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In this episode, we're going to be talking about sameness versus difference. What is sameness? What is difference? This topic is a lot more profound than it would initially seem. And this topic is also going to be very fun. We're going to dig into a lot of examples. And we're gonna talk about a lot of the ramifications of just how significant the answer to this question really is. And we're going to contemplate it together here. today. I wanted to show you after last last week's episode, which was called How to contemplate using a journal, I wanted to show you how to take your contemplation is really deep. Because the problem that I see is that people still don't understand just how deep contemplation can go. I see people taking some profound questions, some existential metaphysical question about the nature of reality. And just thinking about it for 30 minutes and thinking they got the answer. And then that's it. They're all done. And now they're moving on to the next thing. And it's like, no, no, no, you don't understand how much more there is to mine here. And so that's why I really want to go through with this in a lot of detail with you. And then as a homework assignment, I'll have you contemplate this topic of sameness versus difference from scratch, for yourself. Always you have to remember that these very obscure, sometimes sounding questions about the nature of reality, which might seem like they're just pure philosophy, or they're just some mental masturbation, or just some, just some random academic point, like sameness versus difference. They don't turn out to be that way. So one thing that I want you to notice here is that by the time we finished with this episode, I want you to see just how far we've come. And I want you to see what you assumed this topic was about at the beginning, and then what it actually turned out to be after we go through all the details. And that should open your mind to the possibilities of contemplation and get you to start to take contemplation a lot more seriously. We have a lot of ground to cover. So let's begin exploring sameness versus difference. Are you as they say a difference person or a sameness person. And by that what they mean is psychologists sometimes do various tests on people. And one of the things they have discovered is that some people are more different people, while others are more sameness people. And what that means is just that the mind tends to focus more on the differences between things for some people, and for other people, the mind tends to focus more on the similarities between things. And that's one way to categorize people, similar to how you might categorize people as introverts or extroverts or something like that. So let's do the test. I got a pop quiz for you, there's going to be about 40 questions that I'm going to go through really quickly here. So listen to them carefully. And I want you to give a yes or no answer to each one of these questions. And this will determine whether you're a difference person or same as person. And after we're done with with this list, we're gonna go through it again, and I'm going to show you just how much depth there really is each one of these questions. So you can either make a mental note yes or no. Or if you want, you can actually pull out a piece of paper and jot down your answers as I'm going through them. I'm gonna go through them pretty quickly. So if you need to, you can pause to think about it. So you're ready. Here we go. First question is, is Coke, the same as Pepsi? Yes or no? is gold the same as silver? Is an ant the same as an elephant? Is the chimpanzee the same as a human? Is an acorn the same as an oak? Is a child the same as an adult? Is abortion the same as murder? Is beheading a chicken? The same as beheading a human? are identical twins the same? Is your child If you have one, the same as you? Is Monday the same as Friday? is $999,999.99. The same as $1? million? Is English the same as Chinese? by which we mean the languages? is the number five the same as the number 25? Is an idea of an elephant, the same as an elephant? Are men and women the same? Are all human beings the same? are Republicans and Democrats the same? Is Donald Trump the same as George Washington? Are US drone strikes the same as terrorism? is taking a knee at a football game during the national anthem? The same as disrespecting the country? Is California the same as Mississippi? Are psychedelics the same as heroin and meth? Is a blow job the same as sex? is cheating on a test? In college, for example, the same as cheating on your taxes? Are all religions the same? Is the Buddha the same as Christ? Are my two fingers that I'm holding up? The same? Are you the same as a Nazi? Are you the same as you were five years ago? 20 years ago? Are you the same as you were five seconds ago? Are all actualized.org videos the same? Is every hydrogen atom in the universe the same? Is reality the same as illusion? Or fantasy? Is God the same as the devil? is good? The same as evil? Am I the same as you? Is nothing the same as something? That's it. That's the whole pop quiz. Now, I should have warned you. I guess from the very beginning. Some of these might have been trick questions. Maybe all of these were trick questions. So let's go back and take a look at just what we have on our hands here. These are some very fascinating questions. So first, what we have is Coke and Pepsi. Are these two the same? Or are they different? Of course, it all depends on your point of view, doesn't it? For someone who's a connoisseur of soda, the way that maybe I was when I was a teenager, I used to drink a lot of soda. I haven't for probably a decade. And I used to drink a lot of coke. I loved my coke. I was a coke loyalist. I would drink a couple of cans of this stuff every single day. It's one of the things that made me fat. And I would hate Pepsi. absolutely hate it. In fact, if I was brought a Pepsi at a restaurant, let's say sometimes you order a coke and the waitress to her. The difference isn't as big as it is to us. So she'll just bring you some soda, the closest thing to coke even if they don't have Coke, and you say Coke, she'll just bring you a Pepsi. And then you drink it and you're like you What is this? I asked for a coke. And then you you get her to come up and say what's wrong with this coke and she's Oh, we only serve Pepsi products at this restaurant. And then, I mean, I'm thinking in my mind, well, if you would have told me that from the very get go, I wouldn't have even ordered it because I don't want to drink this nasty Pepsi. That's how it tasted to me. And then you know for other people, they they're not very discriminating between soda. And for them colas. Just call Although whether it's a Coke or Pepsi or some Walmart branded non, you know, generic brand Cola, it doesn't matter to them some homemade cola doesn't matter. But for someone who really likes their Coke, you know, they need Coke, they need the original classic coke. And it's interesting because you know, on the one hand, of course, they clearly appear different, different colors, different looking cans. On the other hand, the CANS also look very similar, same shape, same size. In fact, if you look, they have the exact same number of, of liquid in here, it's 473 milliliters. They both contain basically the same ingredients, like carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel color, sugar, various kinds of phosphoric acid, citric acid, caffeine, and so forth, natural flavorings. But of course, they're not identical, right? Because that's why they have a different flavor, different, different taste. And in fact, if you look carefully at the ingredient lists, even though they're very similar, they're still a little bit different. The ordering of some ingredients is different, which tells you that the quantities the relative quantities are different. And actually, the Pepsi, this can of Pepsi has 200 calories, whereas this can of Coke has 160 calories. So this half tell us calories. So are they the same? Or are they different? I mean, they're both cola. So in that sense, they're the same, but they're different kinds of cola. And they're certainly very different from Sprite, or Mountain Dew or some other kind of soft drink. But then again, if we think about all the possible different drinks that a human being can drink, like alcohol, fruit juice, even inedible things like poison and liquid mercury, and all this sorts of bad stuff that you definitely wouldn't want to drink, or just water. These two sodas are certainly much more similar than they are to any of those other kinds of drinks. But it gets even trickier. This question, because look at this are these two colas, two Cokes? Are they the same? Now you're very tempted to say yes, of course they're the same. But if they're the same, how can I have one over here on the left, and one on the right. After all, they are two different cans, they're located at two different positions