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[Music] you what very few people know is that the founding fathers of quantum mechanics were mystics and idealists for the most part they were very sympathetic to anti realism and in their mind quantum mechanics and all of their discoveries in the early 20th century completely destroyed the notion of a clockwork materialist universe and they got it and it's very shocking to actually go and read their writings and I spent many dozens of hours reading their writings for the preparation of this episode and I'm gonna bombard you with quotes from all these people because it's it's just shocking it's shocking they don't teach you this stuff in school they don't tell you about this stuff in university it's just shocking how sympathetic they were to mysticism some of them actually picked up Vedanta and picked up Buddhism and actually started practicing this stuff and learning about it it's quite remarkable so Who am I talking about I'm not talking about some fringe scientists I'm talking about the guys who came up with quantum mechanics starting with Niels Bohr whose huge into mysticism Werner Heisenberg also is as well or when Schrodinger who became a mystic Max Planck Arthur Eddington who is extremely sympathetic to mysticism as you'll see Wolfgang Pauli Albert Einstein who was famously very open to mysticism James genes David Bohm John Archibald wheeler Freeman Dyson and to a lesser degree Richard Feynman I wouldn't call him a mystic but he was a rational guy who understood the limitations of rationalism and that's what's interesting about all of these founding fathers is that on the one hand they were remarkable scientists some of the best scientists that have ever lived they also produced amazing discoveries that won the Nobel Prizes and that created a lot of the technologies that we use today and at the same time they were deep Philosopher's deep thinkers they were radically open-minded they actually cared about the interpretations of quantum mechanics they weren't merely using quantum mechanics as a pragmatic tool to get something and they were geniuses and they actually went post rational they understood the limitations of rationality in a way that many academics today just don't do anymore it's become quaint these were very intuitive thinkers and it's actually precisely because they were so intuitive and they were able to transcend rationality that they were able to make the breakthroughs that they made because a traditional rationally minded person who is wedded to the idea of materialism could not have made the discoveries that these people made see because they have to think really far outside the box and for that they had to be radically open minded and they were for the most part but still not radically open-minded enough not perfectly open-minded which is why even though all of these folks went pretty far as far as I understand none of them were actually enlightened and that's a shame to me because that means that none of them actually experienced the source and origin of why reality exists and obviously to them that would have been the greatest discovery of all time the problem is is that if they had experienced it they wouldn't have been able to communicate it and had they actually experienced it they would have become true mystics in which case what would happen is that they would not have been accepted within the domain of science because the only things that are accepted within the traditional domain of science is the stuff that fits tradition its orthodoxy it's a bureaucratic system you're not accepted if you go too far outside the box you can go a little bit outside the box but not too far so I'm gonna quote to you from many of these great thinkers and these quotes will blow your mind so make sure you stick with me through all of it before I get to that though let me just stress one point again I'm gonna be doing commentary on these quotes so that you can really get the full significance of them but what I want to stress to you is I want to stress to you the importance of epistemology within quantum mechanics quantum mechanics was not just a theoretical or a physical theory it involved knowledge itself epistemology is a study of knowledge and so within epistemology the biggest problem is the problem of how do we know anything how can we trust the things that we know what are we using as our criteria for justification for grounding how can there be a grounding at all for any kind of knowledge what does it even mean to know a thing how is the thing known how is it possible that there is a thing out there the object and a thing over here the subject and the subject apprehends the object how is that possible what's the physical mechanism by which that works that is a very deep question and there's no easy answer because the answer is a strange loop but what you're going to see with all these quotes that I'm giving to you here in a minute is you will start to see this theme repeating over and over and over again it's the problem the core problem of epistemology and you will see that these thinkers they understood the ramifications of their discoveries when it came to epistemology and also to metaphysics so let's begin first we have Niels Bohr who was the early early father of quantum mechanics he was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics everything sort of built upon his earliest work he said quote while the finish given to our picture of the world by the theory of relativity has already been absorbed into the general scientific consciousness this has scarcely occurred to the same extent with those aspects of the general problem of knowledge which have been elucidated by the quantum theory he also said quote isolated material particles are abstractions their properties being definable and as an observable only through their interaction with other systems and my own commentary on this one is that again see he's stressing that this notion you have of an atomic particle that makes up a chair or a person or a cat or a tree this is actually a conceptual construction there are no such particles and the only way you can make sense of there being particles is when that is being interacted with with another system so really what quantum mechanics reveals to us is the the holistic nature of reality you can't just subdivide reality little pieces and then expect all those pieces to just be interchangeable and just to work perfectly with each other and to be all understandable in these isolated little fragments the way that science wants you can't do that it has to be a holistic understanding at least if you care about understanding the whole now if all you care about is understand the little fragment fine you can work on that little fragment but here we really want to understand what is the biggest picture and he said quote we are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down the word reality is also a word a word which we must unit used learn to use correctly see you can't take for granted the word reality the way that everybody does that's what quantum mechanics revealed he also said quote physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given but rather as the development of methods by of ordering and surveying human experience and quote so you see my commentary on this one is that normally we think of physics as oh it's just a study of reality study of physical objects but what is reality and what is a physical object are those not human experiences so physics is not what the materialist thinks it is the materialists started out thinking that all physics is just a study of the of the real world but then as you go deeper and deeper and deeper you discover like oh holy [ __ ] physics wasn't about that physics was about the study of human experience oh that completely recontextualizes what physics is he also says quote I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary the fact that religions throughout the ages have spoken in images and parables and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer but that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality and splitting this reality into an objective and subjective side won't get us very far end quote now let me make a little meta point here about how these thinkers are going to use the word religion so throughout all these Kuo you'll hear the word religion cropping up on occasion when they say religion really what they mean is mysticism they don't mean so much traditional religion the Orthodox religion of Christianity or Islam or or whatever else they mean the esoteric non dual cores of religion or a better word would be spirituality you see they were writing a hundred years ago so the meaning of some of these words has changed so when you hear the word religion as I'm reading these quotes I want you to think not religion but spirituality or mysticism all right he continues and he says quote I consider those developments in physics during the last decades which have shown how problematical such concepts as objective and subjective are a great liberation of thought the wholes thing started with theory of relativity in the past the statement that two events are simultaneous was considered an objective assertion one that could be communicated quite simply and that was to be open to verification by any observer but today we know that simultaneity contains a subjective element we have come a long way from the classical ideal of objective descriptions in quantum mechanics the departure from this ideal has been even more radical we can still use the objectifying language of classical physics to make statements about observable facts for instance we can say that a photographic plate has been blackened or that cloud droplets have formed but we can say nothing about the atoms themselves and what predictions we base on such findings depend on the way we pose our experimental question and here the observer has freedom of choice naturally it will still make no difference whether the observer is a man or an animal or a piece of apparatus but it is no longer possible to make predictions without reference to the observer or the means of observation to that extent every physical may be said to have an objective and a subjective component the objective world of the 19th century science was as we know today an ideal a limiting case but not the whole of reality admittedly even in our future encounters with reality we shall have to distinguish between the objective and the subjective side to make a division between the two but the location of the separation may depend on the way that things are looked at to a certain extent it can be chosen at will hence I can quite understand why we cannot speak about the content of religion in objectifying language the