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[Music] you this episode will be very image-heavy so if you're listening to this on itunes or as an mp3 audio make sure you actually go watch the video version because I really put a lot of time into assembling the images and they're gonna be important to understanding what I'm going to be talking about and also they're gonna be very beautiful and special I'm really excited about this episode this episode here is really the whole reason for why I started actualised org it wasn't to help you overcome your depression or to help you get laid or to help you to earn more money in your life all that stuff yeah that's nice but it just it's it's just pales in comparison to getting to the root of reality thinking about the most deep epistemic and metaphysical questions that's really what I wanted to to bring you guys towards but it's taken time to build up to it and also it's taken time for me to train myself to get to the point where I can talk about these things in a cogent inarticulate way which like for example this episode I wanted to shoot several years ago but I struggled to communicate it and articulate it in the way that I can today so I'm really excited to be sharing this with you so let's talk about what is a strange loop this is an odd sounding term what does it mean and why is it so important well this was a term coined by a guy named Douglas Hofstadter he's a professor of cognitive science and he's an academic and in the 1970s he wrote a very influential book it's especially influential in the science community in the computer science community in the mathematics community called girdle assure and BA this is a monstrous book it won the Pulitzer Prize it's beautifully written and it's also very profound but it's probably also one of the hardest books you'll ever read in your life it's over a thousand pages long it's got complicated logical proofs and things that will completely twist up your mind it'll take you months just to get through it it took me a couple of months to work through this thing maybe eight or ten years ago and in this book he introduces this concept called a stranger there's a lot different stuff he talks about there but the core of it is strange loops he also wrote a book later which is a more simple version called I am a strange loop and basically in both these books he argues the same point his point is that the self the eye that is in you that that thing is a strange loop what is a strange loop well a strange loop is a paradoxical sort of circular hierarchy it's when a symbol becomes self reflexive and it points back at itself and this leads to all sorts of interesting paradoxes and it really stretches the imagination bends the mind to think about the way that it works is that when you have a hierarchy traditionally a hierarchy it's just like a pyramid where you can move up or down the different rungs of the pyramid so to speak and each one just is sitting on top of the other and that is not paradoxical that's how we think of life but there is this odd sort of tangled hierarchy that's possible when the the topmost level interconnects with the bottom most level and so what that means is that when you move up or down through the hierarchy it ends to a circling back around and returning to where you started from and this produces all sorts of weird paradoxes wikipedia says the following thing very eloquently about tangled hierarchies it says that they have no well-defined highest or lowest level moving through the levels one eventually returns to the starting point so if we want to express this symbolically it would look like this a is larger than B B is larger than C and C is larger than a creating a closed loop in which notice every single letter or symbol is greater than the previous one and when you think about this it's like you do a double-take your mind does a double take and it asks like wait wait a minute how can this happen this is clearly a paradox it seems like an impossibility and yet very interestingly we find examples of this in the real world so what this sort of tangled hierarchy produces is a structure without a ground and where have you heard me talking about that before what is a thing that has no ground mmm interesting hold on to that thought we'll come back to it later first let me show you the prototypical example of a strange loop this would be the Penrose triangle right here that you're seeing on the screen so as you can see this is an impossible object you can't really have one of these in the physical world but you could have one on a 2d surface which is what you're seeing now and it's a very beautiful sort of object and one of the properties of this object as you can see is that each element of the object is interconnected with every other element such that if you actually travel along the the this one of the surfaces of this object that ultimately you traverse the entire object and you return to precisely the same point at where you began but that's just the beginning let me read to you a little bit from Douglas Hofstadter because not only is he a profound thinker but he is also a very pithy writer he has a poetic way of talking about these things that doesn't just show you there their logic ality and their and the math behind it but the poetry comes out it's like you start to see the awe and beauty of nature when he writes about strange loops so here's what he says quote when I mean but what I mean by strange loop is not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which in the series of stages that constitute the cycling around there is a shift from one level of abstraction or structure to another which feels like an upward movement in a hierarchy and yet somehow the successive upward shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle that is despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin one winds up to one's shock exactly where one had started out in short a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop and quote and here I want to show you precisely what he means by all that because freeing it in that language can make it sound abstract and difficult