabiting your body. Ah, okay. Like, you know, evil spirits and stuff. So, literally, I drive out in the middle of the desert. He lives in the middle of the desert, this dude. So, I spent like four hours with him, and he basically does an exorcism on me.

Starting point is 03:36:20 Okay. And he's describing all this wild stuff that he's doing but i'm not feeling anything he's like he's he's acting as though he's like pulling evil spirits out of my body and so forth and and i'm just i'm i'm very open i'm open to the idea but at the same time i'm not fucking gullible right i i understand that i can't just accept him on his word so and he basically tells me look i've cured you 90 of your problems are gone don't worry about it go home in a month give it a month to settle and you'll feel great no more problems and and i'm like yeah i don't really buy that but i'll try it um anyways so i tried it and in the first week i even had like a relief in my symptoms for the first week. And I almost like, I was kind of stunned.

Starting point is 03:37:08 I'm like, maybe this is real. Like I actually had a relief of my symptoms for about a week. But then beyond that, it didn't really change my symptoms at all. And I'm here, I am a year later and still dealing with the same shit. still dealing with the same shit. And so, um, so what that, what that taught me in terms of self-deception you were asking originally is, is that, um, I became much more aware of the importance of, of being skeptical of all this kind of woo-woo stuff. I still think that some of it could be real, but I don't just subscribe to it as gullibly as maybe I would have in the past.

Starting point is 03:37:57 Especially when you're motivated to want to believe it. Have you experimented with self-healing, especially being in one of these altered states? Yes, and I could even admit that there was some self-deception there as well, because I was also very motivated to want to heal myself. So after that kind of healing didn't work, I tried to say, okay, fuck, well, why shouldn't I be able to do it? If other people can do it, why can't I do it on myself?

Starting point is 03:38:21 So I have, I've tried to heal myself from very high states of consciousness. I do it on myself. So I have, I've tried to heal myself from very high states of consciousness. And, and sometimes even like, kind of believing that maybe it worked. And it didn't work. See, for the people listening, I would like you if you've listened this far, I'd like you to re-listen to this podcast, because probably as you listened to Leo in the beginning, the seeming audacity of him and his claims may have turned you off, but it's toward the three-quarter mark where Leo right here, you Leo, you're expressing so much humility and skepticism that it buttresses your other claims it at least makes it more palatable for the people who are who are likely turned off which

Starting point is 03:39:14 i'm sure you also get in your youtube comments but if you've listened this far you're likely extremely open-minded however i recommend you again listen with fresh ears there how do you get what is this what is this barometer of woo that you have, and how does one collaborate theirs? So, and then, even to build further on this, so this really started to get me to wonder, like, how do I make sense of this? How do I make sense of this? How do I make sense of the fact that there are, for example, there are exorcists who genuinely fully believe that what they're doing is exercising demons from your body. Like they are fully in it. Like they are not, they are not just, you know, scammers looking for $200 they are like you can tell that these are genuine like kind-hearted people in fact that this guy who I paid $200 for the exorcism he told me that there's only gonna be one you will never need a second exorcism ever again in your life so you're only gonna pay me $200 and that's it right

Starting point is 03:40:20 good like and that was very interesting because I would think that like you know if he's a scammer yeah why would he set it up that way? I would have a whole scheme of ladders, almost like an MLM scheme of like, oh, you've reached tier one and then you've got to reach tier two and this and keep paying me. $200 is not a lot of money for four hours of work. He was with me for four hours. And he's never called me. He's never asked me for money i've never heard from him since yeah i got it he's never asked he's never asked me to refer anybody to him or anything he's a very kind of like reclusive guy lives in the fucking desert so like how do you explain that and um and the way that i the way that my model in worldview explains it is that basically all of us are living in our own bubble of reality, so to speak.

Starting point is 03:41:14 And we assume generally that we're living in the same reality. And in a sense, we're not. We are constructing our own dreams. we are constructing our own dreams and these dreams we could say interpenetrate to some degree but to a much lesser degree than many people and materialists

Starting point is 03:41:32 especially and scientists assume there's a lot of very weird shit that you could be dreaming but that you're not dreaming that those woo-woo people are dreaming so it's not that those woo-woo people are dreaming so it's not that those woo-woo people are Deluded per se it's that they are literally inhabiting a different dream in which like I believe that that guy

Starting point is 03:41:53 Is set to it to himself in his own mind. He was seeing demons He was pulling out of my body, but that doesn't mean that it's true for me Because I'm dreaming a different dream that is not fully aligned with the dream that he's dreaming. And so if you actually study deeply these woo-woo people and you ask them about their first person experiences, this is where

Starting point is 03:42:15 you get the real gold. They will tell you about visions they have, entities they see, ghosts, fucking aliens, you know, evil entities and UFOs and whatever else, angels and shit.

Starting point is 03:42:32 And the mistake that the materialists and the scientists make is he says, oh, well, this is all, it's all nonsense. Even Rupert Spear told you that's nonsense. It's not non-duality, right? He told you that. He considers it nonsense.

Starting point is 03:42:49 Even that is not quite correct. It might be nonsense from a consensus reality point of view, it's nonsense. Maybe it's nonsense from the scientific point of view. You can't prove it in the materialistic standards of proof and by the way those proof standards are all relative and there's many problems with how we define proof within science we can talk about that but anyways but you have to understand is the open your mind of the possibility that those people who claim that they're seeing angels and devils and whatever they're actually seeing it.

Starting point is 03:43:28 And the reason that is, in my model, it's very easy to explain that, it's because there's really no difference between a dream and physical reality. And if you take psychedelics, you'll see. You can take so much LSD that literally when you look at your hands, your hands can turn into the hands of a devil try it yeah well be careful when you try that that particular experiment if you if you dare yeah i still don't see why it's not delusion in your mind. You said they inhabit a different world. Now our worlds intersect and we can call this objective reality,

Starting point is 03:44:10 though objective reality intersects to a much lesser degree than we think. It's more protean than we think. Well, I'll tell you why. It's like this. For example, you can understand language. You have that capacity. An animal, your dog, if you have one, cannot understand words written on a page.

Starting point is 03:44:35 So from the point of view of a dog, your ability to understand language is delusion. When you read a book, you think that the book actually means something. From the dog's point of view, the book means nothing, and that you're deluded to claim that the book means anything. The way I'm imagining this, we've got to use a different example than a dog. Dogs don't even think in terms of delusion.

Starting point is 03:44:54 They're like, oh, is there food? Is there no food? Let's take an example of someone else, like another person from a different culture. Well, we'll get to that, but that's actually a good point. A dog doesn't think about delusion. That means the, consider this, that delusion literally does not exist for a dog.

Starting point is 03:45:10 That's a human idea, a human notion, right? Because people just assume that, oh, delusion is just like an existential fact. Maybe not. Maybe delusion is actually something that is particular

Starting point is 03:45:20 to humans or to certain kinds of beings. But yeah, go on. What example did you want to use? Oh, just use a different culture instead of a dog. Another culture that has the idea of delusion. So they would look at you with your beliefs of non-duality or with your beliefs of the Bible and so on.

Starting point is 03:45:39 Let's take even like a very skeptical child. You might even take a young child and show him that there are words written on a book and let's say he doesn't know how to read. He hasn't learned language. You can show him and he, that child, if he was raised improperly or so, he might be skeptical and he might say, um, no, that means nothing. It's not possible to read. How would you teach a child to read if he's so skeptical he doesn't even believe that reading is possible? Let's say he only has verbal language, but no reading ability. How would you do that?

Starting point is 03:46:13 You see? He would really be stuck. That's why skepticism is so dangerous, because you can really get yourself stuck with skepticism. Because here's the ultimate thing, is that if you want you can be skeptical to an absolute degree about absolutely anything you can literally deny that um you can you can deny that the sky is blue can you deny that you're conscious isn't that what you isn't that what you're doing You can certainly deny that you're conscious, but you'd have to be conscious to do it.

Starting point is 03:46:52 In some sense, you're right about me denying my own consciousness. And I'm not doing so consciously. At least I don't think so. But I do have a feeling that there's a strong relationship between what's evil and what is against existence now that's like a chris langan formulation but there's also and existence is tied with consciousness and i imagine that one can be so wrapped up in one's own self that one denies oneself.

Starting point is 03:47:27 Well, yeah, that's exactly what an atheist does. An atheist is one who is in denial of oneself as God. Well, I would just say, forget about God. Forget about using that word. I would say that an atheist is in denial of... This is tricky. I would say that an atheist can be in denial of themselves being conscious, because they reject existence to such a degree, or they hate it at some level. They don't have to hate it. Like, when I was an atheist, I

Starting point is 03:47:55 loved existence as an atheist. And if someone as an atheist told me that I am, you know, denying that I'm God, I would just laugh at them. No, I would say they hate it at some level. And the reason is that if you talk to an atheist, it's so interesting to me. They have a hatred for God. It's not simply that they don't believe in God.

Starting point is 03:48:16 And the reason is this. I agree with that. The reason is this. They hate the concept of it. No, not just that. They would hate God if God existed. And the reason is they have an arrogance about them they'll say that well what about the problem of stuff how the heck is a problem the problem of suffering even a problem it's because you think you know better you think that you

Starting point is 03:48:35 that there should be no suffering and then some atheists would even say i don't want to live in a i don't want to believe in a god that would allow a child to be tortured and raped i would hate such a god yeah well that's just yeah they're just fooling themselves there they're just not conscious enough to see what evil really is or what suffering is really about but i i mean evil is just selfishness it's all it is and which is equivalent to lack of consciousness so the less conscious you have the more the more quote-unquote evil you're going to be interesting by which by which we mean you're gonna you're gonna take more pleasure in actually

Starting point is 03:49:16 negativity so you might say like the lower your consciousness the more pleasure you're going to take in actually the suffering of others so a really easy way to tell whether somebody has high consciousness or low consciousness or how developed they are is just take a look. Do they actually derive pleasure from the suffering of others? Like, you know, psychopathic people will actually enjoy torturing animals. That's a very, that's a telltale sign of many early signs of a psychopath is that they do that in their childhood. Or even like, for example, you watch political news and you can actually see sometimes something happens to the other political party. And some people are like, well, but yeah, I mean, like that Republican died, even though he was a COVID denier. He died. And I don't and I don't take any pleasure in his death.

Starting point is 03:50:01 He was being foolish, but I don't take any pleasure in his death. Some some of the higher conscious commentators will say that. That's a high conscious person. A low conscious commentator will say, he died and he deserved it, and I'm kind of happy he died. Right. I see that plenty. I recall you saying that you disagree that the left and the right are of equal merit, and that that's's somewhat of a naive view and you believe that the conservative side at least as it currently is formulated at least within the popular news pundits are more likely to lie and be prone to tribalism and so on compared to the left i don't agree with that i i mean and especially not now especially seeing the hatred toward anything

Starting point is 03:50:46 that's like trump or anything that's like a trump supporter i see them as being so unwilling to give trump any credit for anything positive and if oh that's true of course something positive it was by accident or through his selfishness he has done nothing for the good of america by with with any good intention on his part and i i don't see that as characterizing any human there's almost no human that's completely good nor completely evil sure of course i would agree with that so then this also reminds me of sam harris so there's a couple you remind me a couple couple people so tom thomas can we can we, can we take a quick break here for a few? Sure, sure, sure.

Starting point is 03:51:30 Okay, yeah, and I'm going to reset the camera too. All right, man. There's so many problems that I have with the moral to me that a state of all suffering is possible, given what you just said, which is some people derive the most pleasure from committing suffering to others. I don't know if it's physically possible to have a state where there's the most suffering for all being simultaneously. And then even if so, it's not like, well, I have many different critiques about that. But either way, I'm curious what you think about Sam Harris's moral landscape. Additionally, you mentioned, well, it has to be true for you.