fact that different religions try to express this content in quite distinct spiritual forms is no real objection perhaps we ought to look upon these different forms as complementary descriptions which though they exclude one another are needed to convey the rich possibilities flowing from man's relationship with the central order and quote so you see what he's saying here is he's saying that the old classical materialist and skeptic and rationalist objections to religion or to spirituality don't actually hold water because the way that that those schools of thought objected to spirituality is they would say oh well spirituality is just all in your head it's just all just ideas that you come up with it's all just myths and symbols right but what is physics what is mathematics what is science is precisely the same thing so that division that hard line that we thought existed that duality between science and religion actually doesn't exist and quantum mechanics brought that to light Niels Bohr also said quote I go to the Upanishads to ask questions and of Niels Bohr John Archibald wheeler said quote you can talk about people like Buddha Jesus Moses and Confucius but the thing that convinced me that such people existed were my conversations with Bohr Niels Bohr and quote so so much for Niels Bohr now let's move on to Werner Heisenberg he said quote there is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole the mistake of atomizing which should not be atomized unity and complementarity constitute reality so again this is just the theme of holism being echoed once again he also said quote we have to remember that what we observe is not Nature herself but nature exposed to our methods of questioning and quote that goes straight to Sean Carroll's point about mistaking the formalisms of the equations with Nature herself science does not reveal Nature herself science reveals what nature pings back at us after we send out the radar signal see we ping nature with our questions we ping nature with our perceptions and then what we get back from nature is a partial perspective never the whole you can't ping to get back the whole because you are the whole you are nature man is not separate from nature that's the duality that needs to collapse he also said quote light and matter are both single entities and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language it is not surprising that our language should be incapable of describing the processes occurring within the atoms for it was invented to describe the experiences of daily life and these consist only of processes involving exceedingly large numbers of atoms therefore it is very difficult to modify our language so that it will be able to describe those atomic processes four words can only describe things of which we can have and form mental pictures and this ability to as a result of daily experience and quote so you see the problem is is that you can't just think about reality in this sort of sloppy naive materialist way as though reality is just sitting there on a on a table and you can just walk up and just pick it up and and look at it the looking process itself your thinking process and language itself has assumptions and metaphysical frameworks which are the pinging mechanism that you are using to interact with reality and that of course shapes what gets pinged back to you by reality language is not innocent like people assume language carries with it a deep metaphysics when you're using language language implies duality it implies fragmentation it implies differences between the the the subject and the object it implies distinctions such as real and unreal these are all implicit to our language and people take this completely for granted including most scientists because to understand this stuff requires deep levels of consciousness and much contemplation about things like what is the nature of language what is the nature of reality what is the nature of knowledge what is the nature of mind what is the nature of thought what is the nature of symbols and these are generally not questions that most scientists ask unless they're also philosophers now we move on to Max Planck and he said quote I regard consciousness as fundamental I regard matter as derivative from consciousness we cannot get behind consciousness everything that we talk about everything that we regard is existing postulates consciousness end quote of course of course the only baffling question is why do modern scientists and academics don't understand this point and of course the answer is simply because they've bought into a culture of materialism and they aren't conscious of it and many of them are are are deeply wedded to it they cling to it like a Dogma so in a very ironic twist a very delicious twist of of poetic irony it's most modern scientists that actually behave like religious fundamentalists their religion has become materialism Max Planck went on to say quote science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature and that is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve and quote that is a perfect encapsulation of the problem of epistemology to understand physics or metaphysics you first have to understand epistemology but then again you got the strange loop because where is epistemology couched in couched in physics and metaphysics so how do you untangle those well you can't untangle them you're part of the mystery tada that's not a problem that's the feature he also went on to say quote a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it end quote so that's exactly the problem that we're facing now the current generation is very materialistic and perhaps even the next generation will be materialistic as well and they are not going to accept this mysticism stuff they are not going to accept it what's gonna have to happen is that they're gonna have to die and then a new generation of it eventually will have to come up who will just be exposed to non-duality into mysticism from the very beginning as though it's truth as though as fact it's going to be part of the culture culture will have to evolve at point non-duality and mysticism will just become fused with science in a way that's unimaginable right now in most universities for example you know if you go around espousing mysticism or non-duality in a university they will kick you out they're not gonna give you 10 ER tenure and they're not gonna fund your your research they're not gonna give you students to teach they're gonna kick you out because the whole paradigm of the university is what can you prove and how do you prove stuff with mathematical symbols and and laboratory studies that's how you prove stuff and if you can't do that get out you're not a scientist get out why are not a scientist by definition not because you're not a real scientist but by by their definition you don't qualify to be a scientist in their institution it's a bureaucracy it's a game it's a culture now does that mean that all scientific discoveries are just willy-nilly you can just make [ __ ] up in a university no it doesn't mean that you still have to do good science and good laboratory work it doesn't mean that it just means that there's an additional domain which is being missed because these requirements of doing laboratory work in mathematical proofs and stuff this this limits the domain of truth because what you can mathematically represent and quantize is this much and the truth is this much it's big it's huge it doesn't fit on the screen it's bigger than the whole screen you can't even see it that's how big the truth is and the mistake that many rational people make is that they think oh well if it's true that means it must be provable and it must be communicable and I must be able to write it in a book and I must be able to quantize it no why would you assume that much of the truth cannot be quantized there's your problem right there so this creates blind spots max-planck goes on to say quote we are always brought face to face with the irrational else we could not have faith as Einstein has said you could not be a scientist if you didn't know that the external world existed in reality but that knowledge is not gained by any process of reasoning it is a direct perception and therefore in its nature it is akin to what is called faith it is a metaphysical belief anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance of the gates of the temple of science are written the words ye must have faith it is a quality which the scientists cannot dispense with the pure rationalist has no place here and quote I love that that was written by Max Planck he came up with the Planck constant it's just genius it's genius and yet it's completely overlooked today by most scientists completely overlooked faith is a bad word amongst most scientists you hear that word and you recoil and you think all faiths face that's what the religious people are into is faith that's what separates me as a scientist from all those crazy religious fundamentalist people is that they have faith and I don't need faith I have my reason but you have faith in reason and moreover your faith and reason is very deeply misplaced because as a matter of fact reality is not going to submit to your logical reasoning it won't certain parts of reality will but not the whole of reality every scientist makes many deep epistemic and metaphysical assumptions in order to do his science you cannot carry out science without interpretation the way that many naive people with in popular culture think like a lot the that silly notion number that I said that first of the three-part distinction of popular science science is this idealized myth well in this ideal people think that all scientists they don't do any interpretation size is just like the tracking of hard core facts but what quantum mechanics told us is that there are no hard core facts everything is interpretation interpretation creates reality reality is perspective and if you want to experience reality without a perspective well you're talking about infinity you're talking about the absolute you're talking about the the wavefunction of the entire universe as a whole and that's not even something you can think with your mind you can't even imagine what that is that's everything possible at once and also the negation of everything possible at once forget it your mind can't grow your mind cannot go there forget it logic cannot go there rationality cannot go there language cannot go there symbols cannot go there mathematics cannot go there now we move on to her wounds reading her who I really love because he actually started to 3d to read and to study certain Hindu and Vedantic texts and philosophy because he saw that that's what quantum mechanics was pointing him to he says quote Nirvana is a state of