to comprehend so what you see here on the screen is you see the SEM the same basic Penrose triangle but now you see the ball moving along the surface just like I said and if you keep watching it what you'll see is that the ball will eventually traverse every single facet of this object and wind up exactly at the beginning pretty cool huh pretty mind-bending that in a nutshell is a strange loop it's really a very simple concept but its simplicity belies its profundity so what I want to do now is I want to show you the many examples the beautiful examples of strange loops that we find throughout art throughout geometry throughout physics throughout logic throughout life so let's begin our tour of strange loops of course first and foremost we have the quintessential strange loop which is the artwork of MC Escher the theme of all of MC Escher's work was basically paradox geometric and logical and mathematical paradox and here what you see is we see his famous engraving called drawing hands it's one hand drawing another hand which is this sort of interesting chicken and egg dilemma how can a hand draw another hand when the hand needs to first exist to begin drawing and yet the only way the hand can exist to draw as if it was already drawn by another hand is C so how can this be it sounds impossible and yet here it is we see it on the picture of course it's just a picture so we're not saying that this can happen in real life but it makes the mind wonder here's another engraving from MC Escher this one is called relativity you've probably seen this one before these are commonly seen in your high school geometry textbooks or on posters people print these on t-shirts and this is really interesting and captivating because every angle that you look at it from it kind of makes sense but only from that particular angle and then yet when you look at it you're not sure which angle are you looking at from you could look at it from one side from the top from the bottom for the left from the right or you can kind of look at them all simultaneously and it produces a sort of twisted tangled hierarchy which is very mesmerizing and captivating and of course I'm she sure has lots of works along these lines this is just two examples next here I have for you an image of another Penrose triangle but see and this one is broken up a little bit differently and it's actually a little bit easier to see the strange loopiness of this one because you can kind of see how every single cube of this triangle is simultaneously above all the rest and below all the rest you see how there is no top most cube this is what we mean by a structure with no ground this structure doesn't have a ground it's another way to put it would be it's a it's a flat hierarchy it's a perfect democracy where every element is equal and here we have another example of the Penrose triangle in a sort of wireframe and I love this one because it it kind of to me it reflects the the skeletal structure of reality that's what makes me think of is the skeletal structure of reality here we have a Penrose cube you look at it and it just boggles your mind you're not sure what you're looking at it first and then you try to make sense of it but then it kind of starts to make sense but then it stops making sense it slips out of your mind it's a paradox right there before your eyes here's another example of a Penrose cube this is a different kind you've probably seen this with before it's usually called an impossible object you here we have the Penrose staircase and what's interesting about this staircase is that again it cycles back around in a strange loop sort of fashion and then what you notice is that every single step of this staircase is simultaneously above all of its neighbors but also below them pretty mind-bending and of course MC Escher makes use of this particular staircase a lot in his work here we have an example of a mobius strip a mobius strip is an interesting geometrical shape because it's basically just like a a rubber band but with one twist in the middle and really it's a one-dimensional object because if you pick any point on the surface of the band and you travel around what you're gonna do is you're gonna travel around then you're gonna go through the twist and so basically by doing one revolution you go from the it from the outside of the of the band onto the inside surface of the band because it's all one surface and then if you continue that revolution you come back to the outside precisely where you started so two revolutions of a mobius strip puts you right back where you begin and here's another depiction of a mobius strip like object I really love how this one looks and here what you see I don't think this object really has a name it's just an impossible object it's sort of like two Mobius strips connected together in a three-dimensional cubic like fashion but you can clearly see how this demonstrates demonstrates the strange loop and here what you see is a trefoil knot which is a really beautiful simple yet elegant structure where every loop of the knot connects back with every other one and when you look at it you see a sort of sense of unity it's like the whole thing is just perfectly self consistent in this weird and twisted way it's self-contained everything that this object needs it feels like this object has like it supports itself it is its own ground and here you see the classic image of the Ouroboros the Ouroboros is just the fancy word for the symbol of the snake eating its own tail and this symbol actually has a very rich history it goes back thousands and hundreds of years to the alchemists and even further back beyond that and it's supposed to represent life itself the cycle of life birth and death the arising in the passing away and then of course we have perpetual motion machines and the whole paradox behind the perpetual motion machine is that it's a strange loop and of course we know physically that you can't have a professional motion machine but here on the screen you see an example of an old idea of what a perpetual motion machine might look like and this one is called Boyle's flask and it's just water pouring in like a