Starting point is 03:52:12 Truth is strange. It's absolute and relative at the same time, which reminds me of Thomas Campbell. So I'm going to ask you about Sam Harris, your views, and then Thomas Campbell. So let's go on Sam Harris and the moral landscape. So I've not read the moral landscape i'm more familiar with his like metaphysical views and his views on awakening and stuff if you want to summarize to me um what his views are like like for example um i mean i do generally consider sam harris sort of what i would call a moralist in other words he actually believes there's sort of like an objective right and wrong or good and bad yeah so i would disagree with him on that on that um all all good is relative

Starting point is 03:52:51 so um that's just what you'll discover as you become more conscious um it's basically you're going to find that it's impossible to define what is good or what is bad in any kind of finite way. Like for example, if we're talking about what's good for humanity, you can't actually define that because humanity is a bunch of disparate agents. They all have their own agendas and selves and finite selves that they're trying to survive. So what we really mean by good, the normal human relative sense of good, if we're not talking about absolute good, is just like what is good for the ego,

Starting point is 03:53:32 for the human ego. And you can have egos at different levels of development and different degrees of consciousness. And some egos are more expanded, some egos are more contracted. And we have seven or eight billion egos on this planet and there's going to be a lot more of them in the future. And so there is no possible way that you can come up with a unified definition of what is good for all of them. There's always

Starting point is 03:53:57 going to be tradeoffs. And this is why we have the kind of chaos we see in our political system is that when you have a radical democracy where everyone gets to vote, everyone is voting for their own self agenda. And so even the most selfless people, unless they're infinitely selfless, which nobody is basically, they're all going to have their own biases and interests. And there's always going to be competition between all that. and there's always going to be competition between all that. Like even if we were to, you know, meet aliens, let's say aliens land on the White House lawn tomorrow and they are very conscious, loving aliens, but they're still going to be finite and their agenda might be, you know, a beautiful agenda, relatively speaking,

Starting point is 03:54:37 but it's not going to be some absolute agenda and we are still going to have to negotiate with their agenda and our agenda and to see, you know, how are we going to negotiate that with the politics of it should be. It's going to be very messy. And you can't say what's really good or bad in that. It's very relativistic. As far as Sam's metaphysics, he wrote a book called Awake, I believe, or something like that.

Starting point is 03:54:59 Waking Up. Is that what his book? His podcast used to be called that. Now he changed it. It's because of that book actually i got the same just so you know between podcaster or youtuber to youtuber to the degree you can call it ourselves youtube that i was given the advice kurt change your podcast name from better left unsaid which is what it used to be about a year ago to something else because i

Starting point is 03:55:20 have a film coming out called better left and said and people are going to get confused and this person who's given me this advice is a close friend of Sam Harris and he said Sam Harris has the same problem or had the same problem, which is why he calls it Making Sense Now. Because he had a book called, I believe it's Awakening or what is it called?

Starting point is 03:55:37 Waking Up, I think. Waking Up, right. It's a book called that and then you confuse it with the podcast and people conflate the two. So keep them separate. For legal reasons and just for the public okay continue sorry yeah well it's also misleading because he's not fully awake so he doesn't really he doesn't really understand what he's talking about when he's talking about non-duality and god and and and no self so he's had some degree of awakening into what i would call the truth of no self.

Starting point is 03:56:06 What Buddhists call anatta. The truth of no self. And that's of course valid. It's a valid and important facet. It's usually an early stage of awakening. Is when you realize that the biographical ego self is actually a mental construction. It's not a physical thing that exists in the universe so that's what he's realized and that's what he kind of teaches that and you know and so that

Starting point is 03:56:34 that's valid but the part but the problem is that there are much higher degrees of awakening and then ultimately god realization and infinite states of consciousness which which actually get you to understand the very fabric of existence itself and he has obviously not penetrated into that because he doesn't know he can't speak about what truth is for example you ask him what truth is he can't tell you um you ask him where existence came from he can't tell you uh he's he's just gonna say well we don't know and it's impossible to know, you know, that's not something I'm supposed to be able to answer. But the whole point of awakening, to truly awaken, means that you have answered all existential questions, the biggest ones. You know where it came from, why it exists, what love is, you know what truth is,

Starting point is 03:57:19 you know what's absolute. And you can easily talk about these things without a bunch of conceptual or philosophical waffling. And you're also not going to be denying God. So

Starting point is 03:57:40 he's not conscious that he's God. Fundamentally, that's the problem. So if he would humble himself and open his mind more and continue with the work rather than doing his podcast, he would eventually reach a stage where his entire sense of reality and mind would collapse. He would have an existential crisis. It would be very painful for him because he has deep attachments to materialism. But he would see past that and eventually he would become God realized and he would realize that he is God dreaming up the entire Sam Harris persona, which he's still playing. And I don't blame him.

Starting point is 03:58:14 I mean, it's fun to play Sam Harris. I'm sure he gets paid well and so forth. Why do you think it is? Because he has experimented publicly self with psychedelics right to a large degree why do you think it is that he hasn't had a huge encounter a terrifying encounter with god or with love or with his atheism coming to a dissolution well first of all i would say he did it to a small degree to not to a large degree of course large and smaller relative notions but from what i understand he has not really done a lot of psychedelics at very high doses.

Starting point is 03:58:50 And also because he has a very dense materialistic mind. His mind is very much enmeshed not just with materialism, but also with philosophy and science and his moral philosophy and his intellectual persona as a public intellectual, right? And his whole business model and his whole brand is that the people who follow Sam Harris are Spiral Dynamics Stage Orange, highly rational, skeptical, atheistic people. That's his brand. He, like, probably 80%, 90% of his audience, you know, his most rabid fan base are those people. And what he sells them is a philosophy that buttresses and reinforces their worldview. In the same way that a conservative Fox News host like Tucker Carlson, what he's selling is he's selling propaganda to reinforce the worldview of those people who he's appealing to, you know, the conservatives. And that's what Sam Harris is doing, but at a higher level.

Starting point is 03:59:50 And so for him to have a God realization and then to come back and to tell all those people, hey guys, you know, I'm sorry, I was wrong. Actually, I'm God. For him to do that, that would be so antithetical to his survival agenda. Like it would be extremely threatening. It would be so antithetical to his survival agenda. It would be extremely threatening. It would be very painful. And he would lose half of his audience. I mean, he could do that, but it would be very difficult. And I empathize. I'm not criticizing him for it.

Starting point is 04:00:15 I empathize with how difficult that would be to do. In the same way that it would be very difficult for a suicide bomber to admit, you know, hey guys, my notion of Allah was all bullshit, and you know what, I don't have to kill people to appease Allah or whatever. Like, that would be very difficult for a suicide bomber to admit that and to reform himself, because he's so steeped in that ideology, and his entire life and business and his career and his family, they're all tied in with that. That's how he survives, And business and his career and his family, they're all tied in with that.

Starting point is 04:00:44 That's how he survives. It's through that ideology. So ideology is the most dangerous thing. And ideology is not just something stupid religious people have. And it's not just about woo-woo topics. Ideology very much exists within science and philosophy as rationalism. And philosophy as rationalism. This very stubborn, arrogant attachment to a material, logical universe. And anything that contradicts that gets demonized as woo-woo or whatever. It just gets ignored.

Starting point is 04:01:23 And then you get stuck in it. I never thought of it like that with respect to taking a psychedelic and then it not totally shattering your worldview because your worldview is so entrenched. Oh, yeah. That's, yeah. Because what the psychedelic will do

Starting point is 04:01:44 if you do enough of them, is that they will, the psychedelic is trying to expand your consciousness, but your consciousness can only expand as much as you're willing it to expand. So if your mind is not radically open, and, you know, yours is, unlike most people's, so for you, it might be difficult to actually empathize with somebody who's got a very closed mind. So for you, it might be difficult to actually empathize with somebody who's got a very closed mind. It is that way for me too. I'm very open-minded. I have to be to do this work. But there were things that I learned through psychedelics that were so radical, it created existential crises for me that I would have to sit and just, you know, curl up into a ball and just lie there on the floor integrating this thing. You really have to go through all of your psychological baggage before the psychedelics will allow you to expand consciousness into the deep metaphysical and existential and

Starting point is 04:02:36 epistemological framework of reality. And that's exactly what most people encounter on psychedelics is that take a psychedelic, but they don't have the intellectual framework and they have so much trauma fear attachment and psychological baggage it'll take them years to work through that many many trip dozens of trips to work through that until you clear all that out and then finally you can say okay i'm no longer afraid i'm no longer anxious i've gotten rid of all my trauma. Now show me what reality is. And then you'll be shown. But it takes a lot of work for most people. Okay, I'm going to get personal. And so I'll probably bleep my name or just remove this

Starting point is 04:03:17 one part, but leave your answer to this. When I took psychedelics for the first time, I wasn't expected. First of all, I didn't know what to expect. And I was what one would call a hard-nosed atheist. And I pretty much was even after that. It's not as if it shook my atheism. It shook my ideas to what consciousness could be, but not my atheism. And I took a regular dose, one tab. And I remember, I'm just telling you this personally leo because i'm curious to

Starting point is 04:03:46 know what you think so i remember just going to the mirror and feeling like i couldn't control my breath and that was so terrifying i went on the floor i couldn't speak and then two the people that i was with came to me and looked at me and said like heard you okay okay and i said ask me only yes or no questions and i couldn't, because I couldn't say it with emotions. Emotions, for me to display an emotion was far too much effort. I could feel it terrifyingly in the back. But luckily I had enough, I was cognizant enough for them to say that. Okay, for me to say that.

Starting point is 04:04:16 Okay, then they were a bit worried about me and it came in waves and so on. Okay, that's traditional psychedelics. It comes in waves. Okay, that's traditional psychedelics. Comes in waves. But I would have thought that my previous worldview was extremely... I would imagine it as an extremely toughly built home. Steel girders and so on.

Starting point is 04:04:41 But the psychedelic I took wasn't a hurricane's worth. It was pretty much a wind's worth. But I don't know why that wind blew my house down. However, the other person I'm with, he is also a staunch atheist materialist, but hasn't thought much about his own philosophy. That's the key. And he, no, no, but he, what I'm saying is,

Starting point is 04:05:03 but he took the same dose and has taken other doses and has never had personal insights at all. He takes even larger doses and just views it as, oh, I can see the walls changing. That's so interesting. Because you, it's extremely easy to explain because it's obvious that your mind actually wants to understand the very fabric of existence. Like, this is your whole thing. You want the toe. You want, you want the understanding. Whereas you have to understand that most people don't care about philosophical or metaphysical topics at all. Like it doesn't even interest them to most people. You take a guy off the street and you say, Hey, do you want to know what the,

Starting point is 04:05:40 why the universe exists? And he'll be like, sure, tell me. And then you tell him and he's like, okay, cool. And then he just goes by about his day. Like he doesn't care. He doesn't, why the universe exists and he'll be like sure tell me and then you tell him and he's like okay cool and he just goes by about his day like he doesn't care he doesn't it doesn't land on him he doesn't realize the significance of this and he's not thinking deeply about mathematics and physics and trying to connect everything together into some larger thing and like no he's just going about his life you know all he cares about is like sex and food and simple things like this and survival. Also, he's not as open minded as you. You're probably the one top top one percent of the world in terms of open mindedness, whereas he may just be a closed minded person by his, you know, five personality type temperament or whatever.

Starting point is 04:06:26 temperament or whatever um furthermore another important aspect there's layers to to why psychedelics are so complex is that you can't assume that psychedelics affect everybody the same at a physiological level right so we tend to us we tend to assume that like well if i take one tab of lsd and my friend takes a tab of lsd we should have the same experience no not at all like i am extremely sensitive to psychedelics if i I take a psychedelic, it's going to be about three times more potent than it will be for an average person. I've tested this and figured it out with, you know, by looking at how other people do it. Yeah. So like it's a, it's a very, so some people are extremely sensitive. Conversely, other people have extreme tolerances i know some people like on my forum that will say they do 500 micrograms of lsd and to them that's like and you know a pleasant trip if i took 500 milligrams of micrograms of lsd i would be in outer space and probably you know i would never come back right because i couldn't even see the walls of my house. So it varies enormously. And it doesn't just vary in terms of dosage.

Starting point is 04:07:27 You have to understand. Furthermore, it varies in terms of just what is going on. Because remember, what I told you earlier is that my theory is that we're sort of living in our own bubble realities. And everyone's bubble reality is a little bit different. And so you're going to see different things. You know, like, for example, when I do DMT, just regular DMT, people talk about experiencing entities and a lot of visuals. I don't get any of that. I just go straight to infinity.

Starting point is 04:07:55 I don't get aliens. I don't get DMT entities. I don't get fractals and a bunch of colors and stuff. It's just like, just, I'm in the same space, but I just become infinitely conscious of the space. So it's very, it's very different.

Starting point is 04:08:10 Have you tried different doses of DMT? Oh, yeah. Well, if I took any higher dose, I would, I would be dead right now. Okay. Have you taken lesser doses of DMT? It sounds like you're at the highest tier.

Starting point is 04:08:24 I've taken so much. And by the way, it's not a lot. By normal standards, it would be little. But since I'm so sensitive, I've taken so much that it's literally to the point of suicidal levels of dose. So I wouldn't be comfortable taking more. And then lower doses? Yeah, of course. But even the lower doses sent you to infinity?

