TrueLife - The Relationship Between Sound & Experience: How Vibration Shapes Consciousness & Reality

Starting point is 00:00:01 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 scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

Starting point is 00:00:49 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. Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I'm not sure where you are, but I hope you find yourself in a state of bliss. I hope that you are enjoying your day. your day. I hope you got someone to love, something to look forward to and something to do. If you got those three things, life is looking pretty good right now. Well, welcome back to the

Starting point is 00:01:41 podcast. I've been thinking about you. I actually have a little housekeeping to do today in that I got an awesome message from a good friend of mine. And I think what we were speaking about is relevant. It really got me thinking about different things and I'd like to share it with you. I'd like to share what he had written me and what I wrote back to him. So here we go. This one's to my amazing friend Eby, who is one of the coolest people I've ever met on the planet, one of the most spiritual people I've ever met. And if you're listening to this, buddy, I love you, man. Here's what he says. George, listen to a couple of the podcast today and I really like them. See that right off the bat, you can tell he's a good guy. They made me

Starting point is 00:02:28 me think the analogy of the locusts the middle class and minorities they are the majority of people we have ideas of swarming the people on top the upper class or the corrupt politicians and putting them in jail i've always thought that the way you defeat a rich powerful entity is to take their money away by not paying for their products i have also been thinking about origins people say follow the money to find the corruption. Look at everything's origin. Where did it come from? Where was it made?

Starting point is 00:03:07 How was it made? Who made it? With what material? Where did that material come from, etc.? Then is it worth it to pay for it? Whatever it is, if people got together and boycott products on a mass scale, it would get way more attention than a couple of dead CEOs. It's hard to express revolutionary ideas.

Starting point is 00:03:28 via texts because of the very thing you expressed in your podcast about Facebook. Though I don't want to kill anybody and the fact that I want revolution makes me uncomfortable writing this. Because it is likely that someone or some entity is monitoring this particular communication via an algorithm. It's possible red flags, types of words, everything seems to be monitored these days. I know I am a peon in the scope of global society, but I imagine if anyone was able to get any traction on transforming corporate industrial society,

Starting point is 00:04:07 they would have their worst fear released. By the way, besides that point, my kids asked me last year what my greatest fear was and what superpower I would want, and my answer was, I am most afraid of things that you cannot see. Not so much ghosts, but germs, bacteria, and virus, things like that. The greatest superpower is the power to heal and not just the physical but also the mental. Balance. Thanks for provoking this thought, George.

Starting point is 00:04:39 Much love. So there's a lot in there. Let me read you guys what I wrote back. First off, thank you, brother. I said it before and I'll say it again. You are one of the most spiritual people I've ever met. On the topic of swarming locusts, isn't it fascinating? I've been consumed lately with that type of language, the language of life.

Starting point is 00:05:04 Imagine being alone in a field on a beautiful sunny day, off in the distance of black cloud, 80 million locusts traveling towards you at 12 miles per hour. Is that really that different than an angry mob? The locust descend on the field stripping flesh from bone, leaving a trail of famine, plague, and devastation, eerily similar to a mob of angry people. But yet, that is only on a superficial understanding. Maybe that swarm of locusts,

Starting point is 00:05:41 that is the meek inheriting the earth. Or maybe it's a call to action. Perhaps it's a warning, maybe an omen. I guess it all depends on if you identify as the grasshopper or the grain. I'm of the opinion that it is the spirit of the earth communicating the concept of infinite possibility arising from circumstances of finitude. On the topic of rebellion, the Hammer Brothers, minority and middle class, or as I like to call them, Sledge and Jack, they clearly have the power to pummel the rich and powerful and corrupt into a pink, pasty pile of flesh and hair. Ultimately, that would get us nowhere.

Starting point is 00:06:27 The truth is the people on top could rape and pillage and plunder the lower classes and perpetuity. If they were not so greedy and so arrogant, if the elite were willing to sacrifice just one, just one of their own to the justice system, if they were willing to sacrifice one, just one of their own to a public execution, if they were willing to sacrifice one, just one to life in prison or some other form of justice. every seven years, then the few could control the masses forever. On the topic of revolutionary ideas, nothing will work. All ideas of rooting out corruption by changing people's patterns will fail, be it money, race, education, corruption, calamity.

Starting point is 00:07:19 The people we hate, the chains of poverty, the greedy politicians, the corrupt CEOs, The fact that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The criminals, the rapists, the murderers. That's me and you. That's me and you, my friend. All these things are manifestations of our organism. And we could no more get rid of them than we could drink the ocean through a straw. It's both heart wrenching and liberating.

