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[Music] you I'm really excited about this episode because this is gonna be a profound one we're gonna take a really deep dive into the structure of language thought philosophy reality post-modernism and non-duality and we're gonna tie all these things together in a very beautiful and profound way and there's gonna be a very interesting twist at the end of this episode so make sure that you stick with me to the very end I know it can get a little bit of nerdy and technical at times but I promise that it'll all come together in a in a beautiful way which will blow your mind I'm gonna be citing various sources here a lot of the things I'm talking about is not my original work but I'm pulling from other intellectuals namely three sources here that I want to give credit to first is a book called Derrida for beginners by Jim Powell second is a paper called the deconstruction of Buddhism by David Loy and third is a lecture series that I took a lot of notes on called the modern intellectual tradition from Descartes to Derrida by Professor Lawrence Calhoun so I'm gonna be taking a lot of information ideas from them and mixing them together with a lot of ideas of my own and also my insights about mysticism and non-duality and all of it will come together towards the end but first let's begin at the beginning which is with Jacques Derrida now maybe you've heard about Jacques Derrida maybe you've heard about post-modernism maybe you've heard the word deconstruction he was a very influential philosopher in the 1960s 70s and 80s his dates are 1930 to 2004 so he died fairly recently and he was the father of post structuralism and post-modernism and these philosophical movements went on to have a pretty big impact in academic circles in colleges and also in many other fields from literate literary criticism to philosophy to to even art and architecture and poetry and and anthropology and linguistics and just the this-this-this movement was a was pretty pretty influential but even though you might have heard about these words like post-modernism or deconstruction or Jacques Derrida you probably don't really know the details because Derrida is notoriously difficult to read and deconstruction which was his philosophical method that he sort of invented it was just a real mind [ __ ] it was a real challenge to to figure out exactly what it means what the practical implications of it are so here I'm gonna give you an introduction to deconstruction and the ideas of Jacques Derrida in a very simple manner I don't recommend that you actually go and bother to waste your time reading Gyarados work it's brutally difficult notoriously difficult you can read a sentence or page of what he says and you're not gonna understand a single damn thing so instead what I recommend if you are interested in this is just read the commentaries read the analysis of Darrow das work don't actually read the work itself unless you're you're really into philosophy and you're really uh a nerd and maybe that's what you do professionally so the significance of Derrida though is that he mounted a radical critique against all of Western intellectual tradition not just philosophy but also science and logic and mathematics and basically like I said all of Western intellectual tradition for the last 2,000 years since the Greeks and Romans that's a pretty significant thing to do and of course philosophers we tend to be ambitious and we tend to be cocky so we can - like these sorts of things we like to challenge the establishment but before Derrida really came onto the scene there was a movement in philosophy in the early early 20th century called structuralism which was advanced by two men so sewer and cloud Levy Strauss then Derrida came up Derrida came into the scene and he turned structuralism sort of against itself and that led to post structuralism and then post structuralism gave way to post-modernism and so on and then with post-modernism there were a lot of thinkers and intellectuals that came onto the scene that sort of took derrida's deconstructive method and start to apply to all sorts of different fields that i mentioned above so what we need to do first though is we need to go back to structuralism which is what inspired Derrida so the the keys to structuralism are very very simple what structure isn't basically said is it was a it was a development within the field of linguistics and the linguists were so sewer and cloud leve Strauss and what they sort of hit upon was this idea that all symbols in a language for example all letters in all words those are symbols that they are all actually arbitrary which of course makes perfect sense and it's quite obvious but then again it's the obvious stuff that gets you so let's make sure you understand this point what is meant by a symbol being arbitrary is that any word that has any kind of meaning is a label that was completely arbitrarily selected and that any other label could serve as that label so for example if we have the word tree there's nothing special about those four letters T REE or the sound tree which designates the actual object in the real world of a tree we agree that's a arbitrary designation right right so that's point number one pretty obvious now point number two is a little more significant maybe a little harder to swallow but it's a really profound and this is the point of structuralism it said that all meanings of symbols are structurally determined by the difference of the symbols from each other in a network of symbols so what does this mean this means that unlike the way we conventionally think a word like tree isn't merely pointing to a physical object in the world a tree the word tree gets its meaning by its association with all the other symbols in the English language and to really understand what the word tree means you have to understand all the associated words that come with that word for example leaf and branch and green and tall and slender and wood and a bunch of other symbols this was the key insight of structuralism and then so what Derrida did is he came and he took this and he ran with it and actually he sort of turned it in on itself in a sort of self reflective self-conscious way he was interested in how language shapes how we think and also what language says or knows about itself what happens when you turn language in on itself and of course to really grasp the significance of this you have to expand your understanding of the significance of what a language is language is not just words like tree and cat and car and the English language and it's not just all the human languages of which there are hundreds and maybe even over a thousand different languages and different dialects and so forth that exist all around the world and have existed throughout time but also it includes science logic mathematics and poetry and literary criticism and philosophy and basically all concepts and all human thinking so take a moment right now to try to fathom the significance of what it means to really get at the heart of what languages or to make a radical critique of language it doesn't just mean like oh we're talking about linguistics no no we're talking about all of humans law we're talking about all concepts we're talking about all human knowledge there is no knowledge without language so you can see here that we're going to something very fundamental and that any kind of changes we make to our understanding of what languages will have very significant long-range consequences for a whole host of fields literally every single field and domain within universities from physics to chemistry to biology the hard sciences to all the soft sciences to all the humanities to history to linguistics to anthropology to all this sort of stuff because all of it is held together by the glue of language and concepts and ideas so Derrida comes along and he invents post structuralism and basically for him what does a symbol mean the meaning of a symbol comes from two things firstly all of its historical uses so when we take the word tree what are all of its historical uses of course it's changed throughout time and secondly the meaning comes from the network of all the current symbols in the entire web of the language that this word is a part of so let's drop the example of tree let's pick up a new example like the word science which is a little bit more complicated a bit more abstract see with the word tree it seems like well but Leo you know what what's the meaning of criticizing the word tree is it really is it really that significant I mean we know what a tree is right what can you really criticize about that well maybe then we need to take a more abstract term like science because see science a little trickier than tree because tree you can sort of point to it and say okay that's a tree but with science a little art or like what is science have you ever seen science how did you even come to learn what science was it's a it's a very abstract and subtle concept and yet people throw around the word science very casually as though it's just like a tree as though it's just something obvious everybody knows what science is well do they really what does the word science really mean for Derrida he would say what science really means is first of all all of the historical uses of that word and you better believe that that word has evolved over time quite a bit and what science meant three hundred years ago is not what science means today or what it'll mean a hundred years from now our notions of science changes as we actually do science but also our understanding of science is never complete unless we bring into the picture all the other words literally in the English language but let's uh let's forget the unrelated words let's mostly focus on the related words so for example to understand science you also have to understand the word or concept of knowledge truth proof physical non-physical a model rationality logic contradiction quantity measurement and even something like religion or something like superstition you might think that well science is the opposite of superstition so why would you need to understand superstition to understand science but of course you do precisely because you frame it as the opposite so whatever word you're framing has the opposite to some other word they're defined in terms of each other so for many people they think of science like ah science is the opposite of religion or it's the opposite of superstition so all that informs what you think science is but of course not merely just these 10 words that I mentioned or so what Derrida is saying is that you literally have to pull in every single word in the English language that has ever been used throughout the history of the English language from it's very inception in order to truly understand what the word science means because this word is like one node in a giant graph that expands infinitely in all directions connected to every other node in some fashion of course some words are less important than other words for understanding what science means but if you want to be technical about it and you want to be very precise and accurate you have to admit that all of the other words in the English language color and shape your understanding of what the word science means and so the meaning of science is not that it points to something in the outer world so much as its relationship to every other word rather profound for Derrida the critical insight is that meaning is composed of both present and absent symbols so when I say the word science that symbol is present and maybe some of these other symbols like knowledge and truth and proof and measurement and quantity and even religion maybe those are present but notice that the vast majority of the English language is not present when I say the word science and yet what Derrida is trying to say is that it is still in the background playing a part it's like science is the tip of the