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[Music] this is a long overdue foundational episode that's going to help you to make a distinction between relative and absolute truth to understand what these two types of truth are which turns out to be very very important because failure to make this distinction leads to all sorts of traps and conflations which we'll get into into the second half of this episode uh this episode is very much geared towards opening your mind to the possibility of the existence and your personal access to absolute truth that such thing is even possible so this episode connects with previous episodes that i've recorded one called understanding relativism part one there's also going to be a part two which i haven't released yet so stay tuned for that that will also be relevant but this is not part two this is its own thing uh this episode another episode i recorded called what is truth that's a very powerful one make sure you go watch that and another one i recorded called how to discover what's true that's also an extremely powerful one oftentimes i get people asking on the forum in the comments section but leo how do i know what's really true how do i discover the truth for myself if i'm not just going to be adopting beliefs and dogmas well that's why i recorded that episode go watch it it's a very powerful episode that episode will change your whole life it'll change your entire epistemology if you do what's in that episode but i won't repeat myself here there's another episode i recorded called what is actuality it's kind of weirdly titled um that that also helps to point you to truth but anyways before see before we can even point you to truth we first have to open your mind to the possibility of the existence of absolute truth and as simple as that is you would think the reality is that most people are simply not open to the possibility of absolute truth or to their ability to access it so here's my question to you very honestly right now don't repeat what you've heard others say but just honestly how do you feel what is your belief do you believe there exists an absolute truth and if it does do you believe you can access it be honest for the majority of people the answer is no and the reason is is because a lot of the narratives we've been growing up with in our culture in the 21st century have been permeated by notions of relativism and also by materialism uh which cast doubt on the existence and the possibility of accessing absolute truth so there's sort of two levels to it the first level is that you might say well okay maybe there is an absolute truth but how can we really know who's to really say and even if it exists out there somewhere um how could a human a mere human access it because after all humans we have this veil of perception we're living in our own little bubbles of you know whatever our minds are constructing and you know our mind is just uh you know spinning a kind of reality for us that we need to survive as a sort of a biological survival machine you know that's what evolution tells us that's what evolutionary biology and psychology might tell us and so forth so how can we really trust the human senses and after all there's so much outside of the human senses there's ultraviolet light there's infrared light there's microwave radiation there's all sorts of x-rays and gamma rays and dark matter and this and that and stuff that only our telescopes and instruments can see science shows us clearly that we only see this much of the visible you know of the light spectrum of electromagnetic magnetic spectrum we only see this little sliver of it there's all this stuff outside of it and because of this the absolute truth must even if it exists must be out there somewhere for somebody else to discover but not for humans right see this is the kind of narrative that you've been fed or you might be so deep into relativity and relativism and maybe even because of the things you've heard me say in the past because i talk about relativity very deeply it's a very profound concept that most people don't appreciate but you know uh thanks to post-modernism and so forth relativism has creeped into all aspects of our culture to a certain degree and so you might actually your worldview might actually hold that there is no absolute truth all that there are are sort of interpretations versions perspectives subjectivity and nothing else and that's the nature of existence and in fact in a recent episode i released on how your mind interprets reality um i started with a quote i started that episode with a quote from nietzsche uh i love this quote the quote is um what is it it's uh there are no facts there are only interpretations all right see you might have you might have seen that quote heard that quote and then you might have taken that to mean that well then there is no absolute truth it's all just interpretations leo isn't that what that episode was all about why did you use that quote well you see as i warned you at the end of that episode i warned you that you have to be very careful about how you interpret everything i say and that that quote in that episode wasn't meant to be taken literally it was presenting you with a perspective a partial perspective in that episode we were focused on interpretation that does not mean that interpretation is all that there is you see you might have interpreted it that way but again that's just an interpretation that doesn't make it absolutely true so anyways your worldview might simply not have any room for absolute truth after all you haven't experienced it yourself let's assume you haven't otherwise what's the point of watching this so if you haven't then from your point of view when i talk about absolute truth i could be lying i could be deluded i could be hallucinating i could be fantasizing i could have a financial motive i could be building a cult whatever you don't know what my situation is i could simply be mistaken as far as you know so you would need some way to access the absolute truth for yourself to verify it if such a thing exists or maybe it doesn't again from your point of view it could be either or but the problem i want to address now is i'm not trying to get you to believe in the absolute truth here i'm merely trying to open your mind just even to the possibility that you might one day be able to access it that's all i'm trying to do here see we're we're belaboring this point but that's because most people's minds are not really open to the possibility of absolute truth and it's a very radical possibility so what do i mean when i'm asking you to open your mind to the possibility of absolute truth i mean you can absolutely know what reality is as a whole absolutely absolutely what it is that means there's no doubt there's no possibility for error you cannot be mistaken about absolute truth because it's absolute by definition it's absolutely true it's true under all circumstances as opposed to relative truth so here we're going to start to make a distinction between absolute and relative so what do we mean by relative well most of the truths that human beings speak of when we say oh that's true this is true you know we use the word true and the concept true a lot throughout every daily life i might ask you like did you have lunch today and you might say yes i did and then we might say you're lying that's false or we might say he was telling the truth so these are relative truths these sort of human kinds of truths but it's not merely about you having lunch or not i mean this extends into pretty much every human endeavor um so for example when you say the sky is blue you might say well is that a relative truth or is that an absolute truth it's a relative truth why is it a relative truth because and this is not so hard to understand you see the sky is blue is true if we assume certain contexts and other things that qualify that statement and make it very limited so for example the sky is blue to a human being we might say to a different animal that doesn't see color the sky is not blue the sky is blue on earth but that does not mean the sky is blue on mars because sky itself is a relative term which sky are you talking about usually when we just say sky we're sort of implicitly referring to the earth's sky but sky is a more broad term than just the earth and then you know the sky is blue when at certain times in the day the sky is not blue at night the sky is not blue when there's a sunset or a sunrise it's more orange the sky is not blue when there's a lot of cloud cover it's gray and then if you have some sort of neurological defects you know there's all sorts of people out there there's colorblind people there's um people with weird mental conditions and genetics and stuff to them the sky might not be blue it might be a different color right so this simplistic notion the sky is blue ordinarily we take it as an objective fact but really it's not an objective fact it's only a fact when you really qualify it in many many ways and even then it can break down in so many different ways you see um another way to illustrate relativity and i've gone by the way through many of these examples in my understanding relativity part one episode go watch that for more examples but just uh a few more here just to get us grounded and to draw this distinction between relative and absolute is like velocity right so right now you are supposedly sitting there listening to me watching this and uh you're sitting there what's your velocity you're sitting there still pretty still right you're probably not running around as you're listening to me maybe you're out for a jog in which case you have a certain velocity but it's still it's a pretty slow velocity i mean what are you jogging 10 miles an hour at most five miles an hour something like that maybe you're in your car in which case your velocity is faster you're going 60 miles an hour 80 miles an hour something like that but this is this is almost zero compared to the cosmic scale of what velocities are and of course as we know from physics and as we know from einstein and so forth velocity is relative so if you're sitting there stationary listening to me let's assume you're just sitting at home in a chair you're not in your car you might say your velocity is zero and you might say leo's velocity is also zero he's just sitting here right now at home recording this okay [Music] but that's not an absolute velocity that's a relative velocity relative to what relative to the earth because relative to the sun the velocity of you just sitting there is not zero the velocity of you relative to the sun is like hundreds of miles per second as the earth is flying through space and then we can expand beyond that and we can say your velocity relative to like the center of the milky way galaxy is even orders of magnitude faster than that because the sun itself is hurling through space even faster than the earth is hurling around the sun around the center of the of the milky way galaxy and then the milky way galaxy itself is hurtling through space around the center of something else and so it is sort of this nested hierarchy and so what's your true velocity you might say what is what is our absolute velocity well the answer is of course that there is no such thing because velocity itself is a relativistic notion ordinarily because the relativity to us isn't very useful in everyday life we talk about velocities as though they're absolute but really we're talking about them within a very narrow limited frame it's just it happens that our frame here usually is just on this planet since our frame is confined to this planet we can talk about a car going 60 miles an hour or whatever and sort of agree upon it and it kind of works but it's very limited and it's not true in any absolute sense it's purely relative this is of course what einstein's special and general relativity started to point towards is that there's no such thing as an absolute velocity that concept itself doesn't make sense velocity itself is a relative concept now you might wonder why is that why is velocity relative well velocity is relative because here's the the deep intuition behind relative truths is that a relative truth what it's really doing is it's comparing two aspects of reality if we assume for a moment just that reality is one giant singular thing what you can do with that thing is you can take two parts of that thing and compare them against each other and then come up with some kind of truth about the relationship between those two parts so for example to say that something is large or small what do you have to do you can't really say that reality as a whole taken as a whole is small or large because to say something is small or large those concepts themselves are relativistic concepts they require a second or an other against which you can compare and contrast that and either notice a difference or a similarity and a degree of difference so you can't do that with a single object a single object isolated by itself you can't actually tell how big it is so scale is actually a relativistic notion so believe it or not if you if you take the entire universe and you ask the question is it big or is it small you can't actually say which it is most people think the universe is big but the reason you think that is merely because you are comparing it to yourself from your point of view as someone inside of it and therefore to you it seems big but that's relative because again your point of view is just as little like this little ant inside of this giant snow globe but if you were sitting outside of the universe so to speak if you could imagine such a thing which really isn't possible but let's say it could be then um you actually couldn't say whether the universe was big or small because there would be nothing else with which to compare it against now you might say well there could be a second universe well uh this is sort of a flimsy notion of universe when i say universe i'm talking about universe with a capital u that means the universe that includes all possible multiverses too so if you want to go with the multiverse theory yes you could compare our little our little let's say local universe with some other multiverse some other universe from a multiverse you could do those comparisons and you can compare sizes but then we can take the entire multiverse and ask the question is it big or small and again the answer is going to be you can't say unless you have another multiverse with which to compare it against you see how this works so literally what relative truth is is that we have to take a unified whole we have to divide it at least in two parts or more usually more but at least two and then we can compare these two parts so we can say that an elephant is large and a mouse is small relative to what relative to our position in the hierarchy of different animals relative to humans an