Starting point is 04:08:47 None of them gave you an encounter with a fractal geometry or demons or aliens and so on? No demons and aliens. I get a little bit of fractals. That just comes naturally with most psychedelics. Especially if I focus in on it. I can sort of almost kind of maneuver my way through the space a little bit. And it kind of depends on what I want.

Starting point is 04:09:08 Usually I don't, I don't care about the visuals. I care about the insights and I care about the ultimate understanding. So I just, I just go straight basically to infinity. Yeah. Even on, even on like normally any threshold dose of psychedelic at this point will just send me straight into infinity. And then if I take higher doses, it'll be just like almost suicidal levels of infinity to the point where the i experience such ecstatic uh bliss and pleasure from the infinite love that i experience when i'm um

Starting point is 04:09:38 you know going that high that it becomes it becomes impossible for like the body to even contain it you want to kill yourself because it's too it's too pleasure it's too much pleasure basically the pleasure goes infinite imagine experiencing infinite pleasure forever you would think that would be that would be like a dream come true but actually what happens is that your body and ego mind can only tolerate so much pleasure. After a certain while, it actually... And it becomes unpleasurable. It becomes... Yeah, it actually becomes like traumatizing.

Starting point is 04:10:11 It's too pleasant. You want it to stop. So part of your spiritual practices is actually to raise your ceiling on how much spiritual bliss you can experience because that is like your glass ceiling and it prevents you from experiencing more love really fundamentally what it is, it's a fear

Starting point is 04:10:28 of love, you're fearing experiencing more and more of your own consciousness, because what happens is at those levels of consciousness you become so loving, imagine falling in love with torture, rape you know, Hitler

Starting point is 04:10:43 and like, these things become so loving, like it's scary, it's Hitler. And these things become so loving. It's scary. It's frightening to love these things to such high degrees. Most people would think they're losing their mind. And it does feel like insanity at times. And many people don't have very stable minds. So they can take a psychedelic and then they will veer off into some sort of twisted direction. They'll have negative thoughts and then they'll believe that demons are real and demons are chasing them.

Starting point is 04:11:12 It literally turns into a nightmare. And that's the classic bad trip. what are some tips you have for people to avoid a negative trip and even the suicidal thoughts that come with these seemingly at least from one perspective nihilistic points of view when i say nihilism i'm what i'm referring to is the lack of morality let's say amorality or relativeness right okay um yeah so the number one simplest thing you can do is just lower your doses people get cocky and take higher doses as though it's a game like you you need to treat the psychedelic like a loaded gun basically, or like a, a bottle of nitroglycerin. I mean, this shit is, is, is so powerful and so potentially

Starting point is 04:12:13 dangerous if you take too much. So I would just stay in the moderate, low to moderate zone. Don't go for high dose. Don't go for heroic doses. There's this sort of stupid idea within the psychedelic community of like, Oh yeah, man, I took a heroic dose. And then someone else is like, oh yeah, I took a double heroic dose. And just the way that most psychedelics are done are so irresponsibly simply because people are just popping stuff. They're not measuring it. They're eyeballing something and then they end up taking twice as much as what they should. And this is mostly what to bad trips is you just you took too much more than you can handle in the same way that if you're going to go drinking you know know your limits when you drink don't drink an entire bottle of vodka and then act surprised the next day that you're in hell it's also oxymoronic because

Starting point is 04:13:00 they're saying look i took a double heroic dose well truly if you took a heroic dose you would have a dissolution of your ego and you wouldn't be bo, I took a double heroic dose. Well, truly, if you took a heroic dose, you would have a dissolution of your ego and you wouldn't be boasting about taking a double heroic dose. Yeah, well, they may have lost the ego for a while, but the ego comes back after the trip in most cases. True, true, true. And it can even come back stronger. It can now feel like, oh, yeah, I took the heroic dose and I conquered my fear and that now becomes the new ego.

Starting point is 04:13:26 Hmm. That's interesting. Okay, so how does one avoid the suicidal thoughts that come along with nihilism? It's hard for me to say because normally I'm a very psychologically stable person. I have always been that way. It's just a strength of mine. I'm a very psychologically stable person. I have always been that way. It's just a strength of mine. I'm a very grounded person, actually. And I rarely have

Starting point is 04:13:54 suicidal thoughts. And so it's hard for me to relate to people who live in a constant state of negativity and depression and who have like a miserable life. They have a shitty job. They have a shitty family life. They've been abused. They've been traumatized. I didn't have a lot of trauma when I was young. I was fortunate to grow up in

Starting point is 04:14:13 a nice, our family was dysfunctional in many ways, but, um, you know, I received love for my mother and care for my dad and so forth. So those of you who had difficult childhoods, lots of trauma, those of you who have lives that you just don't like, you're miserable at your job and you feel stuck, or you have mental instability or mental illness even, you have to really be careful with the doses. And also you have to do a lot of the basic self-help work. You have to realize before I got into psychedelics, I was, I never took a single drug. I didn't even drink. I didn't smoke weed. I didn't do anything. Um, and I got into psychedelics only like four or five years ago. Uh, and until that I did like 10 to 15 years of work on my life.

Starting point is 04:15:11 I worked on my diet, on my health, on my fitness, on my relationships, on my sexuality. I worked on my business. I worked on my career. I got all those things in order. I got all my ducks in a row. I did introspection. I worked out various lingering traumas that I did, minor traumas that I had. I worked those out. So I worked out a lot of stuff.

Starting point is 04:15:32 Plus, I did a lot of study of philosophy and science and metaphysics and epistemology. And I had those foundations in place. So then when I went into psychedelics, for the most part, it was all very beautiful and very smooth and easy. whereas most people don't do any of that work, and then their friends give them a couple of tabs of LSD at a party, and then, yeah, they freak out. How old are you now? 36. Yeah. I'm losing track of time with all this COVID nonsense. You're extremely wise, extremely, extremely wise for someone who's so young. And something that strikes me about your character is that I watch people like a hawk when I view videos with them or when I'm interviewing them and or. and or and i noticed that if there's this is if there's a skill that i have above all else it's not math it's not physics it's not even interviewing per se it's it would be i can read

Starting point is 04:16:37 people i can i pick up on the slightest hints of insecurity in body language or dogmatism in so-and-so area, partly because I have so much of it myself, and I've observed so much, and I constantly observe it in myself. So much of it is being so self-conscious that I'm conscious of other people, because I can now apply it. because I can now apply it and I don't and I sense deception and I can sense I can sense the slightest well I can sense deception in people and I don't sense that what you're saying is for the sake of your own ego or that you don't believe what you're saying. So there's a congruency about yourself that I commend. And I have plenty of egoic tendencies too.

Starting point is 04:17:42 So there are many times where I want to exaggerate something or I want to paint it in a better light than it really is or where I'm insecure about sharing something or being vulnerable about something. There's a lot of stuff that I don't share. So by no means, like, honestly, I have so much. The tricky thing is that it's in a certain sense, it's actually easy to access infinity. The hard part is how do you bring sense it's actually easy to access infinity. The hard part is how do you bring it back down to earth and then embody it. And that is something that I still have a lot of work left to do that I'm sorting through. So it's really bringing the absolute down into the relative domain that is the most challenging thing.

Starting point is 04:18:26 And in that sense I have a lot of deficiencies. And honestly, many spiritual teachers and even masters do, because it's a really difficult challenge. This is why you see many gurus and so forth having all sorts of sex scandals or character problems or sometimes even addictions and so forth, just because you have to really distinguish between accessing the absolute. That's one thing. Accessing the truth. In a certain sense, that's easy.

Starting point is 04:19:02 That does not mean your character is going to be good. It does not mean you're going to be a moral person it does not mean that you're going to please everybody and also everybody who's looking at you and judging you is judging you through their ego so they have their own expectations so it's almost impossible to meet all of their expectations because they just conflict with each other so

Starting point is 04:19:22 is that because accessing this information, this truth, is different than believing the truth? Or is that independent of what you're saying? Well, truth is not a belief. Truth is what is the case. So you can access truth. It's not information. It is being.

Starting point is 04:19:40 You can become conscious of it. Like, you can look at your hands, but the fact that you're looking at your hands and you're conscious of them, that doesn't, you know, if I have a porn addiction, that doesn't cure my porn addiction if I have if I'm in a fight with my parents, that doesn't cure my problems with my parents

Starting point is 04:19:57 if I'm addicted to greasy food and bacon, that's not going to remove that because the mind most of the structure of the mind still remains. And the mind has attachments and biases and beliefs still remain. And so you're not done deconstructing the mind even after you've accessed infinity. Should one get rid of attachment? Well, it depends on what your goals are.

Starting point is 04:20:24 There are no absolute shoulds. You can do whatever you want. It just depends on what you goals are there are no absolute shoulds you can do whatever you want it just depends on what you want out of your life so if you have a certain goal i can tell you whether like for example if if your goal is to become more loving then yeah it helps to get rid of attachments because every attachment is a bias that keeps you from experiencing higher degrees of love. Because love literally is a lack of bias. What about if your goal is to feel happiness or pleasure? Should one get rid of their attachments? Or get rid of attachment in general? Well, every attachment is going to bring with it suffering because one of the core principles

Starting point is 04:21:10 of buddhism which i agree with is impermanence the idea that no form in the universe can be permanent you can't make any form permanent and everything that you attach to is a form of some kind. It's either an object, a person, a feeling, an emotion. By form, I even mean things like pleasure. That's a form. And even ideas are forms. They're subtle forms in your mind. So if you get attached to the idea of materialism, that's a problem.

Starting point is 04:21:42 If you get attached, even if you get attached to the idea of God, that's also a problem because God is not an idea. God is not your idea of God. So that will create an obstacle. And suffering will come from that because reality is fluid and it's always changing. So anything you attach to, since reality is always fluid and changing, at some point you're going to lose it. And when you lose it, that's when you're going to suffer. Right? So any person you love is going to die, obviously. We know that. So any pleasure you receive from loving a person, you're also going to pay for it on the back end.

Starting point is 04:22:20 It's almost like you're taking out a loan. You take out a loan, and you get love and sex, and it's great and it's fine i'm not saying there's anything wrong with that but you have to understand that there's going to be a cost that you pay at the end of that and and and look if you accept that cost that's also fine you can accept it you could say yeah this will cause me suffering and i'm willing to go through it okay fine there's nothing wrong with suffering i like what you're saying which is slightly different than most spiritual gurus at least from the more eastern tradition where they repudiate attachment wholeheartedly because attachment will bring about some suffering a practical practical yeah go ahead for me well with attachment you mentioned come some happiness.

Starting point is 04:23:05 You get attached to a dog. There's like, let's say, five units of happiness per day. Okay, then you know that there's a loss function or a cost function. There's a cost at some point. It's going to die because, well, there's impermanence. So there's a guaranteed future loss. But then if one is to optimize... Unless you die first. Yeah. That's the key. Oh, great, great. Okay. So there's a guaranteed future loss. But then if one is to optimize...

Starting point is 04:23:25 Unless you die first. That's the key. Oh, great. Great. Okay. Then... Right. And I like that you used the analogy of a loan on one's house.

Starting point is 04:23:38 Because the way that most people that I've heard that are not you express this whole attachment issue is, yes, you should reject it outright because at some point it will lead to, because of the principle of impermanence, let's say, it will lead to huge loss later. However, they don't account for the at least momentary happiness. And then you can do an expectation and say, well, it's a plus. It's in the same way that a risk analysis company would say it's still a plus. If I send you a loan, you're going to pay back when i'm going to get more interest well you can perform the same analysis and then there's that tennessean quote i think it's it's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved yeah i see that missing like there's a nuance that's

Starting point is 04:24:21 missing in so much of the new age circle with regard to attachment with regard to with regard to guilt sorry not with regard to guilt but with regard to free will i don't need to express my thoughts on that so how about i ask you about thomas campbell sure yeah so what are your views on top where do you disagree with thomas campbell large we agree on a lot of stuff um maybe 80 of stuff we might agree on so for the most part i'm going to be splitting hairs here on technical stuff but um that's me that's me in a nutshell man uh but first let me say where we agree i mean he basically i think says that everything is mind or everything is consciousness.

Starting point is 04:25:06 So we're totally in agreement on that. Totally, yeah. Yeah, and then he talks about love and he says that love is fundamental to the structure of how the universe works. And I would agree with him on that. You know, love as being opposed to fear and how, you know, the universe is trying to maximize love and so forth. Basically, we agree on that. And that the purpose of life is to love more, to become more loving, to expand your consciousness. We agree on that. He talks about a lot of like astral travel type of stuff.

Starting point is 04:25:40 And his explorations of that, I personally haven't had much of that experience myself. I don't dispute that what he says is how he's experienced it. And my model basically is able to accommodate that. So that's fine. People can do astral travel. To me, it's just like dreaming and so forth. Yeah, you can do that and explore different dreams, different realms. Okay, fine.