in space, I can drink one of them throw it away, the other one will still remain. This one technically has a different number of atoms in it, than this one does different volumes. So even though it says on here, 473 milliliters on both cans. If we go down to the decimal points to the 10s, hundreds and 1000s of the death decimal point of a milliliter, we'll see that these are not equivalent cans. And if we look closely at these cans, these cans aren't perfect. They have dents and scratches in them. Look, I can clearly see some dents and scratches and stuff in this can. And in this can. And in fact, they have different expiration dates on them slightly different. So again, are they the same? Or are they different? Are you starting to see how maybe some sameness and difference can be a matter of perspective, more so than a matter of objective fact. In fact, think about this, there's probably a billion cans of Coca Cola right now in existence around the entire planet. And even though you might say they're all the same, let's say we're talking about just one flavor of coke, Coke Classic, they're still probably a billion cans in the world. But are they really the same? Or are they really all different. In fact, they're all different because they all exist in a different location in space. All around the world. There are different temperatures. They, they technically each have a different number of molecules in them even though the ingredients are basically all the same, but you can't have precisely the same measurements down to the to the micron measurement level have all the same ingredients in each can. So technically every can is unique and every can has its own imperfections flaws, manufacturing flaws, scratches, dents, and so forth. Even if you count the number of bubbles of carbonation in this cam versus this can, you will find a different number of bubbles. This tan might have a billion bubbles, and this might have a billion in one bubbles making a difference. What about the question of is gold the same as silver? Well, you might say, of course the other, they're totally different. But then again, they're very similar because they're both elements. They're both precious metals. They're both used in jewelry. They're both mined with heavy machinery. They are both the good electrical conductors, and are used in circuitry and other kinds of electronics for that purpose. Even though gold's a little better than silver. They're both elements on the periodic table. Now, you might say Leo, but they're but the elements that's like so fundamental elements are what constitutes difference. Gold is a different element than silver. That's why it's different. On the other hand, we can zoom in even further and we can say, well, what's an elephant made out of? It's just made out of protons, neutrons and electrons. So in that sense, literally, gold and silver are the same, because they're both made out of those three subatomic particles. And if you want to zoom in even further, we can zoom in to the cork level. And we can say they're, they're all made out of quarks. Or we can zoom in even further, if you believe in string theory, you can say they're all strings. And in that sense, gold and silver are the same. Is an ant the same as an elephant? Well, at first glance, you'll say, well, that's preposterous. How can you even compare the two, and he asked is this small an elephant is, is this big. But then again, they shared a lot of similarities. They're both living creatures. They're both carbon based life forms. They both have DNA. They're made out of eukaryotic cells. Each of these cells contains the same organelles, mitochondria, and ribosomes, and all the stuff you learned in biology class, these are all similar between ants and elephants. In fact, I'm not really sure what the similarity of their genome is. But I would bet it's somewhere around like 50%, probably 50% of ants DNA is similar to an elephant's DNA. They both have legs, they both have eyes. They both have other kinds of perceptions. I assume both of them can can smell, I think ants can smell, they can smell, there's pheromones and so forth, just like elephants do. I'm not sure if ants can hear, they probably can hear vibrations or sense vibrations, just like elephants can. They both have a nervous system, they both have neurons. They both have brains, even though the ants brain is very tiny. It's still there. They have a nervous system. They both probably see in color. Not the same color, but in color. So you could imagine since they both have eyes, they can both die. They're both alive. So look how much they have in common. And you thought an ant and health that were different? No, they're the same. Look how much they have in common. We can keep talking, I can talk for a whole hour about the similarities between ants and elephants. And after all, you know it's it's relative, it depends what you compare it to because like if I tell you to compare an elephant to something like the color blue, well, now that's a lot more different than comparing an elephant to an ant. Because the color blue isn't even a living thing. It's not even a creature. It's some sort of I don't know what blue is, what is blue, it's a color. It's an abstract concept. It's not an elephant, not an animal. It's not even alive. You know, certainly, if you compare an elephant to a Coke, it's very different than an ant compared to that elephant. How about a chimpanzee and a human being? Are they the same? Well, if you look at the science, science will tell you chimpanzee has about 98 plus percent similarity in the genome to a human being. But a lot of people get offended by this notion that chimpanzees are the same as humans. It's like no, Leo, we need to there's no there's no way humans are like chimpanzees. What are you talking about? Humans were God's chosen creatures and chimpanzees are just like apes in the forest. How dare you compare me to a chimpanzee? What are you saying? Are you saying I'm primitive? Are you saying I'm ugly? Are you trying to be racist? What are you saying, calling me a chimpanzee? See people people need to differentiate themselves from a chimpanzee. Isn't that interesting? Why do people feel that need to do so? A lot of fundamentalist Christians around the country around the world take great offense at comparing humans to chimpanzees, or that humans evolved from apes or share a common ancestor with chimpanzees. Now, of course, science doesn't say that humans evolved from chimpanzees it says we have a common share. ancestral. But even that idea is very disturbing to people. Might there be something hidden behind that? triggering? getting triggered by that? Yeah, maybe we'll get to that a little bit further in the episode. But I mean, look at the similarities between humans in humans. We're about the same size. We have the we both have 10 fingers and 10 toes. We have hearts. We're both mammals. We're both. We're both born in the same way. We have the almost identical nervous systems. We have eyes, ears, nose, a mouth, the tongue, teeth, or teeth are very similar. We both have grasping hands, we have opposable thumbs, we can both use tools. There's so much that we have in common we both have hair. We both care about our young. We both live in, in tribes. And actually, there's a lot to be learned about the the deep similarities between chimpanzees and humans, there's actually primatologists who spend their whole lives studying the similarities between chimpanzees and humans, and drawing various profound psychological and sociological lessons for us. And I actually have a book on my book list that that is written by a famous primatologist, which compares humans and chimpanzees. And that's a very profound book, you read that book, it completely changes your understanding of humans, because you realize, oh, my god, humans are just like apes in tuxedos, that's all we are. Walking around with briefcases thinking we're so sophisticated. But really, our behaviors are so similar. humans and chimps get scared by the by the same things get angered by similar types of things. We both get jealous, we both cause violence to each other, we both go attack each other and start small wars with each other. If we're in tribes, there's tribal warfare within chimpanzees. So there's a there's a lot of similarity in the psychology of a chimp and an a human. But, but see, the more this similarity gets shared with people, some people get even more offended by this, because they don't like it when it's pointed out to them that they're basically just behaving like a dump, like a dumb ape. But in fact, that's what's happening. Most people are walking around like chimps do and chimp stuff, just, of course, we have more technology, we have more sophisticated language and, and all this we dress nicer. We have nice cars. chimps don't have that stuff. But but you could imagine if chips did and they would act or similar to the way that we act and handle all this technology, and all this, all this luxury that we've developed. So