TrueLife - Symbols, Empathy, & the Language of the Other

Episode Date: April 4, 2022

Symbols are life forms

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scar's my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope your day is going beautiful. Are those clouds out there, or is that a song? silver lining. Are there no clouds in the sky or are blue skies smiling at you? I hope three things you do for yourself today are number one you have something to do. Number two, you have someone to

love and number three, you have something to look forward to. Today I want to begin your day or your lunch or your evening or maybe even your weekend with something you can think about, meditate on. to bring about better relationships in your life. And that is the idea of symbolic language. I've been reading so much lately about the concept of symbols, symbology, words, people, places, everything that we see, letters, numbers. These can all be symbols.

And instead of using the word language describe them, I think that language is a subset of symbols. In fact, I think that symbols are a way for us to communicate more effectively, albeit not as, I don't want to say clearly, because I think that they can be more clear. I don't know, maybe say it like this. I think that we could be transitioning or adding to our language with a set of symbols beyond letters and beyond numbers. I think it could be a type of missing structure inside our language.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. When you go out and about, maybe the first person you see is your wife or your daughter or your husband or your boss or your coworker or your customer or your neighbor, irregardless of who it is that you see, understand that that person is a symbolic representation of what is, It is your thinking at that moment. Everybody's been out and you look across the street and maybe you see an unsavory character.

And you think to yourself, wow, that person has got some problems. If that's as far as you go with your thinking, then I want you to work hard to try and understand that that's just the first step. That's the initial contact. And if you stop right there, then you are doing yourself a grave injustice. Whenever you see somebody, the first thought that pops into your head should be like a trailhead. Wow, this person is morbidly obese. Okay, that's where that trail begins. But if you walk down that trail a little bit, I think you'll begin walking down and beginning to feel a familiar form of empathy.

Because the next question is like, wow, I wonder how they got that way. I wonder if they have problems in their life because of that. I wonder if the problems in their life caused that or if that particular situation is a symptom of the problems that they had or how much combined are they? Is it a pattern? Is it circular? Do they feed off each other?

And if you begin to do that, if you can empathize with the people around you, the environment around you, then I think that you will be, in harmony with the environment around you. And here's the kicker. You begin to see yourself in everybody around you. Whether it's a homeless person under a bridge, a crackhead,

someone that's morbidly obese, a beautiful celebrity, a powerful politician, a corrupt banker, a little girl. You know, if you can just take time to understand that you exist in everyone. Not you exactly, but part of you, and that's the part of language that I think people are missing. Like if you can just take time to look at someone

and understand what it is they might be going through, just the act of observing that will fundamentally change your relationship between you and them in the environment. Okay, I'm going to get out of the weeds a little bit here. Some of you know this, some of you don't. There was an experiment called Schrodinger's cat. And they took this cat and they put them in a box.

That's kind of, spoiler alert, it's kind of a mean thing. So if you don't want to hear about a dead cat, then better turn it off. They took this cat and they put it in a box. And inside the box was a mechanism of gas that would kill that cat. And on the side of the box, there was all these little holes. And they would shoot a laser light, through the holes. And depending on if it was a particle laser or a wave laser,

they wanted to see what was tripping off that particular mechanism that would kill the cat. So sometimes they would fire the particle beam. Sometimes they would fire the wave beam. And what they found out is it was like, man, it was just kind of chance. And they couldn't figure out like there was no real pattern. and then they found out something incredible. They found out that by having someone observe it, just standing there and watching which beam they fired,

it fundamentally changed the way the experiment went. And just to be clear, if the particle beam or the wave beam made it through the holes in the box, it would trigger the mechanism and the cat would die. So prior to someone observing it, it would, It was like 50-50. However, when they'd begun observing it, it fundamentally changed the way in which the cap got killed. Sometimes they would observe it from a certain angle and it would be 70-30.