funnel and then the final going back into the container of water and it's like a little waterfall and at first glance you think about this and you're like well why couldn't this work it almost seems like it's plausible it would be a never-ending infinite flow of water but then of course if you try this in real life you realize that real-life physics makes it impossible because you have friction and you have the force of gravity and air resistance and pressure and it just doesn't work this way and here what you see is you actually see an animated diagram or schematic of a of a real life proposed perpetual motion machine the way it's supposed to work is that gravity supposed to knock the little balls down and the the force of the ball is supposed to kick the apparatus up and then it just spins around and around and around forever in a circle of course they can't work this way in real life but it almost seems like it could this is a strange loop and here's another example that I really love which beautifully captures the the absurdity of perpetual motion machines and you can see how somebody 200 years ago could have thought that hey why couldn't that work even today it almost seems like yeah I'm not even sure why that wouldn't work why wouldn't that work seems like it should the magnets should be able to pull that guy along and give him free power forever no gas no solar power we could really use a car like that today and here what you have is the classic shape called the Klein bottle this is actually an object in the field of topology where the surface bends through itself so you see the wireframe of it there and you also see a glass version of it there and it's really interesting cuz if you go on the outside of the surface eventually you'll end up on the inside and if you go through the inside you eventually end up on the outside so the outside and the inside are really the same this is sort of like a more three-dimensional version of the mobius strip whereas the mobius strip was flat this is volumetric it's like a volumetric mobius strip and you can actually buy a klein bottle they are possible to make and here's an image that I found online which is funnies like a internet meme but it perfectly illustrates metaphorically illustrates the notion of a strange loop and here you have an animation of an infinite waterfall cheshire also made use of this sort of prototype in his work and you can just see how it goes round and round round and it almost seems like it could make sense but you couldn't build one in real life not without using a pump or some other way to drive energy into it and here what you see is a tesseract a tesseract is like a four dimensional cube and what's interesting about this is that it shows how objects that are strange loops in some weird sense fold through themselves in this impossible seeming manner and what also that brings to mind for me is this image of a bottomless floor falling through a bottomless floor that would be a strange loop and here what I want to show you is I want to take you through a few different animations that demonstrate this effect of a thing folding through itself because this is a very important concept and I want you to see the beauty of it and the paradox of it so I'm just going to take you through some various examples of these sorts of animations they're all basically showing the same thing but in different ways and here's another you and here's another you and another you and another you and another you and another you and here you see a different of a strange loop or the dots cycle back around and go through that hole and come out the other hole and it seems like this sort of self-generating self-contained system and here what you see is an example of a strange loop but also something called recursion recursion is this very interesting property of a thing defining itself in terms of itself so what you see as you see these little circles circling around and then eventually shrinking down and making the next circle which then is a part of the whole chain and it happens over and over and over again to infinity and here's another example an image of recursion you see this when you're looking into a hallway with two mirrors on both ends and then you see the mirrors reflecting inside each other and the image just gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller but every image contains every other image and it's very interesting self referential quality and it reminds me also of this other example imagine if you will that you took a really powerful microscope and you looked inside of it so you're sitting there looking through this microscope and this microscope has a zoom function and you press the button and it just zooms in so it's oom z-- into the cells the cells then get zoomed in further into molecules you can see past the molecules two atoms past the atoms two subatomic particles pass those you can see the strings of which everything is made let's say if you believe in string theory and then eventually what do you see you see the back of your own head when you zoom in all the way that would be a perfect example of a strange loop if that were actually the case and then of course we have the classic strange loop from linguistics and from logic and that is the liar paradox this statement is false well if this statement is true then that means it's false and if this statement is false that means it must be true so which is it is it true or is it false who knows it's a paradox the statement because it refers to itself involves itself implicates itself and thereby contradicts itself this is a hallmark property of self-reflexiveness of self reference if you can reference yourself that means you can also sort of negate or undermine or contradict yourself and this statement is actually a very significant statement within mathematics and within logic but I can't really go into that here because that involves girls incompleteness theorem which is a very deep topic and a very interesting topic but I can't cover it here and then of course there is the strange loops that potentially could exist within physical space so Einstein said that space-time