iceberg and this giant iceberg is completely submerged underwater you're not seeing it that's all the other English language words and of course if you want a very clear demonstration of this you can pick up a dictionary and go try to look up any word in the dictionary coming at it from the position of someone who is completely clueless about any kinds of words in English so for example look up the word science and see what the definition is what are you going to find you are gonna find a it's probably 10 or 20 words long again more symbols which tell you what Sciences and they will tell you something all science is a is a method of empirical investigation of reality which uses measurements and experiments to validate hypotheses you know something like that it'll say something again but what are all those those are all complicated abstract words so how do you find out what those are if you don't know well you have to look each one of those up and notice what happens you get an infinite expansion and infinite regress because every one word you look up gives you ten more words that need to be looked up and those ten words you look those up they all have ten more words need to look up and so basically the meaning of the word is always deferred or put off till later you don't really fully get it because the word is defined both by what is present but also by what is absent another way to think of it if you're familiar with how Bitcoin works with how block chains work it's kind of like that language is decentralized like Bitcoin it has no central authority it has no ground it has no foundation and where have you heard me talking about that before for Derrida meaning is relative to all the uses of a symbol it's not enough for me just to say oh well science means this and I get to define what it means sure I could do that some human could do that some dictator could say okay I am in charge of human language and I'm just gonna say that science means the following thing by Fiat but of course that dictator is gonna die eventually and then some other person will come in say no sciences and that science is something else and and then someone else will say something something else and so basically everyone gets a say in what words mean and in fact if you if you look at some of the online dictionaries they add new to their dictionaries every single year because humanity spontaneously just invents new words I remember like five or ten years ago they added the word selfie to the dictionary and you know 20 years ago if you said the word selfie nobody knew what that meant and now everybody knows what a selfie is and it's actually now found in the dictionary because we spontaneously invented it now what does selfie really mean you might think well we know it's selfie means it's a picture of yourself but see that's a very casual way of speaking what the word selfie really means is the idea of a selfie in every single humans mind all over the world so there's a billion of these ideas billions of slightly different notions of what a selfie is and of course your notion of selfie is is connected to all sorts of other notions that it's defined next to and against without which it really wouldn't mean much for example you need to have a notion of a phone you need to have a notion of a self that you can take a selfie of you also need to have a notion of another person because if you're taking a selfie does the other person also count as part of your selfie you see now is tricky you can say well a selfie strictly speaking should just be a picture of me and myself but then see other people will use the word selfie to refer to pictures of them and they're best friends so you have the selfie stick and then you see people walking around with a selfie stick them and a bunch of their friends and then they take a selfie is that truly a selfie or cell a group photo what's the difference well you see this is the complexity and trickery of language it's a lot more tricky than it seems on the surface the way that we normally assume for Derrida this notion of deferment deferment of meaning is very important a words meaning always depends on words which are never being said alongside with the word so when I say the word selfie I'm not usually saying the word phone friend self-other and a bunch of other stuff like even photograph I'm not saying any of those things but in the back of your mind you have all those oceans at hand that's the power of the mind see if you didn't have all those notions selfie wouldn't really mean what it actually means to you also very importantly for Derrida the meaning of a symbol is not an object in the outer world but another symbol a symbol points to another symbol which points to another symbol points to another symbol just like we said with the dictionary example every single word in the dictionary is defined against itself in this sort of iterative manner such that what is the entire dictionary really made out of symbols which ultimately point to what to other symbols which ultimately means that what is this whole thing doing well it's just a set of symbols which are ultimately grounded in nothing it's a set of differences which are ultimately nothing that's the miraculous structure of language and every symbol has an infinite potential of meanings and there is never a moment in time when a symbol is finalized and set in stone and it's like well now we have figured out what a selfie is no it's constantly evolving it has an infinite potential of meanings so the full usage of a word like selfie or science is literally its every single usage that has ever occurred throughout all of human history that's what you need to pull up in order to fully understand the meaning of the word otherwise what you have is you have a partial incomplete a very tiny tiny sliver of it's real meaning for Derrida there is no such thing as the meaning of a word or a concept there's just no such thing and he would say that were very sloppy thinkers and philosophers when we go around talking about things as though there is just one canonical meaning for a word or a thought for a concept especially very abstract words like science or selfie now this should now start to remind you of something I've talked about in the past when it comes to epistemology and webs of belief I've talked about Klein's epistemic ilysm I've talked about how one of the most important developments in philosophy in the 20th century was Klein's sort of discovery or his thesis that when it comes to scientific understanding and scientific knowledge no single statement or proposition is ever tested in isolation so a naive notion of science goes like this well we take a we take a statement like snow is white and then we just go and we check is it true or false that snow is white or we take a statement like there exist atoms is it true or false that there exists atoms then we just kind of go and check and we get the answer true or false but that's not how it works what Klein proposed is that the way that science works in the way that all knowledge all epistemology works not just science but religion and anything else philosophy is that you never you never test a single statement because your knowledge is not individual statements but it's also just like language it's a complicated network of vastly interconnected truth statements with various probabilities about the world and so it's not so simple to just go and say okay do atoms exist let me go quickly check no because the mechanism or method that you are using to check whether atoms exist are also colored by your knowledge you see by your own beliefs and even very primitive notions like true or false are colored by your web of beliefs so even the fact that you think that it can be either true or false but not both for example that is already a a presupposition in a part a very deep part of your entire web of beliefs and then of course which apparatus are you gonna use to test your theories or your hypothesis well the apparatus will also depend on your level beliefs and then how are you going to interpret their results so let's say your apparatus gives you some numbers how are you gonna interpret those there is no interpretation free access to knowledge for human beings there's always an interpretation so whatever scientific methods you use even if they're the most hard-nosed and the most quote-unquote objective sorts you still have to make certain assumptions and then make certain interpretations and how are you making your interpretations will again based on your entire level beliefs and so what Klein said is that never is a single statement tested in isolation what happens is that the entire web of belief gets tested when you're testing a single statement because a statement like snow is white you might say well snow is white that's so easy to test what's wrong with testing that leo you can just go outside in the middle of winter see this note confirm that it's white okay but how do you know you're not hallucinating you see you assume you're not hallucinating in that example but what if you are how do you know you're not inside of a dream when you're doing that C so all of that is part of your background web of beliefs which is coloring how you go and evaluate these statements so snow is white but then you also have to qualify that and say well it's white when we're not dreaming it's white assuming that it's not a hallucination and then you have to qualify what is the word snow is your definition of snow really the same as mine for example the students being snow in between ice and of course that gives us and all the trickiness of of what Derrida was talking about so what I want you to see here is I want you to see the sort of isomorphic similarity between Klein's web of belief model of knowledge and also what Derrida is now talking about with language this language is also the sort of what belief because what Derrida wants to say is that there actually is no one objective correct way to read a text and even though he's talking about text here as in a book of course he means a much broader notion by text he means any kind of argument any kind of philosophical position that one puts forward any kind of scientific model any kind of work of literature or poetry what he's saying is that because meaning is so slippery and so nebulous and so complicated that even the author who wrote the poem or who wrote the scientific paper even he doesn't quite understand what he means when he wrote it because he didn't have in mind everything that all these words could mean and so in his mind maybe he meant one thing but then what I'm gonna read when I'm reading that paper is something totally different I will interpret in a different way and who's to arbitrate between my interpretation versus his interpretation versus a billion other interpretations and a billion other people could have if they read that same paper who's gonna say which is the one right true canonical interpretation what Derrida wants to say is that there is no such thing and the the desire to put forth a canonical reading of any text a canonical definition of any word or any concept is folly and that we are kidding ourselves when we're trying to do that Derrida says that when we speak the challenge we have is that because there's infinite meaning we have to boil and limit ourselves to a very particular set of limited meanings so when I say the word selfie I have to say well I mean by selfie of a particular thing I mean you take it with your digital phone I mean that your friends are not part of it or maybe they are part of it you know I have to define you see I'm taking a word which has potentially infinite meanings and I'm defining it down suppressing meanings so Derrida says that all philosophers and all thinkers and all speakers are always in this process of suppressing unwanted meanings which is sometimes why when you're communicating with people and there's a miscommunication you have to say no no I didn't mean that I