pure bliss and knowledge it has nothing to do with the individual the ego or its separation is an illusion indeed in a certain sense two eyes are identical namely when one disregards all special contents their karma the goal of man is to reserved his Karma and to develop it further when man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier do you expect a a physicist to say that these days he goes on to say quote the same elements compose my mind in the world the situation is the same for every mind and it's world in spite of the abundance of cross-references between them the world is given to me only once not one existing in one perceived subject and object are one the barrier between them cannot be said to have been broken down as a result of recent experiments in the physical sciences for there was never a barrier to begin with end quote he goes on to say quote inconceivable as it seems to the to ordinary reason you and all other conscious beings as such are all in all hence in this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence but is in a certain sense the whole only this is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance this as we know is what the Brahmins express in their sacred mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear taught to vom I see this is you or again in such words as I am in the east and I am in the West I am below and I am above I am this whole world thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground stretched out upon mother earth with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you you are as firmly established as invulnerable as she indeed a thousand times firmer and more environmentally as she will engulf you tomorrow sir so so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and new suffering and not merely some day but now today every day she is bringing you forth not once but thousands upon thousands of times just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over for eternally and always there is only the now and the one and the same now the present is the only thing that has no end and quote from Irwin Schrodinger so he is describing classical classical non-duality this is exactly what Vedanta teachers and he's melting it with his understanding of the metaphysics of quantum mechanics the now is the absolute and you are all of it and it is eternal he also goes on to say quote for philosophy the real difficulty lies in the spatial and temporal multiplicity of observing of thinking individuals I do not think this difficulty can be logically resolved by consistent thought within our intellects but it is quite easy to express the solution in words as such the plurality that we perceive is only in appearance it is not real Vedanta philosophy has sought to clarify this by a number of analogies one of the most attractive being the many faceted crystal which while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object does not really multiply the object we intellectuals of today are not accustomed to admit of a pictorial analogy as valid philosophical insight we insist instead on logical deduction but as against this it may perhaps be possible for logical thinking to disclose at least this much that to grasp the basis of phenomena through logical thought may in itself in all probability be impossible since logical thought is itself a part of the phenomenon and wholly involved with them end quote so you see this is the deep problem of epistemology is that the thoughts and the reasoning that you're using is itself part of the thing that needs to be explained which is what the rationalists don't understand they use reason to understand the world but then they never asked the question of what is reason where does it come from what is it grounded in how does it work and why is it true they don't go there they use reason as a tool as a means to an end they use reason pragmatically and in most situations it works it works for everyday stuff if you want to use reason to to buy a car or to to do some stuff at work it works but it doesn't work when you're trying to understand the absolute nature of everything it breaks down and it makes complete sense that it would break down because how can you expect reason which is a piece of the whole to grasp the whole you're asking the subset of the superset to encompass the superset it ain't gonna work next let's move on to Albert Einstein he has some real beautiful words to say about this about mysticism religion and physics he says quote there is a third stage of religious experience even though it is rarely found in pure form and I shall call it cosmic religious feeling it is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it the individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant hole the religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling which knows no Dogma and no God conceived in man's image so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based upon it hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with the highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists sometimes also as Saints to maintain that cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and most noblest motive of scientific research a person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has to the best of his ability liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts feelings and aspirations because of their super personal value a religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance and loftiness of those super personal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation they exist with the same necessity and matter-of-factness as he himself a human being is a part of the whole called bias universe a part limited in time and space he experiences himself his thoughts and feelings ask something separated from the rest as a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness this delusion is a kind of prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and affection to a few nearest people to us our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty nobody is capable of achieving this completely but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security end quote you getting this Einstein got it Einstein God Einstein understood what the game was here in life what we were supposed to be doing that's what's so remarkable about him not only was he one of the greatest most original thinkers but he was deeply humanitarian he was deeply connected with his intuition his emotions which is actually precisely why he was the world's famous scientists genius doesn't come from the ego genius doesn't come from rationality genius comes from transcendence from infinity from infinite intelligence and the greatest scientist will always be those who go post rational and connect with infinite intelligence they will not be the rational stacks that inhabit most universities they will not be the materialists it takes heart and spirit and faith and passion and deep intelligence and selflessness to be a good scientist it takes radical open-mindedness and the grandfather's of quantum mechanics appreciated this they understood it because they were living it and of Albert Einstein John Archibald wheeler said quote of all the heroes Spinoza was Einsteins greatest no one expressed more strongly than he a belief in the Harmony the beauty and most of all the ultimate comprehensibility of nature and quote and of course Spinoza if you know is one of the few accepted mystics and idealists of the Western intellectual tradition especially in philosophy there are very few philosophers who were successful idealists in the Western tradition Spinoza was one of them Bishop Berkeley after whom Berkeley University was named is also another one and there were a handful of others but but generally very few most were duelists most were rationalist most were materialists so there's no no accident that Einstein picked Spinoza as his greatest hero and philosopher now we move on to Freeman Dyson who is a more recent physicist and maybe you haven't heard of him but he was also instrumental in developing certain theories within within modern physics here's what he said quote beware of him and whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions end quote and also quote an awareness of our smallness may help to redeem us from the arrogance which is besetting the sin of scientists and quote and quote scientifically speaking a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring when something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing interest to scientists almost all things scientists think and dream about our mysterious end quote and quote religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and and sensitive by their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute and lastly he said quote if it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations I would be greatly disappointed I would feel that the Creator has been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination and code and of course that's precisely because reality is infinite and so therefore you cannot encapsulate it with a finite set of equations next we move on to John Archibald wheeler who may be also you haven't heard of but he was also a more modern physicist who did some instrumental work on understanding general relativity and in quantum mechanics and modern physics and in fact he invented the idea of a black hole he coined that her he also coined the term I believe quantum foam if you're familiar with Allen he said quote every item of the physical world has that bottom at a very deep bottom and a material source and explanation that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions and the registering of equipment evoked responses in short all things physical are actually information theoretic in origin and this is a participa taury universe and also he said quote I had the good fortune of having my first and only heart attack last January I call it good fortune because it taught me that there's a limited amount of time left and I better concentrate on one thing how come existence how come existence the ultimate question and the ultimate answer and it can be answered but not symbolically not dualistic aliy because how come existence means all of existence and it's non dual so you have to become Nandu you have to go to it it will not come to you if you insist on being a materialist or rationalist then that's what you'll have you're not gonna have the answer to how come existence because existence money must include more than your rationalism and more than your materialism because those are limiting cases of the larger whole next we move on to one of my favourite physicists and thinkers David Bohm he was an extraordinary thinker and he