elephant is large it's bigger than us and relative to humans a mouse is small again relative to us but if you just take a mouse or an elephant isolated by itself without anything else as context you actually can't say whether an elephant is large or small likewise for a mouse and in fact something even weirder is going to happen is you'll realize that the mouse and the elephant are actually exactly the same scale if you take them isolated if you put them next to each other now you've got scale literally scale doesn't exist is what i'm telling you other than as a relative notion so anyways um that's a bit of a mind to realize when you realize that um uh one of those little little sort of facets of awakening that that you can that you can grab uh as you're doing this work but anyways uh back to the notion of velocity you see the reason velocity is relativistic is because what is velocity velocity as you've learned in physics class is distance over time but what is distance and what is time well distance is the thing that a yardstick measures and how does a yardstick measure distance it has little notches on it little marks each one of those marks whether it's an inch or a millimeter whatever yardstick meter stick doesn't matter whatever units you're using you see a unit is a division within the universe so literally inches on a yardstick are divisions that the human mind constructed thanks to these divisions now we can say that all so and so is two yards tall or such and such as 100 yards long or i'm traveling at a certain velocity because the velocity is yards per minute or yards per second or whatever meters miles and that's only possible because see to compare how tall i am to how tall you are we have to use a a yardstick to measure by dividing me into little parts and dividing you little parts then counting up those parts stacking them next to each other and in so doing see we're we're doing a relative activity and then if we do all that we come up with a relative answer and the relative answer assuming we all agree upon the yardsticks and the methodology and all these other metaphysical and epistemic axioms that come along with with doing this various linguistic conceptual ideas as long as we agree on these frameworks and such we can then come to some sort of consensus relative truth and we can say well so and so is two yards tall and so and so is one and a half yards tall or whatever do you see how that's relative it's relative to a lot of stuff it's relative to the units we're using the kind of measurements we're doing our methodology for collecting measurements and doing the measurements our methodology for interpreting the measurements comparing the measurements that's relative if you change any of those things the truth will actually break in this case it will cease to be true it's only true under all those conditions and assumptions and then what is time because we're talking about velocity that's just distance what about time what is time anyways well that's an episode for another uh for another day um there's some profound things to say about time but how do scientists define time you know how einstein defined time actually i i loved his definition because it was so it was so brutally honest about the nature of what science is doing when it's measuring things is see einstein was very sneaky he was very clever and scientists in general are very clever to avoid metaphysics because they have to uh metaphysics is in the domain of the absolute and what science is doing is always in the domain of the relative because it's always measuring comparing things uh dividing reality so um einstein said that time is just the thing that a clock measures that's literally his definition of time the thing that the hand moving on the face of a clock is measuring it's a it's an ingeniously sneaky uh way to define what time is because you're defining time at the same time you're not saying anything about what the nature of time is this allows you to do calculations with time without getting to the metaphysics of what time is this is what all of science is predicated upon is doing this at the very basic level so any fundamental unit of science whether it's going to be a meter or a gram or a calorie or a a second of time or a hertz or a whatever of the most elemental unit of science it might be an atom it might be a jewel of energy and and so forth uh if you ask a scientist what actually is that thing the scientists will not be able to tell you what that thing is because the scientist simply doesn't know and in fact they're going to have a very sneaky way of excusing their not knowing of it by telling you that it's actually not even possible to know nor is it important to know all we really care about is just comparing the differences between these units but we don't actually ever know what a unit is so for example no scientist knows what a meter is they just know how to measure a meter and how to compare meters likewise no scientist actually knows what a joule of energy is but they know how to compare them and measure them so they can tell you that there's 10 joules of energy in that object over there and there's 20 over here and the difference between them is 10 because what they can measure is the difference but they can't tell you what a joule of energy actually is and so on for every other physical unit it's it's pretty scandalous when you actually discover this about the nature of science but anyways we're getting off track so back to the uh to the clock and to time so what is time einstein said it's just the movement of the the hand across the face of the clock but again what is that what is the movement of the the hand the clock face is also divided into units so again the velocity at which you see there time is also in a sense being defined as a velocity because it's how many subdivisions of a of a circle is being swept across over what a certain period of time in a certain sense see so it becomes very strange loopy and kind of twisted and paradoxical here but um this is this is not it's not a bug this is a feature of how things work uh because it's all entangled but anyways the the bottom line the point i'm trying to make here is that time itself is a relative notion why is time relative notion because literally you have to subdivide one reality into parts and then start counting and measuring those parts those parts are measured in relation to each other and then you can combine those different parts in different ways creating different kinds of relationships which gives you things like velocity acceleration and so forth you can have first order second order third order comparisons and this gives us various kinds of scientific truths all these truths are relative they're not absolute so we have that on the one hand also as we're talking about relative truths we're talking about all human cultural truths all truths of human cultures religions norms moral systems uh you know what kind of food is best whether murder is wrong or not whether slavery is wrong or all this this is all relative truth any truth your mind comes up with is going to be a relative truth anytime you subdivide reality into two or more parts and then compare those parts and derive a truth based upon that comparison that's going to be a relative truth uh just that right there i'm pausing because that right there for for many of you will be difficult to swallow a lot of you will object to that and say no leo that you're wrong uh i don't really have time to go into into that i go into into that more in my series about understanding relativism this this episode is not really about explaining relativity um we have other bigger fish to fry we just needed to present that as a backdrop now again something to compare and contrast with absolute truth so then what is absolute truth well um you see the absolute truth is something that's uh fundamentally different in nature than relative truth it's so different that our minds to think about it because our minds are used to operating within the domain of relative truth everything pretty much that you've called truth in your life has been in the relative domain i want you to understand that it's all been based on comparisons and subdivisions of reality into parts whereas and so what what and the point there is that that has trained your mind from birth into a sort of dualistic relative base of experience for how truth works you think that all truth must work this way because that's the kind of truth you've been dealing with your whole life but what i'm trying to show you is that there's a open your mind to the possibility of a different domain of truth which does not work in that way and the and the mechanics of truth that operate in the relative domain do not apply and do not work at the absolute domain the fundamental difference here is that whereas in the relative domain because you're subdividing reality with your mind you can then make comparisons of one thing to another thing because one thing always has some opposite you're operating dualistically see my series three part series called understanding duality part one part two part three to really get a deep handle on duality and then absolute truth is operating in the non-dual domain what does that mean that means absolute truth is that which reality is before your mind subdivides it in any way it's singular it has no opposite that means you can't compare it against anything else so you can't let's say just for a second just assume that absolute truth exists and it's just like a question mark or the variable x let's call it x for now whatever this x is you don't know what it is but let's just assume that there is this x this x you might ask well leo so tell me about this x i want to know is this x big or small is it skinny or is it fat is it colorful or is it got no color is it beautiful or is it ugly is it good or is it bad is it going to help my life or is going to hurt my life am i going to like it or am i going to hate it can i use it to earn money can i use it to get sex uh how many meters wide is it how many joules of energy does it have in it how many seconds of time does it exist for see you might want to bring all of these questions to this variable x but what you have to realize is that these are questions and features that are coming from the relative domain of comparisons and divisions and as soon as you bring those ideas and assumptions to the non-dual domain of absolute truth you immediately break the absolute truth because you subdivide it with your mind by asking those questions and then it it falls into and is brought into the relative domain by your mind you see so that's the trick that you have to be very careful of here because if you do that without being aware that you're doing it like for example if you insist on asking me leo uh is the absolute truth big or small and you just keep asking and asking asking that you're not getting what i'm saying and what you're what you're doing is you're converting from the absolute domain into the relative domain your mind is doing this outside of your awareness and in so doing you're never going to be able to access absolute truth if it exists because you're always converting it into the relative you see so you have to be very careful at how you're using your mind here what kind of questions you're asking what kind of assumptions you're making i'm asking you to open your mind to the possibility of a absolute domain this absolute domain absolute truth what it really means and i want to speak like from from direct experience here because i can actually tune my consciousness right now on absolute truth because the absolute truth is right here see i i'm speaking about absolute truth as though you might if you're hearing this for the first time it might almost sound like i'm speaking about some sort of mysterious thing that exists somewhere in the heavens somewhere no no no absolute truth exists right here you're immersed in absolute truth the only question is are you realizing it or not and the problem is that you're probably not so speaking from direct experience what absolute truth is is it's that which is true under all circumstances and conditions based on no context it's independent of context and it has no other and it can't be compared to anything else it's a direct access to what is the case truth just means that which is the case it's a direct access to that which is the case directly that means there's no veil of perception between absolute truth and yourself and your consciousness of it so that's what i'm really asking you to open your mind to are you willing your to open your mind to the possibility that there is nothing separating you from absolute truth and that you can access it directly in order to open your mind to this you need to throw away that scientific materialist paradigm idea that you've been taught that there's a veil of perception between you and truth that there's some sort of external maybe absolute truth out there somewhere behind the scenes but us humans can never know what it is because we're in this bubble of uh of perceptions and that we can never break through this bubble now open your mind to this possibility consider that there never was a veil of perception consider that what you have been experiencing your entire life wasn't some sort of foreground behind which there was a actual true background but that what you were experiencing the foreground is the only thing there is and that is the absolute truth in other words what i'm telling you is that open your mind to the possibility that appearance is reality that appearance is absolutely true if if that is the case then notice that there is no medium between you and what's true and you have access to absolute truth at all times there's nothing stopping you perceptions are not in the way experience is not in the way the mind is not in the way colors and sensations and feelings are not in the way because these things are absolutely true is your mind open to such a possibility if it's not actually open it right now i'm not asking you to believe me i'm merely asking you to open your mind you can either do it or not and at this point we have to take this from mere intellectualization to actually doing it so there's a distinction there's a difference between merely thinking about these ideas and actually opening your mind to the possibility of direct access to absolute truth do that right now if you need to pause this recording sit there let your mind actually gain traction with the things i've been talking about and actually consider this alternative way of looking at reality until your mind opens to the possibility of you one day accessing absolute truth even if it's not going to happen today do that there's a difference between thinking about it and doing it i'm not asking you to think about it i'm asking you to do it do it until your mind is open then something will shift