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hey this is Leo for actualised org and here I'm going to attempt to explain all of religion in one video one of the most fascinating questions that we encounter as human beings living this social existence and having this one life that we live through and we go through and discover all this stuff about what life is is the existence of religions not just one religion but many many many religions and is very fascinating how seriously people take their religions how passionate they are about them how they're willing to fight to the death to defend them and also how science plays into this and the whole history of religion so in this video I want to tackle this topic it's a pretty big topic to tackle and it's going to play out in a much different way than you probably think now let me preface by saying that this is my personal perspective alright this is my personal perspective from a lot of study that I've done and I haven't done study so much on religions but I've done study on philosophy and I've done study on personal development and most recently I've done a lot of study on consciousness what is consciousness and that led me to the study of enlightenment and what is enlightenment and all of this has very interesting ramifications for my understanding of religions in fact I just came back from a from an enlightenment workshop I spent seven days immersed in a workshop mind-blowing profound realizations that I've had them I'm seeing reality differently now from that workshop and I'm seeing religion in a more clear light at least in my opinion and so I wanted just to share some of my insights with you about religion if you're kind of curious about this you know just good curiosity sake um and you know I used to be an atheist for pretty much most of my life ever since so I remember remember debating some really religious friend that I had in high school uh and just not understanding how someone could be so religious he was a Christian Protestant I believe I don't exactly remember which denomination but it really really devout Christian and it just I couldn't grasp it because from a scientific rational perspective religions don't make a lot of sense and yet you've got so many people believing in religions and so you start to wonder like well how could this be how could you have billions of people so bought into religion and if religions are false which is what the scientific perspective says about them that they're just kind of fairy tales and stories and myths then why are there so many similarities between different religions and how could religions have gotten such a strong foothold on culture and society so very deep and perplexing question that's not as easy to answer as you might think now I'm going to warn you that you're not going to like what I have to say in this video if you're rationally minded and I am rationally minded to but I've gone through a long journey of exploring lots of different stuff and I'm extremely extremely extremely open-minded so this has helped me in my ability to investigate this stuff but what I find is that a lot of rational people they're rational but they're actually also very similar to religious people sometimes very scientifically minded or rational or even atheistic person will think that they're a hundred and eighty degrees away from religion but actually what I'm going to suggest to you is that if you are that type of person that you have a lot more in common with religious people then you like to admit and we'll get to that as we continue also though even though I'm going to be saying some stuff here that your rational mind is not going to like this video is not a defense of religion and in the end what I'm going to tell you is that you should be dropping religious beliefs if you've got any so let's just start cracking into it another important tablet that I want to make here is that what I'm going to be telling you in this video is going to really strain your rational mind but everything I tell you here will be empirical I'm making empirical factual verifiable claims that I claim you can verify in your own direct experience so this is not going to be some mystical talk this is not going to be like most religious talk which is just talk about stuff that you're supposed to have faith in and believe on blind faith and really there's nothing tangible that you can verify or not verify prove or disprove what I'm telling here is going to be very provable if you want it if you want to prove it it's gonna take a little work though so the core problem here between this whole religion versus science debate is that human beings are extremely extremely dogmatic dogmatic that's the key word here dogmatic what does dogmatic mean dogmatic doesn't pertain to religions or to science or to any particular thing dogmatic means that you cling to a particular worldview or belief now when you do this you don't tell yourself that you're clinging to a worldview or to our belief what you tell yourself is that you have the facts and that this is just a fact and it's true it doesn't feel like you're clinging to anything but in fact what you are doing is you're clinging and this closes your mind down and doesn't permit you to do a very exhaustive open-minded search right so the trick here is not only are we dogmatic but we lie to ourselves about being dogmatic right we don't honestly tell ourselves that were dogmatic we just behave dogmatically and we do this unconsciously and we will defend often to the death our dogmatism denying that it's dogmatism so this is not a problem of religion this is a problem of the human psyche right this is a problem of the human psyche because when the human psyche takes on a core assumption or belief no matter what it is whether it's a religious one or something totally different doesn't really matter you cling to it you make it a part of your self-identity you make it a part of your self-image and when you do that you identify with it and you feel like you need to defend it and that's why having a