you see very interesting how these differences and similarities play out. Is an acorn the same as an oak tree? Well, you might say, How can you compare them an acorn is this big and oak oak tree is huge. But then again, literally, an oak tree comes from an acorn, they literally have the same DNA. In fact, you can't get an oak tree without first having an acorn. One is necessary for the other. So look at how similar they are. And yet you think of them as being so different. How dare you? How about a child as a child the same as an adult, where this is kind of similar to the acorn, an oak question. You might say, well, of course, Leo, as an adult, I'm not a child. I've outgrown all my childish ways, children are silly, and their ignorance, and they're smelly, and they're loud, and they're dirty, and they're noisy, and bla bla bla bla bla. But then again, as an adult, what are you but just a big child? That kid that was in you, when you were a child, that's still there and you now in fact, most of what you're doing in your adult life is just acting out. Stuff that you were as a child, you're still dealing with the same issues, you haven't really outgrown them. You're just a big man, child, or woman child. And when I say manchild, it makes me think of Donald Trump because that's what he is. I mean, look at what he's doing. He's just acting out the same childish impulses that he was for the last seven years of his life hasn't really grown a bit. And yet, adults like to think of themselves as so different from children. Is abortion the same as murder? Well, probably about a third of the country in America would say yes, abortion is no different than murder. You're killing a human being, on the other hand, are a clump of cells is an embryo really a human being? What counts the human be and who decides that I could take some cells from the tip of my finger some living cells and kill them. And I could take more cells than there would be killed in aborting a very early embryo. And yet, you probably wouldn't say that that's killing a human even though they're human cells. So how are you drawing these lines? At what point is murder really murder? And by that logic is, is it murder when you ejaculate? And don't create a baby? Is it murder when a female just has an unfertilized egg that just goes out with her menstrual cycles that murder? I mean, that's a potential baby. I mean, that's your argument for saying that abortion is murder, you're saying well, that would have been a potential human. And of course, you're right, that would have been, but then again, every time you ejaculate, that would be a potential host of babies, and every month that a woman has her menstrual cycle, there it goes, one more baby. You're killing a baby. So are these the same? Are they different? Who's to say? Who gets to say, is there a law written somewhere? Somewhere in the universe, there's like, a database of all the laws of the universe, which includes gravity, and Einstein's equations for relativity equals MC square, the gravitational constant, all this stuff. And then somewhere there's another law that says, if you abort an embryo at two weeks old, then it's murder. Otherwise, if it's early than that, and it's not, is there such a law? Is beheading a chicken the same as beheading a human being? Now, of course, many people say, Leo, how can you compare them a chicken and human being? I mean, these are totally different. A human's life is worth 1000s, or maybe even millions of chickens lives. And after all, we eat chickens all the time, we need to eat food to live and we chickens. But on the other hand, you might have some vegan or some vegetarian, saying, yes, Leah, what is the difference between beheading a chicken and a human? I mean, after all, they're both living creatures, they both have a nervous system, chickens nervous system is fairly complex. A chicken is not that far away from a human being on the evolutionary ladder. And it's a complex life form, and it suffers it has feelings and emotions. And if you would, if you would have been around a chicken yourself, personally, you would see that you would get an emotional attachment to the chicken like you do if you had a pet chicken, and then you would you definitely not want to behead it. And that really is like murdering human. What's the difference? I mean, what's the difference? Is there? Is there a law somewhere in the universe that says killing humans is wrong, but killing chickens is okay. I mean, how selfish would that be? Why would the universe save our human lives? Over chickens lives? Does that make any sense? So are they really different? Are these same? are identical twins the same? You would say? Well, Lee, oh, yes, of course, identical twins must be the same. By definition, they look the same. And they even have the same personalities that we can, we can see from the psychological studies, they literally have the same DNA. So that's as similar as you can get. But then again, they're still not the same. Take a look at two identical twins, and they live their own different lives. Sure, they might have a lot of similarities. They might even like have the same kind of job, but not literally the same job. They don't literally have the same wife, or husband. They don't literally do everything the same. They still dress different and so forth. Unless you're specifically coordinating that, which I certainly don't do us adult. So even identical twins are actually different. Are they? Otherwise it would just be one person? Is your child the same as you say, Well, how could my child be the same as me? Clearly, my child is not me. And yet, you can look into your child's face and you can see yourself right there in your child's face. It's almost as though you're literally part of your child. And in fact, if you're honest, isn't the only reason that you love your child, because they're the same as you. And you perceive that as such. What if you found out that your child wasn't actually your child? Would you still feel the same? Would you still love that child? If you're really honest, you'll admit that out Actually your love for your children is really not much more than the genetic similarity that you think exists between you. Because, look, there's billions of children all around the world that you don't give a shit about. There's millions of starving children in Africa that you don't care anything about. And many people, they could travel to Africa, they can see those kids there. And they will say, Well, yeah, but look, they're their dirty, poor, mangy black kids, or Hispanic kids or some other kinds of kids around the world, third world countries. I mean, they're just yeah, they're just like animals, they're subhuman. They're not the same as me. They're not the same as my child. But then against some other people, they can travel to those exact same countries. And they can look at that mangy child who's a different ethnicity than them, and they can literally see themselves in the child's eyes. And some people say, well, that's diluted Lea, that's diluted, because that child isn't really theirs. But then again, all human beings have almost identical DNA. We are so closely related as human beings, that you might almost consider us as one large extended family that just interbreed with itself. That's how close we are. We are not that many generations apart. Like ever, I forget exactly what the number was. But there was, there was some profound number that I read where it said like that, every human like, if you meet, if you meet a random human being from another country, the chances of you being related to that human being by like a factor of let's say, 2%, are actually enormously high. So like, literally every human being on this planet is related to every other human being on this planet. Because we share a common ancestor just like 100 or 1000 generations ago, literally, we all came from the same grandmothers and grandfathers. And yet, for some people, that doesn't matter, they'll still look at that mangy kid and they'll say no different race, different ethnicity, different country, not my kid. Don't care about them at all. So who's right? Is Monday the same as Friday? Leo, how dare you even compare these two? If you work a standard nine to five job, then you might feel that way. Because you'll say all Friday, Friday is the best day. I love that day. Thank goodness, it's Fridays. I get to have fun. It's casual Friday. I have a whole weekend off. It's great. Well as Mondays I hate Mondays have to go back to work. The whole week is ahead of us that to answer emails and do all this sort of stuff. Mondays are boring and tedious. But then again, Mondays and Fridays are both work days. They're both days of the week. Like after all, I could have compared Friday to an ostrich. That would have been a radically different comparison. Friday compared to an ostrich they don't have that much in common but Monday compared to Friday, look how much they have in common. Is $999,999.99 the same as a million? Well, many people