is actually curved and we can have things like wormholes and black holes and actually the universe itself could be curved and for a while it was not clear and it still isn't totally clear to us whether our universe is actually curved or not they've actually done real-life tests they've set out satellites and tried to measure the curvature of space and so far as far as we can tell that space is not curved so the universe is probably flat but maybe it's just a very big sphere or it could still be a saddle shape or it could be a doughnut shape so if our universe was actually doughnut shaped or spherical shaped that means that you could start at one point in space you could travel a straight line and eventually like if it's a sphere you will wind up exactly back to where you started all the while just moving in a straight line so if that turned out to be the case we don't know if it is but if it did turn out to be the case then that would mean that space itself is a strange loop that would be pretty cool to discover and then of course we have all sorts of time travel paradoxes where you invent a time machine you travel back in time to the time in history where your father met your mother and rather than your father meeting your mother you meet your mother or you meet your father you have sex with him or her and you end up being the one who caused your own birth in this very paradoxical sort of way now of course we don't know if this can actually happen in real life it sounds rather absurd sounds very unlikely but who knows maybe someone will invent a time machine at some point and then we can actually test this out in real life strange loops are predicated upon this notion of self reference really what a strange loop is is it's a system that implicates itself a system that tries to describe itself or a system that tries to point to itself and there's something in that process of trying to do that which makes everything wacky and paradoxical and usually when we're talking about objects in the world we are not talking about them so totally that they implicate themselves so we avoid problems of self reference but then in certain situations you can't avoid problems of self reference for example when you're talking about yourself or when a language is trying to talk about itself or like any of these other examples that I was showing you so this raises the obvious question our strange loops real or are they merely illusions it seems like there are mostly just illusions like many of these 2d objects that I was showing you which you can't really create in the 3d world here's what Douglas Hofstadter has to say about that he says quote the abstract structure in pressures drawing hands for example that I showed you would constitute a perfect example of a genuine strange loop were it not for one little defect it's fake but is there then any genuine strange loop a paradoxical structure that nonetheless deny he belongs to the world we live in or our so called strange loops always just illusions that merely Grey's paradox always just fantasies that flirt with paradox always just bewitching bubbles that inevitably inevitably pop when approached too closely fortunately there do exist strange loops that are not illusions I say fortunately because the thesis of this book is that we ourselves not our bodies but ourselves are strange loops and so if all strange loops were illusions then we would all be illusions and that would be rather a great shame on the other hand it is not a piece of cake to exhibit a strange loop for all to see strange loops are shy creatures and they tend to avoid the light of day and quote that is Douglas Hofstadter from his book I am a strange loop but the plot thickens so you see Hofstadter is saying that there are two real main strange loops for him in life one is girls incompleteness theorem which I said I can't cover here I'll do that in a dedicated episode because it's a very important discovery within logic and mathematics which has enormous implications that very few people understand so that's a real strange loop and then there is the self you and me and I and my Hofstadter argues that the self is a complex set of symbols which twists back on themselves generating themselves from scratch so to speak and that really the self is an illusion but of course Hofstadter is a professional cognitive scientist he's an academic he works in a university setting so as you might expect he is of course a materialist and ultimately he believes that the self and all experience and all consciousness boils down to just molecules atoms neurons brain chemistry but here is where the delicious irony the twist happens Douglas Hofstadter the master of strange loops the inventor of strange loops as a concept as it were has actually fooled himself with his materialism because in being stuck in the materialist paradigm he missed the biggest strange loop of all which is existence itself tada existence itself is the ultimate real strange loop and this division that Hofstadter makes between the real and the illusory is itself illusory and that really when you think about existence the real and the ilusory circle back and connect with each other because they are actually one to exist is to be the illusion see Hofstadter doesn't go far enough yes of course the self is a strange loop of course the self is an illusion but not just the self existence and our bodies yes our bodies are strange loops what you're experiencing right now look at your body look all around you this is a strange loop you are a strange loop inside of a strange loop this is what the materialist cannot fathom from his paradigm what the materialist paradigm really should understand but doesn't is that the brain is inside the universe observing the universe but then the universe is also inside the brain you see the two are causally interlinked and yet simultaneously the two are both groundless in exactly the same way that if you travel back in time and you give birth to yourself and for a second you think about things like no that's not possible but of course it's possible that's the only way that anything can be that's what existence is the problems