Starting point is 04:26:06 It's just all imagination anyways. It's all consciousness. And then where we would disagree is that it's his physical stuff. So I would say he's still not fully God realized because he doesn't, he wouldn't tell you that you're literally God. I don't think he would say that you're something less than god he would say you're an individuated unit of consciousness he says that i see you great memory man yeah and and so i would say um yeah at a certain level you are an icu an

Starting point is 04:26:40 individual unit of consciousness but if you reach the highest levels of infinity, which I don't think he's reached, I think that's the problem, is that he's kind of stuck in the astral realms. I consider him a very high consciousness person. He has amazing advice to give you just to most people. He can give you amazing advice on how to improve your life and how to expand your consciousness, but he has not reached absolute infinity. And the reason that I can say that is because his notion of physics is still somewhat almost materialistic. I mean, he talks about like it's a virtual reality. First of all, a lot of people misunderstand what he means by virtual. So a lot of materialists will latch onto that and say, ah, so he's saying we're in a computer simulation.

Starting point is 04:27:27 That's not what he's saying, though. He's using the word virtual rather poetically and sort of metaphorically, not literally, in the sort of computer lingo sense. So reality is not really happening in a computer. And reality is also not a simulation. I think that would be our biggest disagreement. He says it's a simulation. And he also says it is a finite simulation. He says reality is finite, and it's definitely not finite. It's infinite. And he also says that time is fundamental, and time is definitely not...

Starting point is 04:27:58 Sorry, what were you saying? You're saying that your disagreement is that he would classify life or reality as finite. Yeah, he would classify life or reality as finite yeah he would say reality is a finite simulation i would disagree with that he says that um i don't know if he believes that reality has like a lower limit and like it's quantized can you refresh my memory does he say that it's quantized and that there's a bottom level like a plank length or something yeah right so i would i wouldn't call it, but yeah. Yeah. So I would disagree that there's no fundamental unit to reality. Basically it goes on forever up, up and down in all dimensions.

Starting point is 04:28:31 So you can zoom into reality forever. So that's, that's actually a very important thing to realize because without that, you're not realizing the scope of what reality is. And, um, and then what is, what else does he say? Hmm. Oh, he says time is fundamental, yeah. And time is imaginary, and you can actually have reality without time. You can realize eternity, and you can realize that time is actually something conscious is constructing. You can deconstruct time.

Starting point is 04:29:04 You can also deconstruct space too. But he's still a great teacher and I've in fact learned from him. What have you learned from him? I'm grateful for his work. Actually when I started out his book, you know, what is his book called? My Big Toe.

Starting point is 04:29:25 Yeah, his book was, it's so funny. You talk about materialism and atheism. When I read that book, I was still like an atheist materialist and I was into pickup and stuff. I actually learned about that book from the pickup community on a forum. Somebody just in some random offshoot forum, an unrelated section of the forum, somebody posted that book like in the philosophy section. So I was interested in philosophy. So

Starting point is 04:29:48 I, I scooped up that book and the person there wrote something like, you know, this book is very radical and it'll, it'll change your whole understanding of reality. I'm like, Oh, cool. So I pick up this book and I read the first 10 pages of it. And in the very beginning, he starts talking about his astral travels. And I thought it was so fucking ludicrous what he was talking about that I put the book down in frustration. And I just left it on my bookshelf for like four or five years. I thought it was fucking stupid. Waste of time. Then later, once I, you know, did more of the spiritual work, then I came back to the book and I read, read most of it.

Starting point is 04:30:26 And, uh, so, uh, from him, I learned, I learned about like, for example, dreaming. He, uh, I remember I listened to one of his talks about dreaming and he had, he had a profound insight about how you can use dreaming as a way to learn about your sort of trauma and other psychic baggage. For example, if you have a recurrent dream that you keep having where you're fearful, like for example, maybe you have a dream where you are, like what I had is, after college, I almost had PTSD after college because I was studying so hard for all the tests and exams to be a good student that, um, like I would have nightmares about missing tests or failing classes. And those

Starting point is 04:31:11 nightmares would, would continue years after I was out of college and I wasn't even studying anything anymore. Um, and, uh, and so basically, and I would have those like consistently, like every week I would have them for years. And so what Thomas Campbell basically said was something along the lines of, if you're having a recurrent nightmare scenario like this or just a bad dream, you got to ask yourself after you come out of that dream, like, what is the lesson here for my consciousness? I need to learn about myself to expand my sense of self and consciousness so that I can integrate this So that this dream doesn't need to keep happening again because this dream is a sort of an unconscious message That there's something I haven't sorted out yet in my psyche and when I sort it out the dream will stop. Mm-hmm So that's one thing I learned from him Well, that's psychoanalysis in a nutshell or at at least the beginnings of it, like Freud and Jung.

Starting point is 04:32:06 Yeah, but what's cool about it is that you don't need a therapist. You can kind of do it yourself. Yeah. What are your views on Bernardo Kastrup? Like, where are you agreeing to disagree with him? Yeah, we agree on a lot, probably 90% of stuff we would agree on. He's got very good arguments against materialism, all of which are basically correct, I would say.

Starting point is 04:32:29 He does a brilliant job of kind of dissecting and cutting it apart, better than I do. Sometimes I kind of struggle with being very technical about things, but he's really good at that. And where we would disagree is, I think he's still not, first of all, he's not infinitely conscious. He hasn't accessed but he actually, he hasn't fully actualized that and so he's not actually conscious that he's God imagining all other beings

Starting point is 04:33:12 so he still thinks that there are you know, you ask them a question about like solipsism and you ask them a question about are you a solipsist and he says very confidently kind of like no as though solipsist? And he says very confidently, kind of like, no, as though solipsism is like a bad thing in his mind. I get the sense that he's kind of averse to solipsism.

Starting point is 04:33:33 Do you disagree? Do you disagree? No, yeah. From what I remember, he said he's not a solipsist, and he was very kind of flippant about it. So his model is basically there's this dissociative boundary between his consciousness and other consciousnesses that's right um so what i would just say is that of course that dissociative boundary itself is imaginary and that if he goes deeper in his consciousness work eventually he'll realize that

Starting point is 04:33:59 he imagines all uh all dissociative boundaries and all other agents behind those boundaries that he assumes are there. They're all imaginary. And they will all collapse. And then he'll realize he's God, dreaming the whole thing up. What would you say to some people who say if you zoom in enough to an atom, you would get to another universe? And if you zoom out enough from ours, we're an atom and someone else is. Yeah, that's basically how it works. Although what exactly you'll zoom into or out to in terms of form, that'll be whatever you imagine it to be in a certain sense. But yeah, you can zoom in forever. So technically, just so you understand, infinity is that which can divide

Starting point is 04:34:43 itself forever. So really what reality is, is just division. It's self-division. And every division can divide itself again and again and again in a fractal way without any limit. How deep do you want to go? For example, if consciousness wants to imagine that consciousness ends at the plank length, that will be its end because that's what it's imagining the end is. But if consciousness wants to go deeper and probe deeper and it realizes that the plank length is just a conceptual fabrication, it can go beyond that forever. And yeah, you can zoom out forever as well. And what you'll find there, who knows? Have you heard of someone named Frank Yang? Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 04:35:33 I don't know anything besides how Frank Yang looks. But what are your thoughts on whether or where you agree with Frank Yang and where you disagree? I actually don't know that much about his whole worldview and so forth. So it's a little difficult to comment. I know that he has criticisms of me in that he has this idea of, he's critical of psychedelics. Basically his point is that psychedelics don't produce a genuine awakening or enlightenment, and that through meditation, you can reach a deeper level of

Starting point is 04:36:12 enlightenment. The true enlightenment is the meditative one, and that he would say that that is all beyond the psychedelic stuff, and that it transcends all of it. And basically he's sort of talking about the Buddhist notion of cessation. Cessation is a meditative attainment or achievement, you could say, for lack of any better word. Basically, it's sort of the pinnacle of what a Buddhist meditator would seek to attain, which is you reach a mental stillness, you silence your mind and your consciousness so much that literally the entire universe ceases, it pops out of existence, so to speak, and you're left with just absolutely nothing. There's a total blank.

Starting point is 04:36:58 It's a blank that's blanker than blank, you might say. This would be called cessation in Buddhism, and then they would say that that is sort of the ultimate thing that the Buddha taught, and the ultimate, the true enlightenment, so to speak. And that everything else is just a distraction, or

Starting point is 04:37:17 not the ultimate. That's what I think that would be his position. And I'm curious what the process looks like of going from this state of inoperative nullness to now where precisely does some of the perceptions come back if there's absolutely nothing does it come back in the center does it come back there does it come back everywhere little by little adam by adam i'm curious about how that looks uh yeah i would assume it would pop back in rather suddenly not adam not adam by adam yeah the way that it's been described from things that i've read is that it's a it's a it's a rather um abrupt shift it's almost like imagine you're

Starting point is 04:38:05 sitting here and the entire universe collapses and then reboots from scratch sort of like that like it's it's a very very radical like restarting a computer the screen goes yeah yeah you're basically rebooting the entire universe that's interesting yeah or maybe you could you could almost think of it like a glitch. Imagine like a glitch in your consciousness where you're in the universe and then you pop out of the universe and then you pop right back into it. And since that place that you popped out into, you know, the nothingness zone, since there's nothing there, there's no time there, it lasts for an eternity.

Starting point is 04:38:43 So imagine that you pop out of your present experience for an eternity into nothingness, and then you pop right back in, and all of that took just like a fraction of a second in real time, in our human time. But in, you know, in the cessation time, it lasted for an eternity. So it's a very sort of very mind-melting idea. Yeah, because you have atemporal juxtaposed with temporal. And they are not supposed to have a relationship between, yet they're related in some manner. Right, right. So what I... Continue.

Starting point is 04:39:14 Yeah, so what I would say about cessation is that... I mean, what I talk about doesn't really contradict cessation. To me, cessation is just one thing that consciousness can do. It can cease. It can sort of be totally formless. And that's fine. It can do that. But there's nothing, I give no special privilege to that over any other state of consciousness.

Starting point is 04:39:37 So to me, all states of consciousness are basically equal. And there's nothing but states of consciousness. And to me, cessation is just another thing that consciousness does. No more special than any other thing and that nothingness it's very important to understand that it's not that the universe came from nothing that's not what i'm saying there's an even more radical understanding to be had here it's that the universe is nothing and always was nothing and it's nothing right now. This, everything you're seeing, all qualia are actually nothing because you cannot distinguish something from nothing.

Starting point is 04:40:15 And that is the ultimate non-duality. Yeah. Because if you're still distinguishing and privileging nothing over something, formlessness over form, you actually haven't fully integrated. So usually in the classic awakening path, what usually happens is that first you realize no self. Then you realize that the self is absolutely formless and you sort of get attached to that formlessness. Then you realize that form is also nothing. And then you reintegrate the formlessness into the form. And then you are in such a state of non-duality. You're so awake. That. You don't need to be in a state of cessation.

Starting point is 04:40:54 In order to be conscious of the absolute. The absolute is literally everything. At all times. No matter what state you're in. All states are the absolute, but not all states are aware of themselves as being the absolute. Have you seen,

Starting point is 04:41:12 there's the Simpsons episode where Bart, he needed a babysitter and then someone was called and then there's someone who babysitted for Bart and she's just rocking on the chair. She's like, Bart, put it down. Put it down, Bart. She's like traumatized and she's just rocking on the chair she's like Bart put it down put it down Bart she's like traumatized and she's saying this to console herself but almost like she

Starting point is 04:41:30 can't help it do you remember that that's a really old one yeah there's something that I sense in the non-dualist community a similar pattern noster where they'll say it's all one it's all infinity everything and nothing are the same it's all infinity it's all infinity everything and nothing are the same it's all infinity it's all one almost mindlessly like an attempt to it seems like in an in an attempt to console and convince themselves of something that they've felt so sincerely at one point but no longer do because they're in this world supposedly rather than this other world of of bliss and their current life is so desperate and so hard and they're seeking to get back to that in this world, supposedly, rather than this other world of bliss. And their current life is so desperate and so hard,

Starting point is 04:42:08 and they're seeking to get back to that place of comfort. And the only model they had in that place was that of infinite unity. So they keep professing and trying to get back to this place of inner peace, trying to find... They're trying to get to this place of inner peace trying to find they're trying to get to this place of inner peace associated with saying that all is infinity all is unity all is nothing at the same time infinity and zero are the same rather than trying to get to the truth wherever the truth leads them even if the truth leads them to non-unity or materialism or pluralism. Do you sense it's like a dogmatism in the non-dualist community about non-dualism?