say yes, does matter. One penny difference, Leah, what difference does a penny make? And yet, depending on the circumstance, a penny can make all the difference in the world. For example, if you are making a digital purchase and you're transferring some money to some store using some shopping cart, in let's say you're buying something for a million dollars, will that shopping cart accept one penny shy of the actual buying price? No, it will reject your purchase. So in that case, one penny will make the difference between you buying that thing and not for example, if you're bidding on an auction, like let's say on eBay, you're buying I don't know what would cost a million dollars, some super rare baseball card or something. Then or some really fancy car, maybe some collector's car, and the asking price. The final price is a million, but you bid one penny shy of a million. Are you gonna get that car? No, you're gonna lose your favorite car. Somebody else and if you're a giant business, who's doing 1000s millions of transactions every single day let's say your giant company like Coca Cola for you a penny makes all the difference in the world. You know if the price of a Coca Cola went up by one penny That would mean, probably billions in additional revenue for Coca Cola, it would be very significant. So it's all about what contexts you put it in, and how you look at it, then again, you know, if you're just transferring some money between friends, like let's say you need to transfer $1,000, to your, to your mom or your dad to help them out with paying some of their bills. Does it matter if you transfer to them? $909 or $1,000? Is that $1? Going to make a difference to them? No. Doesn't make any difference? Is English the same as Chinese? Well, first, you might say, Well, yeah, of course, Lea, you couldn't have picked two more dissimilar languages. Right, but I could have compared English to an ostrich. Now those would be quite different. English and Chinese have a lot in common, a lot more than you might initially think. They both have verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, they basically have almost the same kinds of words, you can say almost any sentence in English, and also saying that exact same sentence in Chinese. And even if you found a situation where you couldn't, you could just invent some new Chinese character, some new Chinese words, to stand in for those English words. And if you compare English to something like Navajo, that it's very different. Because Navajo has a radically different grammar than English. And even then Chinese. In fact, the Americans in World War Two specifically relied on Navajo to encode their secret military messages. Because Navajo is one of the most radically distinct language groups separate from the Indo European languages, and even the Asiatic languages, the Chinese and Japanese and Korean and so forth. And it's so different. And it's so difficult to learn for, for indo Europeans and for for Asians, that like the grammar, the way it works is so different that actually you have to think radically differently just to use that language. And so it makes perfect encoding language. And in fact, from what I understand the Germans and the Japanese in World War Two, I don't, I don't think they were able to actually decipher Navajo, because they didn't have the native interpreters because the only people who knew Navajo were Native Americans who were in America. So isn't that interesting. On the other hand, English and Chinese are very different, because they don't have any of the same letters in common, like English and French are much more similar, or English and German than English and Chinese. is the number five the same as the number 25. They also want to hear you've gone too far. Obviously, these are different, how can these two numbers be the same. But then again, they're both numbers, I could have compare number five to an ostrich. And that would have been quite an interesting comparison. But they're both numbers. They're both odd. They're both whole numbers, they are both able to divide the number 100. The number 100 is divisible by five and by 25. In fact, 25 is divisible by five and 25 is just five times five, five groups of five equal 25. So they have so much in common. In fact, if you wanted to, you could devote the rest of your life, the next 60 years of your life could be devoted to tallying up the similarities between the number five and the number 25. And that list would not end it would keep going and going and going. In fact, I want you to consider something very profound, which is that this list is infinitely long. There is an infinitely long list of similarities between the number five and 25. And also, there's an infinitely long list of differences between the number five and the number 25. So out of those two lists, which ones do you select, which ones do you focus on? You see how tricky this is. It's not nearly as simple as you thought. Is the idea of an elephant the same as an elephant. Now, you might say, Leo, how could they possibly be the same? They're completely different. And ideas are something in your head if an elephant is actually real. There it is. But then again, I could have compared the idea of an elephant to an ostrich, in which case they would have been much more different because at least the idea of an elephant has a resemblance to an elephant. In fact, many people confuse often confused their ideas of elephants with to actual elephants, oftentimes people neglect to make a distinction between the their ideas of something and the thing itself. I can start talking to you about pizza and how delicious pizza is. And all this is just going to be ideas, but I can talk to you and all the juicy details about this slice of pizza, such that you can actually mistake is for the real thing, and you're gonna get hungry by it and all that. And all that is just gonna be a mental image in your mind. So clearly, there's a similarity, there's a deep similarity between your idea of an elephant and an actual elephant. In fact, that's what allows you to be able to use this idea to represent the elephant in the first place. Now, it's also possible to represent an elephant with an ID of an ostrich. Now that takes a little bit more work, that's an extra level of abstraction. But you can do it, you can actually program your mind, every time you think of an image of an ostrich that actually what that is, is that's not referring to an ostrich, but that's referring to an elephant. And you can do that. In fact, that's how you learn language in the very beginning. Our men and women the same, oh, this is a really hot button issue, especially these days, people like to make a big deal about how different men and women are. But that, again, there's so much in common that men and women have, I mean, we have the same basic DNA, we're of the same species. We both have hair, and nails and fingers. And we basically have the exact same organs. And we can basically do the same things. But then again, we also have differences. We have different ways. We think we have different psychologies, we have different things that we're sexually attracted to. And some of us are masculine, some of us are feminine, and, and so forth. So which is true, our men really different for women, are they the same? Are all human beings the same? That's also a hot button issue. A lot of people get triggered by that issue. You know, the liberals will say All human beings are basically the same. And then the conservatives will criticize a liberal say, Oh, those liberals are so stupid. They they lump all human beings together, but really every human being is unique and different. Who's right? Could it be that it's a matter of perspective? And that there is no such thing as an objective answer to this question, in a way that most people think, See, most people just assume that these answers have objective questions. I'm sorry, these these questions have objective answers. And what I'm trying to get you to maybe start to open your mind to is the possibility that maybe they don't. Maybe reality doesn't actually know whether all human beings are the same, or whether they're all different. After all, how would reality know the difference? We'll get back to that. We'll talk about that. And science a little bit later in this episode. are Republicans the same as Democrats? You might think, well, Leo, they're so different. How could you put them in the same category? They're like almost the opposites. But then again, they're both Americans. They're both part of the same political system, part of the same government. Many Republicans and Democrats agree on exactly the same issues. They'll vote for the exact same policies. But then again, they're also quite different, and not necessarily different in equal ways. And then you might zoom in further just on Democrats. And you might say, are Democrats all the same? And of course, tool Republican. Democrats are all the same. They'll say, Yeah, well, Democrats are just social justice