Starting point is 00:07:59 The NSA, the... Three letter agencies, the platforms, anyone monitoring calls. These are the monsters under the bed. Peter Pan, the Wizard of Oz. I too fear the invisible. We are protected by something we can't see from something we don't understand. Culture and chaos. The greatest superpower is to heal, not just the physical but also the mental.

Starting point is 00:08:30 That, my friend, is one of the most profound quotes I've ever heard. I thank you for provoking that thought, sincerely, George. Pretty powerful, right? It's so awesome to get to have some conversations or some texts or some emails or a phone call or a FaceTime from people that you care about or people that care about the world. and I wanted to reflect a little bit more on some of these thoughts that Eby had. If you didn't hear the part about the locust, it's in a previous podcast. You should talk, I had previously talked about it.

Starting point is 00:09:14 But it just got me thinking about forces of nature and what we can learn from forces of nature. Be it a tornado or a tidal wave or some locusts or a plague. I don't think it's that far of a stretch to understand that that that. That's the world trying to talk to you and me. These cataclysms, these forces of natures, these animal spirits, they are an attempt to communicate directly to the individual. It's the planet and the individual communicating. What lessons can you learn from this? What am I trying to teach you by showing you this level of devastation?

Starting point is 00:10:04 Well, maybe they're trying to show us. Maybe the planet is trying to reach out to us as a community. Maybe the planet is screaming out to us. Nothing lasts. Nothing lasts. You know, I was building a sand castle with my daughter a couple weekends ago. And as I'm building it, we're talking and we're building the stack. And we're trying to build a little bridge.

Starting point is 00:10:33 And here comes the water, just washes right over it. And it didn't completely. eviscerated it. But it eviscerated it enough, just enough so we could build it back, and then the water came again, right over the top. And then pretty soon as the tide was rising,

Starting point is 00:10:51 more water came until there was no sandcastle left. I thought to myself, what a great metaphor for life. Some people say, oh, that's pretty sad, George. No, I don't think so. I think that it's the world communicating to you and me.

Starting point is 00:11:10 that while you're here, don't focus on building up a monolith or don't focus on hoarding. Don't focus on creating a life of stockpile. Focus on creating a life of beauty. I'm not saying you shouldn't work hard. I mean, you definitely should. And you should sacrifice if you want to have more later. You should work as hard as you can now so that you don't have to later. What I really believe in this same lesson is that our level of communication is it's very poor.

Starting point is 00:12:17 Our ability to truly understand what someone is telling us is an issue. Most of the time we're so busy thinking about what we want to say. We're not even listening. Something else that I believe the world is trying to communicate. through mass events, be it plagues or plagues or disasters or natural phenomenon. I think that this is part of a way of solving the problem of how to keep a society from stagnating. It's the hardest thing in the world to do. I mean, you might have a social system that would run along smoothly for centuries.

Starting point is 00:13:27 But if it lacks the element of novelty, of progressivism, it's dead. I dare say the ants and the bees have smoothly working systems, but they do not change. This element of novelty is what makes the difference between man and the animals. Man sees a future in the present. There is a vision of what can be done with the materials of what he has. A dog sees the present as a present and nothing else. The fact that we can see a future and imagine a future, the novelty is what makes us great and is also the tragedy.

Starting point is 00:14:16 Right, you can't have comedy without tragedy. You can't have life without death. You can't have love without loss. I've been reading quite a bit from an older philosopher, for Alfred North Whitehead. And I got to tell you, it's stunning to me to read what has been written in the past. In some ways, when you read what's written in the past,

Starting point is 00:14:48 it flashes a light, it illuminates a pathway to the future. My grandpa used to tell me, if you want a new idea, read a really old book. And I want to read a little bit, or talk, both talk and read a little bit about from this current book that I'm not. reading now from Alfred North Whitehead. In this particular passage, he's going to talk about Plato in the laws, one of the works of his old age. So here we go, let me quote. Look here. Let me show you

Starting point is 00:15:22 a passage in Plato. He rose peering along his shelves and finally chose a volume in the Loeb edition, opening it to chapter 51 of the Temaeus. The translation was amended here and there by his own pen. he spoke of it. This translator turns this into substance, but it means nature, or more exactly, growth, or the process of growth. Yes, now here, Plato is speaking of the receptacle. The idea is vast and a little vague. He went on through two or three pages, summarizing as he read, until he reached chapter 54. And now here you see, he reduces the idea to commonplace. to geometry. But wasn't that often his method to take the infinite which he alone was capable of tackling and reduce it to a finite