discussion about religion at the dinner table will often turn into some heated debate or argument or people's feelings get hurt is because we don't just treat this logically intellectually rationally we treat these issues emotionally right they trigger us emotionally and don't think that just because you have a rational way of looking at the world that you are not dogmatic see your rational way of looking at the world is still emotionally grounded and it triggers just as easily in you so let's say a rational person as it would in a religious dogmatic fanatical person this is a very common mistake that I see uh atheists making is that they think that just because they're an atheist that they're not dogmatic well what I find in practice is that most atheists are actually very very very dogmatic and this upsets them to hear because they like to use this as a separation between themselves and religious people but actually you're on the same side on that point right the difference you have with religious people is that you have a different kind of dogmatism when I'm suggest to you here though is that you'd be much better served to move away from dogmatism entirely because then you could see this whole debate from a much higher elevated viewpoint and you can get a lot of perspective and a lot of emotional release from giving up your dogmatism but this is a trick thing to do see another problem here is that rational people see religion as foolish right why well because we go out into the world and this is you know how I thought for most of my life is that I I'm here in life and I don't see any supernatural phenomenon I don't see any gods I don't see any miracles I don't see Zeus you know throwing Thunderbolts on onto the earth I don't see any supernatural stuff so why would I assume that supernatural stuff exists and because of this fundamental incongruity basically religion looks like a hoax because religion is talking about supernatural deities and beings and and miracles happening and all this stuff but then you look at at real life and you're like dude I mean just get real what are you talking about this stuff is clearly not here what are you smoking right so that's that's one issue we've got here um but really you have to ask yourself why does religion exist not just one but many many religions and these religions it's not like they're all just totally random different religions they seem to have a lot of common elements and threads between them even though superficially they might look very different also from a big-picture point of view they all sound and start to converge and look very similar so why is this going on very interesting question you have to think about this question very open-mindedly though because I a lot of explanations that come to mind and I mean I've come up with these explanations for myself when I was younger and I you know bred books and heard other people talk about what the origins of religion might be and I want to suggest that the following origins which I want to list off are not good explanations so one explains you might think well religion is just primitive stupidity right primitive cultures thousands of years ago they really don't understand life didn't understand themselves they don't understand how the mind works or science and so they just were basically foolish and their primitive ideas somehow evolved it into these organized religions I want to suggest to you that that's not a really good explanation nor do I think religion is merely superstition that's been formalized and codified I don't think that's a really good explanation either nor do I think that tradition is a good explanation for what religion is and why it originated it's not merely from tradition that these things arose there seems to be a much stronger force at play there than just tradition because there's a lot of different kinds of tradition that we could have had that was not mystical or religion based or God based nor do I think that this explanation of religion as a social political controlling mechanism is a satisfactory explanation for example some people would say that well the region religion existed is to control the masses right especially in the old days where the masses were really stupid and there was less social structures we didn't even have countries we had like city-states and tribes that in this kind of environment you basically needed some kind of abstract system of belief that would kind of bring together and make cohesive a bunch of different people give them a sense of direction and purpose in life or whatever or maybe it was used by some ruler or king to control his people and to pacifies people against rebellion that sort of stuff and while I think that that's definitely been done in the past is that political leaders and religious leaders have used religion as a controlling mechanism for for basically that it's like social engineering and to profit themselves and other such things to gain power to maintain power over people that certainly happened but it doesn't make sense that that was the origin of religion and nor does it make sense that religion is just merely a collection of myths or fairy tales this also doesn't make sense because the myths and fairy tales they could have been very random and very different than they ended up being and it doesn't quite explain what and why religion is so all of those things might be true to some degree but they miss like the core they miss the core that's there and the core that I want to tell you about right here which I've been thinking about a lot about this this this week as I've been working really hard on my enlightenment and studying a lot of consciousness material and this is the thing that you're really really not going to like you're really not going to like this your your rational mind is not going to like this is that there is an absolute truth and this absolute truth is accessible to human beings again there is an absolute truth and this absolute truth is accessible to human beings and here's the really nasty bit