didn't mean what you thought I meant I meant something else and a lot of times when I'm communicating complex and abstract concepts to you like non-dual concepts I have to say no no I didn't mean that and I didn't mean this and I didn't mean this and I didn't mean that I meant this and even when I do that still you could have a different idea of what I actually want you to understand because language is just constantly exploding with infinite meaning and our limited human minds are trying to suppress it down because there's literally too much meaning for your mind to handle your mind explodes with meaning so we're always in this process of suppression and because of this we are always pretending that meanings are simpler than they really are literally when we're speaking we're not quite sure what we're saying and maybe you've had experiences that sometimes when you say something and then you actually discover that what you meant isn't what you really meant and ultimately this leads Derrida to conclude that every statement is a lie because it's B suppressed and limited and it's being confined in this artificial manner to serve our human purposes and this is what he's going to use to make his radical critique of of all Western intellectual traditions now let's quickly go back and revisit the idea about what a symbol is before we delve into the critique of the Western traditions so notice that a symbol is a very peculiar thing a symbol is a thing which is not itself what a symbol is a thing which is not itself so for example we use words like cat and tree and selfie to refer to things but the thing that the word is referring to is precisely not the word that's what makes a symbol useful if a symbol was the exact thing that it was trying to represent then there would be no symbol there would just be the thing for example if I wanted to represent a cat with a cat I would just show you a cat and I wouldn't say the word cat I've just show you a cat but then I just have a cat I'm showing you a cat the cat is the cat it's not a symbol of a cat it's the cat so to represent the cat with something else and make it be a symbol it could be anything notice it could be anything I could take a shoe I could show you a shoe and have you understand that that shoe is actually referring to a cat so of course the shoe is not a cat and yet the whole trick of language is to get you to think that the shoe is the cat that's the both the absurdity and the ingenious nosov it is that literally we have taught our minds to misunderstand reality such that we could use that misunderstanding to manipulate reality so there are two ways in which a symbol is a thing which is not itself the first way is that the meaning of the symbol is not its being so the being of the word cat that being right there is not the same as the being of the animal cat and the second way is that a symbols meaning is its difference from another symbol that's another way in which a thing that is a symbol is not itself so for example I can tell you the sentence the fat cat sat on the mat eating a rat and you understood very quickly instantaneously what that sentence meant but notice that in that sentence the word cat is only different from the word Sat because of the letters C and s or the letter fat F for fat is just one letter difference so in order for your mind to understand this sentence the fat cat sat on the mat eating a rat you have to actually distinguish between all the subtle differences between all those words which sound very similar because as soon as you change one little shape in that in that word it changes the meeting completely from cat to rat too fat to Sat to mat to bat to something else so literally the meaning of the word cat can only work by leveraging itself against the word fat Sat mat and rat it's not only that there has to be a logical connection between let's say a cat and a rat you might say well yeah Lea I understand that a cat is related to a rat conceptually because cats like to hunt rats and maybe cats also like to sit so thats related to sat and cats can also be fat so that's where it's not just that it's literally at the word cat is relate to every single other word in the English language by the differences in its appearance because that's all that language is is the appearance if I take the word cat and I change that appearance to Sat it now becomes sat in the same way that if I took a real cat in the real world and I turned it into a dog what would happen it would no longer be a cat it would be a dog because the only thing there is to being a cat is the cat there's no essence behind the scenes it's not like if I took a cat and I transformed his body into a dog it would be like no that leo that's that's that's actually a cat in a dog's body the essence of the cat now is inside the dog no there is no essence of the cat that's what Derrida is saying the essence is if structure there's nothing else behind the scenes so this notion that Derrida came up with called difference it's actually a French word because Derrida was french-algerian he was also a Jew the reason I say that is because it'll come in later at the very end for the twist but um this word he invented called difference for him it's an important word it has two meanings first it means that every meaning is just differences and second it means that all meaning is always deferred and put off till later you're always promised the meaning of a word or a concept but it's never completely delivered or given to you just like with those dictionary definitions you keep looking and looking and looking for more meaning and it's just a never-ending wild goose chase so all of this that I've been talking about might sound a little bit abstract let's bring it all home with this visual example for those of you who are visual in the audience so here what you see before you is the sort of triangle pyramid which has a bunch of different triangles in it so here's a different way to understand what Derrida is saying very simply what he's saying is that this triangular pyramid represents language it's completely groundless and decentralized as you look at this pyramid notice how different triangles pop out into the foreground of your vision and you notice them and then what happens it as your eyes are scanning through the image that triangle pops back into the background and some new triangle pops into the foreground so these triangles are supposed to represent words or symbols or concepts they are all interrelated in a complicated and very messy way as you can see here and it's difficult to distinguish precisely where one triangle ends and another begins in fact some triangles are like parts of bigger triangles and some bigger triangles have overlapping smaller triangles and then two big triangles can overlap with each other in some interesting way and that is how language works and so what Derrida is saying that fundamentally the problem with the entire Western intellectual tradition is that what philosophers and scientists and thinkers are trying to do is they're sort of like trying to take a black sharpie to this diagram of triangles and they're trying to outline one particular triangle and they're trying to say that's the most important one that's it that's the key one right there that's the true one that's the objective one and everything else is hinging on that one triangle and what Derrida is trying to say that that is that is an invalid thing to do in truth what we have is we have this decentralized network of concepts none of them more important over any other none of them being able to dominate any other and that really what's happening in truth is that these triangles or these concepts are just kind of popping in and out from foreground to background they're appearing and they're disappearing there is their presence and their absence and there's this sort of shimmering effect that's going on and so what Derrida is trying to get us to grasp is that this is the true nature of the mind and of language and that the mistake of Western philosophy is to try to cling to one particular formulation of these triangles because in fact everything within language is relative it's a matter of perspective and the mistake that philosophers make is they they try to claim one perspective as being the ultimate one whereas really you have it this dynamic infinite interplay of perspectives which is what Derrida wants to point out you get that good so now let's move on to his central criticism of Western thought and philosophy and science and literature and everything else and this is something that post modernists all basically agree on is that they agree that Western intellectual tradition is logo centric which is a fancy way of just saying that in the Western tradition in academia in science and in writing in philosophy there was always been for the last 2,000 years ever since Plato and Aristotle there has always been this over emphasis on language and words and this absolute faith that you could describe truth and reality with language and with words and course with logic because logic is also language and words and so Derrida claims that all Western thought basically seeks to find a center within this triangle pyramid it seeks to find a foundation it seeks to establish objectivity it seeks to establish normativity it seeks to find what he calls a meta-narrative a sort of overarching big picture understanding of of any particular topic or field and it seeks to say that's the truth that's the one right way and that's the equivalent of taking a sharpie and outlining one particular triangle and what Derrida wants to say is that you can't do that not if you want to be honest because in truth there is no foundation two concepts two meanings or two language it's very essence is that it's foundationless there are no canonical definitions it can sometimes appear that way simply because we have a loose consensus but in truth the reality of the matter is that it's much more messy and complicated and that it's relative and he goes even further and he says that the great mistake of one of Western intellectual tradition is that it uses distinctions it operates by categories dichotomies hierarchies and binary opposites and this is always a way to seek a ground or a foundation which doesn't really exist there it's sort of a sneaky move that the mind makes it creates a distinction and then it ignores the fact that it constructed this distinction so that's where deconstruction comes in and that's why Derrida calls his method deconstruction is that he's gonna deconstruct all the binary opposites categories and dichotomies and hierarchies that have been constructed he's gonna basically take an eraser to all these Sharpie triangles that have been drawn by various individuals and philosophers and scientists throughout history he's gonna erase them all so that what we have is we have the more natural state of justice sort of shimmering triangular pyramid of just this groundless some network which is always in play and never is one domineering over all the others so what does he mean by distinctions and binary opposites well these should be very familiar to you if you've ever spent any time thinking have you noticed that all thought is dualistic and happens in terms of binary opposites there's a very deep reason for this but we'll get to that later but what do I mean by these binary options here's some examples for you so man versus animal that would be one office by neri opposite reason versus intuition intellect versus emotions mind versus body good versus evil nature versus culture inner versus outer as in there's the inner world and the outer world scientific versus spiritual true versus false a priori versus a posterior II you've heard that one if you were ever a student philosophy epistemology versus metaphysics Physics versus chemistry subjective versus objective the mundane versus the divine reality versus illusion material versus immaterial the practical versus the theoretical