figured all of this stuff out quote we have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent elementary particles of the world our fundamental reality and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts rather we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the foundational reality and that relatively independent behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole consciousness is much more of the implicit order than its master than oh sorry than matter a deeper level matter and consciousness at a deeper level matter and consciousness are actually inseparable and interwoven just as in a computer game the player and the screen are united by participation the field of the infinite the fee sorry the field of the finite is all that we can see here touch remember and describe this field is basically that which is manifest or tangible the essential quality of the infinite by contrast is its subtlety its intangibility this quality is conveyed in the spirit world in the word spirit whose root meaning is wind or breath this suggests an invisible but pervasive energy to which the manifest world of the finite responds this energy or spirit infuses all living beings and without it any organism must fall apart into its constituent elements that which is truly alive in the living being is this energy of spirit and this is never born and it never dies quote ultimately all moments are really one therefore now is an eternity and he went on to say quote space is not empty it is full a plenum as opposed to a vacuum and in this ground and is the ground for the existence of everything including ourselves the universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy and he said quote some might say that fragmentation is the reality and that wholeness is only an ideal towards which we should perhaps strive but this is not what's being said here rather what should be said is that wholeness is what is real and that fragmentation is the response of this whole to man's action guided by a losery perception which is shaped by fragmentary thought and quote so david hole is really big on this idea of holism you can't understand reality through fragmentation and the biggest thing that we as scientists and theoreticians have to fight is our tendency to use our mind to fragment reality to quantize reality to analyze everything to categorize everything as we're doing that what we're not realizing is that our mind is projecting those categories and that fragmentation onto reality which isn't really there it's like you're walking around projecting a grid onto the world and that that grid doesn't exist unless you project it and it's also possible to stop projecting it and when you do if you do stop projecting it you will see that everything is non-dual and you will realize that the grid wasn't just projected out from your mind or from your body onto the world but that actually your mind and your body are part of the whole grid that was being projected so as you remove this grid you will not only remove the categories and the judgments that you have about the physical world out there you will also remove them from yourself and ultimately you will eradicate and erase the ultimate grid the ultimate category which is the category of self versus other such that the two will merge into one whole such that literally you will not be able to distinguish another human being from yourself it's all gonna be one and that's gonna be true non-duality you are gonna remove the grid so much that you will no longer even be able to think the difference between non duality and duality because even that that distinction between all this person's enlightened and that person is not enlightened this is duality that's non duality even that will go even those categories will be erased and then what will be left what will be left cannot be spoken david bohm also said quote the essential feature in quantum interconnectedness is that the whole universe is in folded into everything and that each thing is unfolded in the whole both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality which is indivisible and unanalyzed able and code do you hear that materialists on analyzable do you hear that rationalist unanalyzed able you cannot analyze it it's a synthesis synthesis is the opposite of analysis he also said quote the classical idea of the separable 'ti of the world in two distinct but interacting parts is no longer valid or relevant rather we have to regard the universe as an undivided unbroken whole division into particles and fields is only a crude abstraction an approximation thus we come to an order that is radically different from that of Galileo and Newton the order of undivided wholeness and he says quote one discovers both from considerations of the meaning of the mathematical equations and from the results of the actual experiments that the various particles have to be taken literally as projections of a higher dimensional reality which cannot be accounted for in terms of any force of interaction between them each electron acts as if it were a projection of a higher dimensional reality so we do not say that the mind of the body causally effect each other but rather the movements of both are the outcome of the related projections of a common higher dimensional ground and quote so if you're wondering is the world inside the brain or is the brain inside the world what he's telling you is that it's neither the brain in the world are projections of a higher dimensional reality you ain't gonna figure it out at this plane of consciousness you need to ascend to a higher dimension of reality or consciousness he also said quote the illusion that the self and the world are broken into fragments our agent originates in the kind of thought that goes beyond its proper measure and confuses its own product with the same independent reality to end the solution requires insight not only into the world as a whole but also into how the instrument of thought is working such insight implies an original and creative act of perception into all aspects of life mental and physical both through the senses and through the mind and this is perhaps the true meaning of meditation end quote you see so what David Bohm has figured out here and what he's telling us is that we have to turn inwards we have to reflect about our own thought process become mindful and aware and conscious of the very mechanism of observation and perception which is going on inside of us otherwise we're gonna externalize it and we're gonna keep projecting this grid onto the world and of course when you project a grid onto the world don't be surprised when you see a grid shining back at you you projected it there you put it there of course is there of course the world looks mathematical when your mind is mathematical the world is not truly mathematical the world doesn't run on equations there is no physics the world is not a giant supercomputer crunching ones and zeros behind the scene those are all metaphors they're not reality the world is what then it's precisely what's presented to you right now the world is not hidden from you the world is given to you directly you are experiencing the absolute your experience gap solut infinity right now but you say leo but if i'm experiencing the absolute right now then how come I feel so limited how come I'm not experiencing everything how can I can't see through the eyes of a kangaroo and an elephant and a giraffe and another person and and this and that how come how come I can't read your thoughts how could this be the absolute look here's how it works you see this hand it's a hand you see these fingers their fingers now when I tell you that right now you're experiencing the absolute that's like me telling you you're seeing a hand now when I tell you that you're experiencing your own personal perspective that's like me telling you you're seeing a finger but are these things mutually exclusive look at it when you're looking at just one finger if you're only focused on the finger you can get so preoccupied with seeing a finger that you forget that actually the finger is also the hand now you might say but leo how can a finger be a hand how can it not a hand is something that has fingers the absolute or the infinite is something that contains all the finite perspectives of which you are one and here you are you are the finger so wrapped up in being a finger that you forget that you are also the hand you see that's all that's happening and what non-duality and enlightenment and all this quantum mechanics stuff is pointing you you towards is to say oh yeah of course I am a finger I'm this finger but I'm also the whole hand because the finger is the hand oh yeah of course of course I am the universe let's move on to Sir Arthur Eddington who has some of the some of the best writings connecting quantum mechanics and non-duality and he was an important physicist who worked on general relativity and modern physics he said quote our present concept of the physical world is hollow enough to hold anything the basis of all phenomena is a scheme of symbols connected by mathematical equations that this is what physical reality boils down to when probed by the methods which a physicists sorry that is what physical reality boils down to when probed by the methods which a physicists can apply a skeleton scheme of symbols proclaiming its own hollowness to put the conclusion crudely the stuff of the world is mind stuff the mind stuff of the world is of course something more general than our individual conscious minds but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to the feelings in our consciousness the realistic matter and fields of force of former physical Theory are altogether irrelevant except insofar as the mind stuff has spun these imaginings the mind stuff is not spread in space and time these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived out of it I had a lot of reason to do so I got a lubricate my throat so you see what he's saying there he's saying that all these physical concepts that we have including the concept of reality is actually just ideas in the universal infinite mind physicality is an idea within universal mind we're talking about an infinite dream this dream has enough power to dream up anything it wants including the fact that you're standing here right now being supported by a physical planet and not falling through the planet that's part of the dream physicality is part of the dream it's a limiting case of the dream not all dreams have this component of physicality to them but this particular one that you're in right now does which is why I feel so ill so physical so material he goes on to say quote it is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character but no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience and that all else is remote inference probably it would not have occurred to us that the world could be based on anything else but mind stuff had we not been under the impression that there was a rival stuff with a more concrete reality something too inert and stupid to be capable of forging an illusion this rival stuff turns out to be a schedule of pointer readings and though a world of symbolic character can be constructed from it this is a mere shelving of the inquiry into the nature of the world of experience end quote so his language is a little bit archaic there but what he's trying to say is he's trying to say that everything is mine stuff the idea that there could be anything but mind stuff is a ridiculous idea and all that really is is just more mind stuff and what we thought wasn't mind stuff but physical hard stuff turned out to be just pointers within the mind stuff and bike pointers what we mean is readings like you can look at up at an apparatus that measures something you can take a yardstick and measure something you can look at a scale to measure something but what are those those are just readings what are those that's also mine stuff it's mine stuff interacting with itself mind stuff interacting with mine stuff producing scientific readings telling you valid ways of predicting the future so you can predict how the mind stuff will behave in the future that's what science is in the business of doing making predictions science studies mind stuff so they can predict patterns within the mind stuff successful science is able to isolate those patterns whereas unsuccessful science or religion or pseudoscience or plain falsehood is unable to find those patterns it claims a pattern which doesn't turn out to be valid in this dream maybe in some other dream it would be valid but in this dream it ain't he goes on to say quote the solid substance of things is another illusion it too is a fancy projected by the mind we have chased the solid substance from the continuous liquid to the atom from the atom to electrons and there we have lost it but at least it will be said we have reached something real at the end of the chase the protons and the electrons or at least we have symbolic coordinates and momentum and the quantum wave functions to represent these protons and electrons but we have shown that by following this course we reach a cyclic scheme a strange loop from its very nature we can only can and and it's we can see that from from this nature it can only be a partial expression it is not reality but the skeleton of reality the actuality has been lost in the exigent exigencies of the chase having first rejected the mind as a worker of illusions we have come now in the end to return to the mind it is because the mind the Weaver of illusion is also the only guarantor of reality that reality is always to be sought at the base of illusion and code I love that he's so nailed it their reality his illusion and illusion is the only reality the reason that you have mistaken illusion for reality is simply because there can be nothing but illusion whatever the mind weaves is all that there is and can ever be the only problem is that we have mistaken it for reality she also says quote we have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols beneath which those those methods are unadapted for penetrating but what do the symbols stand for the mysterious reply is that given that physics is indifferent is the Monsieur the the reply that is given is that physics is indifferent to that it has no means of probing beneath the symbolism to understand the phenomena the physical world is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but not the nature of that which is being symbolized feeling that there must be more to this more behind this we return to our standing point in human consciousness and there we find other revelations than those conditioned by the world of symbols it is just because we have a real and not merely symbolic knowledge of our own nature that our own nature seems so mysterious see he's talking about the possibility of transcending symbols and representation he says quote I assert that the nature of all of reality is spiritual not material nor a dualism of matter and spirit the hypothesis that its nature can be to any degree material does not enter into my reckoning because as we now understand matter the putting together of the adjective material and the noun nature does not make any sense like the symbolic world of physics a wave is a conception which is hollow enough to hold almost anything we can have waves of water of air of ether and in quantum theory even waves of probability only we do not get down to the intrinsic nature of things in this way so after physics has shown us these waves we have still to determine the content of the wave by some other avenue of knowledge it is almost as though the modern conception of the physical world has deliberately left room for the reality of spirit and of consciousness end quote that's precisely right quantum mechanics has left a gap for non-duality quantum mechanics is a pointer pointing to the moon a finger pointing to the moon the moon is infinity the finger are the mathematical symbols the problem is that most scientists and academics and thinkers they get stuck at the symbols and they never go for the moon because you can't get to the moon through symbols and most scientists and theorists have always just assumed that I can get to the moon using my symbols but you can't because symbols are always apart and not the whole now let's move on to Richard Fineman who I wouldn't call a mystic but like I said before he knew what was up he knew the limits of rationality he said quote paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be he also said quote the electron is a theory we use it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost almost call it real almost but not really he said quote you can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world but when you're finished you'll know absolutely nothing whatsoever about the bird and he said quote it is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing you see the problem the more sophisticated our math and science becomes the more abstract and conceptual it becomes the less real it becomes and so the better our science the more disconnected we become from our being and that is unfortunately the sad state of modern academia and modern science which needs to be corrected in the future he also said quote a very great deal of more of truth can be known than can be proven which is a point I have already talked about in the past and lastly he said quote I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics do not keep saying to yourself but how can it be like that because you will go down the drain into a blind alley from which no one has yet escaped that quote and that is because reality in the final analysis is irreducibly mystical there is a mystery there that science will never ever not in a trillion years be able to adjudicate or erase all it can do is sweep it under the rug for a while but that bulge will still stick out from under the rug you cannot get rid of that bulge it's there all you can do is you can sort of stick your hand in the sand which many scientists have been doing lately but obviously not these guys this is all the quotes that I have to read to you from the fathers of quantum mechanics so in the end all of this boils down to not believing one scientist over another or one set of interpretations over another but deeply contemplating all of these issues that were brought up for yourself you need to do the work of contemplating and in that contemplation you will discover what is true and what you will discover is that the granddaddy's of quantum mechanics were really good contemplate errs and they got there before you did although they didn't go all the way so even though I call some of these fathers of quantum mechanics mystics they're not real mystics a real mystic in my mind is someone who actually actualizes and fully embodies the absolute the thing that quantum mechanics is pointing to the transcendent they were not that what they were was really good post rational thinkers who got pretty much as far as you can get using your logic and your reasoning which is more than we can say for many people who are writing and talking about these topics today compared for example these visionary physicists to modern day academics and you can find videos of these sorts of academics online and just take a look at what kind of religion these academics and materialists are subscribed to it is a religion of materialism scientism and rationalism the defining characteristic of religion is not the content of what you believe the content is irrelevant it's the clinging to the content that is the defining feature so whether you cling to a physical reality or you cling to some mystical supernatural anthropomorphic deity or you cling to some other new-age belief it doesn't matter what matters is that you cling to it the real difference is between are you closed-minded or are you open-minded and just how radically open-minded are you that's what really matters so when looked at through this lens you can see that many modern academics and scientists are actually deeply religious people despite the fact that they spend so much time criticizing and arguing and making entire careers out of debating religion and denouncing religion I'm talking about people like sam Harris and Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Bill Maher and even scientists like Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking in Neil deGrasse Tyson and even Sean Carroll these people although they have many remarkable qualities they can be great speakers they can be great thinkers they can know a lot about some particular specific domain of their field they can be very rational and very eloquent but in the end they are ignorant they are ignorant of the true nature of reality and the fact that quantum mechanics points the way they are ignorant of the fact that you cannot understand the ultimate big picture through analysis models math traditional science or through logic and reasoning and that's why they fall into the trap of pitting science versus religion as though these are two different sides that you must pick between one or the other sort of like you're a liberal you're conservative and you must be one or the other that fails to recognize the transcendent truth which both sides are misunderstanding and the reason both sides are so adamant at fighting with each other is precisely because it keeps them in a state of a circular self-deception and distraction so they're always chasing their tail and never going up to see the transcendent truth and why