Starting point is 00:16:15 form which average mortals, the educated man of ancient Athens, as you once said, could understand? This relationship between the infinite and the finite is what I was coming to. Our minds are finite

Starting point is 00:16:31 and yet even in these circumstances of finitude. We are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite. And the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude. I wish I could convey this sense I have of the infinity of the possibilities

Starting point is 00:16:53 that confront humanity. The limitless variations of choice, the possibility of novel and untried combinations, the happy turns of experience, the endless horizons opening out. As long as we experiment, as long as we keep this possibility of progressiveness, we and our societies are alive when we lose them. Both we and our societies are dead. No matter how externally active we and they may be, no matter how materially prosperous they and we

Starting point is 00:17:28 may appear. And nothing is easier to lose than this element of non-rengthy of non-rengthyly. It is the living principle in thought with which keeps all alive. How much validity do you give the sense of oneness, which we sometimes have, that sense of our individuality being merged into the all? One is anxious not to talk moonshine about this. The more if like me, he is neither a metaphysician nor a psychologist. Yet I know that those moments are so memorable, the sense of it so strong that years later, ten perhaps, one can reach back into it as if it were only yesterday or today and create out of it it something living and new.

Starting point is 00:18:21 Mysticism, said Whitehead, leads us to try to create out of the mystical experience something that will save it or at least save the memory of it. Words don't convey it except feebly. We are aware of having been in communication with infinitude, and we know that no finite form we can give can convey it. How deep is that in a world of finite resources, the possibilities are infinite. How about his idea of, how about his idea of that sense of oneness that we have sometimes? You know what I mean by that? For me, that sense of oneness is like the height of a psychedelic experience.

Starting point is 00:19:22 That height of being given information without a linguistic pathway. That height of of euphoric ecstasy, but not ecstasy in the sense of overwhelming happiness, but ecstasy in the sense of overwhelming happiness, but ecstasy in the sense of. fear and awe, that sense of ecstasy. The sense of ecstasy that scares you to the point where you are seeing something that you shouldn't see, the sacred, the divine. When I say ecstasy, that's what I mean. It's those moments at the height of your psychedelic experience. It's the height of of ecstasy at which you can't, when words fail, that's when you reach in.

Starting point is 00:20:27 That is when you are truly communicating on a spiritual level. And those are the times that while it's happening to you, those times, it seems like days or hours, but it's truly maybe 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or maybe it's an hour. But it's that time where there is no time. It's the time when you can live a thousand lives. And it's those times that you try and reach back to to bring something back. It's those times. That's how you make the world better.

Starting point is 00:21:09 You must first off find a way to get to that position. Nature is a good way to do it. The relationship between the infinite and the finite. That's what we are living in. Our bodies are finite. But this world is infinite. Our love is infinite. infinite. The possibilities are infinite. Let me continue a little bit more in this dialogue.

Starting point is 00:22:22 Music, I ventured, may come nearer than words. Sometimes during a good performance of the very greatest music, one has a sense that he is in the presence of infinitude, somewhat similar to what the composer must have felt when he was having to choose, between one concept and another in the hope of expressing it. The definite concepts are there in tones or phrases, but all around them hover the infinitudes of possibility. The other ways in which the vastness might have been expressed. Out of this effort to save the mystical experience, said Whitehead,

Starting point is 00:23:02 in the hopes of creating a form which will preserve the experience for ourselves and possibly for others comes clarification. in a thought or perhaps an art form. And that clarification is then turned into some form of action. Mysticism, clarification, action. I have never put it in that form before, but that is the order in which I would state it. I may restate that for you guys.

Starting point is 00:23:32 Mysticism, clarification, action. He said that a static quality appeared in the book, Buddhist religion as evidenced by the history of India and China, that their rate of advanced retarded or stopped, and that since the year 1800 BC, very little change had come to China until modern times, except minor ones in small living arrangements. He was illustrating how subtle a possession dynamic thought is and how easy it is to lose. The death of dynamic thought. Doesn't that kind of sound like the death of creativity or the inability to think critically?