the abstract versus the concrete something versus nothing existence versus non-existence life versus death and so on and so forth there are millions of these conceptual distinctions in order for the mind to work at all it has to create these distinctions but what Derrida wants to show is that yes you can create these distinctions and they work within a limited context but as soon as you try to push this distinction further and further eventually every single distinction will collapse it must collapse because the only way you can define these opposites is against one another and so if you take your analysis of these distinctions all the way to the rock-bottom what you'll discover is that actually one in a set necess neccessity --tz-- or necessarily implies the other and that you cannot have one without the other the only the only meaning of a word like reality is because it's juxtaposed against something like illusion the only meaning of a word like something is because it's juxtaposed against nothing the only meaning of the word theory is because it's juxtaposed against practice and so on and so forth and what you find is that not only does Western intellectual tradition create these binary opposites these dualities but it goes one step further akin it's an even greater sin is that it arbitrarily assigns a privilege to one of the sides of the binary opposite and it marginalized another so a good example of this might be something like rationality versus emotion generally in Western culture we privilege emotionality and we marginalize emotion we say something like well rationality is is the great one it's better than emotion because emotions you know emotions are things for for girls you know real men don't believe in emotions we operate on cold hard rationality and facts and rationality after all is what we used to do science and to do hard math and physics and look at what that's Kotnis we've gotten from physics we've gotten rocket ships and cellphones and semiconductors and computers and all this sort of stuff and we got logic and that's the thing you can really count on is logic because logic is certain where as emotions emotions are airy-fairy and they're so wishy-washy one day you're sad one day you're happy it's unreliable what can you really do with emotions like this right that's how it sort of characterized but what Dara da would do is he would deconstruct that he would say aha so you think that huh well let's take a deep look at that is that really true what is the true interplay between rationality emotions can you have rationality with no emotions and his rationality really as powerful as you think it is without emotions so for example and this is not his example of my example but I think he would agree with me here I've hughster alive and listening to this for example he might say something like ok but we've done neuroscience Studies on people who actually have damaged brains where their emotional part of the brain is actually damaged and doesn't work anymore so these people don't feel any emotions at all they are purely rational they're rational side of the brain the left brain is working perfectly no flaws at all so what do these people do in real life well what we discover in practice is that these people are not able to put their socks on in the morning because as it turns out to actually do something in the world one way versus another way you need to have some emotions that compel you to like have a reason for doing it you see motivation is not rational it's emotional so a person who has no emotions cannot put on the socks because to him why put on the socks when you cannot put on the socks how do you decide between which way to go both are rational after all there's nothing rational about putting on socks or not putting on socks and after all there's nothing rational about eating or not eating how do I determine which I should do not on rationality it's based on emotion emotion compels you to eat and how do you know if you're supposed to have a family if you're supposed to be nice to your wife or your husband not the rationality because rationally speaking there's no reason why you should be nice or why you can be an [ __ ] there's no reason why you couldn't go in and murder people rationally speaking makes no difference rationally speaking there's no reason why you can't put a gun to your head and shoot yourself right now there's no rational reason why you should be alive at all in fact rationally it makes a lot more sense to kill yourself now because you're gonna save yourself a lot of hassle think about it you will save yourself 80 years of hassle living live going through all these problems why do that shoot yourself right now and rashly that's the best option to take but you don't why not because you have emotions which override rationality and in fact the thing that governs you is not your rationality but mostly your emotions and in fact your emotions dictate what you will rationalize to yourself so what Derrida would say is that actually the tables have turned on us my friend it's not rationality that's superior if anything it's emotions that are superior and more primary see for all these years we have been privileged aggression allottee and marginalizing emotions and dare it I would say no we got to do the opposite let's take the marginalized half of this equation and start to privilege it just to see how how radical it will change we can get and then of course see Derrida is gonna be slippery here and he's gonna play that play devil's advocate such that if someone does come and say well okay emotions fine emotions are the privileged term you're right rationality yeah it's not as good as we thought in fact you know what rationality sucks and if someone does that Derrida will come in and say wait a minute let's look at the issue again let's really look at what emotions are emotions are and he'll analyze that and say oh well emotions are kind of flimsy and really look with your emotions you can't really decide what to do and so rationality is important and so his whole game is to play both off each other such that neither one is above the other because to put any one of them above the other is to fall into the mistake that all Western thinking has has been falling into the last 2,000 years is to take this triangular diagram and to mark out one particular triangle at the expense of all the others and that's invalid that's not truthful is what he wants to say if you want another example of this how about reality versus illusion as a duality talk about privileged and marginalized terms man what is more privileged than reality and more marginalized than delusion in the West here illusion has a very negative connotation dreams have a very negative connotation people are always looking for reality reality is what's real illusions those are just like hallucinations and if you want to dismiss the importance of something you just say oh it's just an illusion it's just a hallucination it's just a dream whereas this thing here look this is real the real world it's tangible it's solid it's physical you can't [ __ ] with it this is what science investigates science investigates reality religion investigates illusion see reality is privileged illusion is marginalized and then when non-duality comes into the picture you see this it flip this is flipped on its head and a lot of times when I say that reality is all hallucination people flip out about this and like Leo what are you talking about our reality's hallucination everything's an illusion how can you say these things it's clearly untrue see because what non-duality means that you're you're breaking all these dualities down and then in fact there is no difference whatsoever between reality and illusion this right here is completely illusion it's all illusion everything is an illusion all your problems are illusions your entire life is an illusion but you don't like to think of it that way because well you have marginalized illusion for so long that now if you something bad is happening to you when you think of reality as an illusion and that's precisely what Derrida wants to question now technically speaking reality is neither real or unreal is neither reality or illusion it's actually completely undefined that's what non duality means but the reason for example that sometimes I like to say it's a hallucination it's an illusion is because it [ __ ] the most with your mind it triggers you why does it trigger you precisely because you've marginalized it so it breaks it starts to like break and [ __ ] with your model of reality which is exactly what we need so it's sort of like we take that triangle that you have and then if you think reality is real then it's like you've taken a sharp E and you've marked out a little triangle there that you think is the right one and what I'm doing I'm taking you an eraser I'm erasing that one and then I'm taking another sharpie and I'm marking the opposite triangle just to [ __ ] with your mind see and you don't like that because your whole thing in life is that you want this triangle to be the right one you hate that other triangle now of course ultimately what you want to get to and what Derrida is advocating is that you want to erase all the triangles and you want to open yourself up to the shimmering interplay of the entire network and of course that's ultimately what I'm trying to get you to as well but sometimes to do that what we do is we draw the opposite triangles just to [ __ ] with your mind but anyways so Derrida says that philosophy needs to fix meanings that's what Western philosophy is about it can't work otherwise philosophy has a constructivist biased it has a constructivist agenda it is trying to construct a house of cards to do that it needs to sharpie it needs to draw these triangles and Derrida wants to deny it that Derrida says that Western philosophy tries to always advance some kind of thesis it tries to have the final word he tries to create a meta-narrative what postmodernists mean by meta-narrative is just it has to it tries to have a like a big-picture final say on some matter for example within history there are meta-narratives and we try to say well history basically was like Christopher Columbus he he came over the Atlantic Ocean and he conquered the the Native Americans here and then European civilization rose and that's the true history that's really how it happened and what Derrida wants to say is that no that's a meta-narrative that's a silly childish notion of how history works the reality of history is that it's much more complicated there were millions and billions of people at work to create the history around the time of the era of Columbus Columbus was just one guy on one ship around him were many other people and millions of people existed here in native as Native Americans in America that that are completely unknown to the history books never talked about their net their names were never recorded so basically a postmodernist would criticize all of history as being meta-narratives highly selected data points which are done arbitrarily connected together to create a sort of narrative or a picture which isn't really there it wasn't like that it's just convenient for us to think of it that way because our minds are constantly oversimplifying everything but if we really want to be accurate honest we have to say that's not how it worked and that everything you learned in school about history was a fiction that's really what it was history is just fiction and a lot of people find that upsetting because they think I know Leo the world really it really was like Columbus came over and like my ancestors were on that ship and and you know gotta turn on it really happened like my grandparents were in World War two and and they they were suffering really badly and then it on that's best real that's real history that's not a fiction that's the power of the mind that's the power of language that's the power of concepts is that