is that because the transcendent truth is challenging it's scary it requires that you lay your ego on the chopping block of reality and it will get chopped in half and this requires that you give up all of your intellectual positions no matter whether these positions are Theological scriptural traditional positions from Christianity or Islam or anything else or they are modern quantum mechanical or evolutionary or whatever other kinds of positions you have which you consider to be modern 21st century science the common thread there is that no matter what positions you take they are still just intellectual they are still just at the level of symbols and therefore they leave you trapped inside the mind and that ultimately what our aim here is is to escape the mind to jailbreak your mind to experience raw unmediated reality you see what quantum mechanics points us to is the fact that the observed and the observer the object and the subject are one what that means if you really think it through is it means that you are the object that you're looking at literally you have direct immediate access to reality you are not limited by perception you are not limited by any kind of indirect process you are the very reality that exists you are being itself the only problem is is that you have this conceptual matrix which you walk around and project upon reality which keeps telling you that although this is just all this is all perceptions these are perceptions and I'm over here and that person's over there and I'm looking at that person through a process of perception my brain is doing this neuro chemical stuff and the neurons are firing off and I've got a consciousness and they've got a consciousness and somehow there's an external world and all these things somehow fit together that whole picture that is what we're trying to destroy if you can destroy that if you destroy that operating system which is infecting your perception of everything then ultimately what you're left with is raw unmediated being not perception not consciousness not mind stuff but actually undefinable infinite being which is what's happening right now as I'm speaking it's not anywhere else it's happening right here it's a matter of looking at exactly the same thing you've always been looking at but now with fresh eyes at a higher plane of consciousness not using your rational logical mind now let's address some objections but Leo aren't you just cherry pick cherry picking all these quotes isn't it the case that you just went through and you look through you spent a bunch of time you like picking out religious sounding quotes from all these different people and then you compile them all together so it paints an unfair picture as though these people were really religious but really they weren't actually know first of all I quoted at great length specifically to address this objection I was quoting large large chunks sometimes entire pages from these various thinkers I wasn't cherry-picking I mean of course I was cherry-picking to present you with the most juicy stuff not to waste your time so in that sense of course I was as I must but I was specifically picking ideas and quotes that I feel a representative of how these people thought I was I was actually delivering the essence to you here I was distilling down the essence and if you doubt me then what I recommend is you actually go and study this for yourself then you can have to put in your own time because I spent dozens of hours researching all of these quotes selecting the best ones go actually read I have plenty of books of my book list from some of these scientists and some of these physicists and in fact specifically for this episode I'm going to add one extra book to my book list I'm adding it right now so if you're subscribed or just go log in you'll find it you'll find at the very top I'll add it to the very beginning of the list and it's going to be a book of just purely quantum mechanical quotations and it will list in great lengths quotations and articles that were written by all of these speakers and a few others that I didn't get time to mention and you'll be blown away by the profundity of these thinkers and you will walk away convinced that they were anti-realists for a good reason another objection might be Palio aren't these just quaint religious scientists sure of course scientists a hundred years ago in the early 20th century yeah they their minds were were still filled with the with the cultural indoctrinations of religion so they were still struggling to break free of that of that bondage and today in the 21st century finally atheism has become acceptable and now scientists are really free to be what and thinking and do science however they want and now most of them are atheists and so now our modern scientists these are the real scientists and those those are just some quaint leftover dinosaur sort of scientists it can certainly seem that way if you're subscribed to the Atheist paradigm but what you will discover if you really investigate this matter deeply for yourself is that that's wrong that's exactly precisely backwards these granddaddy's of quantum mechanics is they killed materialism with their own bare hands and that must have been pretty painful for them to do because they were hardcore scientists but they did it because they had to because they were in the pursuit of the truth regardless of what that means and what they discovered is they discovered that science taken to its ultimate conclusion rationality taken to its ultimate conclusion goes full circle and eats itself alive as it must of course as it must and they appreciated what they accomplished but then the scientists that came afterwards the ones who are not visionaries many of them subscribed to the culture of now materialism and atheism which is starting to run rampant through universities because the pendulum swings back and forth between religion and science and so for a long time we've seen the excesses of religion play itself out throughout culture throughout history and so it's very easy for an educated person to see these days that oh yeah much of the nonsense that goes on with Christianity and and some of the Islamic you know traditions and all this sort of stuff is very corrupt it's very abused and it's it's used for all sorts of evils and problems arise from that and it's not very rigorous or intellectually honest and so from that what happens is that you say ah okay so we got a swing our pendulum completely in the opposite direction towards materialism atheism and so you do and you swing there and that's where I was for most of my life is that that extreme end of that position I was a serious atheist I did believe in God or angels or any sort of nonsense I read Darwin's On the Origin of Species on my own effort like back in in 10th grade just because I was curious they didn't force me to read it I read it myself because I was curious what is evolution how does it really work I went to the original master original source and that was very instrumental in shaping my worldview but see the problem is you swing your pendulum so much to this side that you commit the exact same sin that was committed by all the religious fundamentalists but now you commit it in a different style and now this style is the sort of militant atheism that we see or the sort of just run amuck materialism which denies phenomena denies consciousness starts to equate reality with symbols and mathematical equations and starts to equate the external world and deny the internal conscious experience that every one of us is having and the only thing that you really have of life the only way you know that you're even alive and this gets denied in the way that for example Dennett that daniel dennett does in his work it's really remarkable it's a remarkable feat of of mental trickery that is played on oneself so the irony the very deep irony and i guess it's the poetic justice and that the Karma of the universe is that the very same sin that that these atheists and materialists were so adamant and judgmental about of the of the religious fundamentalists that they themselves as they try to escape that sin they actually fall into just an alternative version of that very same sin which is just dogma blind belief faith faith in materialism faith and rationality face that there is no paradox and that everything can be logically understood and everything can be analyzed and quantized it's the exact same faith which fuels religious fundamentalism which is why when you look at debates between someone like Richard Richard Dawkins and some religious person you actually see that they're just mere opposites of each other their level of consciousness is the same they're both in a state of delusion and in a state of suffering and they are emotionally clinging to their ideas they're just different ideas another objection that will come up here but Leo how is any of this stuff practical okay fine you won the you won the philosophy game you won this word game but it's just a word game after all what difference does it make if if you call it real or anti real material or immaterial physical or non-physical dual or non dual what difference does that make to my life well you're right it's just a word game but are you conscious of the fact that reality is a word game U is a word game death is a word game fear is a word game anger is a word game what are you doing in your life what is controlling you everything that you are doing you are doing to maintain and perpetuate your survival everything there's nothing in your mind that even crosses your mind other than that and you run around thinking you have all of these problems depression anxiety panic attacks sadness disappointment frustration suffering pain these are all word games your entire life is a word game do you understand the significance of this if what I'm saying seems impractical it's only because it applies to absolutely every facet of your life and that is actually so practical that is overwhelmingly practical it's too practical it's too practical for me to tell you that you cannot die it's too practical for me to tell you that there is no reality so what are you crying about when you don't get your money when your boss fires you what are you upset about these are all conceptual problems that you've constructed your entire identity is something you've constructed all the judgments you have about other people but especially about yourself you don't like your looks you don't like your emotions you don't like your financial situation you don't like your relationship you don't like your family you don't like this you don't like that you want more of this you want more of that what is that this you that you keep hating that you can't possibly accept that you're always disappointed by