in you that does not mean that you've all the sudden discovered absolute truth it only means you've opened your mind that's all it means do it don't think about it do it this is where the results come this is what makes this work different from mental masturbation and from regular old speculative armchair philosophy you have to actually do it then it changes you if you don't do it it won't change you and then you're stuck so continuing on about this point one of the most common objections i get when i talk about absolute truth or share certain aspects or facets of it with with people through my videos is uh is this objection but leo how do you know the absolute truth isn't just an experience or a self-deception or a hallucination or just a trip or just some fantasy you made up how do you know it's not just neurons in the brain generating experiences and stuff and fooling you a lot of scientifically minded and rationally minded people ask this question people who ask this question haven't actually opened their mind to the possibility of absolute truth so again i'm i'm lingering on this point because it's one thing to just talk about opening your mind it's another thing to actually open your mind so again if you have this objection right now and you're wondering well leo how could i ever know that what i accessed was absolute truth how could i ever know that what you're telling me is is is correct what if i'm fooling myself what i mean when i say consider the possibility of absolute truth is i mean it's absolutely true because it's singular there's nothing outside of it it knows itself simply by being itself so i want you to consider the possibility that there can exist some something in reality that is so true and knows itself to be completely true that it cannot be mistaken it cannot be deceived it cannot be hallucinating it cannot be fantasizing it cannot be deluded it cannot be mistaken it cannot be false literally it is impossible for absolute truth to be false is your mind open to such a thing existing think carefully about this don't just say yes get traction with it and actually genuinely ask yourself whether you're open to this this is a radical idea that i'm suggesting your mind may not be open to it in which case that's fine that's where you're at but at least be honest about it see are you open to the idea that you can become conscious of something that is so absolutely true that you can never be wrong about it a lot of people here would say no in which case what i'm telling you is that then you're not open to the existence of absolute truth that's the problem the problem is not that i'm deluded or whatever the problem is that your mind is not open to this possibility again i am not using this to prove to you absolute truth i'm merely asking to ope is your mind open to that because if it's not that's where this journey ends you can't go any further that's where you're stuck and you'll be stuck there for the rest of your life until you decide to change your mind and if you have some sort of logic in your mind that says well but it's dangerous to open my mind so much to this absolute truth because leo what if what if i open my mind to this and then i start to believe in something then i think it's the absolute truth but then it turns out later that it's not and then i'm mistaken and i'm wrong and i and and it ruins my life what if that happens sure maybe that could happen but that is not absolute truth that is something else that is beliefs that's not what i'm talking about when i'm talking about absolute truth with absolute truth i'm talking about something that cannot be wrong it's absolutely true it cannot be wrong again you may simply not be open to this possibility at all many scientists would chime in here and say leo that's not possible and even if it was possible how would you know it was possible which puts us into a very strange loopy catch-22 epistemological uh conundrum here sort of a paradox because when you ask the question how would you know that something is absolutely true again i'm asking you to consider something very radical if something is absolutely true it knows itself to be absolutely true because it is absolutely true the tautology here is not a bug it's a feature absolute truth must be absolutely true by definition by pure tautology this is not circular logic this is not begging the question this is just the possibility of absolute truth now you might say that that's not possible then your mind is closed to that possibility and maybe you're right maybe it's not possible but what if you're wrong what if it is possible i want you to notice this if your mind is closed and you think it's not possible how can you know it's not possible have you explored the entire universe have you explored every truth there is to explore in the universe such that you can now feel confident that absolute truth is impossible and impossible to access obviously notice that you haven't you haven't even explored one percent of the universe science hasn't even explored one percent of the universe and yet you feel so adamant in keeping your mind closed against the possibility of absolute truth can you see the problem in that can you see that if you're wrong in that you have fallen into a deep epistemic blunder if your mind actually carefully contemplates these things that i'm saying it should open your mind to the possibility of absolute truth but then again i can't force you to do it you'll only do it if you want to do it if you care about doing it so see the paradox and strangeness of absolute truth is that since it's undivided by anyone's mind it's one and it's singular therefore you can't even speak about it in terms of validation because usually the skeptics what they're looking for is they're looking for some sort of external or other validation of the truth this is a lot of what the game of science is it's all about validation so if for example if i discover something as a scientist i might discover some fact the speed of light let's say i said i discovered it's this it's x and then someone and then and then as a scientist thought you know i'm trained to doubt that and say well maybe i made some mistakes in my methodology maybe my experiment wasn't too good so i need to get some other scientists who will independently verify run the experiment himself and then and then they will get some result why and only if x and y match can we then agree that this is the true speed of light and then you know the more scientists we bring into this the more these independent experiments we do eventually we can build a consensus of independent sort of cross-referencing experiments and ultimately reach some sort of truth this is how science protects itself but remember this is all operating within the relativistic domain and then we carry over these expectations remember i warned you about this we carry these over into the non-dual domain and now we tend to want to do the same thing with absolute truth and we tend to want to say well if there is this absolute truth in leo you've discovered it or somebody has discovered it okay great but then let's validate it and what do i tell you i tell you it can't be validated and you say well if it can't be validated it must be false that's how it works in a relative domain that's not how it works in the non-dual domain because in the non-dual domain you can't validate the non-dual because validation itself requires two different observers a division within reality and two different experiments and two different results and then combining those together into some sort of synthesis this all involves duality and relativity in the non-dual domain there is no possibility of validation you can't ask your neighbor to validate non-duality for you then of course you say well but leo if it can't be validated in the classical sense then how can you ever know that it's true and you think that that's a bug of this system it's not this is the core feature of non-duality is that precisely because there's no other against which to validate it whatever it is automatically makes it absolutely true it's absolutely true by virtue of being completely one singular and sovereign it's literally absolutely sovereign that means it defines what it is this is very strange loopy and foreign to those of us who are operating under the sort of dualistic relativistic materialistic way of looking at truth to really bring this home point to you and to show you how this works i actually have an episode where i go into this in a lot of detail called how authority works it's one of my underrated episodes go watch it it's actually very profound and it's very relevant to this issue here so see here's my question to you how do you know that you exist right now don't just give me a a parroted answer i want you to actually become conscious right now of how it is you know that you exist you may not know what you are you may be unsure about that you might be doubtful but you certainly right now are conscious that you exist this is true in fact it's absolutely true your existence is absolute truth right now become conscious of your own existence right now to me it helps to like look at my hand as i do that so take out your hand and look at your hand and just become conscious that what you're conscious of right here right now it absolutely exists there's no possibility of it not existing when it is existing you might say oh leo but i what if i'm a computer simulation no no you don't get it it doesn't matter if your computer simulation even if you think all this is a computer simulation it exists right here right now you're conscious of it that's absolutely true become conscious of this don't think about it become conscious of it see i'm going to tell you something very radical here that you're probably going to doubt but i'll say it anyways the only one in the universe who can tell you that you exist is yourself think about it you might initially think like no leah that can't be true because i can ask my neighbor i can ask my pack and call my mom and ask her mom do i exist and she will say yes of course you exist and in this way i can validate that i exist and that i'm not crazy well if you think that you don't understand the depth of this problem of sovereignty and authority when you call your mother and your mother tells you that you exist see the only reason you accept that answer as validation of anything as your of your existence for example is because you already accept that you exist if you didn't already accept that you existed and that she existed then she couldn't use her existence to validate your existence you see for her existence to exist it has to exist within your existence so when you call her in a sense you're begging the question because you're already admitting to yourself that you exist just by calling her and asking her to validate your existence because you're assuming that she exists you're doing all this implicitly unconsciously without being conscious of what you're doing therefore to you it might seem like this is an actual proof of something it's not an actual proof of anything what's really going on in this case is that you exist that's the bottom line you exist and then everything else that you use to validate your existence is already layered upon your existence is a second order effect of your own existence right because your mother can't exist without you first existing your mother if you think about it has only ever existed in your existence her existence has never been separate from your existence in fact the idea of your existence your mother's existence is already one of those divisions that you've made in reality there really is no such thing as your existence my existence my mother's existence there's only existence in fact existence is absolute truth here it is look existence existence absolutely exists it sort of seems obvious when he put it that way but what i'm saying is is so radically profound do not assume that you understand what i'm saying you don't you're not conscious of what i'm saying even though it might seem like these are just word games these are not just word games it's not just word salad something very substantial is being said here but you don't understand what is being said because you're not conscious of it yet if you did it would completely blow your mind so you see my point is that you already are relying upon a notion of absolute truth but you're not honest with yourself about it and how you're relying upon it is that you you believe you exist and you've believed that your entire existence and you're not wrong about that and when i say you i don't mean the human self i mean existence itself i mean consciousness itself consciousness itself exists consciousness is existence that's what we're talking about so see you take that for granted and then you use that in order to bootstrap your entire relative framework of relative truths and then you want to use that framework and reflect it back and try to use it to then apply it to the non-dual absolute truth and then when that fails to work you take that as evidence of the fact that there is no absolute truth and that whole spiel is your self-deception so the self-deception you have to be worried about here is not that you are hallucinating the absolute truth it's actually that you are hallucinating its non-existence that's the self-deception so we have a self-deception wrapped within a self-deception so when you think that you are deceiving yourself by believing in absolute truth as a possibility and you're doubting absolute truth that doubt of the absolute truth is the self-deception that needs to be cured in order to be able to access absolute truth in fact this problem goes so deep that even when people deconstruct much of their mind like i teach and then they actually do get a brief glimpse of absolute truth they get a brief glimpse of it maybe for five minutes then they fall back down into relativity into duality and then they start to second-guess themselves and they start to say oh well but what if that was just a hallucination what if that was just some stuff happening in my brain in my mind neurons and things and what if i was just imagining that and i was constructing something that leo was talking about the only reason i experienced this absolute truth was because leo fed that idea to my mind for years through these videos what i'm telling you is that when you do that when you doubt the absolute truth that is the delusion and you're not recognizing that you think by doubting everything including the absolute truth that you're actually getting yourself closer to truth and that turns out to be the ultimate deception because doubt itself is something that's part of the relative truth framework it's not part of nonduality when you are conscious of absolute truth what i'm asking you to open your mind to i'm asking you to open your mind to this following radical