warrior, Marxists, socialists. But of course, if you ask a Democrat, the Democrat is going to be a lot more discerning about fellow Democrats. And to a Democrat. Not all Democrats are going to be socialists. There are some very progressive Democrats who will be considered socialists, and then there will be some centrist Democrats who a Democrat would consider more Republican than a Democrat. And the issues that Democrats and Republicans care about, they're basically the same issues. They both care about earning a good wage. They both care about taxation. They both care about their families. They both care about having access to employment. They both care about health care, they care about all these things. They have a lot of things in common. They're both human beings. I mean, I could have compared a Republican to an ostrich is Trump the same as George Washington. So Leah, now you've gone too far for sure. How could you possibly compare Trump to George Washington? They're nothing alike. And I would tend to agree with you. But of course, they do have so much alike. They're both human beings. They're part of the same species. Did you know that George Washington was one of the richest US presidents of all time, of course, you have to account for inflation. Of course, Trump likes to lie about as well, we don't really know how wealthy he is. But even if even even under the worst line conditions, Trump is still gotta give him credit for being relatively wealthy. As far as presidents go, and politicians go. And they have many other things in common. In fact, you could spend the next 60 years as a historian and researcher doing research on all the commonalities between George Washington and Trump. Of course, you could also spend 60 years doing a careful study of all their differences. So which are you going to select what you're going to focus on? Are US drone strikes the same as terrorism? Now, many Americans would object to that characterization, say, Leo, how dare you even compare terrorism to drone strikes? I mean, the United States does drone strikes in the name of good in the name of democracy, the name of freedom and, and against the terrorists, we're fighting the terrorists with these drone strikes. It's not terrorism, it's counterterrorism. But, you know, you can actually go and read and watch documentaries of people in Afghanistan and other places like that, where these drone strikes occur, who are literally terrorized every night, by the prospect of a drone strike accidentally hitting them. And there have been 1000s of civilians. I'm not talking about terrorists, I'm talking about civilians, innocent civilians, children, women, families, husbands, you know, people haven't done anything wrong. And their lives, they're already living a very tough existence in that country. You know, lots of poverty, they're difficult conditions to raise a family and, and now these people have to worry, and they have to watch the skies, and they have dreams that their children will get hit accidentally by one of these drone strikes, literally that terrorize them. If that's not the definition of terrorism, what is then again, of course, the United States is not deliberately killing the civilians. At least we like to think so. So what's the difference? What's the similarity? Maybe depends on how you look at it. is taking a knee during a football game at the national anthem. Is that disrespecting America? Well, a lot of people would say, yes, it is. Because you're supposed to stand up and hold your hand over your heart and all this. And if you're not doing that, you're disrespecting the country. Then again, a lot of people would say, well, but this is like the most respectful form of protests that there could possibly be. I mean, a disrespectful world protest would be like, if the guy took off his pants, and showed his ass to the camera. That would be disrespectful. But taking a knee, come on, that's not disrespectful. That's actually a very respectful form of protest. And then, of course, the people disagree with each other vehemently, thinking the other side is dead wrong. Is California the same as Mississippi? And Missouri, Leo? How could you compare these two California, Mississippi, so different, but then again, they're both in America, they're both states. They have similar kinds of governments. They have similar kinds of policies, similar, very similar kinds of laws, almost all the same laws in California, then apply in Mississippi, a murder in Mississippi is going to count as a murder in California, a theft and a theft, they're both going to count like, probably 90% of all their laws are very, very similar. And in fact, you could drive around in Mississippi with a California driver's license, and vice versa. And, in fact, you could live a very similar kind of lifestyle in both those places. But then again, of course, they're also very different. They're different politically, they're different, which presidents they vote for? They're different geographically, they're different in terms of temperature, and all sorts of stuff. Which are you going to focus on? Are psychedelics the same as heroin and meth? Well, a lot of people think so a lot of people lump those together in the same category and, and that's why they they hate and they demonize psychedelics. But then of course, if you've done psychedelics, you realize just how different they are from something like heroin or meth. Is a blow job the same as sex. Well, that very much depends on what, what, what side of the line you're on. Because like, let's say you're a teenager or something, and your parents tell you not to have sex. So of course, maybe you get a blow job. thinking to yourself, well blow jobs not really sex. And if they catch you, then you say, Well, I didn't have sex, I just had a blow job. Or let's say you're one of those fundamentalist Christians who believes that it's immoral to have sex before marriage. So you're saving yourself. But hey, blow jobs don't count a sex, I can have all the blow jobs I want until I'm married. And then, and then I can have sex and blow jobs. See, so very much depends on kind of where where your agenda lies on that one is cheating on a test the same thing as cheating on taxes? Well, you probably think they're quite different. I mean, what is cheating on a test had to do cheating on taxes. One is a crime cheating on your taxes, you can go to jail for that cheating on a test. That's not very serious. Probably most students have cheated on a test at least once or twice in their life. But then again, they're both forms of cheating. And fundamentally, a cheater is a cheater. Cheating is not a particular activity. Cheating is an attitude, it's a frame of mind. And I would bet good money that there's a positive correlation between people who cheat on their tests, and people who cheat on their taxes. Because a cheater is cheater. Then again, there are many people who would just cheat on a test, but never cheat on their taxes, because they draw a clear distinction between those two. And they see that, you know, cheating on taxes, that's a really serious offense, both legally speaking, but also just morally, because when you're cheating on your taxes, what you're actually doing is you're basically just stealing money from public coffers. Whereas when you cheat on a test, you're not, you're not really hurting anybody. But then again, if you're cheating on an important test, let's say a test that determines whether you're gonna go to Harvard or not, like an essay t test. And let's say by cheating on this test, you got a perfect score on this a T, and therefore now that allows you to go to Harvard, whereas otherwise you wouldn't? Well, there's a very limited number of slots at Harvard every year. So you literally stole someone else's chance to go to Harvard by cheating on this test. So that's pretty serious. You've changed someone's life by doing that. Are all religions the same? Well, a lot of scientifically minded and historically minded rationally minded people. So yeah, Leah, all religions are just all fantasy myths, nonsense stories, fairy tales, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, that's all it basically is just delusion. Really. Look at all the differences you see within religion. Somebody differences, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims? Are they really all the same? Are they different? How about we look at just the Christians, or the Christians all the same? You might say all the Christians are all the same. If you think that go to Wikipedia, and type in List of Christian denominations, you will get a list of Christian denominations, that is like 10 pages long, which has probably 200 different Christian denominations on their listing every percentage by the millions of each version of Christian you Baptists and Anglicans, and, and Roman Catholics and Protestants and evangelicals and Orthodox Christians, Eastern Orthodox and, and then sub denominations and sub sub sub denominations and all that. So what are they all