that you're not going to like it's not accessible to the rational mind it is not accessible to the rational mind the scientific rational mind hates this it hates this idea this idea is not something it wants to accept so what I submit to you is that if your mind is rejecting this idea and it's not even open to this possibility than what your being is you're being dogmatic now here I just stated this but I want to go in and explain how this can be possible and why you're missing this why your rational mind is missing this because your rational mind is rejecting out of hand this idea that there could be something outside of the rational mind it seems silly it seems superstitious it seems mystical it seems well religious and religious is a bad word but I want to urge you to be a little bit more cautious and careful and open-minded here because I'm going to lay something on you that's going to be pretty deep so here's how it works I'll tell you exactly the structure of the core of religion and my claim here is that this structure is actually true this structure is actually true so here's how it works you've got a sense of self of personal self you believe that you're a body and you believe that you're this mind and the brain inside the body and you've got this personal story you can remember the time that you were born and the way that you grew up and where you are now and you believe you're going to die and yada yada yada right and that all makes pretty good sense except there's one problem and that problem is that if you look really carefully and really deeply what you're going to realize is that this sense of self that you have is actually an illusion and if there is no such thing as a sense of self so the thing that you call you the thing that you the thing that you think you are most certainly when we say your name the thing that points to well that thing is actually a big confusion and a big mistake in your mind so what's possible then is it it's possible to basically jailbreak your brain right you know how they jailbreak cellphones to break out of the crappy operating system or whatever install whatever software you want well what's empirically possible is to jailbreak your brain and you can jailbreak the mind from the brain pretty cool in doing so what you discover is that the self the self that you believe that you are everything you believe that you perceive is actually not being perceived by a you and this answers a very deep existential question and the existential question that it answers is that it answers who you really are you believe right now that you're this physical body well what I'm telling you is that that's false that's a false identification you're identifying with your physical body in the same way that maybe a psychotic person might identify with being a a chair or a tree or something in the same way you're identifying with your body it certainly feels very real but it's not true when you break through that illusion and you find what's true is you discover something well that's quite unfathomable and literally in communicable and that is that the self the true self not the false self but the true self is nothing and this nothing is a very special thing this is not something to be dismissed lightly nothing here I mean literally you are literally nothingness this cannot be believed or logically understood it has to be directly experience you are the nothingness so you are it once you realize it you can actually be it you can be the nothingness so the self is nothing okay that's step one the second step is to and by the way when you experience that that's called enlightenment when you realize that that's called enlightenment so after you get your first enlightenment about yourself then comes the next even bigger enlightenment and that is answering X essentially what is existence have you ever wondered about that what the hell is existence how can existence even exist ever wondered about that well what it turns out is that you can have an enlightenment experience that will reveal to you the absolute nature of existence and what that absolute nature is is nothingness existence and nothingness are the same they arise out of each other or more accurately existence arises out of nothingness and that nothingness doesn't go away it's always there this is referred to as the void in certain Buddhist traditions or maybe Zen traditions they call it the void so all of reality comes from nothingness now this might seem like okay that kind of maybe make sense or whatever but see I'm not telling you here to believe it or to take it on as a theory I'm telling you that you can actually get a direct encounter with this truth the other enlightenment that you can have there's multiple enlightenment so you can have another Lightman you can have is that other people others around you everyone you see are also noting also nothingness and what that means is that because you're nothing and they're nothing that you and them are identical the same at an existential metaphysical level you're identical so you could have that enlightenment experience and then ultimately what you discover is you piece all these things together and you get a direct experience of the absolute truth and the absolute truth is basically that existence arises out of nothing this nothingness this ultimate void is God the word God refers to this nothingness because it's the source of everything right it's not a personal God it's not a God with a beard it's not a goddess him or her but it's God in the sense that is the source of all reality and this nothingness is a unity it's one and it has no space it has no location it has no distance it has no size because nothingness doesn't have any of those qualities what we're talking about here is not an idea of nothingness which is something but we're talking about literally nothingness and what you discover is that you are nothing and God is nothing and so because this because of this you are God that right there is the core of every major religion all major religions are grounded in the