that the materialist doesn't get it because for the materialist existence needs to have a ground and for him that ground is matter or energy or fields or whatever but what I'm here to tell you is that there is no such thing there is no ground existence is the perfect strange loop existence and non-existence are not two things that's a duality the two are actually identical for a thing to exist is the same thing as for it not to exist it's a matter of perspective it's a matter of relativity and this is not a great shame the is mandatory this is the only way that something could come into being for something to come into being it has to not be because illusion is the only reality there is that's how you get something from nothing that's how come anything exists at all if you wondered why is there something rather than nothing there isn't something is nothing they're exactly the same thing since reality means everything that means everything is one thing which means that it cannot point to itself because it's the ultimate self reference problem how can one thing point to itself when it is the only thing in existence it can't it has nothing to point with it has nowhere to go to point outside of itself so if you sort of imagine a basketball how can a basketball point to itself well it can't because it needs to have a hand with a finger to reach outside of it to point to itself that means the basketball has to be here the hand has to be outside of it and also there needs to be a space for the hand to reach out plus the hand needs to be able to curve back to point to itself so the basketball because it doesn't have that it just is itself it needs to realize that it just is itself in the same way that you need to realize that you are just existence itself the substance of everything is itself and it couldn't be anything else what else could the substance be but it self this is what the materialist doesn't understand the materialists always thinks that the substance needs to be something else but that's something else is itself a substance that needs to be explained and so on forever and the material just gets tired with this whole chain of reasoning he just says well we don't know it's just a mystery it's just one of those questions you can't answer it's one of those philosophical riddles that have been asked for for millennia and no one knows the answer no they do know the answer just drop the materialist paradigm and realize that the substance of everything is itself which means that everything is nothing something and nothing are identical finitude is identical to infinity self is identical to God the ultimate irony the ultimate tragedy is that if any human mind should have gotten this it should have been Douglas Hofstadter he's a brilliant thinker he's not just a logician he's just not he's not just a left brain thinker he's highly intuitive and right brained but nevertheless even him he got voice hoisted by his own petard he got tricked by his own mind because the reality of strange loops is that they are so goddamn strange that you can't wrap your mind around it and what's really funny and tragic is that actually in girl Escher and both Hofstadter talks about Zen he actually cites Zen teachings as examples of paradox and strange loopiness but what he never got is what the Zen teachings are actually pointing to the Zen teachings are pointing to exactly what I'm talking about they're pointing to the fact that existence itself is a strange loop and the reason if you ever wonder why a Zen master talks in riddles and is confusing the hell out of you is because there no way he can point to existence itself as being nothing because the thing he's pointing with is the thing you need to get so every single word he says misleads you because that's the nature of language it cannot grasp being and that's something that Hofstadter came this close to understanding but he didn't get all the way I would really love for him to grasp it one day before he's dead that would be amazing that would tie a nice little bow around all that this life's work but sadly I don't think you'll ever get there because of the materialist paradigm he even has a chapter in his book called I am NOT God which shows that he doesn't understand that I and God are the same thing and so the tragedy of Hofstadter's work is that as beautiful as it is as poetic as it is as much effort energy as he's poured into it his entire career went into this this is his entire life's work into understanding this stuff into explaining it and communicating to the masses and he's done a pretty good job of that that he himself has never gotten to the heart of the issue and I am here to help you to avoid that mistake that's how dangerous the materialist paradigm is doesn't matter how intelligent you are doesn't matter how many phd's you have doesn't matter how good of a scientist you are none of that matters if you cannot grasp the paradoxical nature of being nothing can substitute for that and no one can do that for you but yourself this is one of those things that's just so obvious that it's too obvious to be communicated it's like if you can't get that one plus one equals two if your mind can't broke that then you can't do mathematics you're stuck at square one you failed on the very first step and it's the same thing with understanding being if you cannot grasp being directly by being it that's it you're done you're done you're lost in concepts forever let me return to the image of the Ouroboros because actually I didn't tell you the real depth behind the Ouroboros the Ouroboros is an ancient ancient symbol it's one of the most ancient symbols that we have that survives from prehistory the earliest example that we have of the Ouroboros actually goes back to the tomb of King Tut 14th century BC found in the book of the netherworld that was found in this tomb and there you see the symbol of the serpent eating its own tail here what you see is you see an example not from King Tut's tomb but you actually see an example from Cleopatra The Alchemist this is 3rd century AD Egypt so this is much later than King Tut by wish I mean more recent to our time and that's the