Starting point is 00:24:28 Not that there has ever been real truth. However, it seems in this world of contradiction and abstraction that we're moving further and away from anything that could be considered the truth, from anything that could be considered true enough. I believe that for every new technology that we get, something is taken away from us. If you get a chance, go back and check out the last series I did on the medieval internet, where we get into how today's society is becoming more and more like the feudal system of the dark ages. So strange to think about how such a liberating technology as the internet could retard our for liberty in the future. Additionally, the Dark Ages gave way to the printing press,

Starting point is 00:25:32 which at the time was like the internet. However, looking back on that today, this amazing piece of technology, the printing press, is in fact what could be possibly the reason for our narrow thinking. And if that's true, if things run in cycles and we are moving in somewhat of a dark age, could it, would it, should it not be the same? The printing press of the dark ages is very similar to the internet of our age. And while at the time, people saw the printing press as an opportunity to move wisdom, to move words, to move the truth to the masses. So much was lost. so much information obfuscated so much information gone and isn't that the truth with the internet this object this powerful form this medium this idea of freedom for the individual is causing us to lose

Starting point is 00:26:54 our humanity let me try and shine a shine a light on that allow me to read to read you another passage or a few other passages to try to give you the insight. Quote, a while back, I said, you were speaking of the death of truth which results when men attempt to codify it into some dogma or institution which they hope will conserve it for posterity. Even Plato in his old age, at least seems unwilling to let his ideal society take its chances. Possibly it is true because he had seen disaster to Athens. But isn't the difficulty with all such attempts that the sum of existence is larger than any system, however large? The desire for a pattern of existence, said he,

Starting point is 00:27:46 is a natural and very common wish that our experience should have some meaning, some order, and it should make sense. The hypothesis of science are the same. The pattern may not represent anything more than our conception of our lives as we would like to believe them to be or our hypothesis of a scientific process but it studies us i may have spoken to you before about the static civilization of china a time came when things ceased to change if you want to know why read confucius and if you want to understand confucius read john dewey and if you want to understand confucius read john dewey and if you want to understand John Dewey, read Confucius. Confucius wanted to get rid of the silly ideas. The simple facts ought to suffice for you. Don't waste time asking questions about the ultimacies

Starting point is 00:28:45 under those facts. Mind you, I greatly admire what John Dewey has made possible in the development of your Western universities. I am speaking here about the consequences of the doctrines of pragmatism. Thus, the Chinese discovered the magnetic needle. Iron placed in certain positions would cause a pointer to aim north. Now that, Confucius would say, ought to be enough for you. The fact suffices. But when the magnetic compass is brought westward into Europe, what happens? Immediately, the silly questions begin to be asked.

Starting point is 00:29:24 Why? What makes the needle point north? straightaway all sorts of fruitful consequences ensure as that mathematics, which had been well-nighed useless for two thousand years, is pressed into the service, and so on. Now these are just these superfluous questions which pragmatism would ignore. Of course, he smiled as he said it, if you say in print that the individual should be listened to and that these silly questions ought to be asked, you will instantly be pestered with letters from 3,000 idiots whose questions are silly. But the point is, he resumed, that the silly question is

Starting point is 00:30:06 the first intimation of some totally novel development. Suppose we admitted this principle in the sphere of morals. What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like. The immorality is what they dislike. But the silly question as applied to morals would open the way to a discovery of the few ultimacies behind all systems of morals, a region in which very little has yet been done. Here's another passage I think that speaks to the heart of what I was speaking about earlier, about the printing press, taking away our ability to see some things clearly. Quote, writing only brings out comparatively superficial experiences.

Starting point is 00:30:59 Man has had it a relatively short time, shall we say, about 4,000 years? First in the form of chipping pieces of stone for the decrees and boasts of monarchs, then on papyrus. For only about 3,000 years or less, have men written down their thoughts. Let us say from Homer's time,

Starting point is 00:31:22 now, for ages before that, you had immense quantities of human experience accumulating in men's bodies. The body itself was, and still is, an immense experience. The sheer harmony of its properly functioning organs gives us a flood of unconscious enjoyment. It is quite inarticulate and doesn't need to be articulate. But in bulk, and perhaps in significance, it far outweighs the scope of the scope of the written word that by comparison is mostly trivial. Even with the very greatest masters of the written word, Dante, Goethe, one is left aware of how pale the statement is in comparison with the experience itself.

Starting point is 00:32:12 Goethe can only suggest the misery and horror of the Gretchen tragedy. Dante's inferno can only be a shadow of what he imagined. or the murder of Agamemnon and the agony which came before it and after. What perhaps the written word can do is recall to us our own experiences or give us intimations of experiences, which we are likely to have. Okay, so if you stop there and just think for a minute, when you read a story and when I read a story, we can imagine that story in our own minds.