truth of no self that's what I like to call it the truth of no self Christianity is founded on this as is Judaism Islam Hinduism Buddhism Taoism Zen even Sufi ISM and yogic practices in India and in the East all of these different religions are really different ways very roundabout way is often to explain what I just explained to you now there's an additional really big wrinkle in this whole thing is that what I explained to you here is just like a vague vague vague vague story still a story not reality about what reality is right and so just consider for a second I know that what I said might sound crazy to you I sound very implausible or whatever but just consider for a second that if this mechanism that I explained is actually accurate and correct it would certainly explain a whole hell of a lot about why religions are and how they are and how they came to be wouldn't it wouldn't explain a whole hell of a lot if you look at religions through this lens let's take a look at it right but you have to take into consideration that this idea of no self this truth of no self as I call it that this is something that has to be directly experienced this is not something that can be spoken or logically analyzed why because when you think about nothingness it's already something what is the one thing that you cannot intellectualize about its nothingness you can't intellectualize nothing that's because when you're intellectualizing that's something so the problem here becomes that if you want to get at the nothingness you can't do it through your conventional practical everyday logical thinking you can't do it through scientific thinking you can't do it through language and by the way science is language science is language you cannot do science without language so because of this you have to be open to a radical new third alternative of understanding reality what do I mean by a third alternative well you've got one alternative which is to conceptualize about it right you can create a model of how reality works and that's what science loves to do and that's what we do with even non scientific pursuits we create models religion creates models - we create models in our everyday life we create maps of reality and all this kind of stuff it helps creating these models so you can create models and concepts and you can think about reality that's one way to understand reality a second way arguably even better and more direct is to actually experience it with your own senses first-person experience who can doubt what they actually see when you look up in the in the sky and you see the Sun or the moon it's really hard to doubt that that thing exists because you see it right there before your eyes so experience is really nice and you know one of the crowning achievements of science is that it what it did is that it founded its models on experience so science is great because you actually get to look at what's their reality experience and then you get to create a model but that model it's not just some any model you want to create otherwise that would be a fairy tale it's actually a model that's pinned down by experience right so it's limited it's constrained there's verifiability built into it so that's real cool and then what we do is we say well that's pretty much all we've got right you've got experience and you've got your conceptualizing of experience that's how we know stuff and I mean that's the end of the story right well what if it wasn't what if there was a third way a third way to know stuff what would that way be you might ask well what if you could actually be the thing itself think about this so for example when you're looking at my hand right now you're seeing it right now the question is you're looking at it and you see it and it looks like a hand to you now the question is to the hand itself to the hand what does the hand actually appear like does it appear the way it appears to you does it have colors and stuff or does it actually have its own being which is different than the way that it appears to you you're probably going to say yeah sure it does leo but what are you trying to say that I can be this hand how can I be the hand it doesn't make much sense well this is where the truth of no self becomes very important because the problem is when you're identified with yourself and you believe that you're this right here this body and this mind and these thoughts well then you're stuck and you can only be this you can't be anything else now though if you jailbreak your brain if you really dis identify from everything in your experience including your body and your thoughts and everything else then this gives you the freedom to be everything in anything I'm not saying this figuratively I'm saying it quite literally so this sounds pretty crazy and it sounds like well it's just just some sort of myth or something like that but what I'm saying here is that you can actually do this in your own experience it's not a myth you don't need to go read a Bible or whatever to do this you can actually it can be done now the trick though is that it's difficult to do this it's not quite easy and why is that well because you're extremely attached to your self to your self hood to your self image and so decide this process of jailbreaking your mind from the brain this is a very serious psychological undertaking this does not happen easily because everything in your psyche resists it in the same way that when you try to hack an iPhone or whatever the software in the iPhone resists you hacking it right but there are hackers who are good enough to hack it and then what they can do is they can do some remarkable stuff when they get rid of all those all those limits that the you know the original phone manufacturers put on the damn thing all those limits can be overcome so it's kind of the same with your mind and your brain now the problem here though is it's again human beings think extremely dogmatically right remember the original core problems talked about at the beginning human beings are extremely dogmatic well if