that you're always frustrated you can't control because you've got all these emotions pulling you in a million different directions what is that this is not separate from science and reality this is not separate from your emotions are not separate from reality and from the truth when your emotions are tugging you in a million different directions that shows you that you're out of touch with reality see for the materialists they need to actually make again a split or a firm boundary between the rational world and the emotional world because for them these are two different worlds and of course they conflict and contradict and so at the same time the materialist an atheist must live in this sort of conceptual bubble where everything is rational and everything is analyzable and quantized Abul but then at the very same time he must still deal with his horniness his hungriness his depression his anger problems his fears and anxieties and his insecurities and his disappointments with life and all the struggle and all the pain and all of that and so while on the one hand he can tell himself that all I'm a great theorist I'm a great intellectual and I have PhDs and books that I've written in all this and I have all these followers and I popular and I'm successful and I'm all that deep down inside he's a mess emotionally he's a mess because you cannot master your emotions when you have a metaphysics of materialism it's impossible it's impossible which is why you have these great theorists or professors or academics and they're on antidepressants or their relationships suck or they have anger problems just as one sad example David Bohm take David Bohm brilliant physicist one of the most brilliant physicists of all time he understood this stuff he even went to the extent of a he would agree with everything I'm saying here but nevertheless he didn't actualize it he didn't actually become enlightened he didn't actually become a full-bodied mystic and therefore the end of his life he became very depressed and his life ended in in great misery and sadness and he was institutionalized for his depression later on in life and he died having all this knowledge all this theory but in the end what did it do to him he got lost in the in the labyrinth of his own mind because that's how powerful the mind is it's not enough to know what I'm saying and say okay you Netley oh now I know and now I'm gonna be happy no you're not gonna be happy now you know but it did nothing to change you now what you need to do is you need to take the next big step is you need to go beyond merely knowing what I'm saying conceptually cuz that's just more Theory all of this is just more Theory more symbols and you need to go and actually embody and become the thing the finger is pointing at and that's where the real work of self-actualization and spiritual development and non-duality comes into play this is not the end this is the intro this is the intro I need to say all of this to you just to deprogram you from all the [ __ ] the materialist rationalist [ __ ] that our culture has filled your mind with and even so we're not done because to fully eradicate this mind virus of materialism which still exists in your mind you will need to spend years eradicating it not just listening to me listening to me won't be enough this is just the starting point of your journey another objection that comes up here is but Leo aren't you just making a God of the gaps argument atheists like to to make this kind of defense leo it sounds like yeah quantum mechanics knows some stuff but then there's some stuff that quantum mechanics can't really grapple with can't really deal with we haven't quite figured it all out quantum mechanics is still being done there might be revisions in the future yadda yadda yadda so what you're saying is you're saying that just because science hasn't figured everything out and there's still some mystery left in the world that now you're gonna stick God in there because you love God and because you believe in God now you just you don't want to stick God in there you want to use quantum mechanics to justify your spiritual inclinations no that's not what's happening here that's not what's happening here I had no spiritual inclinations I was an atheist and I didn't just read the Bible or go to some you know Christian revival meeting under some tent and found the Lord and was born again none of that stuff happened to me what I actually discovered is that God is the gap tada it's not God of the gaps in the sense that oh there's some gap in science so therefore we're gonna stew God in there no no God literally is the gap within which everything is transpiring it's precisely because God is a gap aka nothingness emptiness void Sunita it's precisely because God is empty that you don't see him it's precisely because God is empty that you can't symbolize it how do you point to emptiness you see it's the perfect self-deception the perfect self-deception because God is hidden completely in plain sight this is God the universe is God you are God and that's the only thing there is is God there's nothing else God is absolute infinity and all the finitude that absolute infinity must contain to be itself God is the hand and all the fingers of the hand imagine an infinite hand with infinite fingers that's what we're talking about God is the hand and God is also the finger on the hand and God is both and all and also neither so in conclusion what did we discover today first and foremost I want you to understand that materialism is dead it died in the 1920s and the people that I quoted to you from they're the ones who killed it and they understood the significance of what they did but of course like a bad horror movie the dead the dead monster doesn't want to stay dead it comes back to life it still has some life in it it's still kicking it wasn't completely put out of its misery and so it lurched back and there's been a revival of materialism and atheism and it's permeating science and Western intellectual tradition and this is a problem it's like a zombie that's arisen from the dead and this zombie will infect your mind because it is a mind virus and it will become your religion it already is and it will become the religion of your children and your children's children unless you make extraordinary efforts to undo this programming these fathers have quantum mechanics they have proven and shown that science and rationality eats its own tail as it must that's a strange loop as it must be in conclusion also we've learned that reality is irreducibly mystical mysticism is not just some facet of reality that we haven't understood yet and that we will in the future if we just do more science that's not what I mean when I say it's irreducibly mystical what I mean is that being itself cannot be known because the actual process of knowing is itself being so as odd as this might sound it's actually impossible for God to know itself because actually if you've ever wondered how come there's this division between metaphysics on the one hand and epistemology on their other hand metaphysics has to do with the substance of things and epistemology has to do with how we know what things are so what's the connection between these two fields well with total non duality of course all distinctions and dualities must collapse including of course the duality between metaphysics and epistemology such that epistemology becomes metaphysics knowledge is being the deepest way to know a thing is to be a thing but the problem is that when you're being a thing you're not knowing a thing you're being it so in a sense what many of these theorists and materialists have chosen as they've chosen knowing over being and what I'm saying is that we need to flip that around choose being over knowing and see the radical difference that makes in your life and it will make a radical difference it's not just gonna be a word game it will transform your entire relationship to life and all of your emotions and how you interact with everything with everybody and maybe for the first time in your life you will experience what true satisfaction and joy feels like another conclusion is that popular science the myth of science the idealization of science is has this model of reality which is 300 years out of date this clockwork universe model of Newton and decart and even Democritus atoms and molecules bouncing around this is this is dead this is dead it does not exist this is just a fantasy a story in your mind it's also important that I point out that non duality does not hinge on quantum mechanics so it might sound feel like I'm saying olio so what happens if like quantum mechanics in the future is disproven in the same way that Newtonian mechanics was disproven and replaced by quantum mechanics what if something new comes along and replaces quantum mechanics will that disprove and shake the foundations now of non-duality no absolutely not because non duality is not dependent upon any system of justification or theory so I am NOT saying here that because of all this evidence from quantum mechanics that because of that I think non duality is true and God exists that's not what I'm saying what I'm saying is that reality is absolutely infinite I have personally become conscious of that so have other people and so can you and quantum mechanics is a nice little bonus that is a pointer that can be useful for people who are stuck in the materialist paradigm who are completely [ __ ] deluded to escape the labyrinth of their own mind and so if quantum mechanics goes wrong in the future and it's disproven and whatever else it doesn't matter non duality is still be non duality your knowledge and understanding of non duality does not hinge upon quantum mechanics it's just a nice convergence you know it's a convergence of evidence it's also important to enlarge our understanding of what science is and that's something I'll be talking more about in the future but what we have today and what when we say the word science today most people say it what they're talking about is traditional Orthodox science and this sort of science excludes first-person experiences which is the most real thing we have what we need to do is we need to expand that notion such that first-person experiences are also included and are studied by science and are taken seriously this would be the domain of philosophy called epistemology no not epistemology but a phenomenology phenomenology is the study of phenomena this is a legitimate scientific domain and in the future it will be treated as such non duality is not really some alternative to science it is science it's just the science of the future which modern science because of its orthodoxy rejects and doesn't take seriously but it will in the future because the essence of science is not whether