thing is that when you are conscious of the absolute truth there literally is no more room left for doubt error or mistake or delusion or the brains and neurons or a veil of perceptions or human misunderstanding or human misperception or illusion none of that can exist within absolute truth absolute truth means you've pierced through every single veil so here's what i'm asking you to really open your mind to is your mind open to the possibility that you not anybody else but you personally can pierce through absolutely every veil of deception and reach the rock bottom of what reality is is that possible and if your answer is no then my question to you is how can you know that what if you're wrong can you see that if you're mistaken on this point and such a thing actually is possible but you're wrong about it that you will never be able to validate it for yourself because you see unlike other things which can be validated to you by others absolute truth is of such a kind that it cannot be valid by any other literally that means when you finally if let's say if you finally reach absolute truth no human being will be able to validate it for you not your mom not a scientist not a doctor not a professor not your guru not even leo it will only be you just like with your own existence nobody and i mean nobody think about this is radical there is not a single being in the entire universe no matter how intelligent or advanced technologically whether they're aliens or angels or whatever that can validate your own existence to you no scientist can do it no professor can do it no doctor can do it no theologian no priest your parents can't do it nobody can do it but you that means the only way you can know that you exist is through your own existence and there is no other way it's 100 direct there is no veil there is no medium there is no process by which you validate your own existence existence exists it's too direct for there to be a process any process you use to validate existence can you see that that process is already too many steps removed from existence itself because every step in the process itself has to exist in order for it to lead to some sort of conclusion so any proof for existence is absurd and stupid literally stupid is what it is because if you think you can prove existence through some mathematical formula or through some scientific procedure or through some kind of experiment or through calling your mom or by talking to an alien through some sort of radio communication device if you think you can prove your own existence that way you you're being so stupid because that chain itself has to exist for it to prove anything you see so literally what i'm saying is that the only way you know you exist is by existing and while that might seem sort of obvious and sort of a hollow statement it's actually not it's a deeply profound statement what i'm literally telling you is that the only way that reality knows it exists is through its own sovereign self-recognition of its existence so see ordinarily we think that oh reality just exists it just exists without us it just exists somehow in some way we don't know how it just it's just like this but no what i'm telling you is that reality only exists if it recognizes its own existence and if it doesn't then it can't exist this makes reality itself absolute truth because that's what oneness is see oneness infinity that which has no ends or bounds that which has no other to it cannot have something outside of it which it can reference relativistically to make a proof to lean upon it can't be used as a left there's no archimedean point is what i'm telling you that you can leverage to actually challenge existence itself because existence is all there is that's the nature of the absolute there's nothing else you can compare or contrast it with there's nothing else you can use to define it the reason you can't put your finger on what existence is is because anytime you use your words or your mind to say oh existence is x existence is y existence is z it has these property has these characteristics anytime you're doing that you're you're dragging existence into from the non-dual domain into the relative domain and in so doing you are creating an opposite to existence which is non-existence which doesn't actually exist so when you're doing that you're not actually conscious of what existence is when you're fully conscious of what existence is you actually can't say what it is it's because it's literally undefinable you can't define it because to define anything a definition of anything requires at least two things the thing you're trying to define and then the thing defining it but both those things have to exist first you see everything boils down to existence so existence itself is the absolute and what do i mean by existence i mean everything so here we get the ultimate strange loop and paradox which is that when you actually become conscious of absolute truth you will realize that there was always only the absolute truth there never was a relative truth because the absolute has no opposite see if you're living in a reality where there is absolute truth on the one hand and then there's relative truth on the other hand that already is part of the relative domain because it's in the relative domain that you have different kinds of truth in the absolute domain there aren't different kinds of truth there's only absolute truth so the deep profound paradox of absolute truth is that while it seems like absolute truth is this airy fairy notion that exists somewhere in the heavens that can never be accessed the truth is exactly the opposite is that the only thing that exists really is absolute truth because it's absolutely everything and all the relative stuff that you've been attached to your whole life has just been stories spun by your mind which of course is a part of the absolute truth but it's a lack of consciousness of it it's a misconstrual of it it's a misinterpretation now of course some of you who are dense will say well leo but what if all yeah this all sounds good it sounds like nice philosophy but what if all of this is just a self-deception to which i say what i'm pointing at is something beyond what my words are able to communicate so when you take the absolute truth and you turn it into stories and words that i'm telling you and explanations even explanations like this one they always become relativistic all my explanations absolute truth are all relativistic they're all finite so yeah this here in the in the relative domain you can have self-deceptions but when you are directly conscious of the absolute truth which you are not right now then it can't be a self-deception and then the only question is um are you gonna be wise enough to recognize that this is a possibility that you can actualize and that you haven't actualized it yet but that you could because see it's hard to actualize something when you don't believe you can even do it or that it's possible to even do now you say billio but all of that could just be experiences generated by neurons in the brain no it can't if you think that you're operating the relative domain you're not in the absolute you have to enter the absolute see there's no way for you to understand the absolute while sitting in the comfort of the relative domain because the relative domain is illusion you have to leave the relative domain and go and inhabit the absolute non-dual domain you have to do that and then that is how you validate it you say aha leo but you said it couldn't be validated well it can't be validated through anyone but yourself which is why i talk about direct experience so much the only way reality can know that it exists is through you it can't exist in any other way but through you the mistake that materialists and scientists have made is they've made the mistake of assuming that reality can exist independently of your existence this is an unscientific unprovable claim and it also happens to be false and you will discover that it's false if you ever enter into the absolute domain and leave behind the relative domain so you see the relative domain has extremely powerful hooks and anchors that it has sunk into your mind deep deep deep into your psyche that is keeping you anchored in the relative domain and so the struggle here is is sort of snipping off all those anchors and hooks that keep you attached but of course as you're doing that you're literally detaching yourself from what you consider reality because what you consider reality is consensus reality it's the reality you generated with your fellow human chimps uh through culture and through even science science is part of culture by the way and through external validation see you are so insecure about taking back your full authority your absolute sovereignty as the the reality that you are the universe that you are you're so afraid of taking back your sovereignty of thinking for yourself of validating your own truth that you want somebody else some other human to validate for you want some guru you want some professor you want some scientist you want somebody with a big name with a lots of charisma lots of passion you want someone like me to validate it for you and in so doing you will never reach absolute truth and you will forever be deluded that is the chief delusion and that is what i explained in my episode called how authority works see you are unwittingly giving away your authority to imaginary others out there that you created by dividing reality into multiple consciousnesses and you think that by dividing reality into multiple consciousnesses and giving your authority to those other conscious whether it's your parents your government officials or your you know your tv pundits or whoever you watch on youtube or some guru you like or whatever priest you listen to or some textbook you read or some scientist you you enjoy listening to whoever the authority is you rely on those people to tell you who you are and that you exist and what's true because the truth is is that if you didn't rely on any of you if you cut all those umbilical cords all that would be left is you and your own mind which then literally means that whatever your mind imagines becomes the absolute truth and that is what you're terrified of because then you literally have the sovereignty of god your imagination becomes absolute then when you dream your dream becomes absolute reality and by that i don't mean that you dream of money and then you wake up and there's a bunch of money in your bank account no no i mean when you are dreaming about money at night when you're sleeping that dream is absolutely true as true as what's happening here right now that does not mean you're gonna get a bunch of money in your bank account so don't get your hopes up that's what you're really terrified of what you're ultimately your mind is protecting you from realizing this why because in a sense this is what you perceive madness to be what you perceive madness to be is being so lost inside your own mind that you can't tell the difference anymore between what's real and what's unreal humans have classified this as insanity or as something that's a problem and it can be a problem if it's done in a dysfunctional way but if it's done in a functional way where you're fully conscious of what you're doing and you're not abusing it then what actually happens is that you discover the ultimate truth and the ultimate truth is that the entire universe is your imagination at work and your imagination is completely sovereign which is why your reality feels real no matter how crazy your beliefs and ideas are have you ever wondered why you know religious fanatics do crazy things why people believe crazy things and behave in crazy ways the maga people the anti-vaxx people the provacs people the uh the corporate people you know the muslims the jews the the atheists you know all these people they're all crazy they're all living in their own bubble realities and they're acting as though their reality is the truth why is that well because the ultimate truth is that their imaginations and their above they're spinning their bubbles they're spitting their realities that's god constructing reality and whatever reality you're dreaming up is the reality you're inhabiting and that's what feels real to you and if you're imagining that you can't walk through a wall that's what your reality becomes and you're terrified of learning that because then you're all alone see you can't even ask somebody else to validate this for you when you realize what i'm telling you you might think like oh i'm gonna i'm gonna email leo and i'm gonna just double check let me double check with leo if i got if i got this right now if you're emailing leo to validate this then you haven't got it it's completely you you're completely sovereign you're completely absolute but you don't want to accept that because it's too much responsibility to bear and it leaves you feeling all alone [Music] and then you can't tell what's up what's down what's good what's bad what's left what's right what's true what's false what's real what's unreal because all those distinctions melt away and then what you're left with is you're left with absolute consciousness absolute truth which is precisely what all this is right now right now you exist as absolute truth that's all there is the problem is that your mind has misconstrued for your entire life what this life this experience we call life what it is it isn't a veil of perception there aren't atoms behind the scenes there aren't mathematical calculations happening in the universe behind the scenes there aren't physical laws behind the scene somewhere running this show this is it reality is precisely what it appears to be consider that radical possibility open your mind to the possibility that what is real what is true is exactly what is before you right now stop imagining any more layers to reality than what you see consider for a moment this radical possibility that this is it absolute truth does not look like numbers or computer simulations or angels or bearded men in the clouds or atoms or quarks or strings or multiverses or universes it doesn't look like that it looks exactly like this right now this is it this this you this is absolute truth and everything else is you're imagining which is still part of the absolute truth but it is imaginary when you think of quarks and brains and neurons and experiences and veils of perception and different spectra of electromagnetic radiation to which you're not privy to when you think about different conscious entities when you think about rattlesnakes and bats and dolphins and whales and all their ways of perceiving the world when you think about angels and devils and you think about aliens perceiving the world in different ways all of that is this right now you're imagining it right now isn't that true don't believe me take a look take a