this truth of no self is communicated to other people because you communicated right you can't communicate being being something you have to be it you can't communicate about it anything you communicate about is just a more story so the only way to get and use this third alternative of being is to actually do the being yourself but see the problem is it because it's so difficult to actually jailbreak your own mind that when you talk about these things to other people what they do is they construct stories and they turn this stuff into belief systems right and then those beliefs they turn into myths and a lot of times the way that people talk about these things is through analogy because that's the only way you can talk about it you can't talk about it directly to talk about it directly would be to be the damn thing yourself but see I can't make you be it you have to do it yourself so this creates a really big problem because other forms of human knowledge can be easily spread for example if you want to write about mathematics you can write some formulas in a book and you can explain everything then you can print a million copies of this book and send it around the world and create classrooms full of you know calculus books or whatever that will teach calculus and problem solved now how do you communicate the truth of no self well you can write it in a book but the problem is that the person reading that book just by reading that that doesn't jailbreak his mind so he still believes he's the self and he's so dogmatic he doesn't understand he's dogmatic so what he does is he conflates reality with a belief system and he thinks that just believing it is enough so he reads the book he reads about no self he reads about some God idea or nothingness or whatever and then he turns it into a belief and so the only way that you can mass spread the truth of no self is by turning it into a belief system which makes it necessarily false you can turn it into a myth if you want to stay true to the truth of no self the only way to do that is through silence you can't say anything so this presents a really big problem because it turns out then that you can't mass distribute the truth of no self this is one of the few truths that cannot be mass distributed unlike most of science and all the other stuff that we know all right so this should this should start to be clicking in your mind you should try to get this Oh aha right as all the things you know about religions start clicking into place when you're looking at it through this lens that I'm sharing with you let me just continue a little bit more so now think back to thousand years ago what life was like or maybe even 5000 years ago back then our understanding of science and scientific principles and sound philosophical reasoning processes was non-existent right human beings at that point did not develop good practical analytical thinking skills so there was not a really good scientific way very careful methodical way to explain what I'm explaining to you now in fact human beings weren't really clear about all the trickiness that the psyche presents the whole idea of a psyche or a subconscious mind these ideas they're just a couple hundred years old a couple hundred think what it was like to live life two or five thousand years ago it's like you were living in the dark you were living in a totally different reality you did not understand reality the way that you understand it now through science and so therefore people resorted to mythology and storytelling to talk about this truth of no self now how did this work in practice well you have some extremely hardcore really [ __ ] hardcore guys maybe one in a million or one out of ten million that will break through and see the truth of no self by jailbreaking their mind these were the Mystics these were the Yogi's these were the Jesus Christ's and the Buddha's these were the sages these were the Swami's there's so many different names for these kinds of people right these were the Zen masters before there are even words and masters you got a figure this is how it happened and then what happened is when they break through this and they they see this amazing mind-blowing shift in perspective on life what they do of course is that well some of them remain silent and say nothing but some of them want to share with others because it's like oh my god you're living in a [ __ ] dream you're living in a [ __ ] dream you're mistaken about how your whole life works and you don't even know it you don't you don't even have a suspicion of not even an inkling and if I'm the yogi here and I'm sitting here I'm looking at you like it's just preposterous it's preposterous I've broken out of the matrix I want to help some other people break out of the matrix and so what I do is I try to explain it to you in the best way that I can but again I can't explain it directly I need you to experience it but the problem is that it's pretty difficult for you to jailbreak your own mind and you know 5,000 years ago 2,000 years ago the process of jailbreaking your mind and achieving an enlightenment experience was not well studied was not well known and it really was just kind of like something that happened almost by blind luck so there was no reliable process to give to others for having them achieve enlightenment of their own and see the truth themselves so all that you could do is you could tell stories and so that's what people did is they told stories right and as they told these stories this idea of no self was explained and tailored to the local culture because the way that we understand the truth of no self here in the West in America let's say might be one way and if you tell it to us in some sort of cloaked and veiled Indian culture way then we're not going to we're not going to be receptive to it so it has to be told in an American way and if we tell it in Europe it has to be told it in a European way and if we tell it in the Middle East it has to be told in a Middle Eastern way and if we tell it in India it'll be told in an Indian way