the same? Are they different? Are all Baptists the same? If you ask a Baptist are all Baptist the same? What do you think they would tell you? No. They will make fine distinctions between different kinds of Baptists like, Oh, I hate those Baptists over there that Baptist churches is full of, of evil Baptists, and we're the good Baptists over here is the Buddha the same as Christ. And for this one, I have a really funny story. I came back from Hawaii. This was maybe half a year ago, after a meditation retreat there. A good retreat, lots of deep insights and awakening experiences. And I'm driving back from the airport, my taxi drivers driving me back home. And, and we're just chatting in the in the car in his taxi. And he asked me, Oh, where are you from? What are you doing? I'm like, oh, yeah, I just got back from a long retreat in Hawaii. I'm glad to be back. And then he's like, Oh, well, meditation. What is meditation? What is meditation? I mean, this guy was, you know, he wasn't into self help. He wasn't into spiritual. He didn't know anything about this sort of stuff. So I'm trying to explain to him what meditation is. So I tell him well, meditation, I just basically sat there for a week and did nothing and I just kind of sat in a room for 12 hours and just like stared at the wall. That's meditation. And I tried to clear my mind thought. And he's like, like, that's what you do. Are you serious? Is that what you did? Are you joking with me? I'm like, No, that's I'm serious. That's what I did for whole week. And he's like, that's, that's, that's crazy. Why would you do such a thing? If he and then he's like, if I, if I had to sit alone in a room for a whole week, my mind would just be nagging me all the time coming up with all sorts of crazy thoughts and ideas. And I'm like, Yeah, that's exactly the point is to calm your mind with meditation. And to him, this was such a foreign concept. And he's like, God, what's the point of the book? What's the point? Why, why empty your mind? Why would you want an empty mind? Just this amused me so much. And I'm thinking about how to explain this to him. And I'm like, Well, you can have profound mystical experiences. After many days of emptying your mind, you can have awakening experiences. And I'm trying to explain this to him. But he doesn't know what awakening is what enlightenment is, I have to find a way to explain it to him. So I asked him, hey, you know, are you religious? Because I know I can. I can relate this to him if he's religious. And he's like, Yeah, I'm a Christian. And he was actually I think he was Ethiopian. And Ethiopia, Christianity ism. It's one of the few Northern African countries that that Christianity is big in other places, and it's more Muslims, but historically, it was Christianity. So he's a Christian. And I'm like, okay, so you believe in Christ and the message of Christ? And he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I do. I go, I paraded in church and all this every Sunday, blah, blah, blah. And like, well, then, you know, you know what I'm talking about? What was the central teaching of Christ? It was that you could awaken. You could have enlightenment, you can become like Christ, by doing these practices, and what what was Christ really teaching? He was teaching you meditation? What is prayer really about? It's not about asking God for gifts and stuff. Prayer is calming your mind. So that you can silence your mind and actually merge with God and realize your own Christhood your own Christ nature. And he's like, Yeah, I guess. But what does that have to do with meditation? Isn't meditation, like, something Buddhists do? Isn't that like the Buddha? That's not Christ. And I tell him, yeah, that's the Buddha, Christ Buddha, same thing. Buddha nature, Christ nature. And he and this, and I will never forget this, this made me laugh so hard. And also this was so eye opening for me about just how difficult it is to communicate these ideas. This is exactly what he said to me, he said, but isn't the Buddha evil. And I just started laughing and laughing and laughing. Because he as a Christian, he was taught that Buddhism is just some devil worship cult. And it has nothing to do with Christianity, because what Christianity is interested in is differentiating itself, from Buddhism and Hinduism, and all the other religions. So of course, what it does it demonizes all the other ones. And that prevents people from actually seeing the deep interconnectedness between all of religions, and what is really being taught. And realizing ultimately, when you have this union for yourself, in your direct experience, that you are none other than the Buddha, and the Buddha is none other than Christ. That's a very profound realization. Are my two fingers the same? They look the same. But actually, they're mere copies of each other. But of course, they're not even copies because each one is unique. different hair, different, different freckles, different scars, different cells. There's a there's very complex stuff going on in each one of these fingers. In fact, that could ask you this, is this finger right now? The same as this finger right now. You might think so but how? How could they be the same? You know that there's billions of cells and blood cells, oxygen, chemicals and stuff flowing through this finger every second, all the blood that was there has already flown out new blood has flown in. It's changing. It's growing. It's aging, it's actually slowly dying. All the cells get replaced this finger, you might think it's the same finger that I've had my whole life. But really, every single molecule in this finger has been replaced over my entire lifetime. So how is it really the same? Which brings us to the even larger question. Are you the same as you were five years ago? or 20 years ago? Or hell, even five seconds ago, are you the same? Are you the same as you were? When you started watching this episode listening to me, I've already filled your mind with all these crazy new ideas that you never thought before. already. If you believe in the scientific materialist model, your brain has changed by just the things that I told you in the last five seconds. So you're always different. And yet you still think you're the same, you still fundamentally feel like you're the same thing that was born 2030 4050 years ago, and that that's you? Why do you feel that if you're different? Technically, you're different. So how can you say you're the same? Which is true? Are you technically different? Or are you the same? Who's to say? Are you the same as a Nazi? No, of course, people will immediately say, No, Leah, how, why? Why would I be a Nazi? I'm not an I'm not a neo Nazi. But that's not what I asked you. I asked you can you see the similarity between you and a Nazi? I mean, after all, Nazis, not some monster, a Nazi as a human being like you same species, same Oregon's same brain, same mind, same basic ideas. Pretty much the same value system is you people think Nazis have radically different values. No Nazis have almost the same values as you. Even if you're not calling yourself a Nazi, there's so much similarity between Nazis. To the point where, you know, people don't like being lumped together with Nazis. So of course, they're going to make all this effort to try to differentiate themselves from Nazis. But in doing that, that actually makes them very susceptible to then becoming a Nazi. Because to really understand Nazism, and the evils of it, and how to avoid it, you have to actually study the similarity between the Nazi mind and your own mind. And to see that actually, the kind of logic and reasoning and justifications that a Nazi would use to justify the kind of evils that they committed, every human mind is capable of every single one, don't care who you are, you could take a baby, and that baby's mind is capable of what that Nazi mind is capable of. Because at one point, that Nazi was also just to maybe it's just all a matter of how your mind gets programmed, what kind of ideologies gets fed to you, what you start to believe what your paradigm is, and then what kind of place you find yourself in life. And then you know, pretty soon you can start telling yourself that, hey, I was just following orders. Let's see if the ego doesn't like to be compared to Nazis. Because the ego loves to compare itself to the good guys, not the bad guy. So the ego, the ego will do everything possible to differentiate itself from the bad guy, the quote unquote bad guys. Are all actualised.org videos the same? Well, if you're a casual viewer of actualised.org, then you would say yes, of course Leo, you're you're just you're basically spouting the same shit. Enlightenment is self actualization that every single fucking week you're talking about. egos and, and this and suffering and religion and Buddha and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the same? Same gobbledygook. Same religious sounding mumbo jumbo. But then of course, if you're, if you're a discerning viewer, then you're thinking