look anything i'm saying that's true is only true because it's present for you right now if it's not present for you it's not true something else is true for you because you're imagining that something else whatever that is see like if you imagine like some new age people do some new age people imagine that they're aliens from other planets star seeds and arcturians and whatever else see if you imagine deeply enough that you're an alien from other planet that becomes your reality and nobody and i mean nobody can change that if you want to believe you're an alien and you really want to go go with it all the way you can believe it and no matter what anybody tells you you'll keep believing it and believing it and believing it and it'll just become your reality after all that's exactly what you did to become human see the only difference is that it was a little bit easier for you to become a human because when you started to believe that you're a human people weren't naysaying you and saying oh you're bad for believing you're a human how dare you you're insane which they would do if you tell them that you're an alien but see when you became a human the way you did it is you just started to believe you're human and you started imagining more and more that you're human you're human you're human and then others around you because they were doing the same thing because you're playing the same game they kept reinforcing in you yeah you're a human you're a good human you're a good human good human bad human bad human bad human don't do that don't believe this that's bad this is good believe this don't believe you're an alien that's bad believe you're a human that's good don't believe you're a cat or a dog that's bad believe you're a human that's good right and they kept doing they kept reinforcing that in you more and more and more and then you grew up that way and then now you think you're a human and you think you're actually a human and you think you were born a human and you think that there's no other way you could be and you think that this is a scientific truth but you see if we took a human and we just did that and we just replaced human with alien we could raise a human that believed he's an alien just using the exact same process just through just through social pressure and reinforcement and that person would legit believe that he's an alien yeah it's it's twisted it's heavy stuff heavy stuff not not very easy to to swallow all this so see um what's really crucial the whole point of all this is that i want to preempt a trap for you the trap i want to preempt is this is that some of you doing this work will actually maybe within a year or two stumble upon absolutely you'll get a glimpse of it you'll get a 5 10 20 minute glimpse maybe a 60 minute glimpse of it maybe during a psychedelic experience maybe through some meditation through some yoga through some shamanic breathing maybe through a you know through a solo retreat you'll get a glimpse of it but then what will happen is that you'll come crashing back down and then your mind will try to protect you from that by telling you oh well that was just a trip oh that's just hallucination oh it's just neurons in the bra it's just an experience it was just a mystical experience and there's no way to validate it and then you'll forget about it and drop back down into your human life and in this way you will never fully actualize absolute truth and you'll never fully get a a real a real deep deep experience of it because a little glimpse of it is not the same as a deep experience of it to get the deep experience of it you have to really really embrace the oneness the sovereignty take full responsibility take back all of your authority really understand that nobody will validate it for you and that that is not a bug that's a feature and this is actually what you want you want to become absolute what does it mean to be absolute you can't be absolute unless you're sovereign about the construction of your reality to be absolute means that you recognize that this reality is your responsibility and no one else's nobody else is doing it you are doing it nobody else is to blame nobody else can validate your existence nobody else can tell you whether you're sane or insane nobody can tell you whether you're being a good person or a bad person a moral person or not a moral person a spiritual person or not a spiritual nobody can tell you whether you're doing your spirituality right or wrong only you can figure that out and know that and it's from that that comes the ultimate confidence the ultimate strength and unshakeable unwavering imperturbability a groundedness you're grounded in the absolute at that point now some people here will object and they'll say but leo what if somebody follows this advice they do that and then they delude themselves because they they do it in the wrong way and then they they start to believe that they're an alien or something and then they you know they're 100 confident about it that they're this alien or that they they're 100 confidence that that that the world is coming to an end so they have to go out there and murder people or they're 100 confident that that that because everything is love that they're allowed to go around raping people to which my answer is yes that is certainly possible there are a million ways to this up er and for for every one person that succeeds in actualizing what i'm talking about there will be a thousand who become murderers and rapists and cult leaders and exploiters and manipulators and criminals and in wind up in a saint asylums but you know what that's already the case that's already the case in the relative paradigm in which we're living the material is paradigm which we're living we already got plenty of terrorists and murderers and rapists and thieves and criminals and corporate raiders and uh white-collar criminals and and you know swindlers and grifters and corrupt politicians and dictators and child abusers and animal abusers we already got millions of those people we got millions of mentally ill people we got millions of depressed people we've got millions of bipolar people we've got millions of psychotic people so that that why don't you count those against the materialist paradigm against the relative duelist paradigm so you you seem to to take every little every little hiccup that happens along the non-dual path you take it as against the non-dual path but then all the the war the slavery the genocide the corporate exploitation the wage slavery the actual slavery the uh religious indoctrination the scientific blunders and disasters and uh you know wars and technological death that is caused by pharmaceuticals and by nuclear weapons by radiation by heavy metals you take all that and you completely ignore all that and then as soon as there's a little hiccup on the non-dual path you say oh that that means the non-dual path is so dangerous well how much more dangerous is it than what you're doing already what you've been doing your whole life what you've been seeing on the news that's the dual path what you've been seeing on the news the nature of the absolute is that anything you think or imagine about the absolute is not the absolute that's the paradox but there's a further paradox which makes it even more of a mind which is this is that at the same time everything that you think and imagine about the absolute is the absolute but not at the level at which you think it is try interpreting that correctly if this sounds like word salad if it sounds like zen it's because there's a reason why zen sounds like zen because you can't bring the absolute into the relative and speech is the relative language is relative logic is relative you cannot do logic on the absolute at least not the kind of logic you're used to there's a sort of different kind of higher order we might call it sort of an infinite logic an undue logic but it's it's a it's a very paradoxical logic the absolute cannot ever be spoken or thought of without paradox or contradiction this is not a bug this is a feature because the absolute is total it's all-encompassing and it's one so make a distinction please between two types of absolute to make this more confusing there's absolute with a lowercase a and absolute with an uppercase a absolute with an uppercase a is what i'm pointing at when i'm talking about the absolute so anytime i say the word absolute i'm actually just using a word a relative word absolute as separate from relative these are two words concepts thoughts when i say the word absolute that is not the actual thing the actual thing is what the word is pointing at but can never be spoken that's the uppercase a absolute so the lowercase absolute is just a concept it's an idea you have an idea of absolute you have an idea of god you have an idea of infinity of an idea of love you have an idea of everythingness you have an idea of nothingness these are all ideas these are not the same thing as the actual things those words point at but also they are because language and words are part of the absolute but they're not the the entirety of it and it's not what we're concerned with in this conversation then i want you to make a further distinction i want you to make a distinction between absolute truth as the actual thing being pointed at versus as dogma and as ideology see so there's a pre-trans fallacy that happens here see one of the problems with teaching about the absolute from a higher level perspective from a sort of spiral dynamics tier two perspective is that those at tier one when they hear about absolute truth they will misconstrue it as pre-rational falling into the pre-trans fallacy and they will construe it as like oh well leo is talking about the absolute truth that means he must be some sort of crackpot a religious fanatic cult leader because he actually believes that his beliefs are true absolutely true but that is not what leo is saying leo is saying something much much much more nuanced and more radical and complex than this i'm saying something trans not pre by trans what i mean is that so see there's sort of three levels that humans go through the first level is that humans get mired in absolute truth as ideology and dogma this is what you see in the middle east a lot this is what you see in evangelical christian circles orthodox religious traditions fall into the sort of spider dynamic stage red and blue absolute truth they actually believe that jesus was this was the son of god this sort of stuff like they take the bible literally as absolute truth this is a very low level of cognitive development this is the pre stage then you grow out of that and you reach the stages orange and green where now you realize that that stuff wasn't literally true the you know the stories in the bible aren't literally true uh they're mostly just myths and exaggerations and so forth um you realize that at stage orange and green and then to you people who claim absolute truth those seem like lunatics you want nothing to do with those people they seem unscientific they seem religious they seem uh small-minded they seem myopic they seem bigoted because usually people who latch onto absolute truth you know they are bigoted literally they're bigoted because their mind is so closed off to that little perspective but you have to understand that that is not really absolutely true that is just beliefs and dogma and then so people who are at stage orange and greens is perhaps one of the most dangerous stages because here you actually are going to university you're reading books you're studying science mathematics logic and all this post-modernism maybe even a little bit you're studying this stuff you're understanding this stuff and now it seems to you that you have the scientific worldview that now you understand that relative truth i mean that absolute truth is just all you know human constructions and such and dogmas and now finally you're free of such a such a silly notion and you think you've made it well you haven't made it you're stuck in the middle now there's the trans level the really complex advanced stuff which is what i'm talking about the position i'm talking about is the place that okay so you've discovered that those were all myths and stuff in the bible and so forth but then what about the actual that the bible was pointing to you say oh well that stuff it didn't exist the bible was pointing to nothing and that's where you're wrong the bible was pointing to something it was horribly corrupted and misconstrued but the bible was pointing to something what was the bible pointing to what was jesus pointing to what was the buddha pointing to what was moses pointing to what was muhammad pointing to they were pointing to absolute truth with capital a but you can't speak it you can't logic it you can't science it you can't run experimental you can't validate it and so the problem is that whenever i speak from that level people assume that i'm speaking from just a religious dogmatic level and and that's really a shame that's the pre-trans fallacy so watch out for that and it'll happen to you too if you're gonna be teaching others about this stuff it'll happen to you people will you know even even just using the word god see sometimes i hesitate to use the word god because i know that in any episode where i use the word god immediately half the audience will think that i'm a stage blue religious fanatic or a christian or an evangelical or something just for saying the word god that just just for saying that word and then sometimes people say well leo why use that word it's such a religiously loaded word it's it's not a good word use a word like nothingness or something it's better use a word like the universe it's better um but uh but actually when you realize that you're god you'll you'll understand why that word is used it's the perfect word the problem is it's corrupted but uh it's always going to be corrupted any word you use for god will end up corrupted so you can't avoid that problem it's just nature of the beast because you can't translate the absolute into any words notice you know you might wonder leo how do i know if a truth is conceptual or i mean sorry if a truth is relative or if a truth is absolute well an easy way to know if a truth is relative is that notice that all relative truths are conceptual that means is your truth at the level of language or logic or thought or mind or concepts then it's a relative truth absolute truth is at the level of being being so a great analogy that i like to use here is the lego analogy the lego analogy is look we have lego blocks we can build any shape we want with them we can build a pirate ship we can build a castle whatever let's assume we're going to build a one of those medieval castles so um in this analogy the lego blocks themselves are the absolute truth and the shape that the blocks create that's the relative truth so the castle is relative