Starting point is 00:32:58 And if you and I talked about the story, or if you and I wrote a report on a story we read, and we were asked to give vivid details of that story, that we're not in the story, you and I would write down two different accounts. The point I really want to drive home and give some more examples of is the way we consume our information

Starting point is 00:33:19 changes the way we see that information. The way we consume our information, it changes the experience of the situation. Does that kind of make sense? Let me read another passage here. I would rather hear a performance with heart in it, said I, than an impeccable technique. And mind you, said Whitehead,

Starting point is 00:33:46 the same holds for personalities. They make their effect more by what they are than by anything they say. Even when you are using words effectively, they gain a great deal from the physical presence of the speaker. Warmth, accent, emphasis are emanations from body and spirit. Of course, the very best writing is an attempt to convey in printed words some of those overtones which are sounded by the voice. and emanated from the physical personality. This to me is why, to this day, I remember William Hung. Remember that guy from American Idol that's saying,

Starting point is 00:34:32 She Bangs by Ricky Martin or whatever that guy, the Living La Vita Loca guy? Look, I don't even remember his name, but I remember that kid's name. It's because when we see something where someone puts their heart into their performance, whether they're really good or they're not really good, you can see the heart.

Starting point is 00:34:51 You can see them putting up a performance. And that kind of a performance is much more memorable than any myriad of boy bands that didn't make it. Right? Those were manufactured. All this manufactured sound that's being put in front of us to make money for certain types of people and contracts. That's the manufacturing consent.

Starting point is 00:35:17 That's the impeccable technique without any heart behind it. And while there's a recipe there, that recipe is an imitation of the real thing. One part that I really enjoy investigating and spending my time thinking about is why. Why is it that this performance that was not very good is so much more memorable? than a group of young people who are very talented and sound really good. However, they just don't have the ability to trigger an emotion. That takes us full circle to the idea of our language. It takes us full circle to communicating in a more effective and efficient way.

Starting point is 00:36:18 It's almost indescribable. fear. What I fear the internet is doing to us is making it impossible for us to see those communications. Just like the printing press with its linear print gave us linear thinking. The internet is giving us these even more tightly controlled ideas. The internet is limitless and its ability to limit our thinking. It seems to me that words are clumsy. They're inadequate and they're very, it's very difficult to explain certain experiences or emotions. And that's why we have poetry.

Starting point is 00:37:15 And also it explains, I think it also explains or goes to the point of us losing our ability to see things and communicate, one with the printing press, And now with the internet. If you think about the Iliad and in the time of the Greeks, quite possibly the smartest man in the Western world was Plato. And they wrote in verse. They used poetry. That is what poetry is at its best. It comes somewhere near capturing in a net of words,

Starting point is 00:37:59 those powerful evanescent moments. the ones of happiness and pain and those moving moments in life where you see your child being born where you see the body of your child lifeless right after all words are only sounds a word is a sound and the relationship between that sound and an experience is very artificial it's very arbitrary Let me see if I can read another passage and maybe some things up here. Quote, I said a while ago that words could not safely be treated as entities or ideas detached from their contexts. They acquire their true meanings from the momentum of the passage as the beauty of a star is not only in its color and brightness, but also gains from the grandeur of its surrounding immensities.

Starting point is 00:39:16 Quote, for I think we take in quite as much through our sense of hearing as by our sense of sight, perhaps more. Mind you, I don't mean to compare our dependency on the two senses, for we are more dependent on sight since we have mobility. But I think we respond more to a solemn sound, to music, or to a great bell. It establishes the emotion almost instantaneously, and we think about it only later. organ music much more easily conveys a devotional attitude than visual objects. Your national anthem, which I hear frequently over the radio, does not, fortunately, lend itself to being shouted by mobs in unison. But it admirably serves its purpose, and hearing it, I am more moved than I am by the sight of your flag. The point I am trying to make is that with the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion.

Starting point is 00:40:27 Whereas with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful. Let me just read that again. The point I am trying to make is that with the sense of sight, the idea communicates, the emotion, whereas the sound, whereas with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful. Well, there you have it, my friends. Hope you enjoy today's show. I hope that you choose to deliver the spoken word to the people you love. I hope you choose to go out and spend some time in nature and listen to what she's telling you. I hope you choose to sit quietly under a tree and take in the beauty that is all

Starting point is 00:41:26 around you. And I hope you choose to become a beautiful person and spread some aloha around the world. I love you guys. Aloha.

TrueLife - The Relationship Between Sound & Experience: How Vibration Shapes Consciousness & Reality

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