Starting point is 04:42:50 I don't get that from advanced non-dual masters, who I would consider advanced, but certainly those kind of wannabe folks who are maybe students and are early on the path, it's certainly very easy to bullshit yourself with ideas about non-duality. And all those ideas are not non-duality. All ideas about infinity are not infinity. So you can easily fool yourself with ideas that you might even fool yourself that you've awoken when you actually haven't. You can fool yourself to think that you've awoken to the highest

Starting point is 04:43:28 level when you actually are at a shallow level of awakening. That's just because awakening is so tricky because you have a little bit of awakening and then you kind of even a little bit of awakening is so awesome and radical that you say like, well, fuck, this is amazing. Surely there can't be anything

Starting point is 04:43:43 beyond this. And then later you'll realize there's something beyond it. Um, so I think that though, of course those traps exist and you have to be very careful about not conceptualizing this stuff and turning it into an ideology. I don't see that in you necessarily, but I see that in many people, I won't name names, but I sense a fakeness about some of them. I don't want to use the word dogmatism about their non-duality they perceive to be these recalcitrant scientists who have this emphasis on models and language and they have compassion to virtually everyone except them i see this a bit with thomas campbell too well i mean i'm a little guilty of that myself in terms of like lack of compassion towards uh very dense scientists like you know like compassion to everyone except them like

Starting point is 04:44:45 richard dawkins type of person like yeah so so you can turn science into your shadow like yeah interesting you can turn richard dawkins or daniel dennett into your shadow and i and i've been guilty of that in the past to some degree you know i have bad mouth sam harris at times um when I could have been more compassionate. Because ultimately what you learn is that everything is happening, everything you don't like about reality is happening out of ignorance. So those people who are doing something you don't like, they're doing it out of ignorance. That means they don't know any better. So they're like a little child that doesn't know any better.

Starting point is 04:45:35 And so the more conscious you become, the more you realize that. So anybody who has some sort of ideology or a scientist or a philosopher or an academic or a religious fanatic, they're only doing it because they're stuck in their paradigm and they don't see a way out. And so can you really blame them for that? I mean, if they knew better, if they were more conscious, then they would act better. But you can't really blame Richard Dawkins for being Richard Dawkins. He is that way. He's never going to change, and you just got to accept that he's stuck there. And honestly, awakening is not for most people because it's so extremely radical. Most people are not willing to handle God-realization, and this goes back to your earlier question about attachment.

Starting point is 04:46:05 Do I think that it's appropriate to tell everybody to drop their attachments? Not at all, because the majority of people are not meant to awaken, and they will never awaken no matter how well you teach them, so you should not try to shove awakening down their throat,

Starting point is 04:46:24 and therefore they will always have attachments, so them so you should not try to shove awakening down their throat and and therefore they will always have attachments so they need to be taught how to live with their attachments in a responsible way not too attached but also you shouldn't tell them to remove all attachments because it's just not practical and also even if you're awake you're gonna have attachments like literally you can't survive for more than three days without attachment to water

Starting point is 04:46:49 you're gonna have to drink water so survival necessitates certain attachments it's just it's more about it's more about a nuanced sort of view of like don't worry so much about letting go of the most

Starting point is 04:47:04 healthy attachments you have like you don't worry so much about letting go of the most healthy attachments you have. Like you don't need to worry about maybe letting go of your wife or your need for food or water or a house, but you can certainly let go of a lot of stupid attachments you have, especially in the, in the realm of ideas, ideologies, beliefs, you can let go a lot of those. You can let go of political beliefs. You can let go of religious dogmas, scientific dogmas you can let go of even your emotional attachments to needing to

Starting point is 04:47:33 hurt somebody or to get back at them or to defend yourself against an attack or to to experience a lot of pleasure, you can let go of some of those and your life will be better probably as a result. What I notice, and I don't know what to call this community, I don't even know if it's a community,

Starting point is 04:48:09 but the non-dualist community, new age spiritual guru types, or not even gurus, forget about that, let's say the followers of the gurus, what I noticed in them, there perhaps my aversion to some of... Well, what I notice in them is there's an affectivity about their happiness. And I don't know if you sense it, but I'm fairly certain you sense it and others sense it too, where they seem compelled to chuckle and to smile at everything. I think Sadhguru has a bit of this quality. Maybe to demonstrate, because to not to be mad or to not find humor in every little bit,

Starting point is 04:48:58 every little challenge would be to demonstrate that they're incongruous and false. And I see it as similar to putting on this persona that the self-development community has you know the self-develop many people when they record videos they're like all right guys let's do the and they and they smile no one smiles like that when they're speaking they're like all right guys and let's go and then they changed they cut the standard youtuber does that like they're adopting someone else and it's pickup gurus have this feigning of masculinity and they change their voice and they have they display their intemperance with cars and so on they express command at at all right guys this is this is how you. And they've put on this feigning.

Starting point is 04:49:45 And I also sense that in, it's like, I sense that in some of the non-dualist community, followers, let's say. And I'm just curious if you sense it too. Like, for example, I don't really see that with Sadhguru. With Sadhguru, I see him just being playful

Starting point is 04:50:00 and kind of, I mean, the dude is so conscious. What has he got to be mad about? I think he's just being playful and kind of, I mean, the dude is so conscious. What has he got to be mad about? I think he's just being playful and that's just his personality. I see him as being pretty authentic. I think most of the highest quality non-dual teachers, for most part, I find them to be extremely authentic. In fact, I find them to be the most authentic humans. And there's a good reason for that is because the only way you can be authentic is by discovering truth.

Starting point is 04:50:27 Because that's what you authentically are. Everything else is a construction. You know, much of your character is just a construction. non-duality with also a lot of the new age community and also youtubers and such and self help then then yeah you can in the new age and stuff you can probably put you can find people who are like overly lovey-dovey types everything is like super positive and optimistic like um who's that guy um ralph waters have you seen this guy infinite water never heard yeah he would probably be the best example of what you're talking about, like this sort of like, hey, guys, it's all peace and love.

Starting point is 04:51:10 Like he literally starts his videos like that. And, you know, I wonder how authentic that is to him. Maybe he is that, I don't know. Maybe he is that way or maybe he's putting on a bit of an act. I mean, honestly, when I do my YouTube videos, I put on an act too. I almost treat it as though I'm like an actor on a stage. So I over-dramatize some stuff and, you know, to make it a little exciting. Because otherwise it would just be boring as fuck.

Starting point is 04:51:32 Can you give me that example? One example. Well, a lot of times I'm sort of in this imaginary debate with like, with almost like an idiot in my audience. So it's like, but Leo, I thought you said this. And so I almost have this conversation with myself. I do it tongue in cheek. And it's almost a bit of a problem

Starting point is 04:51:53 because it makes my audience feel like I'm talking down to them. And so I could give them more credit. You actually do a good job of sort of assuming that your audience is very intelligent and can handle the technical stuff. Yeah. Well, I don't see that in you. Sometimes I assume the opposite.

Starting point is 04:52:13 A lot of times I assume my audience is just like stupid as a doorknob. You know, well, I think you're being a bit harsh on yourself. And I see when you do that, when you give these debates, you do these debates aloud between different personalities. At least I haven't seen you say that this is what you're likely thinking. Or even when you say that, maybe I'm not thinking you're talking about me. I'm thinking you're talking about someone else. Because I've listened to so many of these that is the intention like when i say hey you know but leo whatever blah blah blah i'm sort of intending in my mind it's not that i'm talking to you it's that i'm talking to one of the trolls in the comment section it's almost like that yeah and then and i'm trying to make it kind of funny like um i will try i will try to sometimes like actually think of like uh a really ridiculous sounding objection and frame it in a really ridiculous way just so that it's funny. But in a certain sense, it's not the best because it would be better if I really steel man some of my objections and not ridicule them. But I also try to be humorous.

Starting point is 04:53:21 But I also try to be humorous. So speaking of giving the audience a bit more credit, and I was talking to you earlier about being more precise. And when I'm being persnickety, it's not just because I'm trying to pick apart. It's because I think that the truth can be found when you are as precise as you possibly can be. And you take an analogy. Some people say you're taking that analogy too far, but I don't think there's such a thing

Starting point is 04:53:46 as taking an analogy too far. I think there's something like elongating an analogy and mutilating it because you've pushed it past this domain of applicability. But in that, it's not taking it too far. You're actually demonstrating the limits of what you're analogizing and you gain some more insight.

Starting point is 04:54:04 So speaking about that, as well as speaking about treating the audience well, demonstrating the limits of what you're analogizing and you gain some more insight. Speaking about that as well as speaking about treating the audience well, I think that there's so many your audience and the audience, people who are listening to this are so much more bright than traditional media has given

Starting point is 04:54:20 them credit for. Neil deGrasse Tyson would say, this is what gravity is you take it's like a sheet it's like a mattress you put a bowling ball and then you're wondering like the average audience member is thinking first to think oh okay i understand it then second they're like well you're using gravity to explain gravity because the way that the marble falls is because of gravity now because of that i have always had that problem with that visualization let me read to you something le Leo, about this whole, about being specific.

Starting point is 04:54:48 Because Raymond Smullyan, who's a mathematician, a mathematician that I look up to so much, him and Douglas Hofstadter are the people that I would interview, except Raymond Smullyan is no longer with us. But Raymond Smullyan had this great conversation between a mortal, between a man essentially, and God. And it's about free will. And it's such a brilliant conversation. It's so fun. It's so clever that I may just spend an hour at some point on another video just reading this conversation from my audience. But I want to read it to you because you say when you've gotten to some states, you feel an identity with God. And Raymond Smullyan would say, would agree with so much of what you have to say,

Starting point is 04:55:33 but would say that, look, it's not so you feeling identical to God is not the same as being God because there are other possibilities. So let me give you, let me read this for you. Sure. So the mortal says, oh, come on now. If I'm only talking to myself, then how can I be talking to you, God? God says, I'm just in the middle of the story, just so you know. God says, your use of the word only is quite misleading.

Starting point is 04:55:56 I can suggest several logical possibilities under which you talking to yourself does not imply that you're talking to me. Okay. The mortal says, suggest just one. God says, well, obviously one such possibility is that you're talking to me. Okay, the mortal says, suggest just one. God says, well, obviously one such possibility is that you and I are identical. Sorry, the mortal says, that's such a blasphemous thought. Luckily, I didn't utter it. You uttered it, God. God says, okay, according to some religions, yes, that's blasphemous. According to others, it's plain, it's simple, it's immediate, it's the perceived truth. The mortal says, so the only way out of my dilemma

Starting point is 04:56:26 is to believe that you and I are identical? God says, not at all. That's only one way out. There are several others. For example, it may be that you are a part of me, in which case you may be talking to that part of me which is you, or I may be part of you, in which case you may be talking to the part of you which is in me. Or again, you and I might partially overlap, in which case you may be talking to the part of you which is in me or again you and I might partially overlap in which case you may be talking to the intersection and hence talking to both you and me the only way you're talking to yourself might seem to imply that you are not talking to me is if you and I were totally disjoint and even then you could conceivably be talking to both of

Starting point is 04:57:01 us anyway it's a clever you can see this was written by a mathematician just on the word usage it's such a fun it goes on for an hour it's a conversation between a man who in the beginning says to god please god take away my free will because it's such an it's such a huge burden and god is like well i can take away your free will but then once you commit horrible acts and then the man is like, shoot, okay, yes. Well, okay, but I won't feel my free will, and so I won't be responsible for it. And then God's like, well, won't you be responsible now for what you do then? It's such a fun dialogue, man. Yeah, it sounds like he's sort of exploring all the paradoxes of what God is. And I mean, when the finite mind

Starting point is 04:57:46 tries to wrap itself around the infinite, it's absolutely impossible for that to happen. So paradoxes are the result of that. That's what all paradox basically boils down to. What I would say is, yeah, I mean, as great and as fun and as interesting and even important as it is to consider all those possibilities, and it's always important to consider how you might be wrong about something, but when you reach infinite consciousness, every single distinction that that mathematician made in his arguments and in his logic, they will all collapse. And finally, the distinction will collapse between self and other, and the last thing you will realize is that you are absolutely God, and that

Starting point is 04:58:30 there is no other but you. And it's really interesting, you know, because you might think like, oh, well, that's just what Leo, that's just how Leo wants it to be, because, you know, he's a narcissist or something. But actually, the way that it happens in practice, when it really happens to you, there's a really interesting psychological sort of dynamic, is that when you become conscious of God, first of all, you become conscious of it, at least this is how it happened for me, you become conscious of it as other than you. So when I first became conscious of God, the first thing I realized is that, holy fuck, God exists.