the legos themselves are not their absolute do you see the difference can you see that the shape of the lego castle is a second order effect of the blocks there's a hierarchical dependency in that the legos can exist without the castle but the castle can't exist without the legos likewise for example you can have existence with no proof but you can't have proof without existence you see because truth is prior to proof likewise you can exist without other people but other people can't exist without you because all other people exist within you so you are the lego block and the other people in your life are the castle that is built with those blocks this is why you can't use them to validate truth for you because you are prior to other people you exist prior to all humans including your own human self therefore you cannot use a human to validate that which is prior to humans i mean this is this is very basic common sense stuff it's just that people don't like to think about it very much so the absolute just to be clear the absolute is the actual building blocks of which everything is composed in other words if we want to use a term from velocity of science the absolute is qualia colors sounds feelings emotions tastes smells thoughts these sort of sense perceptions we might say this is the substratum of which reality is composed and everything else is secondary is not composed of atoms atoms are composed of colors and thoughts and feelings and sensations science has that relationship inside out and that's why it's so confused and that's why it's stuck with the hard problem of consciousness here's another helpful analogy to distinguish between relative and absolute truth if you think of the sherlock holmesian universe the fictional universe of sherlock holmes and you know victorian england or wherever and whenever you know his universe takes place um there are truths within the fictional universe of sherlock holmes you know facts facts that we could cite i haven't actually read the sherlock holmes books but if you read the books you can make factual claims like for example sherlock holmes lives in a house on such and such a street with such and such a house number is that true or is that false it's one or the other or you could say sherlock holmes is either married or unmarried one of them is true one of them is false he has children or he doesn't true or false his parents are still alive or they're dead true or false um he has a a detective partner named watson true or false and so and so on you know we can generate a list of factual statements about the sherlock holmes's you know fictional universe do the cars drive on the right or on the left in the sherlock holmes and universe supposedly that's like a fact i don't know it depends on how the author set that up those would all be relative truths what are they relative to they're relative to how the author chose to write the story see the author could have written the story otherwise author could have given sherlock holmes a different street address different house number uh a wife or children or his parents could have died or they could still be alive or you know any number of things cars can drive on whatever side of the road of the city that the author wants because it's a fictional universe it's a dream it's imaginary but we can still make factual statements about how the author chose to write that particular story and that is what science is doing in our dream world here that we call life so when science is making its objective factual statements it's doing exactly the same thing as we would do with the fictional universe of sherlock holmes so there's no surprise that it works yes it works in a relative sense it's true in a relative sense it's true that sherlock holmes has a partner named watson does that make watson real does that make sherlock holmes any more real no they're still fictional characters the relative truth doesn't care about the actual reality of what it's talking about because all it is is just a comparison likewise with what science is doing here like do science ask the question whether atoms are real or not no science doesn't care whether atoms are real or not all it cares about is just measuring what's there and manipulating it does science care if the moo the moon is real or not no landing a land landing a man on the moon has nothing to do with the reality of the moon you can land a man on an imaginary moon as long as the man is imaginary too that's the mind of all this so even though that whole sherlock holmesian universe is a fiction it is imaginary it is a dream and it is all relative and it could have been imagined otherwise the way it's being imagined itself is absolutely true do you get that the substance we might say the actual physical book on which the sherlock holmesian story is written that would be analogous to absolute truth in this metaphor see the actual substrate of the book is existence the book exists it's consciousness it exists in your consciousness and that is absolutely true so you see contrary to what many people think about the absolute and the relative you know people fall into one side of the other is that we have people who become dogmatic absolutists like religious fanatics that becomes a huge toxic problem they give absolutism a bad name and then we have people who become the opposite of that the polar opposite is like total relativists and they believe everything is just everything is just open to interpretation everything is just purely subjective there is no absolute truth the truth is just whatever we want it to be and then they they create all sorts of disasters as well this becomes a problematic world view as well um the truth is somewhere actually in between it's kind of intertwined it's that the absolute and the relative these are not polar opposites but rather these are deeply intertwined like a double strand of dna helix aspects of one unified whole reality relativity is not a contradiction of the absolute and the absolute truth's existence is not a contradiction of relativity it's actually the two perfectly seamlessly cohesively add up together like the yin yang symbol so technically absolute truth cannot be spoken but it can be spoken about which is what all spiritual teachings are whether it's the bible or buddhism or what i teach it's speech about the absolute and this speech you have to be very careful because it it comes with inherent limitations all speech has these inherent limitations spiritual speech is not immune to these limitations and they all must always be kept in mind so spiritual speech is not the absolute itself but it can point to the absolute as hopefully this speech is doing but also at the same time of course speech itself is not separate from the absolute and the absolute is not separate from the relative if you think the relative is here and the absolute is somewhere out there you got it wrong the relative and the absolute are exactly standing in the same place overlapping each other which is why they're so difficult to distinguish and to see one or the other because usually you're only seeing one or the other but not both at the same time because they're so overlapping they're so close to each other there's no distance between them you have to be very clear about which you're speaking about the absolute or the relative this leads to a uh a set of traps uh which i call conflating of the relative and the absolute and vice versa and this is common you see this made a lot of times by newbies who get into this work and even by advanced teachers who have already reached the absolute then they make a conflation in the opposite direction so i want to give you some examples of this conflation because i see it happening all the time on my forum in the comments sections and hey i'm guilty of committing it myself i'll give you some examples of that too so what happens with this conflation is that you become conscious either of the relativity of nature or the absoluteness of nature and then you get stuck on that one way of looking at the world or at nature and then you you try to carry over the lessons from the absolute into the relative and from the relative to the absolute and it becomes a a mess because you're not carefully distinguishing the two so here are some examples of relative speech about the absolute um that that easily gets misunderstood and taken as the absolute so for example we are all one is that true yeah is that absolute truth actually no it's a relative truth because all speech is relative truth it's a relative truth about the absolute it's pointing to something how about the statement the brain does not exist is that true yes relatively true is it absolutely true uh it's pointing to some absolute truth that you could access and the sentence itself when it's uttered is absolute truth um but at a sort of a first order level not a second order level that you usually think of it as reality is hallucination is that true it's relatively true it's relative speech about the absolute everything is consciousness again that's a relative speech about the absolute you are god that's also relative speech about the absolute the purpose of life is waking up that's also relative speech about the absolute nothing is good or bad that's also relative speech about the absolute life is meaningless that's relatively true science is a human invention and science is relative that's relatively true other people do not exist that's relatively true there is no one to become enlightened that's relatively true you have no control over reality that's relatively true enlightenment happens by itself that's relatively true you are immortal that's relatively true death is impossible that's relatively true but none of those statements themselves are what they are pointing to here are some examples of conflations that happen for example nothing is good or bad so it's okay if i steal see nothing in good or is good or bad that's sort of a that's a that's a relative statement that you get from accessing the absolute when you access the absolute you'll realize nothing is good or bad okay but then you can bring that back into the relative domain and say well if nothing is good or bad that means i guess i can steal that's a mistake now of course don't get me wrong you can steal and stealing is not wrong per se in the absolute sense but in the relative sense stealing is a problem and that's where stealing occurs stealing doesn't occur in the absolute sense stealing occurs in the relative domain and when you get punished for stealing and when people criticize you and judge you for stealing they're going to be doing that from the relative domain of survival and the reason you're probably stealing is also from relative reasons like you want food or you want luxury or you want money or you want freedom whatever that's why you steal so so you have to be very careful about how you bring back and distort lessons from the absolute into the relative domain because the ego loves to do that oh yes it does because see you get a glimpse of the absolute but the ego is still not fully dead and the ego will come back and it'll co-opt that truth and use it for its own egoic purposes for survival to enhance the survival how about statement like life is meaningless that is a truth you will realize if you access the absolute but then you can bring it back down to the relative and you can say well if life is meaningless then i'm going to sit on my couch and watch television that's what i should do because life is meaningless but no that's not what life is meaningless actually means that's a distortion that's a conflation how about the statement reality is a hallucination that's something you'll realize if you access the absolute but then you bring it try to bring it back down into the relative you say well if reality is hallucination that means i can walk through walls right no wrong because the walls of your house being unwalked through-able is your hallucination therefore of course you can't walk through them because you're hallucinating that you can't just like in a dream you see like um in your dreams at night when you sleep what keeps you from falling through the floor of your house because after all the floor of your house in your dream isn't made out of anything solid it's not have atoms so the question is why don't you fall through the floor so the answer is exactly the same reason as why you don't fall through the floor wherever you're standing or sitting right now there's no difference because you're hallucinating the floor in both cases um another absolute sort of truth is that there is no one to become enlightened that's true in a sense um but then you can sort of misconstrue that in the relative domain like a newbie might hear that it might say oh well if there's no one to become enlightened that means it's impossible to become enlightened and that would be false it is possible another example like this is enlightenment happens all by itself it's a spontaneous occurrence an act of grace you've heard certain spiritual teachers preach this some newbie who is stuck in the relative domain might hear that and misconstrue that and then conflate it and say oh well that means i should stop meditating if enlightenment happens by itself then why meditate of course that's a gross misconstrual of that teaching how about the teaching that the ego has no control over your life that's something you'll realize when you awaken to the absolute but then you can misconstrue that and then someone who let's say is struggling to lose weight in the relative domain they might say oh well you know i can't lose weight because the ego has no control so i just can't control myself i just eat everything oh yeah well then how come i can lose weight i also don't have an ego just like you but for some reason i'm able to lose weight but you're not maybe that's just an egoic excuse maybe you actually do have that ego and it's sneaking in with all these excuses about why you can't lose weight see whether you have an ego or you don't you can lose weight you can gain weight the ego has really no say on whether you can gain or lose weight here's another common funny one that i get sometimes sometimes we say we are all one right you say that as a spirit teacher and then some some snarky um you know troll in the comments section says i'm like oh well leo if we're all one why don't you send me all your money again a conflation of the absolute and the relative see if we're all one why would i need to send you all my money if we're all equally one why don't you send me your money that's equally plausible why do you have this bias of me sending you money as soon as you send me some money maybe i'll send you some money see what goes around comes around um here's another one um leo you say that you're immortal okay yeah from the from the from the absolute perspective you are immortal but then but then someone might