and Africa it'll be told in an African way and so on and so what you have here is you have the same truth but it's tailored to the culture and to the era and the time in which this truth is discovered now the truth is absolute but every culture is different right and every culture has stuff that it likes it doesn't like and dogmatic and close-minded people they're not very tolerant people so if you want to explain this stuff to them you have to really tailor it in such a way that their mind their limited mind will find it palatable palatable right it's like giving someone a pill a taste bitter but to make them swallow it you have to like coated in sugar sugar coating the pill so in a sense that's what religion tries to do right and also in a sense no matter what explanation you give of no self it doesn't really matter because every explanation is wrong it's not like there's one right explanation the only right explanation is to actually have the person become the truth themselves and get it for themselves everything else is already wrong so in a sense you could say that you know every twist and turn that religions put on it it's just like a a teaching mechanism right it's just a tool now the question is are you going to be receptive to this tool is it going to help you to achieve enlightenment you're for yourself or won't it maybe it'll get you lost in stories and ideas and looking somewhere where you'll never find enlightenment and what ended up happening very ironically actually is that most of religions devolved into exactly this is you just had people talking and talking talking about this stuff and believing in it creating dogmas around it fighting over it and all this of getting psychologically invested in it without realizing what the hardcore Mystics were really talking about if you go and you actually study every major religion we're going to discover is that there's a hardcore mystical strand it's called esoteric right the esoteric strand within every religion it exists you'll find it in Christianity you'll find it in Judaism with Kabbalah you'll find it in in Islam with stuff like Sufis you'll find it in in Hinduism and you'll know you'll find it with yoga and all this stuff you'll find like the hardcore mystics those are actually the people who are living religion in a true way but the problem is that they seem very radical they seem very anti mainstream and that is of course how it has to be because the truth of no self is very radical and it's very anti mainstream you can't mainstream it by definition it's completely individual it makes the spread of religion impossible it really does so you have these hard-core mystic esoteric splinter groups very tiny little niche splinter groups within every religion and usually what happens is that they're marginalized those people are demonized they're killed they're driven into caves and into the woods and all this stuff because there's no way that they can compete with the hyped up [ __ ] that's generated when you take the truth of no self and you spend a bunch of crazy mind-blowing stories about it right and you give it to the dogmatic mind the dogmatic mind cannot understand no self but it can very easily take no self spin some tales about it and then understand those and latch on and cling to those which is exactly what religions do right so that's basically how it works in my mind when I look at religions is very clear to me through this lens how it looks the closer you get yourself to enlightenment the more your awareness is raised about some of these issues with self image and self concept and jailbreaking your mind and uh how nothingness really works that nothingness can't be something this that you can't perceive nothingness because at reception of nothingness would be something and not nothing when you start to learn about the the problems with conceptualization and the fact that to think about something you need to use a language system to think about it and that language systems have in hair by Isis and problems and challenges and when you start to look at all this stuff you start to see from a very very clear perspective like oh of course of course there's these religions of course they work the way they work of course people buy into them of course right and the reason you say of course is because you recognize in yourself that dogmatism that dogmatism that up fanatical religious person has that dogmatism is in you it's in you you just deny it maybe you hide it a little bit better than that person maybe you don't take it to some really far-fetched extreme maybe you don't act on it as much but it's still there in you and the way you can recognize that is just by actually by feeling it right you can feel that dogmatism when someone starts disturbing your worldview or your beliefs maybe with a video like this one what starts to happen is actually you experience emotions strong emotions distaste fear anger bitterness uncomfort you know feelings of discomfort demonizing of the other person burning the person at the stake or whatever creating a straw man argument out of what they're saying closing your ears clicking the off button telling your friends how stupid the idea was that you heard writing a nasty comment or you know whatever whatever means you use to to protect your worldview you notice inside though that this is a it's like a dirty feeling once this happening and you it's a dirty feeling sometimes it's hard to to pinpoint it but if you're very self honest you can say oh yep there it is there's that dirty feeling inside me it's inside you so in wrapping this up one thing I want to address is atheism right so you might you might ask well Leo what about atheism so is atheism wrong is it false is it true what's going on well in a sense it's like the atheist is half right right because what does the atheist say the atheist says there's no God well the religious the true religious person what he wants to say is that there is a God but this God is nothingness so in a sense that the Atheist and the true mystic agree right because