yourself, how can people even think that every video is unique, new topics are being covered new, profound insights and things that I never heard about before, even though I thought that I saw everything there was to see and heard everything there is to hear about self help. And then the next video comes out. And now it's something new, something different, something I never heard about before. How is this even possible? So which is? Is every hydrogen atom in the universe the same? Will on this one, he went to Hollywood? I got you now? This is a physical scientific question. And the answer is definitely that every hydrogen atom in the universe is the same. That's what physics tells us. Really, really? Or is every one of them different? If they were all the same? How could they be in different positions in the universe? So at the very least, they have different xyz coordinates. And also, the fourth dimension time, a different time coordinate, let's say? At the very least, you have to pause it that because if you didn't pause it that how could you distinguish one hydrogen atom from another one? So literally, every single hydrogen atom in the universe is different. But of course, they also share a lot of similarities too. You could swap one hydrogen atom for another hydrogen atom, and it probably wouldn't make a big difference to your scientific experiments, or to your technology. Is reality the same as illusion and fantasy? Well, you might say, Leo, that's totally different. What can illusion fantasy have to do with reality? It's the opposite. But then again, who's to tell? What is reality? What is fantasy? You assume there is such a thing as reality. And then anything that doesn't correspond to that is fantasy. What What if reality isn't like that? What if the nature of reality is that it's not distinct from illusion and fantasy? What if reality cannot tell the difference? between reality and fantasy? What if fantasy is the reality? After all, how would you distinguish the two? And you might say, well, Leo, we can clearly distinguish between something real, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But that's not my question. My question is that thing that you call real? How do you know that that itself is not an illusion? How do you know this hand right before your eyes right here is not an illusion. What would you use to distinguish between an illusion and reality? And that criterion that you're using to distinguish between reality and illusion? How do you know that itself? is not an illusion? See the problem there? It's a very deep problem. Think about Elon. Is God the same as the devil? The religious people say, Leo, how dare you even compare these two? Obviously, the devil is the opposite of God. But really isn't? Have you thought about this? Think about this. Set your dogmas and religious teachings, and just think about this? Very simply using common sense. What did they tell you? God is they told you God is infinite. They told you God is the Creator of everything. So did the devil not get created by God? If the devil was not created by God, then that means that God did not create everything. And then the question is, how did the devil come? Come into being? So if, if God didn't create the devil, that means the only possible other place the devil came from is God knows that the devil created himself. Right? But if the devil created himself, that means he has the power to create himself, which is the power that God has. So that means that the devil is God. So let's say though, that you say, Okay, well, let's say the devil didn't create himself. Let's say God created the devil. But Leah, that still doesn't mean that God is the devil. But they told you that God is infinite. If God is infinite, that means God is everything. There is nothing which God is not. That means that everything that God creates, is God itself. So no, no creation of Gods is separate from God. Which means that God is literally the devil. Interesting. is good, the same as evil. Now, again, here, we're gonna say, no, they're the opposite. But then again, it depends on who you are, and what position you're looking at it from. After all, what's good for one person is precisely evil for another person. And what's evil for another person is precisely good for another person. For example, a terrorist will think that blowing up some civilians is good. Whereas people looking from the outside of that situation will say that that's evil. So who is right? Be careful about just assuming that you're right. Because the terrorist is also just assuming that he's right. So again, who's right? Everybody feels there, right? So you can't just rely on your feelings of being right, to determine whether you're right or not. And after all, what's the difference between right and wrong? Is there a law in the universe that says that something is right, something is wrong? Or is that something that your own mind created? Am I the same as you? You might feel like we're very different. You might say, Leo, you're you're so intellectual. And you know so much stuff about self actualization, whereas me, I'm just getting started. I'm confused about this stuff. I have a hard time meditating, I have a hard time understanding some of these enlightenment concepts he talked about and so forth. And you might feel like we're very different. But over time, as you self actualize, and you gain more consciousness, you'll discover more and more just how similar you and I are, until maybe one day you will actually realize that I actually am you and that may be all that I am is just, you telling yourself to wake up. Wake up, wake up is nothing the same as something? Again, you might think nothing and something these are opposites. To have something is to have nothing, or is to have something is to not have nothing, and to have nothing is to not have something Well, you got to be careful about that. Because after all, nothing is nothing. And precisely because it's nothing, it could be hiding right under something. You see, the problem is that people assume that nothing is some empty void. Somewhere somewhere far outside of all of this reality. The opposite of this, it's what happens with all this gets destroyed. But what if nothing is precisely what is here right now? What if this is nothing? How do you know what nothing is supposed to feel like and look like? You assume it's supposed to look like an empty space? But how do you know it's not full of everything that you see around you? How do you know that the entire time that you've been alive, alive, from your very birth, all the way till now, all the stuff you went through all the suffering all the problems, all the emotions, all the ups and downs, the happiness, the sadness, the misery, the depression, the joy, the beauty, the love all of it? How do you know that all of that is not nothing? Who's to say that these things are distinct. So that's the quiz. I hope you start to see now how much depth there is told us a lot more than you probably imagined when we first started. And it's a lot more of a consequential topic. Notice, we touched upon a lot of hot button issues here, issue that have been debated by mankind for 1000s of years issues that men have killed each other over for 1000s of years, all because they get stuck arguing between a specific set of differences or similarities, and they get ideological about it. And they insist that they're right. Because they fail to see the relativity of what difference and similarity really are, they don't really understand the essence of what difference and similarity are, they just assumed that this is just sort of like a given reality short, just gives you a bunch of similarities and gives you bunch of differences. And there it is, it's just objective, it's just facts. You just look at the world, you see the differences, you see the similarities, and it's just obvious. And that's it. And if somebody doesn't agree with me, and doesn't see it, they're just stupid, they're deluded, they're crazy, they're criminal, and we lock them up, we got to exile them, or in the worst case, we got to execute them. And that's the mindset that we're questioning here. What I'm trying to get you to see is the relativity of thing. And relativity is too deep of a topic to fully elaborate on here, I'll have a separate episode about the future. But fundamentally, what relativity means is that it depends on your perspective. And what that means is, is that without a perspective, there's nothing there. So it's like that, that old saying that if a if a tree if a tree falls in the woods, and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? And the materials paradigm would say yes, of course, it makes a sound, there's just no one there to hear. And with relativity, the relativity paradigm tells you that not only does it not make a sound, there is no tree and there is no forest, if you are not there looking at it. That's relativity, but we'll get into that deeper in the future. So there's a lot of examples that we see happening