say oh leo so then you don't mind if i if i shoot you no actually i do mind if you shoot me because i still also live in the relative domain of survival and shooting me is about survival and i do care about my survival and you might say well you're a hypocrite because you're not supposed to care about your survival but nothing about being immortal says i'm not supposed to care about my survival as a human because the human self is relative and it's mortal and it's finite and if you have certain relative objectives like if you want to teach people then you got to maintain your body you got to eat well you got to you know shower you got to go to the bathroom you got to take care of your sexual needs in a healthy way you gotta earn money and so forth so there's no contradiction between this these things um sometimes people say oh well if you're enlightened why do you charge money for teachings well i would happily not charge any money for teachings if the world didn't expect money from me for survival see i charge money for teachings because i gotta eat and i can't go to the grocery store and pay them with enlightenment i got to pay them with cold hard cash that's what people want um and you know if i want a house to live in i can't just go to the real estate agent and and you know look at them with a sort of eckhart tolle eyes and get a free house they're gonna want a you know a cart hard cold check which requires money and i can't teach unless i live in a house and i eat food because that's what survival entails and if you can't understand that then you've got more study to do more contemplating to do here's another conflation that might happen is that someone hears me talking about the absolute or about god like a christian hears me say that or uh you know a muslim hears me talking about allah or something and then they say oh well that means that my religion is true no it doesn't mean that there's actually a lot of within your religion and the way you're misinterpreting your religion is deeply false and the god and the absolute that i'm talking about is further away from your religion than probably atheism is but you know you just hear the word absolute you hear the word god and then in your mind to your ego it sounds good to validate whatever you existing your existing beliefs are how about this one uh you know maybe your girlfriend asks you did you cheat on me and you because you're this absolutely awakened non-dual master you say well cheating is just a social construct baby get over it see when you do that you're conflating the absolute with the relative and see the ego is extremely crafty and it will do this when you do reach high levels of awakening if you ever do uh watch out because there's your mind is still going to be sneaky it's still going to be around and it's going to be using the absolute in all sorts of ways like this you might actually go cheat on somebody and then justify it to yourself as like well you know i have too much love in my heart to just commit myself to one person so i'm going gonna sleep around with everybody and it's okay because i'm just so loving you might do that easily even if you're enlightened uh here's how about another one you know i say that the brain is imaginary from the absolute perspective that's correct there's no brain you're imagining it but but see in the relative domain of survival and that's where the that's where the word brain really comes from brain is a relative word uh in that domain for example if you drink dirty heavy metal polluted water like your tap water filled with mercury and lead and stuff if you drink that tap water every day for years that might destroy your brain's health you might become depressed you might even become suicidal and psychotic after enough of that poisonous water and then you might say oh leo but but you said there's no brain so supposedly i should be able to drink a glass of mercury with no problem no that's not what it means to say there's no brain brain is a relative notion and drinking a glass of mercury is also a relative notion and if you do you're going to encounter another relative notion called heavy metal toxicity that's also a relative notion and then you might discover another relative notion which is called illness and suffering and then you might discover the ultimate relative notion which is called death and then you know if you're okay with that then you'll die but if you're not which you probably aren't then it's probably not a good idea to drink a glass of mercury how about this everything is love and since everything is love that means junk food is love leo why demonize junk food junk food is good because everything is good god created everything including junk food so that means i can eat all the junk food in the world right well you see the problem there pretty obvious sometimes it's said that there is no path to awakening and then some newbie will hear that and interpret it as well if there's no path that means i can awaken just by continuing my ordinary life i don't need to meditate i don't need to study i don't need to practice i don't need to self-inquire and then of course he'll never awaken how about this in the absolute sense you might discover one day that everything is perfect and good and then you might take that and then you might misconstrue it in the relative domain like this where you might you might say well if everything is perfect and good then what's the problem with suffering why should we care about reducing people's suffering in the world well of course suffering is a relative problem and reducing people's suffering is a relative concern at the absolute level it doesn't matter whether people suffer or not but at the relative level it does matter mostly because the suffering comes back around to you see you might not care about the suffering of your neighbors but then if your neighbors suffer enough they'll come and inflict some suffering on you and on your children on your family and then you'll probably care even if you are awakened you'll probably still care it's not hard to make you care about the relative pretty easy all you have to do is stick your nuts in a vice or stick a needle in your eye and you'll you'll very quickly start to care about the relative neo advice left to say that you're already awake and that there's no need for enlightenment because you're already enlightened everyone's already enlightened yeah that's sort of true from the absolute perspective but see they commit the sort of opposite mistake is that they go so deep into the absolute that they then can't teach properly meeting students where they're at see the student coming to a neo-inviting for awakening advice is not coming from the absolute perspective they're coming from the relative perspective so the student needs relativistic teachings the rel the proper relativistic teaching to a student is enlightenment is is very difficult to do it takes years of work sometimes decades of work uh you need gonna meditate your ass off you gotta read books you gotta study you gotta do self-inquiry you gotta practice yoga take psychedelics do all this and maybe you'll have a chance in hell of becoming enlightened that's really the practical advice at the relative level at the absolute level you're already enlightened but that doesn't help a newbie how about this sometimes i say death is imaginary at the absolute level yes it is and then some newbie hears that and says well leah then why don't you just kill yourself but what's the connection if death is imaginary why would i want to kill myself how about this you are god you've heard me say that before and then i might say i have an illness or i'm sick and then you might wonder a newbie at the relative stage might wonder well how is it possible that god could be sick or could have an illness why don't you just magically wave a magic god wand and fix yourself heal yourself magically since you're god but that's not how god works god includes sickness god includes cancer god includes genetic disorders god includes toxicity um god includes uh losing your your hand in a wood chipper god is all those things so it's very very possible for you to be enlightened and deeply awakened and still have some sort of illness from genetics or from toxicity from your environment or from improper diets or from the past the way you used your body in the past or abused it in the past through physical injury the way you exercise or lack thereof there's there's or just old age i mean everybody ages differently um when you realize your god it's not that now you get to control and manipulate everything the way you want it's actually the opposite of that you surrender to the way everything is so when you realize your god is not that you you cure your cancer actually it's that you accept your cancer and um you let it kill you if it will if there's no other solution then you let the cancer kill you but if there is a solution you can you can work to try to you know fix it get chemo or something you see people assume that the way that god heals cancer is by waving a magic wand no i mean it could be that but it also could be god heals cancer by going to a doctor and getting it surgically removed or getting some chemo that's also a legitimate way to heal cancer and sometimes god can't heal cancer and god dies from cancer ramana maharshi died from cancer he is considered to be one of the most enlightened people in the last century uh how about this like leo you talk about birth being imaginary yes it is from the absolute perspective and then you might wonder leo but you also talk about your past you talk about being a child you talk about your past experiences that you've had how can you reconcile those two things you talk about your parents i thought your parents were imaginary yes when i'm talking about my past or my parents i'm speaking relativistically i'm speaking from i'm sort of speaking towards the consensus reality that us humans have co-imagined together us humans culturally we have a notion that we all have parents and we have a past and so forth and we speak in this way and it's a it's a convenient practical way to speak that's why we created it because it's practical if i had to explain to everybody that i'm talking to about how birth is imaginary we i couldn't have a conversation with people so i just ignore that part usually you know if i'm speaking to uh to my accountant about you know oh i asked the count oh how are your kids and he asks me like oh what were you up to last weekend and what am i going to tell i'm going to say well last weekend didn't really happen because i'm gone i'm just imagining it's all just a hallucination am i going to tell them that or am i going to say oh yeah last weekend you know i went to a to a barbecue i'll just tell them that because i'm speaking relativistically and if someone asks me like leo what were you like as a child i can still answer that it's going to be relative to how i imagined myself i was as a child i'm imagining myself as a child and then i'm reporting it to you and that's that's what my childhood is that's what yours is too but i mean you can be conscious of it or not up to you so you see there's all sorts of these kinds of conflations that can happen these conflations can happen in both directions most of these conflations i would say would actually happen when a newbie at the relativistic stage first starts to learn about the absolute but hasn't accessed it himself yet a lot of conflation happens a lot of gross distortions and ignorance but it can also happen the other way where a teacher becomes so awake so enlightened that then they they too easily dismiss the relativistic perspective the survival perspective or they sort of talk down and don't meet the student where he's at um for example i caught myself doing this recently um with with different with with a model like somebody on the forum shared ken wilbur's uh four quadrants model and my initial gut reaction reply to it was something like um like oh it's just it's just a dualistic model sort of a actually a quadratic not dualistic but more of a quadratic model i sort of poked fun at it um but then i realized to myself you know i'm being too flippant and too conflating from the top sort of down because what i noticed is that you know i still use models i talk about spiral dynamics i talk about the susan cagroiner model there's lots of models i talk about so it's not per se that all models are evil or bad it's just that like you have to be you have to be fair if you're going to criticize a model for being a model then you got to criticize all your own models too so it's not fair for me to criticize ken wilbur's model four quadrant model for being a model when i'm also using models so you have to be very kind of even-handed in how you do criticisms and dismissals of stuff because you can very easily dismiss a lot of stuff from the absolute perspective i think that's sort of one of the phases you'll go through is as you reach the absolute and then you're communicating with sort of normies the normies might say i'm like oh you know yesterday my girlfriend broke up with me and now i'm suffering and you'll just sort of brush it off and say oh that suffering is just a it's just a dream or you know um you know your friend loses a bunch of money and you say oh money's just imaginary you know just like who cares and then and then something happens in the political system you say oh well politics is all just and imagination and it's all just devilry and it's not true it's all relative but you see um very quickly you'll realize that this sort of cavalier attitude isn't very healthy and it's not the most mature form of of realization um because the reality is that the relative domain is pretty damn important for most people because most people are never going to reach your level of consciousness and even you yourself might struggle to reach your your own highest peaks of consciousness which you're sort of taking your highest lessons from so what you have to be very careful with here is be careful using absolute truth to justify any kind of survival activities or desires or needs of your own because the ego will want to do that the ego will want to apply absolute truth selectively for its own purposes ego loves to play loose with the truth ego will relativize well sorry will weaponize both relativity and the absolute in order to fulfill its agenda and manipulate reality in whatever way it can this is what lawyers do this is what criminals love to do they're experts at doing this religious people do this political commentators do this it's a very very sticky trap and that's what's key to understand is that you can the ego can exploit both absolutism and relativism towards its own devilish purposes it's also important to understand that relative truth even though it's not absolutely true by definition uh it's still crucial to survival because all of