you can construct these realities out of thin air and they really start to feel real but you have to start to see that their gross oversimplification of of what's really transpiring and even deeper than that it's all based on these dualities which ultimately must collapse and the whole problem is that once you're buying into all these dualities then you don't want them to collapse your body into the dualities all of Western tradition intellectual tradition is bought into these dualities and these dualities prove to be very limiting they're like straight jackets or pigeon holes ultimately what Derrida is trying to say is that Western tradition has been trying to capture the truth with words and the truth is that you cannot capture the truth with words because words are just differences and nothing more than that differences without substance all right I'm gonna take a quick intermission here take a little break but you don't go anywhere because I'll be right back with more all right let's continue because there's a lot more to be said here we're almost getting to the really juicy part but first let's talk about explicitly what is deconstruction Derrida's method so here's how it works you take any logo centric argument or a thesis or a philosophy or a model and you start to question its conceptual distinctions until you break them all down and you show their limits and you show how eventually they must collapse you question and undermine the privileged parts of the distinctions and you empower the marginalized parts of the distinctions until ultimately you break the whole thing up and you reveal that this entire scheme is actually in truth completely groundless and you sort of stand off as a neutral observer on the sidelines as it were you don't take sides over one part of the distinction versus another and you just step outside the whole game and you just observe the entire interplay the shimmering of all these elements and you delight in that and that is in essence deconstruction you can apply this as a technique to literary criticism to poetry to linguistics to science to philosophy to psychology to whatever you want the key is that all conceptual distinctions in a text are unstable they must be this way and the deep reason for that which Dury dorita didn't really get into is is the fact that realities non-dual it's because reality is non-dual that all dualistic conceptions of reality must ultimately collapse it doesn't matter whether they're made within science within physics they will all ultimately collapse can't be otherwise that's what it means to say that reality is non-dual that's what it means to say that that's the absolute truth but now I'm starting to get into a little bit more of how deconstruction dovetails with non-duality which is strictly speaking not what Derrida was talking about but nevertheless it's important for our work here so ultimately what you discover through deconstruction is that each side of the dichotomy contains and implies the other side so you can never deny the other side it's rather similar to how morality works you know some people who are very moral they like to denounce evil without realizing pet you can't have good without evil you can't go around denouncing evil because the only way you do that is by not being conscious of the fact that the evil you're denouncing is part of the whole you can't have the whole without the evil the evil comes with the whole and so this just doesn't apply to good and evil but this applies to all dualities and ultimately rationality must eat its own tail they must come full circle even rationality itself as we'll talk about for example with Kurt girdles incompleteness theorem I'll shoot an episode about that even rationality itself when tickets to us full limit must eat itself break itself down and ultimately devolve into paradox the distinction between a rational and the irrational must collapse the distinction between true and false must itself collapse the distinction between reality and illusion must collapse and that's something that you can even see demonstrated from within side of logic which is what Kurt kernel was able to demonstrate so what's the end result of all this deconstruction and all of Derrida is thinking well the end result is that the essence of concepts is that they have no essence they are the pure possibility of play the end result is that no thesis can ever be advanced about anything no argument can ever be made for or against anything because deconstruction is the exhaustion of all theories and views it's the collapse of all hierarchies it's the collapse of all power structures of all attempts to privilege one concept over another the collapse of all justifications and reasons it is to become unmoored and D anchored such that you have no more ground to stand upon and the only thing that results is this sort of endless playfulness of reality it flows which is different from the way it is when you're under the Western intellectual tradition because when you're under the Western intellectual tradition you're encased in this conceptual matrix which locks down the free flow and playfulness of reality because it says that no reality is this way and this way and this way and not this way and this way is bad and that way is bad but this way is good so all of that is being blasted apart with dynamite here and what this means is that if you're gonna be using concepts and ideas feel free to do so but just remember what you're really doing just remember the house of cards that you are building and remember to hold all your ideas lightly rather than cling to them as though your life depended on it and of course what this means is also that all philosophical philosophical questions are endless they never end so if you wondered maybe that philosophy is just a mental masturbation and a wild goose chase chasing your own tail around the circle as well Derrida is saying that basically that's exactly what it is you can never settle a philosophical question at the level of language because all language just sort of revolves in an endless merry-go-round and that's precisely why if you wondered you know in philosophy for thousands of years philosophers have basically dealt with the same questions about truth and metaphysics and justifications and normativity and and morality and existence of God in all this and basically none of the questions have been answered and this is precisely why because the only way you can try to answer them is by building a house of cards but that some other philosopher comes and says no I don't like your house of cards I'll build my own I'll blow down your house of cards I'll build my own house of cards but I'm not gonna call it a house of cards because your house of cards is a house of cards but mine is not a house of cards mine is built out of real solid stone it's set on a real firm foundation and of course what Derrida says no you can't do that yours is also house of cards everybody's house of cards is a house of cards and of course a lot of people don't like that idea because to them this smacks of relativity relativism and this leads us to the question of what was the impact of Derrida and his work on culture at large well it's probably like you might think of course most serious academics viewed him as a nihilist and as utterly toxic to what academia is about his work had very little impact within the sciences the hard sciences because think about it for the academic for the hard scientist what is he up to he is on a constructive agenda there's something that needs to be constructed something pragmatic science is not about idle theory building it's about pragmatism for our reason now science will tell you oh well we're pragmatic because Leo we like to be practical and we precisely want to avoid all this metaphysical speculation all this philosophy all that stuff yeah it's just kind of airy-fairy we are very practical and they tout that as a positive thing and in a sense that is a positive thing but also there is a negative side to pragmatism because when you're purely pragmatic that means that you don't really care about the truth what you care about is you just care about getting a utilitarian result you care about building your technology you care about building your theory damn the consequences damn damn whether it's true or not doesn't matter if it's a house of cards if I can build a house of cards that can accomplish something in the real world if I can use a lie or a deception or an illusion to push something through that I want then I'm gonna do it that's the danger of pragmatism see and so most academics were very dismissive of all of derrida's work precisely because it's so threatening to their very livelihood the whole point of being in academic is that you are dealing with concepts for a living you are using concepts to construct houses of cards so if you are denied that as Derrida is trying to do well what are you gonna do are you gonna say okay I'm calling it quits I'm going home is that what you're gonna do or are you gonna say no no that's okay I can keep building my house of cards they're not really house of cards they're just made out of stone this guy who's just smoking a bunch of stuff he was just some some some radical philosopher guy I mean who cares about what he said in effect it's as though Derrida went to a butcher and asked him to become a vegan what do you think a butcher who's been butchering animals for 40 years and has made his entire career out of this he has children who get fed from his butchering and you tell him to become a vegan what do you think the butcher is gonna say is he gonna agree with your vegan philosophy of course not so of course the hard science is dismissed most of what they're to have to say but there was some traction in dario's work with the field of literature literary criticism it became quite popular there which if you think about is a quite odd application of these ideas to me that's a very shallow application of these idea but that's sort of where it caught on and in certain softer sciences in the humanities has sort of caught on perhaps in anthropology perhaps in various cultural studies gender studies feminism and stuff like that it caught on and post-modernism did flower for a while in the 70s and in the 80s you sort of ran its course at this point it's not really that popular but it still exists within universities and academic institutions and certain scholars it's had an impact because basically what it turned into is a sort of relativism where you could say that well one culture might have a certain set of values but then who says that those values are the dominant ones the ones that we should put on a pedestal what about these other cultures who have marginalized values maybe we should put those more on a pedestal and so that sort of thing started to play out in universities and then also what came from post-modernism is the sort of anti-establishment relativist political ideology so it got involved with politics and then of course you know a lot of people started to abuse this philosophy to justify whatever kind of things they wanted to justify largely post-modernism was dismissed by most people as mental masturbation as most philosophy is because it's just not practical enough to meet they're just like self-survival agenda and and then the other problem that happened with it is that people didn't really know what to do with this philosophy after all like okay let's say we believe Derrida and let's say we just accepted always okay he's right so all all of our Western traditional institutions and conceptual models that they are all just houses of cards and we're gonna break them all down well where does that leave us what do we do most people are practical people they want to know what am I going to do with this how am I going to apply this and for a lot of people this philosophy just strikes them as impractical and for example for this hard scientist this strikes them as impractical because