Sometimes they would observe it from a different angle and it would be 80-20. And so even to this day, there's still questions of like, why is it that when you observe something, you change it? Now I get it. That might not be, I'm just coming off my head. head. That might not be exactly the way Shrardinger's cat works, so don't jump down my throat on it, all right? But that's pretty much the gist of it. The part that I want to make clear is that just observing something fundamentally changes not only your relationship to it, but it changes

the relationship of the thing you're observing to the environment. Okay, think about that for a minute. I'm going to say it again, so there can be no mistake. You, observing a lot of the environment. You, something changes not only your relationship to that something, but it changes the relationship of that something to its environment. Why would that be? How can that be? Well, the only way that can be is if you are part of that thing or if you are part of the environment or if you're part of both. You see, you're connected. The same way that particles can be in a superposition, right? When one particle on the earth turns to the right,

its brother particle in space turns to the right, or turns the same, whatever. The same thing is inside of us. When I begin to think a certain way, I begin to influence you to think the same way. And I'm of the opinion it can be controlled. I'm of the opinion that if I come up, to you and you're sad and I put my arm around you and I look you in the eyes. I believe that I can

get our heartbeats to synchronize. I believe that if we choose to do breath work together, hey, are you all right? Take a deep breath. Just take some deep breaths. And we began breathing together and my hand is on your shoulder or maybe my palm of my hand is on the side of your cheek and you can feel my heartbeat slow through the fingertips of my finger. It's that form of touch. It is that synchronizing of breath and heartbeats that allows me to transfer to you a feeling of compassion. Everyone's heard of healing hands

and different types of medicinal practices that may not be something that Western medicine likes to talk about, but there's something there. And I believe we're on this cusp. I believe it's a language. It is a form of communication. It's a form of communication that we don't understand, but we're beginning to understand.

I believe that what we are in the midst of is a radical transformation that begins with us as symbols of one another, as symbols of something greater than any individual. We are each a symbol of that greatness that makes up life itself. And it's that word that it's this idea of something bigger than ourselves that people get hung up on. A lot of people use the word God and a lot of people laugh at people for using the word God. but God is just a way to say something that there's currently no linguistic pathway for.

And that is why there's so many interpretations of what God is. So many people in the West today laugh or scoff or poo-poo the idea of a creator God that lives in the sky. However, it's not that people are dumb or stupid or are uneducated. All of us, all of us, all of us lack a linguistic ability to describe the unknown. Some people may be more sophisticated. Other languages, if you believe in Sapir-Worf theory, may have an ability to explain things that seem to be more logical or more mystical, but they're only words. And with words and language, it's very difficult to describe that which is indescribable.

Does that kind of make sense? Think about like our language as something that sets us apart from every single animal on this planet. Think about our form of communication as much as we fight each other, as much as we fail to communicate or get our point across due to a lot. interpretation or translation. The fact that we do have an ability to use our words to explain how we feel, that we have a mechanism that we are beginning to utilize that makes someone see themselves in us or for us to see ourselves in them. That is the emergence.

of a new type of communication. Okay, so I'm going to back up a little bit so that we can get a good running start and just shamed through this next section. So we have spoken about particularly in Schrodinger's cat how just the observation of something changes it. We started off with the cat, and then we spoke about how

you observing something in somebody else can change your relationship with them as well as their relationship with the environment. Okay, so what does it mean when you as an individual start observing your own life? Right? What does that mean? If you were just going through your life

willy-nilly, waking up, go to work, come home. Wake up, go to work, come home. Wake up, go to work, come home. You know, whatever you're patterning, is. In my book, The Terror Before the Sacred, I say, everyone lives in a snail shell. If you take a cross-section of a snail shell, you'll see that it is a repeating circular spiral where each chamber grows bigger and bigger, but has the exact same obtuse lines in it. So the chamber gets bigger, but it's a pattern of the smaller chamber that came before it. And that is sort of like the life we all live, our patterns in life.

That particular pattern is like a Fibonacci circle. That particular pattern is fractal. And that particular pattern that we as humans live is similar to that snail shell. And so what happens when you become aware that you can see that pattern? What happens when you become aware that you can change that pattern? What does that mean? Can you change that pattern? You can.

Do you have the courage to change that pattern? Maybe. Is it synonymous with a life form waking up? Is this what it means to say when people in the singularity, or is this what it means when people say consciousness, becoming aware of the life that you live, becoming aware that you can change the patterns in your life? And what if me waking up,

what if me beginning to understand that I control the patterns of my life, that I am God for me, that I am part of a divine being, the same as you? What happens when multiple people begin seeing this pattern in their life? Maybe not the exact same way that I see it, But they begin to take charge and create a better snail show for themselves. What happens when they take hold of the intellectual, introspective tools they need to better form the environment in which they live?