actual symbol that Cleopatra the alchemists drew and you see those letters and words on the inside what does it say guess what do you think it says it says all is one this is the symbol for the ultimate strange loop this isn't just a snake biting its own tail this is the explanation for the cause and origin and substance of all of reality in this one little symbol and mankind has known about this since the very beginning since before we can even record history King Tut knew about this and many of his predecessors before him and of course it's no accident that the serpent and the Serpent's tail that these symbols have been used not only in ancient Egypt but also for depicting Kundalini energy in Hinduism which also goes back many thousands of years maybe as far back as 5000 years ago or even further it's been used as a symbol agnosticism it's been used in alchemy and of course all of these are mystical traditions which all recognize absolute infinity and the nature of reality as being non-dual where all distinctions collapse where reality is identical to illusion where the self is identical with God where matter is identical with energy where the subject is identical with the object where good is identical with bad where everything is one where something is nothing and this explains the origin of everything and also what I want to show you is this strange loop image from John Archibald wheeler so we go from ancient Egypt all the way to modern times to the 20th century John Archibald wheeler was a a brilliant modern day physicist who worked post Einstein and post the development of quantum mechanics and he was a very seminal physicist who worked on quantum theory and also general relativity theory and cosmology and he made very important discoveries and also coined many concepts for example he coined the concept of black hole he coined the concept of quantum foam he'd coined the concept of wormhole so he was a very influential physicist he actually died not too long ago just ten years ago he died but this guy understood the nature of reality because what I'm showing you here is I'm showing you an image that he drew in one of his papers where he was talking about the interesting and paradoxical situation which we see in quantum mechanics where we see this problem is that when you're measuring particles subatomic particles within quantum mechanics the observation of the particle effects the result of the experiment and this was something that boggled many quantum mechanics mechanist minds for a long time they could understand how to work around this this problem and here John Archibald wheeler he he drew the situation in this sort of strange loopy fashion as the universe developing this eyeball looking back at itself and he has some brilliant quotes here's one quote that he said he said space-time tells matter how to move and matter tells space-time how to curve that's a strange loop for you right there about general relativity he went on to say something really amazing which people don't really appreciate today when asked what is the ultimate nature of reality he basically said that all of reality is not physical but information let me quote to you from him he said quote every particle every field of force even space-time the space-time continuum itself derives its function its meaning its very existence entirely from the apparatus elicited answers to yes or no questions binary choices or bits bits of information it from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world is at bottom a very deep bottom in most instances an immaterial 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 evoke responses in short that all things are physical are actually information theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe and quote so what he's saying there is that observation creates reality literally there is no reality there is nothing physical there is only information and what is information but appearances which have no substance something which is literally nothing he got it but see the materialist paradigm is so deep and so stubborn that even when people working within the materialist paradigm like many of the fathers of quantum mechanics for example when they do their tests and get their results and they show you and they tell you that everything at root is nothing that still doesn't register up the chain and it still doesn't really get people to reevaluate their materialism so people will believe in quantum mechanics but they will still be materialists at heart which is the ultimate absurdity the ultimate irony because in the last hundred years your own science has shown to you that science defeats itself that materialism defeats itself that ultimately everything boils down to nothing there are no atoms there are no subatomic particles there are just wave functions there are fields and what our fields and wave functions there are nothing they're literally nothing that's what your science tells you and yet you still go around touting science as a defence of materialism no you just haven't grasped the deep consequences the profound consequences of what mankind has discovered in the last hundred years even many quantum mechanic scientists and physicists and cosmologists do not get this because there's a difference between doing science experiments crunching numbers and actually being able to grasp the nature of being these are two radically different things just because you can write a PhD paper just because you can do some number crunching and you can get a professorship does not mean you understand the ultimate nature of being it means you're very good at shuffling cymbals around and you're very good at describing one thing in terms of another thing but you never get to the rock bottom of anything that's the tragedy of it that's the tragedy of science and materialism is that it's missing the thing that's right under its nose I personally realized all this when I realized that everything is nothing in me out of itself I drew a little picture which I want to show you here this image was just sheared into seared into my mind from the sheer magnitude of the discovery that I made for myself