a hard physicist will say well what do you want me to do Leo do you want me to stop doing physics I mean after all I got to keep doing physics I got to keep running my experiments I got to keep you know writing papers I got to keep going after my Nobel Prizes I got to keep making discoveries are going to help to advance technology and all that so I mean we can't really stop doing that so what should we do should we stop should we continue to do it who knows this darrid I even say what the practical consequences of any of this stuff is it's hard to say and see a lot of people took this sort of ambiguity in terms of the practical consequences and they sort of ran off with it to do whatever they wanted to so for example people who were marginalized like feminists or minorities in universities they would they would use the philosophy to advocate a privilege of their values or kind of a leveling the field and so this became popular and for example certain feminist studies and circles and certain minority circles like the LGTB community and the transgender community saw this as something that they could use like well I could define my own gender because previously it was said that well there's just males and females but now Derrida seems to say well why are there only males and females isn't that just like a privileges of this dichotomy what if there are other dichotomy what if we can say there are some other kinds of genders and in some people you know who want that then they seize on that and then they use it to justify whatever kind of gender they want to create and so on so see the danger with relativity of course is that the ego can seize on relativity and use it as a weapon to push through whatever kind of self agenda it has and that was one of the things that I think tarnished the legacy of post-modernism that's exactly what happened and that's very predictable of course that would happen because the truth of non-duality is that it's complete freedom when you break down all conceptual structures you're sure left floating on anchored and you can float whichever way you want you can do whatever you want and this is part of the problem with Zen devilry is that you can become enlightened but just because you're enlightened doesn't mean you're you can stop being an [ __ ] you can still be an [ __ ] you can still rape people you could murder people you can start holy wars you can become a cult leader I mean enlightenment doesn't preclude anything the way that people sometimes like to think enlightened Atman doesn't make you a sage non-duality is complete freedom and that's sort of what Derrida was pointing to but then of course when you give unconscious people who are not deeply conscious of non-duality but are just believing in it as an ideology and that's what deconstructionism became as it became an ideology for people when you just believe in this stuff as an ideology then you actually fall into the very same trap that Derrida was trying to use this method to escape from see you invent a new ideology and then that new ideology you follow it dogmatically and and and then you use it to justify all your unconscious egoic needs and wants and desires and and that's where a lot of abuse can happen so in the words of Lawrence Cahoon in talking about the legacy of Derrida he said quote sometimes if the philosophical critique is sufficiently radical it simply leaves us where we were before and quote and that's sort of what ended up happening with deconstruction now I want to say a few words about why Derrida's writing is so convoluted and complicated a lot of intellectuals and scholars after reading Derrida they criticize him as being actually an obscurantist and an intellectual fraud so by obscurantist what they mean is that his writing is so convoluted and so non-committal doesn't try to take any stances whatsoever that it seems like he's using language in a fancy way to say nothing at all and of course in a sense that is what he's doing but to most academics and scholars this strikes them as just complete mental masturbation and not only that but it just strikes them as as complete fraud because it seems as though he's writing these books and he sang these very complicated things to make himself seem intelligent like he has something important to say but really he's not saying anything and here's a quote that I want to give you from one of his critics which exemplifies this this is a critic by the name of Mark Goldblatt and here's what he writes about Derrida quote Derrida special significance lies not in the fact that he was subversive but in the fact that he was an outright intellectual fraud and that he managed to dupe a startling number of highly educated people into believing that he was on to something whatever Derrida was affirming he is also simultaneously denying from a logical perspective the only way to read Derrida on his own terms is to mentally insert the phrase or not after every one of his statements and quote see you see this is precisely what this academic is is criticizing Derrida on so if Derrida wants to criticize all of Western intellectual tradition and say that its logo centric you see the problem that Derrida faces is that if he says okay so all Western intellectual tradition is logo centric and that's bad if he says that he can't say that because to say that would be to play into the game of logo centrism that's too advanced a thesis that's to mark out one triangle out of the whole so he can't say that so the reason that Derrida's language is so con looted and it seems like at the same time he's affirming something but then also denying it is because of course that's the nature of non-duality from the position of duality which is what this critic is coming from yeah it seems absurd from the position of logic it seems absurd because duality has to at the same time affirm and deny so derrida's has to say at the same time that Western intellectual tradition is complete nonsense and it's all logo centric and then in the same breath yes to say but also it isn't and this is what really irritates and confuses a lot of people who are strictly rational and strictly dualistic because they want to concrete answer but the whole point is that Derrida is trying to give you the answer that there are no concrete answers derrida's position is that there are no fixed positions tada that's the point but the problem is how do you say that when the thing you're criticizing is the very mechanism by which you're trying to speak your criticism it's a problem of self-reflection and Derrida was keenly aware of this problem which is why his writing is so convoluted and complicated because look if his position is that all language is a lie and yet he's writing a book using language how does he say that without himself opening up his writing to further deconstruction so you see what Derrida has to do as he's writing is he has to deconstruct himself in a very sort of self-conscious manner so that nobody else can deconstruct him because if he wrote something that smacked of being a thesis or a firm stance what would happen is that someone would come back to him and say ah well you're deconstructing us why don't we just deconstruct you and what he has to do is he has to say ah but I've already because myself so there's nothing in me left for you to deconstruct and if he left something there for further deconstruction that would mean that he's being a hypocrite because he's actually committing the very same sin of which he is accusing all other academics and all other intellectuals of of committing so this is actually a very interesting point about his writing style now of course I think that his writing style could have been a lot more clear and a lot more simpler I don't think his ideas are that complicated that you couldn't put it down on paper in a simple way but nevertheless the paradoxical nature of his ideas I think some of that is just inherent to non-duality is inherently irreducible because there is there is paradox within reality which cannot simply be ignored the way that Western intellectual tradition has tried to do for thousands of years it's just not that simple that's what Derrida is trying to say so very much just like a Zen master Derrida has to write with one hand while he erases with the other see he has to say something and then he has to negate what he says just like a Zen master and that is for good reason that's not an accident because that's that's the difference between a sort of dualistic attitude and a non-dualistic attitude towards reality now of course the most important question though is yes now we understand where Derrida was coming from what he was trying to do and some of the implications of all that but was Derrida right did he actually accurately describe non-duality did he actually describe reality well here is again where the twist happens here is where the master gets hoisted by his own petard yet again you see the problem with Derrida and deconstruction isn't that it's too radical and that it goes too far it's that it doesn't go far enough yes language and concepts of course their logo centric of course their dualistic but there's an even deeper layer which Derrida himself never got to deconstruction as Derrida proposed it was not complete it was deconstruction but it was still stuck at the language at the at the level of language and the level of concepts Derrida's mistake was that he was overly focused on language and philosophy and academia and that he never went beyond that to actually make a discontinuous jump into proper non-duality his non-duality was really just conceptual non-duality he understood and a very important thing which is that all philosophy is dualistic all thinking is dualistic the entire mind is dualistic but see there's two things that could happen when you understand that one is you can understand that and then be aware of it but still continue to use the language and the concepts that you were sort of criticizing because you think that there's no alternative it's sort of like yeah you might say like yeah humanity is a [ __ ] up race and we do evil [ __ ] to each other so you know what we're just gonna continue doing evil [ __ ] so I'll just participate in the madness that would be sort of one take on it or you could say okay so all of language and all of concepts and all of mine is dualistic but is there a level beyond that can i transcend the mind can i transcend language can i stop using concepts to interface with reality and that last step is precisely the step that i don't think he made see for Derrida he was operating within the domain of philosophy and epistemology and linguistics and he still took for granted even though he questioned a lot of that stuff he still took for granted many fundamental metaphysical assumptions of materialism so to really complete his deconstruction here's what would had to happen he would have to recognize that the distinction between language and reality is itself a false distinction and the distinction between epistemology and metaphysics is itself a false distinction and the distinction between doing deconstruction on the mind and doing deconstruction on the physical world is itself a false distinction such that when you realize all this there is a spontaneous breakthrough in sight that happens when the in the inside the mind where the mind shuts down and you have a raw direct unmediated non-dual non symbolic experience of reality at this level there is no language there is no concept there are no distinctions you are interfacing with being itself and this is true non duality this is what all spirituality aims at but of course they I didn't get this far at least that's my opinion because he was still thinking of non-duality in a purely intellectual way it's the difference between understanding enlightenment intellectually and talking about it and actually experiencing it for yourself you see you can talk about that oh yeah maybe all this is an illusion maybe we're just