Well, it seems to me it wouldn't take while slow at first. It's like the way Yogi Berra, I think it was Yogi Berra says, hey, how did you go bankrupt? He said, slow at first and then all at once. it seems to me if we look back at you know pick your pick your divine being be it Buddha Allah or Jesus or Moses or Elijah

or Elon Musk or whoever it is that you as an individual will look up to and think is enlightened maybe it's your parents maybe it's your grandpa maybe it's your grandmother or somebody regardless of who it is there was one person

and then all of a sudden you start looking around and seeing more people and then all of a sudden you start looking around and seeing yourself and you realize that you can look at other people

and understand what it is they're going through because you're going through it and if you can't understand what people are going through it's probably because you haven't gone through it yet and that gets us back to the idea of the mirror that gets us back to

seeing your past and your future in the lives and eyes of other people. It is possible. It is possible to see beyond time by seeing the way in which the people you love have lived their lives throughout time. It is possible to travel through time.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. There's a church event that happens. You know, I'll use this. There is, for those of you have been married, That is a sacred time. And my wife and I eloped. We got married on a beach, a beautiful beach, with this pristine blue water and this white sand,

and it was just me, my lovely wife, and a representative of a divine being bigger than everybody. And at that moment, when I was holding my wife and I kissed her, I realized that I, right now at that moment, am living in the same time that everybody who's ever gone before me had lived through. It may not be the exact day, it may not be the exact weather, but it was the exact same time. And for those of you who got married, regardless of what church it was in or where it is, there's a moment that's beyond time when you look into the eyes of the person you love, surrounded by those that you care about.

And you make a commitment before something bigger than you. It's almost like the absence of time. And everybody shares that time. People in the past that did it and people in the future that are going to do it. They're all going to experience that time. And it is in ideas like that that time travel is actually possible. Because at that time, you're experiencing what people a hundred years ago experienced. And if the tradition mains around, what people are experiencing what people are experiencing what people,

a hundred years from today will experience. You see, so this takes us full circle back to our language. It is the language that is lacking. And when you have a framework

that does not allow to build out the dream home and you're stuck living in a home that is not your dream. Does that kind of make sense? We need a language so that we can better more thoroughly comprehend

ourselves. And I think it has something to do with other individuals and seeing their lives and understanding what their lives are teaching us. And I think that that can be done in just a few moments of quiet contemplation when in a conversation or staring at someone or sitting quietly and contemplating with that person.

I think that you can see. into their life. I think they can see into yours. Think about some of the words people in psychiatry or counselors use. Hey, this person has all these walls up. Hey, put your guard down. You know, the words we use describe not only what we want in our life, but how we're feeling. And they have, the words provide the answers and it's sometimes in the question. Right. What color was George Washington's white horse. Hey, how can you have your guard down? Hey, put your guard up.

You know, how can I get to see you as an individual if you always have your guard up? Well, that person always has their guard up because they've been hurt. Does that mean that someone saw into their life and stole something from their soul? What does that mean? I don't know 100% exactly what it means,

but I do know that you have the ability to see yourself and everyone around you and the environment in which you live. If you choose to take some time to get to know your higher self, what is the world trying to teach you? What is the world trying to teach us? What is this thing we call language? Can you, for a moment, imagine yourself as a symbolic representation

of something not only bigger than you imagine, but bigger than you can imagine? Right? Is it that something exists in us that exists in everything? And is that thing that connects us. I believe that we are on the cusp of a transformation. We are witnessing the birth of a new form.

We are becoming, if we can fight through this transition, we can be born anew. A new time, a new era, new possibilities. I think our language, ladies and gentlemen, our individual selves, our environment, were all symbolic representations of one another. Symbolism, language, love it.

That's what I got for today, ladies and gentlemen. I love you. I hope your day goes amazing. thank you for everything you do and realize the people around you are a symbolic representation of you. Don't waste your time on superficial

thoughts. Look deeper. Find the thing that bothers you about that person inside yourself and fix it and when you do, help the other people fix it too. That's what we got for today. Let's get up and get at them. Aloha.