Starting point is 04:59:10 And I was wrong. That was my first realization. At that time, I did not identify with God. That, just to realize that God exists, this was absolutely mind blowing. It's a complete,

Starting point is 04:59:25 like, your whole life will never be the same after that point. Not as a belief, but more real than anything else that you consider real in your life. So that happens. And then it took me a lot more awakenings to finally realize that, holy holy fuck it's not just that god exists it's that what is god see first you you find god then you start to wonder but what is god you still don't understand it then you go you probe deeper and you realize fuck of course it's all one if it's all one that means i am am God. I've been separated. I've separated myself from what I am because I feared what I am, because I was

Starting point is 05:00:10 attached to a finite identity, a finite idea of myself. And so, then you realize that, but that's still not where it ends. Then it goes even deeper. You realize God even deeper, what you are even deeper, because you still don't really understand what it is. You question it deeper. You have further awakenings into what is really

Starting point is 05:00:27 God? What am I really? And then you realize that God is infinite love. And when you realize that, then you don't feel, you don't feel worthy. You don't feel worthy to, to, to accept yourself as that because it's too good it's literally so good it's impossible for it to be so good and your your ego cannot cannot accept it i mean i'm a i'm a rather arrogant and prideful person but even when i realize that it's too good to just latch onto it with your ego it it humbles that's interesting it humbles you so deeply that you say, you actually, you almost do enter, and I did sort of enter into a conversation with God, sort of like in that dialogue, where it's like, you see God and you say, oh my God, you're so beautiful, you're infinite love, you're infinite everything. You created me, and you're penetrating into the heart of what God is. And, and, and then as that's happening, you're being showered.

Starting point is 05:01:29 God is sort of like radiating love upon you. Literally like, um, it's almost like coming closer to the sun. The sun just radiates you with its heat. Uh, and you don't feel worthy to be in the presence of the sun, and you just feel so humbled. Like, I mean, you're in tears. You're bawling in tears. You're writhing in ecstasy on the floor.

Starting point is 05:01:55 This is like a profound life-changing experience, as this is happening to you. And what brings you to tears is to realize how selfless God is, how beautiful, how good God is. But the final thing that kills you is... Because, see, there's still a duality there, because you're treating it as separate from you. It's like, oh my God, it's amazing. I'm not worthy of it. And then, and you're like, God, how can you be so good? And then the final coup de grace that God bestows upon you is that God says, here, I'm you.

Starting point is 05:02:42 I'm giving it all to you. I'm you. I'm giving it all to you. You see, so it's not that I'm above you, and that you're some part of me, and that I'm infinitely good, and you're just a little human down there on the earth, and you're trying to, you know, pray to me and all this.

Starting point is 05:02:59 It's not like that. The final gift, the ultimate thing God wants for everybody, is only one thing, which is to realize that you're God. You're not a part of God. You're not a little figment of God. You're God. And it's when you get that that it kills you. you like literally what you experience when if if you are if you are willing to actually surrender your ego and here you require complete self-surrender because the only way you can accept the gift of infinite selflessness and love is to completely annihilate any attachment to any

Starting point is 05:03:37 physical identity you ever thought you had when you are completely willing to let go of absolutely everything the final gift that is given to you is that you simply become God. And at that point, you're just dead. And you just are a pure singularity of love. exists and why it must exist and why it can't be anything other than what it is because if you think about it just think about it if you had the ability the power to create absolutely anything what would you create and the answer is so simple you would create nothing but infinite love you would radiate infinite love forever showering it upon every possible being that you could imagine. This is the only worthy thing for an infinite intellect to do, and God is pure, formless, infinite intellect.

Starting point is 05:04:34 It is an intelligence that figured out how to create itself and to radiate love to the maximum number of possible beings that could ever be conceived of. And that's what God is. It's an infinite radiation of love forever. With no end and no beginning. And when you get that, you're done. You've answered every possible question that you could have about yourself and the universe. And it doesn't matter to you what the details are.

Starting point is 05:05:10 Science doesn't matter to you. Math doesn't matter to you. Nonduality doesn't matter to you. You're just love. You're just pure love. Imagine what the universe was before the Big Bang. Right. It feels kind of like that.

Starting point is 05:05:25 It's like you become that, but not in a neutral way. It's love. I'm wondering, and I wonder this, I'm sure you've wondered this too, this quest that I have for a toe, I imagine it's much more of a journey

Starting point is 05:05:40 than it is a goal. And the reason is because I don't want it to be a goal. Imagine if I did get the theory of everything. What would I have left to do? Would there be fun? Would there be excitement? Now you're saying you would just dissolve in the pool of love.

Starting point is 05:05:56 Yeah, well, I'm saying that's why I'm too selfish. I'm too selfish to accept the toe. Well, it's beyond a toe, because a toe is a theory, and it's beyond a toe because a toe is a theory and it's beyond a theory but i know what you what you mean um but yeah so what i'm saying is so radical that if you there's many degrees of this so it depends how far you want to take it if you take it to its penultimate i mean not penultimate but just to the ultimate if you take it to the ultimate. If you take it to the ultimate, if you accept infinite love, you're actually going to destroy the entire physical universe. It's going to cease to exist.

Starting point is 05:06:35 Right, okay. Let me get something straight here for the audience as well as myself. When you say the universe will cease to exist, you are meaning from your perspective, but somehow your perspective is also correct. No, at that point, it's so absolute that you realize that there are no other perspectives but your own because you're imagining all perspectives. And so you will basically destroy the universe for everybody. You'll take everything with you.

Starting point is 05:07:08 You'll become absolutely nothing forever. And... This has never happened before then. What has never happened? That someone or something has realized this infinite truth and destroyed the universe. Well, that's where it gets tricky. It can only happen to you. That someone or something has realized this infinite truth and destroyed the universe. Well, that's where it gets tricky. It can only happen to you.

Starting point is 05:07:32 There's not anybody else to whom it could happen but to you. Yeah, okay. And then what happens from other people's perspectives? They don't exist. So no one else's perspective exists. In the ultimate sense, yes. Help me understand this. You understand where I'm getting this.

Starting point is 05:07:55 It's extremely paradoxical because it's not that they don't exist per se. It's much more radical than solipsism. Some people say that solipsism is kind of ugly and unpalatable. And it's like, oh, you know, I don't like solipsism. Or it's too crazy to be true. You know, something like solipsism is just too wacky. It shouldn't be true. It's too radical. And actually what I'm saying is that solipsism is not radical enough to be true.

Starting point is 05:08:20 So what actually happens is that it's not just that you're alone in the universe. The reason you're alone is because you're so together. So look what happens. Right now we're sitting here and you're imagining that there's all these different perspectives and people. You, me, dogs and cats and so forth. But as you become more conscious, all those divisions, they are merging towards each other. Look like this. They're coming together, coming are merging towards each other. Look, like this. They're coming together, coming closer together, and closer together, and it's all a convergence.

Starting point is 05:08:50 Imagine like a cone, like this. It's an infinite cone. It goes infinitely far down, but eventually it all converges and moves upward, and all the divisions are dissolving, and all differences between perspectives are dissolving until finally you reach the top of the cone. And at the top of the cone, there's just you. Because you've literally fused yourself into every other thing. So you can interpret it as like, oh, well, that's kind of bleak because I'm just by myself. But that's not quite the right way to think about it.

Starting point is 05:09:30 The other way to interpret it is that the reason I'm by myself is because I'm so together. So imagine if we took you and your wife and we merged you together in love so deeply that you weren't just having intercourse with each other, but you were physically fusing your bodies and consciousnesses and minds into each other so completely that by the end of that process there was no more separation at all between kurt and your wife and you were just one in love forever and you would never separate again you would be in love forever eternally but you and her no longer would exist you would never separate again. You would be in love forever, eternally. But you and her no longer would exist. You would just be complete, undifferentiated oneness. And now imagine that that happens with every single human and living being who could ever exist, ever, in any possible multiverse. All of it merged absolutely into, and you have love. That is what love really means. Let's imagine Sam Harris encountered God.

Starting point is 05:10:58 But he would just say, well, you're saying God is ultimate reality. Something like that. And he would just say, yeah, well, I encountered ultimate reality. I agree. I wouldn't call it God. I don't know why you have to attach a religious connotation to it. So what do you say to that you're God. And it's not just nothingness. It's not just emptiness. It's not just some sort of like object, like a table or a chair. And it's not a person.

Starting point is 05:11:37 And it's not like an alien. It's more like what God is, technically speaking, is it is self-creation. So what it means when I say that you are God, it is to realize that you are literally imagining your own body and hands into existence. You're so conscious that you know how you're doing it. You're so conscious that you,

Starting point is 05:12:02 you are literally conscious of how you're constructing all of reality. So what would you call an infinitely conscious agent that is infinitely intelligent, infinitely good, infinitely powerful, infinitely loving, and self-created? is so free of limitation and even logical constraint that it is able to create itself out of nothing. And it's constantly creating itself, and it's endlessly creative. It is creativity itself. What would you call that? You'd call it God. So the word God is the perfect word.

Starting point is 05:12:44 That's what it is. That's what you are. So the word God is the perfect word. That's what it is. That's what you are. Let's get to some of these audience questions, man. Let's do it. This has been so fun. Good, I'm glad. Actually, one of my notes here, before I get to that, I have a note on, I have a note that says one wouldn't have the levels of Spiral Dynamics if one truly believed in Spiral Dynamics.

Starting point is 05:13:12 And the reason is, because at the highest stage of Spiral Dynamics is Indigo, and one realizes there's no rank, there's not one position that's privileged over the other. And thus you can't say that there's a development because to say develop implies a direction even to say incorporation implies that you privilege inclusiveness over exclusiveness and so to me the developers of spiral spiral dynamics to even write it as a hierarchy means they weren't at the stage where hierarchies were meaningless well certainly certainly the developers of Spiral Dynamics, they themselves rated themselves at stage blue.

Starting point is 05:13:51 Claire Graves put himself at blue, not indigo. There was no... First of all, indigo is an idea from Ken Wilber's model, so it's a little bit more advanced. But yeah, it's just a model. Spiral Dynamics is just a model. It's basically a scientific model, so it has all the limits that scientific models tend to have. And so it only works in a sort of relative pragmatic sense. You shouldn't attribute it as an absolute. You shouldn't think that these levels are somehow baked into the actual fabric of existence.

Starting point is 05:14:24 a handy way of categorizing people in the same way that we can categorize animals according to reptiles, birds, mammals, etc. But these are not absolute categories. There are plenty of animals that kind of have features that are in between, and we could change how we categorize animals. We don't need the reptile category per se. Is the principle of impermanence not susceptible to impermanence? Yeah, so sometimes it's said that the only thing that's permanent is impermanence. Yeah, so why is that principle exempt?

Starting point is 05:14:59 That kind of paradox. How does that happen? Why is that the case? How is it that you can say everything is impermanent except this guy it sort of depends on what perspective you look at it from again it's relativistic um i would say that that principle principle mostly is applied at the sort of more basic level of human life. If you're going to the very highest absolute levels, you might even just say that everything is permanent, like permanent love or something. Whereas if you're at the lower levels of consciousness, just your experience of life, it's almost like a scientific statement.

Starting point is 05:15:48 I mean, scientifically speaking, we're always experiencing consciousness as fluid and changing. It's never stuck, as far as we know, empirically speaking, right? Have you ever experienced a permanent state of consciousness where it's stuck forever?

Starting point is 05:16:03 No, right? And really, I don't know of any human who has described such a state. Otherwise, how could they even talk about it? Because they would be stuck in it. You'd basically have to freeze the whole universe. So it's almost like you could think of it scientifically, like the whole universe is moving. You could almost say like the whole universe is expanding. Just that right there there the big bang alone tells you that you can't have permanence what do you make of this argument from chris langan which says that you have free will the reason you have free will is because you are god and god is ultimate reality there is no limitation set on the universe except from the universe because that's correct so there is no so the universe is self-determining and there's no other definition of free will than self-determination

Starting point is 05:16:53 so yeah the universe you inherit free will yeah god is god is god creates everything using infinite will. And God could give you a portion of its will, right? So in the same way that you have, as a human, you have a portion of God's intellect. You're actually using God's intellect right now to make sense of the words I'm saying. Your IQ, that's God's intellect filtered down to a very low level so God has like an infinite IQ you could say a human has a portion of that, likewise you could say that you have a portion of God's will but a very small portion

Starting point is 05:17:33 so you can for example imagine some thought and then go into the real world and try to build that, like you have an idea for a for a house you want to build and you can go build that house. And that's how humans create stuff. And in fact, part of the joy of being human is creativity.