it's like um there is no god but the fact that there is a nothingness becomes the God see nothingness it seems like nothing this is this all it's just like its nothingness so that lets you know it's kind of pointless and shallow and Hollow and there's not much meaning there but actually nothing is this is a profound absolute existential nothingness it's hard to appreciate how powerful this nothingness is because there's nothing this is the source of all life it's a source of all reality so because it's so profound and because it's so all inspiring people call it God now the atheists could say well there is no God but see if you take that atheist and you actually give him an enlightenment experience for real and you get him to feel directly to be the nothingness he is going to have a real difference of opinion a real difference of attitude a real difference of perspective things are really going to change for him and it's not going to be the typical kind of atheism that you see you know people talking about so what about science is science wrong well science is great and with science we can build a lot of cool stuff and technology and whatever and we can learn about electrons and protons and all sorts of cool [ __ ] but there's a really big problem at the core science right yes signs very practical there's a really big core problem and that's the matter qualia problem and this is a problem that science has never addressed it's a problem that really signs skirts all the time and my current understanding is that science will never ever ever ever be able to rectify this problem here's the problem is that science says that there's physical matter and there's a physical world and that sounds all great you know we've got protons and electrons and quarks and strings and all this energy and whatever other physical things you want to talk about but science says nothing about our perceptions so the things that you are considering most real in your life your feelings your emotions the colors that you see the smells that you smell the tastes and the sounds and the qualitative aspects of all that those things are not atoms or energy or strings or quarks or molecules or anything else like that if we cut open your brain we're not going to cut you're not going to find the color orange in there if we cut open your brain we're not going to find the feeling of love or happiness in there and if we cut open your brain we're not going to find the sound of a guitar in there and yet these entities these experiential entities are very very real to us the thing that science does with this problem is that it really kind of skirts it under the rug doesn't like to look at it sometimes it'll deny the existence of qualia altogether or sometimes it'll come up with some ham-fisted way of taking matter and qualities of how combining the together and explaining something away but in the end it doesn't really resolve this issue now maybe I'm wrong on this maybe in a thousand years science will resolve this issue but from where I stand now and from what I understand about enlightenment is that you're not going to be able to resolve this issue if you want to resolve this issue what you have to do is you have to become enlightened and then the issue resolves completely like that so the resolution of the issue is enlightenment but then what that does is that really throws science on its head really starts to get you questioning some core assumptions that science makes right so real quickly I want to just go through and explain a couple of key terms and concepts that religions rely on pretty heavily I want to tell you exactly what they mean in no-bullshit terms so the first one is what is God God is absolute nothingness it's absolute it's real you can encounter it you can be it you actually are it you just don't realize it yet because you're identified with your body so that's God God is not some bearded man in the clouds or whatever the [ __ ] your religions tell you he is number two have it in hell what does this mean is their natural heaven in hell no hell is where you presently live hell refers to your current existence of being stuck and identify with your body that is literally hell because you suffer for it every single day you can't avoid the suffering because you live with a body that's going to die right so there's going to be suffering heaven is the dis identification of yourself with your body and becoming absolute nothingness you know what's cool about being absolutely no one and nothing is that nothing can harm you and nothingness it exists absolutely all the time forever so there's no worry about your death or whatever other problems happening to you so this makes you untouchable and that is heaven okay next idea is faith faith what does faith mean well faith is actually very interesting this is a very interesting realization I just had last week from from this workshop that I did what faith is is your ability to open your mind up to the third possibility so you know we have concepts and we have experience the third possibility is being right this the third possibility of being well this is something that it's very hard for the rational mind to open itself up to and what I've literally found in myself is that I have to have faith in it now this sounds like a dirty word to you if you're rational / SEC faith no I don't want to have faith Lee oh that's for stupid people and I agree with you except that in this case if you actually want to have an Enlightenment experience you're going to need faith you're not going to do it without faith and so it's kind of like well is faith really that scary are you so dogmatic that you're going to be clinging to this idea of never having faith in the third option and therefore never experiencing the third option or you can have the faith to take that you know that leap of faith and try to go for the direct experience and actually get the direct experience actually be the thing and then see what I'm talking about for real for you so faith is important their next term is good and evil what