and the image was of a cat playing with a ball of yarn except I was the cat and I was made of the very same yarn that I was playing with so see this cat innocently naively ignorantly plays with the ball of yarn not realizing that the ball of yarn circles back around and constitutes the very cat itself such that if you ever truly unravel the entire ball of yarn you will ultimately unravel yourself because the self and the world are all the same thing they're always connected because that's what it means to say that reality is one see the notion of reality includes any other thing that could possibly be outside itself as soon as you say oh but there's something outside reality the notion of reality expands to include that thing so the concept of reality is a very interesting concept unlike most concepts and that it's so flexible that it has to capture everything you see it's a catch-all container for everything that's why it must be one because by definition anything outside of it is it it expands to include that thing and so on and so on and so on and so on which means that it is infinite tada you are the cat playing with the ball of yarn not realizing that the ball of yarn is actually yourself when it comes to existence itself paradox is not a bug paradox is a feature this should actually be intuitively obvious if you're a right brain thinker and you're not overly attached to any kind of ideological position like materialism or rationalism it should be intuitively obvious to you because after all we're trying to answer the mother of all chicken-and-egg problems which is how did something come out of nothing how come there's something at all when there could be nothing when you're gonna answer that question you should Intuit that the answer will be a strange loop that the answer will be a mindfuck that'll be paradoxical as hell because you cannot talk about the most fundamental aspects of reality without contradicting yourself this is not a mistake contradiction is not a mistake here it's a necessary feature because the thing you're talking about is itself part of the thing that we're seeking to explain you as the being who's conscious of the universe is talking about the universe but you must include yourself in the universe to explain yourself you see the hand doing the grasping must itself be grasped and that cannot be done with grasping the hand cannot grasp itself it can only be itself so what you need to become conscious off is the being directly directly is completely direct there's no way there is no chain leading up to it it is itself the ultimate strange loop is a loop that's so loopy that it just is itself it doesn't have room to band back around it's such a loop that it just is like a dot imagine a loop as a dot that would be the most concise articulation of a strange loop is just a dot a point a singularity that's what all this is an infinite singularity but the only way to grasp that is to literally become the singularity to become the point you cannot grasp the singularity by reaching outside of it because you're reaching outside is it so no matter how much reaching you do with science with logic with reason with evidence with proofs with talking with thinking with symbolizing with testing all of that is the thing that needs to be grasped and the talking about it isn't the same thing as it you see so let me guide you now through a little imagination exercise to really try to get you to grasp this so what you're gonna see on the screen here you're gonna see one of these strange loops that I've shown you before and it's animated it's moving and it's mesmerizing and you can see how it twists in on itself and this is a beautiful structure but now what I want you to do is I want you to extend this metaphor a little bit more into a little bit closer to what it's ashli like what I want you to realize is that this strange loop right before your eyes right now is missing two components to make it total the components that it's missing is that notice this strange loop is separated right now from its background see so there's a black background and the thing is twirling around now what I want you to do is I want you to imagine this of object but that it also isn't different from its background the background and the object must be one they must loop into each other so imagine that there is no separation between the background and this looping object imagine that and finally you must involve yourself you as the one looking at the object right now you are looking at this strange loop and there is a separation there between you and it so now what I want you to do is I want you to make the final leap the final involution where you involved the background into the object great now involve yourself as the perceiver of G object into the object so that the object the background and yourself are all identical one happening simultaneously right now through no method through no mechanism through no process and that that whole thing both exists and does not exist simultaneously everything is itself with nothing left over and it is pure magic and if you can accomplish that feat right there then that will be enlightenment but it's one thing to imagine it it's another thing to accomplish it can you actually accomplish it can you actually become that object that you're seeing on the screen can you actually merge that object's existence with its non-existence its foreground with this background can you dissolve every single duality to get to a singularity if you can you will realize the ultimate truth of all of existence and you will see that everything that you see around you is pure magic God is not something to be found out there in the clouds somewhere God is not an avatar God is this right here everything you're seeing this you're inside of God right now this right here is pure magic pure divinity everything around you is divinity the problem is that you're not conscious of it because you take it for granted because you're ignoring the completely obvious because it's such a deep mind that it has to unravel you in the process you cannot accomplish what I'm saying here without the complete unraveling of