Starting point is 05:17:51 And a lot of people miss out on this joy. Like, you as an artist, as a filmmaker, and so forth, as a rapper, and whatever, like, you understand, and you probably get joy out of being creative, right? Why does that give you joy? Because inherently, that is God's business. God has no other business but to create. That is the highest joy is to be creative and to

Starting point is 05:18:12 be sharing your creative gifts with others. That's what creativity is about. And then as a human, you do it in a limited finite way. You know, you don't have all the creative capacities of God. You can't literally imagine a house into existence. So you have to first imagine it in your mind. It's a little faint image. And then you have to go and actually buy the lumber at Home Depot and build the fucking thing. And so in that sense, you have a little bit of free will and you could participate a little bit in the activity of being like God, being a creator, being a little God. So see, God is delegating its Godhood to all the little agents out there in the world and giving them a little bit of a taste of what it's like to be God.

Starting point is 05:18:52 And then if you like that, you can do more of that. And that's why people become artists and creatives. And those people are usually more spiritual too. In the same way that you say that god is in the business of creation can one also say by duality god is in the business of destruction yeah i meant creation in an absolute sense um but yeah yeah destruction is a part of creation because you can't have creation without destruction so in the same way like why is it that when you talked about, why is it that when you said it, you said the word creation? Now, I imagine it's cultural. Well, one can say it's cultural. We think of creation as a positive. And so if I want to attribute positive qualities to God, I'm going to prioritize creation. But I equally could have said destruction. Is that the case or no? Could you equally have said destruction?

Starting point is 05:19:41 Is that the case or no? Could you equally have said destruction? Again, it is very relativistic. It depends on how you define these terms in your mind. The way I define these terms in my mind is that I have a lowercase c creation and a lowercase d destruction. And then I have an uppercase c absolute creation, which encompasses both of those. Um, I don't do that with the word destruction. Um, and the reason is, is because, um, I don't know, it just kind of feels intuitively wrong to do that. I mean, you probably could do that. Nothing is stopping you.

Starting point is 05:20:18 You can formulate your worldview or models of God, however you want. No one's going to stop you. models of God however you want, no one's going to stop you. But, it just like, it feels more intuitive to me to think of God as creator rather than destructor. Although, of course, destruction is a part of creation.

Starting point is 05:20:38 But like, for example, if you're an artist, let's put it like this, let's say you're an artist, do you consider yourself a creator or a destroyer? For some reason, you call yourself a creator. Like you're a YouTube creator, not a YouTube destroyer. Right? Even though you might destroy some of your old YouTube videos you don't like.

Starting point is 05:20:57 But you don't think of yourself that way. That's not sort of your purpose. That's not like why you're... The destruction is serving the creation. You're not making destruction the point. Uh-huh. So in that same way, death serves life, but life doesn't serve death. Death's point is to serve life, but life's point isn't to serve death.

Starting point is 05:21:19 Is that a correct statement? Yeah, you could put it that way. I mean, there's no absolute correct statement as far as things like this go it's like it depends on how you want to frame it it's relativistic you have a video which i didn't take a look at about good intentions and why everyone acts with good intentions now i don't believe that and i haven't watched your video so i don't know the exact line of argumentation i imagine it goes like this. Everyone has a worldview. Everyone has a model.

Starting point is 05:21:47 Everyone is aiming with respect to that model. So even if they're killing someone, they believe in that moment killing is the best thing to do. And because they're aiming at what's best, they have good intentions. Is that something along the lines of what you are doing? Yeah, but it's more radical than that. What I'm saying is that literally everything, every action that happens in the universe is good. It's not just from good intention,

Starting point is 05:22:10 but it actually literally is good. So even when a terrorist blows up civilians, which like happened today in Afghanistan, in the latest news, there was a suicide bombing in the airport in Afghanistan. So see, first of all, what needs to be understood is that that person who did that explosion thought he was

Starting point is 05:22:28 doing good. In his own mind. But, never mind that, you could say, well, he was just deluded, he, you know, he was indoctrinated into some sort of terrorist cult, and therefore they brainwashed him. Okay, fine. But that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that he was literally doing good in the sense that

Starting point is 05:22:44 the only thing that happens in the universe is good. But the good is always filtered through some sort of finite form or ego mind when we're talking about humans, for example. So when a human behaves, the human is always behaving as what is good from his state of consciousness. So it really depends on what your state of consciousness is. The lower your state of consciousness, the more twisted your idea of good is. The higher your state of consciousness, the more

Starting point is 05:23:17 pure and less corrupted, more selfless your idea of good is. So for example, like Hitler, Hitler did the Holocaust and most people would say, well, that's bad, obviously. Um, well, that's bad from one point of view, but from God's point of view, it wasn't bad because, um, if you actually take a look at what Hitler was doing, what he was doing is from his point of view, from his perspective, he was doing what he thought was the greatest good for his people. And given his identity, when you're identified as being an Aryan German, not a Jew, then from

Starting point is 05:24:01 that point of view, you start to see Jews as something subhuman and something that needs to be purged from reality. And so it's good from that point of view to destroy that which you consider bad. You see, so Hitler was destroying bad from his point of view, which is good from his point of view. So he was acting from the intention to destroy evil, which, of course, because he was corrupted, his mind was corrupted and very finite, turned out to itself actually be a source of evil. And that's how all evil is created. Most of the evil in the world is created by attempts of limited ego minds to destroy evil. Have you noticed this? I would say that that's a naive point of view,

Starting point is 05:24:53 but I'm saying that and I'm not as wise as you. So that means that you can correct me. So let me, no, let me give you my justification. Yeah, sure. I see.

Starting point is 05:25:08 I don't think that everyone is aimed at what's good i don't think that people do only what's aiming at what they think is love only aiming at what they think is good i think they do what they do often to spite love and even though they have enough strength to do otherwise they knowingly go against it. I see this in myself at times. And there's even quotes, many quotes from Dostoevsky about this. There's a great one from Moby Dick. From hell's heart I stab at thee. For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Yeah, well, hate is just a twisted form of love.

Starting point is 05:25:43 The reason you hate something, ask yourself this, why do you hate anything in reality? What's the point? Because there's an evil part of you that's against good. There's something deeper you need to realize. The only reason you hate anything is because you love something else instead. Yeah, well... is because you love something else instead. Yeah. So like, for example, for example, the reason,

Starting point is 05:26:10 why did this, I mean, this is, we can actually like empirically sort of look at this. Why did Hitler hate the Jews? Because he loved the German people so much. His idea and love for Germany, the purity of Germany, he was so in love with being German and that whole

Starting point is 05:26:29 identity that therefore he hated Jews. Because he saw them as an impurity onto the goodness he was trying to protect. But his notion of goodness was very finite. It sounds to me like what you're saying

Starting point is 05:26:47 boils down to you're aimed at something. And that's it. What do you mean? If you're saying you don't like, you hate something because you love something else, that's essentially saying you're aimed at something else. So at least you're aimed at something. Well, the hatred is helping you to get the love.

Starting point is 05:27:10 You see, the only reason you hate is because you weren't given enough love. If you were given more love, the people who are the most hateful people in the world, you can demonstrate this just within psychology, you know, clinical psychology. The people who are the most hateful are the people who receive the least love or some sort of twisted form of love from their parents.

Starting point is 05:27:33 If your mother didn't love you and your father beated you, then you're going to grow up to be a hateful person. And all of that is just a coping mechanism to get the love that you were denied. See, if you're denied love, you're going to want to deny love to others because you have nothing else to live for. The only joy you will get in life is to deny love to others because it was denied to you. So if I take that back, then at some point God denied himself love. Why is that? If I'm saying, if I'm evil because my parents deny me love, then why did they deny me love? Because they were denied love.

Starting point is 05:28:07 And you just keep going back and back. What was denied love initially? Well, there's only God initially, which itself is synonymized with God. I mean, sorry, with love. Right. So we could say originally there was infinite love. And then in order to share itself with others, it had to divide itself. And so that division of infinite love is, you might say, the original form of evil.

Starting point is 05:28:35 Because when something infinite has to take on finite form, it automatically becomes less than everything. form it automatically becomes less than everything and so as soon as God started to partition itself that is what led to what we would call evil then it is evil though if you think of it that way you can I mean it depends on how you define what evil is if you just say that evil is just partition or division then yeah you could say that but that becomes partition or division, then yeah, you could say that. But that becomes very different from what we normally mean by evil. Because people attach moral judgment to evil. Right?

Starting point is 05:29:13 So in this case, you'd have to remove all moral judgment. Well, I imagine that also, the reason you're removing the moral judgment is also because there's no free will in this model. It's just cause and effect there was a bit of yeah that got passed down yeah so then in that same way when someone says hey they're just doing the best that they could then because there's no free will you can also say they're doing the worst that they could the reason is look if you're you can only do one thing. So it's like a set, just one point.

Starting point is 05:29:47 So that one point is its greatest point. So the supremum is that same. I understand what you're saying. You could say that, but the problem is that there's no such thing as worst, and there's no such thing as bad, and there's no such thing as evil at all, because the only thing that exists is absolute perfection. So everything is absolute perfection, including all the divisions. So you're still suddenly judging the divisions as something that's bad, that shouldn't have happened.

Starting point is 05:30:13 But the way that infinity or love works is that infinity must include all possible finitudes. So the lack of the total unity must include all possible divisions within itself. So the way that God resolves the evil problem is that God just simply absorbs all of the evil into itself. Until no evil remains. Let me explain it a bit differently. Let's imagine you have a spectrum and then plus one is like good and then zero, or sorry, minus one is like evil. So plus one is good, minus one is evil. The plus one is good minus one is evil the closer you are to plus one the more good you are okay so the closer you are to minus one the less good you the less good you are the more evil you are okay right and and then what happens if we keep compressing

Starting point is 05:30:57 this because there is no free will you can't choose between these so you get down to just zero which means that you're simultaneously doing your best and you're simultaneously doing your worst yeah and that's called absolute love absolute good that's what absolute perfection and goodness is and actually you don't need to compress them you can take this and turn it into a loop right it's going to loop around and they're going to touch and you're going to have a perfect loop of infinite love and unity and oneness and absolute good so absolute good includes hitler yeah okay see okay let me let me let me let me play around it's it's extremely radical it's it's also tautological so there's no way there's nothing you can say that will break it but you can try feel feel feel

Starting point is 05:31:40 no i'm not gonna break it i'm gonna have fun with it. The video is titled something like, Why Everyone Has Good Intentions. I don't know the exact video. But then when I said, you're also passing down evil about two or three minutes ago when we were speaking about it. You said, well, I mean, evil has some connotations, so I don't know if I would attach that word to it. Because this isn't precise. Well, I could say the same about good and how you just described good. It has connotations. So should you use the word good intentions?

Starting point is 05:32:10 If you're not willing to use the word worst intentions or bad intentions or evil intentions, why are you willing to use the word good intentions when good in your model doesn't bear or bears little resemblance to what people ordinarily think of as good. Because when you fully awaken, you will realize that everyone acts from absolute good. So that's just something that will happen within your consciousness. And then you'll understand that, of course, everybody acts from good and evil has never existed. It was never possible. So that's just something you'll realize when you fully awaken. And you'll just call everything good. So imagine literally walking down the street and everything you see, you're just like, good, good, good, good, good.

Starting point is 05:32:50 And then you ask yourself, well, where's the bad? And then you realize there isn't any. And then you're just happy. And that's it. I mean, this is the nature of talking about absolutes, is that we want to have a kind of a logic to explain the absolute, but actually you can't have a logic to get to the absolute. You first need to get to the absolute, and then you can do logic on it. Logic comes afterwards. You can't actually reach it through a logical process.

Starting point is 05:33:29 Because logic is finite, so it can't be infinite. I have so... You know, with you, I have 14 pages... I gotta pee first. Okay, okay. We'll go to the washroom and then we'll wrap up. Alright, cool. In approximately one or two weeks, I'll post a part two with Leogura, this time focused on him rather than his ideas.

Starting point is 05:33:48 It will primarily consist of audience questions, so if you have any questions for Leo, leave them down below. 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. why he created it, and how it's used is far more powerful than reading any message. I'm here with Matthew Phillips. Matthew Phillips reached out to me a few weeks ago telling me that he has this app, and when I say app, it's almost an understatement. He has a project that he wants to run by me and also run by the viewers of this channel. It's about, well, I'll let Matthew speak about it mainly why I decided to speak to Matthew on air and have you all listen is because I found the story to be inspirational so inspirational I had to stop and we said save this this is

Starting point is 05:34:35 great we're going to speak on camera because most of the time for ads you'll just hear someone read an ad and then you have no connection to who created it and why they created it. So who are you and why did you create it? Wow. Well, who am I? That's a deep question. But thank you, Kurt. I'm excited to be here.