you can symbolize things with mathematical formulas that really is not the essence of sight that's a limiting case of how to do science that's one way to do science there are many ways to do science the essence of science is to be radically open-minded and to investigate the nature of everything that's the essence of science how you do the investigation what instruments you use or whether you even use instruments at all whether you use rationality or intuition or whether you read tea leaves those are different methods and you should be open to all those different methods because you don't what the limits of each method are one method could get you very far but it might stall out at some point it might turn out to be a dead end and it might not be able to let you explore the entire domain and what science is about is science is about understanding the entire domain and how can you say that you're doing true science when you don't understand why reality exists when you don't understand why the domain exists how can you say you're doing real science now you might wonder why does it exist well that's something that's so profound that you can only discover it for yourself by putting your ego on the chopping block it exists because there is only one thing that exists infinity and infinity must exist because it also includes its own non-existence so in fact really nothing exists and everything exists and that is infinity and it couldn't be any other way so non duality is science Yoga is science meditation is science phenomenology is science self inquiry is science but you need to broaden your understanding of what science is as science has always done throughout the entire history of science there was never a consensus and agreement upon what science is science has always had to construct its own method on the fly as it got going and it's precisely because science has become so successful recently that this this feature of science has gotten lost on a lot of people a lot of people take science for granted as though science was just given to us handed down by God here's the method to find out everything that's true about the world no nobody gave you such a method you are born into this world not knowing anything not even knowing how to know something not even knowing if it's possible to know something or what method to use to know it that's the entire purpose 'ti of life that's why it's so interesting that's why science is so interesting because it's so mysterious what's going on here and not the least of which was what's most mysterious is science itself is mysterious how does science even work that's a deep mystery that's a strange loop in and of itself make sure not to confuse everything that I've talked about here as a defense for religious dogma or a defense for some Christian interpretation of the Bible or some Islamic law or something like that not at all not at all that's not what I'm doing here we're going way beyond that we're going to the mystical non dual core from which all religions arose but then these religions got corrupted in the same way that science gets corrupted the corruption in religion stems from the exact same force as the corruption in government as the corruption within science and every institution and in fact every individual human being because the nature of the ego is too corrupt truth that's his job based on that you are alive you cannot be alive unless you're ignorant of the truth because the truth is that you're dead and that you were never born and that you will never die be careful about using things that I've said here to justify certain beliefs or positions that you hold especially using it as a weapon against other people other religions other scientists or whatever that would be a big mistake the proper application of this is is a deep inward self-reflection that makes you pause about everything you're doing in your life and makes you really ate everything makes you re-evaluate whether you think you even exist that's the proper application in the future non-duality will become common knowledge everyone will know about it but not in our lifetime and probably not in the next century and maybe not even the next millennium because the reality is is that the mind and the ego is so stubborn and so selfish that it has consistently figured out ways to corrupt this truth for over 5,000 years that's what's so remarkable quantum mechanics is just that if the iceberg it's bad enough that our cultural model of reality is 100 years out-of-date for modern science it's even worse than that it's 5000 years out of date from the mystics and visionaries who existed way back when and talked about this stuff but you know they were killed they were burned at the stake they were silenced their teachings were corrupted and distorted and misunderstood by materialistic people because what do what do people care about in general they care about practical stuff they care about money sex survival success Pleasant emotions that's what people care about they don't care about the truth but then they become the victims of their own success the victims of their own materialism the victims of their own rationalism because in the end it's they who suffer the pain of being in this cycle of ignorance chasing chasing chasing but never finding infinity you can't find infinity through materialism if you are a serious scientist or you are an aspiring scientist in a university maybe taking a PhD or doing a master's degree or a bachelor's degree and you're going up and you're gonna be in academia my biggest piece of advice for you is that what you need is you need direct non-dual experience you cannot be a serious scientist without this you will become this technician and this materialist because that's what that Barak bureaucracy and that cultural system will program you with you need direct non-dual experience in fact what I suggest for you is become a mystic become a mystic not just in theory but in practice actually become a mystic and believe it or not you can be both you can be a mystic and you can still be a great scientist in fact it's necessary being a mystic is necessary for you to become a great anybody a great politician a great scientist a great anybody a great inventor a great artist a great teacher a great human being because you need truth on your side because truth is all there is what are you aligning yourself with if you're aligning yourself with the falsehood with illusion you're aligning yourself with nothing if all of this sounds radical to you consider that it's only because of one thing it's only because you have blindly taken for granted the metaphysics of your culture that's the only reason you have subscribed to the knowledge that has been given to you by your culture both spiritual knowledge religious knowledge and scientific knowledge and you'd never ever bother to ask yourself wait a minute is this actually true you just accepted it because as soon as you were born people were just feeding you stuff you were so confused you didn't know what the hell is going on people just gave you answers and you just accepted those answers blindly and it started to make sense for you because yeah what a culture is a culture is a cohesive system it feels so real and solid precisely because it's it's consistent it's self consistent but self-consistency does not equate to the truth you can in fact have an infinite number of self consistent systems which are not true in the same way that you could have an infinite number of self consistent novels which bear no resemblance to reality they're just novels they're just stories but hey there are great stories and they're very very self consistent and they might make you feel very good and they might even be very effective at helping you to build the rocket ship or cellphone or whatever you want to build but they ain't true and the reason they you know that ain't true is because just investigate your emotional system you're unsatisfied you feel incomplete and you're in a state of suffering all the time you're never satisfied notice that that's what tells you that you're out of alignment with the truth and that's something that only one thing can cure and that is true mysticism all right that's it please click the like button for me and come check out actualize Network that's my website I've got goodies there for you to check out the forum my blog the life purpose course my book list I have a lot of books on my book list besides the new one that I'll be adding I also have a lot of books I have a whole category that's called epistemology and metaphysics and I've got great books on all these scientific topics so if you're into that go check that out that will completely transform your understanding of what reality is and lastly let me just say that this issue of science is something that I'm still not done talking about there's a lot more to be said about science there will be more episodes about science and it's very important that you don't misunderstand my position on science I don't hate science I'm not anti science I am the biggest advocate of science I love science which is precisely why I criticize it because I want science to be as accurate and rigorous as possible but what happens when you have a whistleblower or someone who is inside of our organization or a bureaucratic system who says that oh there's corruption there's corruption what happens immediately the ego the collective ego of that system reacts against it and it labels that person as a heretic and as an T the system so if I do this inside of a religion I would be called an t religion and I would be kicked out of the religion if I did this within a political organization I'd be called anti Republican anti-democratic be kicked out of that organization and if I do this within a university I'm gonna be called an anti academic and if I do it within science I'm gonna be called anti science because every complicated organization needs to maintain itself it's the ego it's a collective ego and of course science is no different science is a collective ego and it is just as adamant at defending itself and surviving as any other organization any other religion any political party and as yourself as any individual because that's how it came into existence in the first place but I do not hate science what I want to see is I want to see science purified of its dogmas I want to see signs of the most radically open-minded sort visionary science not this sort of bureaucratic run-of-the-mill technical science that they do in universities these days that's not true science that's a bastardization of science but of course those people will all disagree with me which is why we must wait for them to die out I want to leave you with one final quote from the grandfather of quantum mechanics Niels Bohr you