survival happens in the relative domain pretty much and survival is pretty much what 99 of your life is preoccupied with and pretty much all that you care about in a sense to most ordinary people relative truth may as well be absolute truth from their point of view because they know nothing else that's the tragedy of their predicament is that uh relative truth is completely untrue but they treat it as though it's the only thing there is and therefore it does in a sort of sense become a sort of pseudo-absolute from their point of view again which is why it's so powerful to then break free because when you break free it is like flipping your entire reality upside down and it creates a lot of a lot of new possibilities in your life see murder for example is a relative problem but it would be a big problem for you if you got murdered because all you basically know and care about is a relative domain so even though murder is not a problem in the absolute sense in a relative sense it's a very big problem it's the biggest problem you can have in the relative domain pretty much so be careful dismissing the relative too quickly as long as you want to stay alive for longer than a day you have to be concerned about the relative domain no matter how enlightened you are how awake you are how god realized you are if you want to stay in the human form that's a relative form it's finite and it requires certain survival activities of you you got to feed the body water the body uh you know clean the body take care of the body and so on to make sure it continues to function the ultimate problem with absolute truth is that it's simply too big for it to be useful precisely because it's everything is sort of like too much to be able to manipulate or to handle for the purposes of survival we can't use all of reality as one we need to break reality down into pieces to construct little minor relative truths that we can use those to manipulate reality how we want and this is ultimately why most people don't really focus on absolute truth and they never find it is because how's it going to help me because my whole life is concerned about this little local corner of the universe that i live in my little local troops that's all i care about that's all i need to know in order to survive in my little small way but what if the small narrow way in which you've been living life becomes unsatisfying to you what if you want to live a bigger life well in that case you got to expand your perspective more towards the absolute see from the absolute point of view you can become enlightened right now for example but from the relative point of view you need to do lots of practice from the absolute point of view maslow's hierarchy of needs doesn't matter at all sex doesn't really matter money doesn't really matter self-esteem doesn't really matter creativity doesn't really matter business success doesn't matter your social status doesn't matter none of that matters from the absolute point of view but from the relative point of view that most of you are at that stuff matters a lot and it's holding you back from awakening and in practice for most humans to awaken they need to move very high up maslow's hierarchy of needs see my episode called using maslow's hierarchy of needs to self-actualize uh it's an oldie but a goodie where i talk about that that's one of the most practical and effective relative ways of of awakening is just satisfy those basic needs that you have fill the holes in your in your pyramid which looks like a piece of swiss cheese you know fulfill your sexual needs get your financial needs met get your self-esteem in order get your social life in order once you got all those things in order then awakening will become much easier because you're not going to be desperate and needy for all those other lower things you will have experienced them you will have noticed the dissatisfaction with all those things the insufficiency of all of them and then you will be ready to move on and transcend but if you're uh struggling your whole life for sex and money and food what transcendence can there really be now this is not an absolute rule you can always awaken even if you are poor and sexually starved and uh and hungry you can still awaken and there are plenty of yogis and so forth and ascetics in india who do so every year but that's not a path that most normies will be able to follow and succeed in and lastly let me conclude with why the absolute is important you might be wondering like leo why spend so much time talking about it um what's it gonna do for me well that's already the wrong frame but i know where you're coming from so here's some of the stuff it'll kind of do for you first of all it will be the most important experience of your life there cannot be a more important life experience than coming in contact with absolute truth because it's the highest it's absolutely true secondly it recontextualizes your whole life see my episode understanding recontextualization it radically re-contextualizes your whole life in many areas of life including relationships business money uh your own self-image how you relate to yourself um your own shadow your health your career uh children love like it's going to recontextualize so much stuff science what you think science is society and culture all this will be radically recontextualized uh and it'll have significant practical consequences it won't just be theory there will be practical consequences it eliminates fear hatred and suffering coming into contact with the absolute defangs relative problems by putting them into proper perspective and virtually all of human problems are simply a lack of perspective it also cuts through human there's so much human in our culture and it's very difficult to break free of it until you access and ground yourself in something that's outside of human invention which is the absolute it's really good for that you don't even understand how much this human bogs you down until you've escaped it at least for a little while and basked in the pureness and honesty of the absolute also the absolute is the only ultimate source of true happiness true happiness is the result of uh spiritual connection to the absolute so the more connected you are to the absolute the happier you're going to be and the less connected you are the more miserable and depressed you're going to be no matter what other external material conditions you set up for yourself in life whether sexually financially recreationally or whatever so if you feel like you're succeeding a lot in life materially and you're you know you have a big house and a big nice family and you got you got plenty of sex and you got good fast cars and you got good food and you travel all over the world and you're doing great in business and then you but you feel like still something is missing in your life and it feels like no matter how hard you work you're just spinning your wheels and being happier seems to get harder and harder not easier and easier well now it's time for you to turn your eyes towards the absolute that's what you're missing also the absolute just happens to be the answer to all of life's questions at least all the most important ones do you really want to understand what life is and why it is and how it is then you need the absolute for that it also answers a majority of the the profound scientific questions you really want to do quality science you really understand want to understand what science is you need access to the absolute for that it's also just profoundly beautiful there's nothing more beautiful than the absolute so if you're a person who appreciates beauty within art within music within film within games within life within nature within people all that beauty where do you think it came from it's the absolute manifesting as those things life really only starts to make sense after discovering the absolute and that's perhaps one of the most fulfilling things that the absolute will give you is it just it gives you a sort of a calm because you're no longer like this pinball bouncing around in the pinball machine of life being pushed hither and tethered by others reacting to others being confused by what's going on and what's happening to you and whether this is right or that is wrong and and you're just bouncing around constantly this is what how most people's lives are are like um discovering the absolute just it grounds you it mellows you out it helps you become non-reactive it gives you a nice very healthy foundation upon which then you can build a healthy life and there's more benefits but we'll keep it we'll keep it short that should be enough to entice you all right that's it i hope now you understand the difference i hope now between relative and absolute i hope now that you're not going to make these conflations both as a newbie and also as an advanced practitioner once you get there and i hope your mind is now open to the possibility of the absolute and then the next step after that is actually doing it actualizing it all right that's it i'm done here please click that like button for me don't forget and come check out actualize.org that's my website on my website you will find resources that will help you with this whole process it'll make things clear you could find my book review list over 200 of some of the best books that i've read unique books that you won't find elsewhere on the internet and these books are really required reading material if you're going to get serious into this work even though my work is deep and broad it's not enough just to listen to my content you also have to read the books and that will give you a list at least at the beginning a sense of validation because see in practice as a newbie you need some validation of these ideas you can't just hear them from me you should hear them from other masters and teachers who will sort of triangulate with what i'm saying and then it'll corroborate it and then this gives you more confidence in it until you can go out and actually practice it and actualize some of the stuff and then when you do then you won't need the books you won't need the validation of me or anybody else you'll be on your own but before you get on your own you need a little bit of training wheels and that's what the book list offers you um you can also find the life purpose course over 25 hours of fresh exclusive content that's different from the free content that i release specifically about uh motivating yourself for the rest of your life finding your life purpose and passion very powerful course i get a lot of very good testimonials on a almost on a weekly basis from people who've finished that course you can also find uh other resources like my blog where i'm posting new stuff and sharing links and videos you can come to the forum and ask questions where i answer questions other smart people on the forum answer questions come get help there if you have some place that you're stuck with your journey at um what else you can support me if you'd like at patreon.com actualized i appreciate any donations that you offer to me helps me stay financially independent so that i'm not corrupted by advertisers and uh you can check out my second channel called actualizedclips for shorter snippets of my main videos that are done by a good editor of mine so that is that make sure you make use of those resources and more resources will come in the future i plan to release new courses and other things that i'm working on it's just taken me longer than anticipated because of certain health issues i've been struggling with recently and working on and the last thing i want to say is this is that what actualize.org really is from a high level is it is religion if religion was modernized with the 21st century brought up to speed with the 21st century and if it was free of of most corruption then you would have actualized.org and if it was sort of taught at a very sophisticated complex level but most religion most religion is thousands of years old very very out of date they use the wrong metaphors you can't relate to them very well um it's cognitively not complex enough uh for really learning this material and it's also full of of deep corruption and devilry and and that's the problem with most modern religion um and because of this religion has gotten a bad rap and a negative stigma so i even almost hesitate to say that actualize.org is is like a religion because people get the wrong idea about it but really um the word religion is also a relative word religion can happen at different levels of spiritual moral and cognitive development so religion what happens that spiral damage stage blues not a very good thing religion when it happens at stage yellow or turquoise is a very very different beast [Music] now even though i say you know free of corruption it doesn't mean actualizaria is completely free of corruption i can still be corrupt i still am corrupt in certain ways um uh as long as you're a human as long as you're finite you're always going to be corrupt in some way or another so that's basically inescapable so it's really not a question of whether you're free of corruption or not it's a question of uh what degree of corruption do you have and i consider modern orthodox religions to be quite corrupt whereas compared to what i'm teaching there are still corruptions in what i teach just because i'm human as well as something more but it i'm also in a very fortunate position that i'm financially independent uh and pretty well off at least for now and so because of this even though there are sort of financial pressures upon me here and there you know i could always want to earn more money and stuff and water down my teachings but actually what i'm noticing is that as i'm developing myself and becoming more conscious that's becoming less of a less of an influence on me and so i actually feel my teachers are getting more pure more authentic less corrupt but you know um there can still be corruptions here or there so don't hold me to some sort of perfect standard and the way that you overcome that problem of any corruptions in my teachings is by validating these things for yourself in your direct experience and then my own personal limitations and corruptions won't so much affect you and be a problem because hey i got news for you no matter who you're learning this stuff from they're always going to have their spin on it their own biases they're always going to have some financial pressure placed upon them there's always going to be some opportunity for corruption and sometimes it can be severe severe so do be mindful of that and because of this you shouldn't just blindly trust any spiritual teacher and the best spiritual teachers will tell you don't believe me go out and test this stuff for yourself and only if it's true for you should you follow it and pursue it if it's not then go follow something else and that's what keeps you safe you