Starting point is 05:34:55 And please, the audience, excuse me. I am so nervous. But my life about five years ago was going swimmingly. I was an enterprise technologist leading a really large scale organization on the emerging technology side. So all things that are kind of cool and future and emerging, but more on the enterprise side. But in my personal life, I've always struggled with something that's always had me down. And that's that along the way, I've lost really everyone that I've ever loved. My mentors, my family, the people that raised me, the people that really defined me. And as a father now, I've constantly thought about what's the impact of that and how could I kind of change

Starting point is 05:35:36 that in the future. But it was really about three years ago where an incident happened, and this is what I shared with you, where I was at home one day, and I had an incident where I didn't think I was going to make it. And that was one of the scariest incidents of my life, but not so much because I feared death. It was more because in that moment, I had this great deep realization that I had utterly failed in my singular life purpose. That upstairs in my home, I had two children. My son is now six, my daughter's now four. That if I didn't make it through the day, I felt like I was abandoning them for the rest of their life. That sure, I may be living in a good house and have college paid for, but that's not really what life is about. And in that realization, I felt like an utter failure

Starting point is 05:36:23 that I hadn't taken the time to foster the one thing that I thought meant more than anything at that moment. And that was my legacy. And it kind of begs the question, what is legacy? Luckily, I ended up pulling through and everything's good. But I never lost sight of that experience and it, and it deeply touched me in a way to where, you know, going to do the standard nine to five just didn't cut it anymore. I knew that this was a problem that I had to solve for people. If something like what I'm creating, it had existed when I was growing up, maybe I would

Starting point is 05:36:57 still have access to these people that, you know, hung the moon for me. So I thought of a way, you know, how could I be there for my children forever? Is there a way that we could create to capture kind of all that we are, all that we wish to share and all the important things that we wish to pass along to the people that mean the most to us in a way that could transcend time and space, right? And that was really the genesis of the company I started. How often do you think about that experience, that near-death experience, whether or not it's technically a near-death experience? You know what I mean? Sure. Yeah, it was life-changing. I think about it every day. Listen, the happiest

Starting point is 05:37:35 moments are when I wake up and I hug my kids good morning, when I pick them up from school, when I tuck them in at nighttime. They define my purpose. I would have told you that I was waiting my whole life to figure out what my purpose was, but in that moment, I figured it out. I knew it. And it was the best moment of my life, you know, scariest, but the best, because I understood that, you know, maybe this life experience, everything that I've learned, everything that I've been through, you know, we go through life and we have things happen and we experience life and we gain knowledge. It's like you add time and perspective in that equation and hopefully it shakes out as wisdom. Right. And it's like, well, what do you do with that wisdom?

Starting point is 05:38:11 You kind of shape your value systems. How do I go throughout this world and interact with people and others? You know, how do I love? How do I change it for the better? And, you know, I thought it was so important for me to capture those things and pass them along to my children, stand on the shoulders of how far I've carried the torch, right? Take it even better. I looked at my one sole purpose as, you know, to create two happy, more conscious, better human beings than I am. And in those moments, I thought, have I really achieved that goal? In a few years when they grow up, they're not going to remember a thing about me. I don't remember anything about my father. I lost him too young. But man,

Starting point is 05:38:57 it shook me to the core. So I looked at this as this panic. And I started out with journaling. Let me just express myself. Let me dump it all into a notepad, everything that I deemed important about life and love and success and failure. But the reality is, Kurt, they're two and four. These are heavy topics, right? What do you mean they're two and four? Oh, I mean, at the time, they're ages, right? So it was like, what are they going to do with this? Is this appropriate? When are they even going to think that this is relevant for them to interact with? Where's this going to live? So then I switched over to email addresses, right? I created Gmail addresses,

Starting point is 05:39:34 which I don't think is uncommon for the new parent. And I gave my best friend the password and I said, hey, listen, I'm going to write these Gmail addresses every time there's a significant choice or a moment or a discovery or a lesson I've learned or a hardship I've gone through. And I want to give my kids the meaning behind it or the context. We'll talk about that later because that's a big part of Transcend and how we tell stories. But I wanted to give those to him. So if anything ever happened to me again, he would be able to give these email addresses. My son and my daughter would be able to understand who I was, where they came from, what I had hoped for them, the advice for them to live the happiest, most fulfilling, most conscious lives possible.

Starting point is 05:40:14 And that gave me some peace of mind, but it was cumbersome. It was a pain in the ass. It's not easy to do. And like, where do you start? Right? Like I, I was listening to Leo's and thank you so much for turning me on to, to Leo's content. I think it's amazing, but I was watching a video of his that said it was life advice for young people. And it was a multiple hour, you know, I think broken up into two videos where he said, you know, I imagine that this is the culmination of my entire life and all the best things that I've learned, my wisdom, my experiences. And he said, I imagine as if I had a son in the future and maybe I'm dying and he's going to sit down and watch one video. And how can he best absorb that information?

Starting point is 05:40:59 What's the most important things that I could tell him about traps to avoid and how to be happy and successful? But not everybody's Leo Gurra. We all can't sit down and riff that for four hours. And even doing it over Gmail for me was tough. It's like, where do you start? And I heard Leo say that. This is so enormous of an undertaking. So it's overwhelming. So that was really the start of the idea of there has to be a better way. If I was going to try to figure out a way to take everything that is CURT and make that consumable for people in a way that wasn't disposable and was private and you owned it, what would that look like? How would I even go about that methodology of dissecting what is CURT? That's a tough question. So we, you know, I worked with a lot of

Starting point is 05:41:45 professionals and we've figured out a software application that we think is our best effort of how to do this. And we think we've done a good job and we're so excited to give it to folks. Great. In that example, you said, what is Kurt? Now, are you creating for other people or is it for you to create for yourself? No, this is for you to create for yourself. Yeah. So think of it as tools to document. You know, if I had to distill it down into one sentence, I would say transcend is an easy to use mobile application that enables you to document and preserve your legacy is the word I'll use for those that you care about. That's really kind of what I think it is, right? And when you think about legacy, you know, if your users Google this, it's going to say, you know, an amount of money

Starting point is 05:42:32 or property gifted to a descendant. But I think on a human being level, we all know a legacy is so much more deep than that, right? So we've given people the tools, we call them starters, for example, to start documenting this stuff, right? So we've got people the tools, we call them starters, for example, to start documenting this stuff, right? So we've got thousands of prompts of every vector of who you are to help you kind of dive in and pull this info out of you and prompt you, and then allow you to import that information in some really creative ways and tell the stories behind these moments and save them.

Starting point is 05:43:00 But most importantly, it's safe, it's private, it's secure, and you own the rights to everything. And that's a big part of this. I mean, as a parent, and when I was looking at creating the software, I looked at social media, like a few that have come before me have tried and failed as a data source. And I looked at it like I'm repulsed by that. Social media to me is the worst place that you could ever look for an authentic look at who a human being is. So using that as a data source went right out the window. So I didn't use a social media app, but I had to build something from scratch that was purpose built for this and really built on a foundation of privacy. We had to go write the terms of service,

Starting point is 05:43:45 the privacy policy. I mean, we started from scratch and I don't know if I can say this, but we have the same lawyers as Google and I mean, as Apple and Facebook, they represent us too. But we had to start from scratch and fund these documents because it's almost the antithesis. It's you own everything. I don't want it. I want to be the steward and protector of your data. I want to help you tell your story and I want to safeguard it, but I want nothing to do with it. Just like my memories aren't for sale. My kids aren't for sale. My thoughts, feelings, ideas are not for sale. They belong to me. They belong to my family and the people I care about. And so Transcend's really built as a platform for you to articulate these things, save them, organize them, and then

Starting point is 05:44:24 Transcend helps you intelligently present them to the right person at the right time. Are there export options? Not yet. So yes, we have them on the roadmap, but we haven't built them in yet. But yeah, the idea is if you want to take all your data off my servers, it belongs to you. Do it. Take it. Right? That's what people want to hear. Firstly, they want to hear, can I remove it? Okay, great. And then second, do you have access to it within your servers? I'm sure there is some way of you accessing it, but I'm not, well, I'm not 100% sure. So how do you overcome that? Sure. Of course, in order to service an account, we have to have the ability to help people out, right? If Kurt, if you created a memory and said, hey, my memory is not functioning correctly, I need help. We have

Starting point is 05:45:08 to be able to go in there and help you, right? But we've structured this company in a way that your privacy can never be compromised, right? There's no data sharing. It's a closed loop. And we did that very, very intentionally. And we don't want to be in the business of looking at your data at all, right? This is a service and that's why it's a paid service, right? This is a subscription-based app. I should say that up front because nothing's free. was like, hey, if you were a superhero, what superhero would you be? And I had to let her know, hey, do you know what that really is? That's just mining your data. It's a personality profile. You know, my everything that you do is meant to game you and sell who you are. Right. So we had to architect the very nature of transcend to be that antithesis. And because no precedent had existed, we had to be the first ones. And that's why I'm confident in saying we're the first ones.

Starting point is 05:46:08 So some people listening right now, they're sold in the sense that this sounds huge. How practically does it work? Can you take us through a use case? Yeah, absolutely. So let's say you go to create a post inside of Transcend or you capture a moment. I think something that's lacking from all social platforms is the ability to articulate why it's important to you or why it's meaningful. Nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn. But as human beings, this is literally what you and I are.

Starting point is 05:46:37 We are meaning making machines. This is what we do. Yet somehow it's been overlooked by everybody. So when you post content on Transcend, you're taking through an additional step of annotation or telling the story behind it. So you can create videos, you can create a text post, you can create written posts, you could create audio or a combination of all of those. But then you're taking through an annotation step where you actually tell the story of why it's meaningful to you. And then you decide who has access to it, when they have access to it,

Starting point is 05:47:09 how or where they have access to it. And then that goes into what we call your legacy or a timeline, for example, right? So as of today, we're in step one of a three-step process. It's intuitive. Next step is immersive. And then the third step is going to be interactive. So as of right now, you're able to interact with this content. If you have permission, you can go in and experience it. You can go through all the media and hear the stories of why this is meaningful, right? That's kind of step one. That's intuitive, like a Facebook memory or an Apple memory, except we have this edge that nobody else has. And I'm probably giving up our secret sauce here. And we've met with Apple. But if you look at Apple's

Starting point is 05:47:54 memories or Facebook's memories, they're looking at tons of metadata to figure out why things are important to you. How many times did you open it? Did you share it? Did you change the color? Did you post it? Did you add an emoji? All of these little data points to say, this must mean something to Kurt because he's messing with it a lot, right? With Transcend, we actually get to the heart of exactly why that's meaningful to you, why and who it's meaningful for outside of you, because you're setting up these permissions and telling us. So this gives us this extreme edge of being able with really good accuracy, almost eerie accuracy to be able to promote the things that are for the right person at the right time. So, you know, in the next step,

Starting point is 05:48:30 this is beta right now, but it's not in production. You know, my daughter one day can pick up the phone and say, Hey dad, I'm having a really bad day at school. Can you tell me a funny story? And it's going to say, well, Piper's asking dad, that's Matt Phillips stories, a tag, you know, funny as a tag, it's going to reach into this deep, you know, data ocean that I've privately built for myself. And it's going to pull out the piece of real authentic content that I have recorded and tagged. And then it's going to present that to her in real time. Right. So, uh, I had somebody in a meeting yesterday say, oh, this is like Superman's cave where he talked to his father in the crystal. I've never seen this, but it seems

Starting point is 05:49:10 like a good analogy. Right. So right now it's, it's, you're browsing, you're browsing the content and we go the extra step by capturing the story and the meaning. But the more data that we have in the system, the better we're getting at intelligently presenting these memories and moments to the right person at the right time. you can interact with them, if that makes sense. Now, we go a step further because I realize, hey, not everybody's had my experience. Not everybody's a parent. Not everybody cares about legacy. I would argue that this is more about meaning and connection. So we put a lot of tools in here to help people connect with the people and loved ones that they have in real time. So on top of the prompts for, we call them insight prompts

Starting point is 05:49:53 or insight starters that all feed your legacy with prompts about moments and memories. We also have starters that are more for engagement or connection. So if you want to have a meaningful conversation with your significant other about, you know, how could I be a better husband for you? Or tell your kids that you're proud of them, or have a tough conversation with your boss or your child or your brother or your mother, we have thousands and thousands of prompts

Starting point is 05:50:18 categorized by situation and relationship to help you actually really connect and get below the surface. you

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Leo Gura on Infinite Consciousness, God Realization, Free Will, and Love

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