living in the matrix maybe this is all a dream and that's a nice interesting sort of philosophical notion to have but to actually experience your present moment as being an illusion as being a dream that's a whole nother level and that's something that Derrida was maybe on the brink of breaking through to but he never quite broke through to it so I see Derrida as having stumbled upon the duality of the mind and having advocated for a sort of conceptual non dual stance when it comes to mental things but not taking it all the way because he never really fully transcended his own mind and I think that's because he never thought that that was a possibility I think that he always thought that the only access that the human being can have to reality is through language through concepts through the mind it's quite a radical thing to consider that you could possibly transcend the mind and access reality through something other than language and I want to read to you here a really great quote from a paper by David Loy who is a Zen master and he's also very knowledgeable about deconstruction and he pinpoints precisely this problem that Derrida's deconstruction faced when looked at from a true non-dual perspective from someone who's enlightened from someone who has studied and actually embodied the teachings of Zen Buddhism for example here's what he says quote what is interesting about Derrida's type of deconstruction from a Buddhist point of view is that it is logo centric for what needs to be deconstructed is not just language but the world we live in and the way we live in it trapped within the cage of our own making bound by our own rope to use a Zen phrase the problem is not merely that language acts as a filter obscuring the nature of things rather names are used to objectify appearances into self existing things that we perceive as books tables trees you and me in other words the objective world of material things is metaphysical through and through and it is this metaphysics that most needs to be deconstructed because this is the metaphysics that disguises itself as common sense reality which makes me suffer and quote so that's just what I was talking about the latent metaphysics which makes you believe that you are in a real physical reality right now the materialist paradigm your sense that you are a a separate self separate from other individuals your sense that you were born that you're going to die all of these they seem as just common sense Givens that's just how reality is but is it really what if you take deconstruction to its ultimate ultimate ultimate end way beyond where Derrida took it beyond just the intellectual realm but to the actual physical realm where your deconstruction literally starts to break down your physical reality to the point where you start to feel like you're going insane because physical barriers are now starting to melt and collapse before you in your very direct experience what happens when you start doubting that there exists a floor so much the possibility opens up that the floor will actually cease to exist beneath your feet and you will fall through it that's the level of deconstruction that Buddhism deals with and of course not just Buddhism every single mystical tradition from advise of a danta to to Kabbalah to yoga to to everything else that's true deconstruction you're not just deconstructing ideas or philosophies or texts in a book which is the problem with Derrida his deconstruction was mostly aimed at philosophies and textbooks but actually your present experience what if you deconstruct your entire sensory experience your sense of having a physical body what if you deconstruct your physical body so much that you stop believing in a physical body that would be pretty radical and that might actually solve this problem with deconstruction of not being a practical philosophy because yes when deconstruction is only happening at the intellectual level it might not be so practical but when it starts to happen at the level of your emotions at the level of your real world metaphysics what you think is real and physical and true well that becomes very practical very quickly the problem there is that actually becomes so practical that are you able to handle the consequences of that because you will start to feel like you're going insane a little bit maybe a lot depends on how deep you go with this deconstruction so just like Douglas Hofstadter was really close to really understanding at all of reality the strange loop just like Georg Cantor was really close to understanding that his proofs of absolute infinity and different sizes of infinity that those actually pointed to the real deal the actual absolute infinity but he didn't quite get there I think the same problem plagued Derrida and he never actually got there what would have been cool is if he actually did get to true non-duality and he actually saw what's ultimately true which is that reality is absolutely relative not just at the intellectual level not just at the cultural level not just at the level of academia and philosophy but at the physical level at the objective level there are no objects because objects are a duality there are no boundaries because all boundaries are constructs there he would have realized that there is no difference between something and nothing there is no difference between reality and illusion there is no difference between herself and another it's all one everything collapses as it must because that's the nature and the logic of being if you were to ask Derrida what is everything he would have probably said everything is just differences and that's exactly right that's the nature of reality the nature of reality is not atoms or molecules or things or energy or or God or any of that the nature of reality is just differences and what is the nature of differences it's nothing differences and nothing that they're made out of that's what all this is it's just differences just distinctions we have conceptual distinctions we have physical distinctions but even the distinction between the conceptual and the physical is itself a distinction which can collapse all distinctions can collapse and when the when that happens what do you get get under emptiness you get nothingness and then you realize that reality is a strange loop you realize that everything as Derrida said is truly infinite play nothing has dominance over every anything else it is this tangled hierarchy where every element is inter playing with every other element it's infinitely diverse it's constantly in motion you can't pin it down it has no foundation it's absolutely groundless it's what the coupe the Buddhists call the groundless ground that makes everything else possible all of these differences and distinctions just like Derrida was saying within language well that's what's actually happening not just within language but at the physical level of reality so to me that's what I found very profound and beautiful about derrida's work is that I see the isomorphism between how he describes the structure and function of language and then what I experience as the structure and function of physical reality and that they're really the same sort of structure it's a web with no central authority God isn't some central authority who sits outside of the web dictating commands that's not God that's a bastardization of the notion of God God is simply the realization that there is no ground and that all there is is just as infinite expansion in all directions of this decentralized web so if you want to put it poetically you could say that what reality is is reality is sort of like an infinite Bitcoin expanding in all directions with nobody in control and that's something I wish that Derrida was able to directly become conscious of for himself that would have been a a beautiful way to go full circle with his philosophy when I was like 16 years old I actually developed my own version of deconstruction which is why it was really easy for me to understand where Derrida was coming from as soon as I just read a couple of things about him I could just quickly see that okay I know exactly what he's doing that's kind of what I was doing in my own mind except I wasn't doing it the level of language I was doing at the level of epistemology and metaphysics basically I caught on very early when I was 16 years old when I started thinking about the nature of reality the nature of language and thoughts and and beliefs I sort of caught on the head all belief systems are just houses of cards that are foundationless and so I was able to kind of come up with my own version of deconstruction back then I haven't even heard about Derrida or post-modernism earning this kind of stuff just on my own I was thinking about this stuff and it just became very apparent to me that all of it was growl as it had to be groundless it couldn't be grounded in anything because every ground needs a new ground so what's it grounded in it can only be grounded in nothing and so I basically used my little version of deconstruction to deconstruct religion to deconstruct atheism to deconstruct science to deconstruct all of philosophy and I actually fell into the very same mistake that Derrida fell into is that even though I did deconstruct all this stuff I was still only doing it on an intellectual conceptual level and that was very helpful because a lot of people get stuck in these concepts so that allowed me to unstick myself from all these concepts that was super helpful but it still didn't take me all the way to non-duality you'd only take 10 or 15 more years of doing research and then ultimately stumbling upon enlightenment and having some enlightenment experiences that I was able to to really complete that circle and to actually to actualize the deconstruction my my deconstruction wasn't actualized and I still don't consider it completely actualized there's still a lot more actualizing of it that I need to do there's still a lot of things in my mind that I need to break down and deconstruct but but what's nice about deconstruction is that it sort of gets your foot into the door if you can deconstruct your concepts most people can't even do that they struggle to do that go take a scientist or go take out an atheist or go take a rationalist or go take a theist and ask him to deconstruct all his concepts and beliefs good luck with that they ain't gonna do it they ain't gonna do it and if they don't do it at least on that level then how are they actually gonna do it on the physical level of their being of their emotions of their entire personal life there's no way in hell they're gonna get that far you see so you want to start at the conceptual level then the deconstruction will sort of burrow its way in and corrode all your concepts all your beliefs the entire mind and then it goes deeper and deeper and then starts to actually corrupt your physical reality like [ __ ] in your physical reality starts to to melt away the floor under your feet starts to disappear so to speak and that's when things get really heavy that's when you get the real deep mind [ __ ] that's when your deconstruction starts to actually actualize and that's when you get true spirituality is when you get mysticism that's when you get non-duality that's all it really is that's how religion happens that's true religion for you right there but good luck convincing a religious person of that or even a scientific person that or even an academic person of that you won't because they are deeply bought into this entire enterprise of constructing see that's what humans do we construct the mind is a construction machine it's a conceptual construction machine it builds a conceptual matrix why does it do this because that helps us to survive that puts food on the table believe it or not the greatest business of the mind and of human beings is to construct [ __ ] have you noticed this the mine is a [ __ ] spinning machine as it must be because as it turns out the only thing that can