are these things mean these are not absolute terms these are relative terms these are metaphorical terms so what is evil first of all evil is selfishness evil is identification with your body and all the actions that you do to live and perpetuate your ego that's evil that's literally what evil refers to so also the devil we should bring the devil in here too what does the devil refer to the devil refers to you the way that you're presently living you're a goa Clive so you are you are the devil right because you're tricking yourself the devil is deception you're deceiving yourself about being this body in this mind here which is just not true and then what is good good is everything you do from a selfless state good is when you become God is when you see that your nothingness and therefore you also see that your everything and you start behaving in a good way why because when you see that everything is you you want to treat it well the reason you treat other people or even physical objects poorly the reason you litter the reason you steal something the reason you lie or deceive is because you believe that well I'm here I need to protect this and that thing over there is not important screw that so you do something to improve this at the expense of that well if you literally believe that your everything you don't want to hurt anything at the expense of anything else and then you're good how about afterlife what is afterlife mean well afterlife means understanding the absolute truth of nothingness because when you understand the absolute truth of nothingness then you are in the afterlife already why because you can't be destroyed you're untouchable nothing less lasts forever and lastly what is salvation mean salvation means being saved from your wicked state so metaphorically speaking if we say that you're the devil right now then what I could do if I'm enlightened or whatever is that I could communicate this truth of enlightenment to you sort of maybe within you something will recognize a spark of truth here and you'll come towards the light and you'll try to go for the Enlightenment experience maybe you'll have some faith and you'll open up yourself to the third possibility and you'll have a direct experience and then you will become good from evil and that will be a true salvation a remarkable rebirth I'm being very poetic in metaphorical here but that's exactly what the Bible is is a very very loose very very very very very loose very very very metaphorical very very very very poetic way of describing some of the stuff that I've been talking about here and just a couple of last points to wrap up is that everything I said here can be directly experienced for you so the reason that what I'm telling you here is not religion um is that what I'm telling you here I invite you to go and realize in your own life you can verify it right I'm making a verifiable claim verifiable claim and of course the irony of all this is that is that religion is really a terrible way to get to know God the people who are the most religious are the furthest away from God that's the whole irony of this thing but of course that means that if you just become atheistic you know that like the typical atheist the dogmatic atheist that also puts you very far away from God so if you really want to understand the stuff and you want to be one with God and you are God then what you can do because your nothingness is you can you can attempt to attain an Enlightenment experience or two and then in that process you will become religious but in a non-religious way in a very non dogmatic way you're not going to hold a single belief you're not gonna need to have any theory you're not going to need to partake it in any ritual you're not going to need to pray or to meditate or to do anything at all because your absolute nature is nothingness and that absolute nature is the same forever and always and it has no place it has no space it has no time boundaries it has no problems whatsoever and it's the most beautiful truth that you can discover in this life so what I really recommend here even though it sounds like I'm here promoting religion or whatever you can see that this video is very nuanced I didn't take any sides here I really kind of carved out a new space new space for you hopefully this space looks cool and appealing and you want to go and try to maybe experience a bit of it for yourself taste a bit of it for yourself what I recommend for you is if you are a religious person and if you do hold a single religious belief of any kind that you drop all your religious beliefs because every belief that you have religious ones or scientific ones or whatever other kind you've got all of these are holding you back from realizing your true nature and now hopefully you can appreciate why true mystics are so rare because it's extremely extremely extremely difficult to let go of all the beliefs that must be let go of in order to realize this truth it's really a scary [ __ ] business it's a scary [ __ ] business it's not an easy business this is going to be one of the most difficult and emotionally grueling and challenging endeavors that you will undertake in your life and it might take you many many many years and much much much struggle to do it and you might even invest all that time energy and you might fail so so yeah some good news for you there I'll end on a happy note alright this is Leo I'm signing off posting your comments down below click the like button please share the video with a friend and finally come sign up to my newsletter right here and actualize that org it's a free newsletter I release new videos every single week on oh man all sorts of personal development topics from very abstract ones to very esoteric ones to very practical ones so if you're interested in really getting a really deep and profound understanding of life and your own psychology and use it to create amazing performance in your own life which is what all I'm about is amazing performance my own life then come sign up and check that out stay tuned for more you