yourself because there is no such thing as a self because there is just the one and right now you think of yourself as not the one you think of yourself as a little one amidst all this other crap that's the bottom line so I hope you can see why this concept of the strange loop is so important it's important for many reasons it's important because it's just deeply fascinating and beautiful like Escher's Arendt worked it's important because it gets to the fundamental nature of all in reality it is a mandatory feature of existence without this feature there could be nothing well there is nothing you see but our language is dualistic so it's hard for me to articulate what I really mean there this concept of it is important because it shows the limitations of logic a lot of people who are stuck on Logic are afraid of strange loops for good reason for very good reason because strange loops will destroy as girdle's incompleteness theorem has done since the 1930s it's important because it shows the paradox that paradox cannot be avoided when you're talking about the most fundamental things this concept is very helpful and necessary to understand what existences it's important to understand this if you're contemplating if you're self inquiring if you're meditating if you're studying non-duality and if you're trippin I highly recommend that if you're gonna do a trip it's like a Nellie trip I mean that Yuri watch this episode before your trip and then you go trip don't watch it during watch it before right before and then go trip and then notice how much deeper your trip will be try to contemplate what a strange loop is as you're tripping holy your mind will be blown your mind will be blown to smithereens you will get so thoroughly mind that it will be the best thing that's ever happened to you if you care about understanding reality if you don't if you care about protecting your ego and you care about defending your paradigms then well you're gonna be in for quite the mind-fucking and it's probably gonna be quite a painful experience for you but if you're open if you're willing to surrender if you really want to know what's true it'll be the most beautiful thing you've ever got in your life and your life will never be the same from that point on see what our culture doesn't tell you is that our culture is scared to death of paradox of strange loops and of self reference this is true in science it's true and logic it's true in mathematics it's true in politics it's true across every field of society because the only way the Eagle can survive is by lack of self reflection because self reflection leads to the collapse of everything that is why paradoxes and contradictions are outlawed from logic by Fiat not because they don't belong there they are at the very core and center of logic without paradox and contradiction there could be no logic but they are dismissed and discounted and demonized because they literally threaten the collapse of all of reality more on that in the future when I shoot my episode about girls incompleteness theorem we're all going to deeper depth about that but that's it for now I hope you liked it hope you enjoyed the pictures please click that like button for me if you did and come check out actualized org look at my book list there's a lot of amazing and important books on my book list for you to read to wrap your mind around all this stuff check out my life purpose course chat on our forum there's a lot of cool stuff happening on the forum it's been very active lately come look at my blog I'm posting a lot of my most advanced insights on the blog these days so you want to make sure you're up to date with those and then just stick to stay tuned with more actualized dialog episodes every single week watch one every single week the topics you will notice are getting more and more amazing and more and more profound and we are still only just scratching the surface of where this content is going to go in the next few years actualized org will be about personal development but also personal development and also understanding the deep deep big picture of life and don't worry I'm not just gonna be talking about metaphysical topics from now on I'm still gonna have a lot of very practical topics we're gonna circle back around talking about emotions we're gonna talk about spiral dynamics we're gonna talk about very practical things and various techniques we're still gonna cover all that stuff right now I'm just in this phase where I want to play off some this metaphysical stuff to kind of test the waters to see how you guys are receptive to this if you're into it so in the future it's gonna be a combination of all that plus we're gonna be talking about society we're gonna talking about ecology we're gonna be talking about government we're gonna talking about corruption we're gonna be talking about history all this stuff is gonna be all intertwined because ultimately what actualize that are what aims to do is not just help you to improve your personal life but to help you to understand everything there is to understand about life at the highest highest highest most holistic levels and this is something that is quite rare you don't generally see this in personal development virtually at all and you don't see it within science you don't see it within history you don't see you within government you don't see it within mainstream culture you don't see it anywhere because the whole point of the absurdity of the ego and the way that it lives is that it fractures everything it's the opposite of holistic science is fractured government is fractured education is fractured personal development is fractured it's all fractured because that serves the purposes of the self the purposes of the ego because that makes it easy to escape the truth the only way you get the truth is holistically so stay tuned to see that whole picture come together it has not come together yet there's still so many more fundamental topics so many cornerstones we need to put into place to be able to erect this giant structure to see it all and then of course you have to follow it up and contemplate and pursue it in your own life you