exist is [ __ ] because in reality nothing exists so for you to think that something does exist that something is objective that something is non relative well the only way you can get that is by bullshitting yourself that it's not so people work really hard to [ __ ] themselves into thinking that their their morality their values their purpose their very physical existence their nation their government their philosophy their ideology that all of that is tangible and objective stuff and that's precisely why they're so touchy about it and they're so defensive and they get so offended and so angry when you start to really burrow in and start to deconstruct that stuff they hate it if you haven't noticed philosophers have hated skepticism since the very beginnings of philosophy since the early Greeks skeptics have been hated why is that because skeptics are one of the few philosophers who say hey you know what all the philosophy is probably [ __ ] and all the other philosophers hate that and the scientists hate that and the intellectuals hate that and government and leaders hate that and institutions hate that in businesses hate that they all hate that because they want to construct conceptual landscapes that's what the mind is for that's why it's so powerful because it literally creates reality through illusion and through concept because with all you have to work with is the medium of illusion within that domain you can construct something very solid seeming because illusion within illusion is just reality it looks like reality because there is no real reality against which to compare the illusions and of course actualized Org lest you forget is not immune to this in the same way that Derrida was not immune to this see deconstruction can be deconstructed and everything that I talk about with actualized org can be considered a position by those who don't understand what actualize that org is really aspiring to be see the point of actualized org is to show you that you are drowning in a sea of [ __ ] of human [ __ ] that's why you suffer that's why you have all the problems you have in your life you are bullshitting your family as [ __ ] and your friends are bullshitting your society as bullshitting everything around you is [ __ ] you're drowning in a sea of [ __ ] then you find actualized org and you think all actualize that org that's solid land let me swim up on solid land actually no actually I said Rocky's not solid land if you are drowning in a sea of liquid [ __ ] actualized org is an island of solid [ __ ] that you can creep up onto you crawl up on this island of solid [ __ ] and for a while it feels great because like oh at least I'm not drowning in liquid [ __ ] but then you have to realize wait a minute isn't this also [ __ ] it's just a different form of [ __ ] it's helpful see it's helpful to get yourself out of the liquid [ __ ] but then you're on the mountain of solid [ __ ] you gotta say well okay how can i transcend beyond that how can i transcend beyond the concepts of enlightenment beyond the concepts of actualize that org and then eventually ideally what you do is you become so conscious that you even transcend the island of [ __ ] and you just completely sort of float off into empty space and then you're free of all the [ __ ] altogether but of course the trouble is that I have to communicate all this to you using language using concepts so how am I supposed to use concepts to make you aware of the fact that concepts are false and dangerous isn't that an inherent paradox an inherent contradiction yes of course that's the entire problem of religion the entire problem spirituality is a problem of mysticism the entire problem of all Zen masters which is why Zen masters talk in riddles because they're trying to use concepts to show you that concepts don't work but then people don't get that to get that requires a leap in consciousness which most people don't get because actually most people when they hear you using concepts to criticize concepts they go ah Leo I got you aren't you committing the very same sin that you are criticizing all of us for doing yes of course you have to jump beyond that just as Derrida was trying to show for dared on to truly succeed he had to have no position for me to truly succeed with my work I have to have no position to and is difficult because every time I'm delivering a concept my mind tries to kind of stick to it it clings to it the very nature of the mind is that it clings to everything so the whole problem here is how do you transcend the mind using the mind and the answer is you really can't so then why are we talking about this stuff well like I said because even though everything here is [ __ ] there are degrees of [ __ ] you can be drowning in liquid [ __ ] so some solid [ __ ] that's what I consider actual eyes that are solid [ __ ] can be helpful to keep you from totally drowning but then once you get yourself up there and then you got to move beyond it so that's gonna require some intelligence from you see and it doesn't matter if you're listening to actualized org or just some other non-dual teacher or teaching whether you're a Buddhist an advice an EO ad Viton whether you're a Sufi or Muslim or a Christian mystic or whatever kind of mysticism you subscribe to it doesn't matter you're gonna face this problem this is the core problem of mysticism is that the mind loves to talk about it and think about it but it never actually makes the leap off of [ __ ] island it gets stuck on [ __ ] Island because it seems like oh well now I'm in a spiritual community and all isn't this good it's so much better than what I had before yeah it's a little bit better being on a solid mountain of [ __ ] is better than drowning in liquid [ __ ] but it's still not the ultimate end goal and I hope that this episode has has helped to convince you of that to illustrate to you to demonstrate why that is the case in fact derrida was so close to non-duality that one of one philosopher who met him said the following thing the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas is said to have asked Derrida to confess that he was in fact a modern-day representative of lyric kabbalah so this philosopher Livanos was a Kabbalist and Kabbalah is just Jewish mysticism they have a firm handle and understanding of non duality they had for thousands of years probably for four or five thousand years the the Jews have understood this and as I said before Derrida was a Jew he wasn't a devout Jew I don't think he understood anything about Kabbalah or cared about it at all but see when a Kabbalists hears Derrida talking about everything being groundless and he hears him talking about deconstruction see the Kabbalists instantly can understand this anyone who's had a true direct experience of non-duality can understand what Derrida was trying to grasp at but couldn't quite fully get that's why this guy accused Derrida of of stealing ideas from from Kabbalah of course I don't think Derrida I did it's just uh it's just sort of an accidental convergence because when you're looking for truth as happened in my case like when I independently sort of develop my own version of deconstruction when I was 16 or so I was just looking for truth and I didn't know any other philosophies so I was just going Streatley on what's true and if you just honestly genuinely go for what's true you will ultimately discover that what's true is complete groundlessness deconstruction is going to be your method that's why you have negative theology the method of negative physiology and many different methods from zen to yoga to neo-advaita to buddhist methods they involve deconstruction of one form or another and that's a very powerful method that's what self inquiry ultimately is about you sit down and you try to deconstruct what you are until you get to the truth and that's a that's not an additive process that's not a constructive process that's a destructive process and that's where most people really find it unpalatable because people hate deconstructing themselves what they want is they want to construct themselves into some kind of spiritual ego some super-ego which is ultra spiritual and ultra loving and ultra magical and all this sort of stuff but it turns out that enlightenment and non duality is really the exact opposite of all that so there you have it what I want you to do now is I want you to click on the link down below the video I have a link to David Loy paper the deconstruction of Buddhism this is one of the most important works of philosophy that I've ever read in my life it's about a twenty page paper it's a quick read it's not very complicated especially after you've listened to all this so make sure you go read that paper because there's profound insights and truths there which take everything I said here and just take it to a whole nother level it's gonna completely explain non-duality spirituality and Western philosophy this one paper puts a nail in the coffin of all the last two and a half thousand years of Western philosophy from the Greeks till today this is the answer after this paper you really don't need anything more what you need is then you need to go and you need to actually do the the practices the actual deconstruction until you actualize the truth alright that's it I'm out of here make sure you click that like button for me please come check it actualized org check out my blog I've posting lots of new stuff there check out the forum check out life purpose course check out the book list I've got books along these topics as well that I'm adding to the book list and stick with me for more content coming soon I hope you start to see that more and more stuff is starting to interconnect and very profound ways and this is gonna keep happening because this is ultimately why I'm passionate about actualized org it's not about sharing one technique or helping you with one problem in your life it's about interconnecting all of these diverse and very interesting facets in this rich juicy way sometimes that can get a little nerdy and it might seem like oo leo is this very practical do I really need to know all this stuff do I really know need to know about Derrida in order to attain enlightenment of course not of course not if you want to go and just practice enlightenment in a cave please go do that you don't need to listen to me ever again but most people are not capable of doing that number one and number two well what are you going to do with your life what I find meaningful in life is I find meaningful to explore interesting ideas and concepts and see how they interconnect because I'm a cerebral and sort of intellectual and conceptual guy maybe you're not in which case you probably don't want to watch me you probably want to go do some yoga or something but if you are I mean what are you gonna do after you're light and what are you gonna do you're gonna sit around and do what Wow what I find meaningful and interesting is you sort of playing around with all these concepts not because I have to not because it's necessary but just because it's interesting because ultimately life is about doing stuff you find interesting and there's no reason why one thing is more interesting or better than another if you want to go live in a cave fine if you want to go watch TV and play video games your whole life fine if that's what floats your boat and for me what floats my boat is studying these concepts and talking about them and thinking about how they all interconnect to me that's beautiful to me that's like the artistry of life the artistry of the mind I love exploring the mind and maybe one day I'll exhaust that interest then I'll move on to other interests but for now this is what I'm interested in and for people who are still on the fence about this and people who are still deeply stuck in their mind people who are still floating around in a sea of liquid [ __ ] well a mountain of solid [ __ ] could be just what you need so stick around for more of that you