all around our culture these days, in the news and in the media, which have directly to do with, with people not really being able to, to grasp sameness, the essence of sameness and difference. For example, we see lots of racism and xenophobia and ethnocentrism, race wars, what is this but people arguing over sameness in differences? A lot of times these differences are very petty, very petty differences, like differences in in melanin in the skin color. How about Israel and Palestine. They've been at each other's throats at each other's throats for a long time. And they consider themselves to be very different. But I'll bet you this, that if we had an alien race of Martians fly down tomorrow, and start to conquer the world, the Palestinians and the Israelis will start to get along just fine. They would find all sorts of similarities. They would start to go to the same schools and they would start to go to the same restaurants they start to integrate a tear down the walls because they have a larger difference. They have the aliens to fight against. And for them now, so it's a matter of survival. But then I'll bet you one more thing that as soon as the aliens were defeated, let's say we defeated the Aliens, the Palestinians and Israelis would again go back to being at each other's throats. Because again, there would now no longer be that external difference. So now the sameness they shared to overcome that larger difference, will now again get further subdivided into individual differences between Israelis and Palestinians. And I'll tell you this one further thing, once the Israelis and Palestinians maybe in 1000 years, once they finally get together and make peace and, and integrate and solve that whole issue in the Middle East. They will subdivide even further, this joint unit of Israel and Palestine will itself then find frappes factions and divisions within itself. And in fact, right now, within Israel, you can find divisions within Israel, different political factions and groups, some of them want to integrate, some of them don't. And same thing with the Palestinians. Wouldn't it be helpful to understand this sort of stuff if you're trying to overcome that conflict, and really find a lasting resolution and avoid all the violence and all the nonsense that goes on there? All the demagoguery and all the ideology? about Christianity versus Islam. Those likes to go out each other's throats as well, citing differences between each other, calling the other one evil. Without seeing the deep similarities between the two. How about capitalist versus socialist? Same sort of problem? How about the culture wars that we're seeing all over the place? Now? Same sort of problem? How about the Gender Wars, men versus women feminists versus the men's rights advocates? Same sort of problem. How about sexual harassment, the ME TOO movement, you see this, this sort of problem happening with the me to movement where some people lump too many different kinds of sexual harassment into one category. So they will, they will lump together rape and a pat on the butt with a crew dirty joke, or maybe some some awkward flirtation in by the watercooler at the office, right, those are, those are quite distinct things. And yet, they're all They're all lumped together. On the other hand, it's also important to recognize that there is a common element, there's a deep sameness between all of these individual cases, in that we have a cultural problem, in that men in general tend to have a lack of sensitivity, about how they pursue sex with women, especially the workplace. And men do abuse, their power, and their position their privilege, to to try to get sex, and sometimes, you know, it can be very light stuff. But sometimes it can escalate to something as as ridiculous as whipping your dick out uninvited at a restaurant or something like that, or in a hotel, corridor. And so it is very important that we also recognize the commonalities and that we say, hey, as a culture, we need to think about reforming some of this stuff. Because you know, I don't want my daughter growing up in a world like that. You want your daughter to grow up, and we're like that. How about science versus religion, this is also one of those hot button issues that gets debated the atheists versus the Christians, or it's the, the evolutionary scientists versus the creationists, and so forth. And they go back and forth. And they, they and it's all it all has to do with sameness, as in differences. The scientists love to emphasize the difference between science and religion. But as I'll say, a little bit later in this episode, that's that difference is not always as great as they like to believe. So what is sameness? And what is difference? Like, really? What are they? And here I want you to start to contemplate, and I don't want you to just speculate. And to come up with theories, what I want you to do is I want you to take two objects in your direct experience right now. Like this finger and this finger, take them in your direct experience, look at them. And notice, train your consciousness on these fingers. And notice first of all, that they're different, but also that they're similar and the same. And I want you to kind of focus your your consciousness back and forth between those two and as you're doing that also bring in a sort of meta consciousness, a meta awareness of what you're doing, and try to get a sense of like, what is difference and what is sameness. I'm not just asking you what's the difference between one thing or another finger? I'm asking you what is the difference? P Read difference between any two objects. What is that? And what is the sameness between any two objects? What is that this is the sort of a higher level, second level abstraction from one particular difference. And don't go too fast here, let yourself really slowly just train your consciousness on it resists speculating, or theorizing or bring in any kind of scientific explanations and just go with your direct experience, the answer is right there in your direct experience and nowhere else. So of course, you can try that now you can pause the video and try this now. But really, it's not gonna be enough for you to try for five minutes. This, this needs some serious work. So I'm just, I'm putting this out there. And as your homework assignment for the next week, you will be practicing this. And you can try different objects, you can compare your finger to a pen, to a pencil to a car to a cat or whatever. In fact, I also want to want you to try the following exercise, I want you to try to think of two things, which are as utterly radically different as you could possibly imagine. So as an example, what might happen, you might think of like a donkey, and a car. Those seem quite different. Okay, so let's say that that's your answer. But then I want you to ask, but how are they still similar. And you'll quickly notice that actually a donkey and a car are similar. They're both used as vehicles, they're both transportation devices, they can both be used to, to lug around cargo. And in sources, they almost both require fuel. They don't work for free, you need to feed the donkey, you also need to feed your car with gasoline. They require energy or both, in a sense machines. One's a biological machine, another one's a mechanical machine, but they're both in a sense machines. Of course, very different. But you find those similarities. So then I want you to say okay, well no, let me find something even more radically different. Like donkey, and what? Love. Those are radically different things. They're like, not even in the same ballpark. Donkeys in love, love. Love is not really even a physical object. Because like a donkey in a car. They're both physical objects, but a donkey in love and would love what's the connection? And then I want you to ask further. What is the deep similarity between a donkey and love and you will find something there is my claim? Well, for example, it's possible for a human being to love a donkey. Not necessarily romantically, I just mean like, you could have a pet donkey that was living on your farm for a long time and you can develop a real love for that for that animal. And it's back to you might even hypothesize that a donkey might love its children. After all, loves is a is a sort of a, a high level human mammalian type of emotion at least if we believe the scientific material Sparrow. So if humans are capable of love, are chimps capable of love? Probably, most people probably say they are especially like with their children. I think most people most people would admit that chimp mothers love their babies. No less than, than a human mothers love their babies. And so you know, a donkey is not that different from a chimp. Or you could, you could find other things. I want you to do that exercise and see how radically you can pull, pull things apart. And then also notice that there's still similarity in the very end. And no matter what, no matter how radically different you can think of two things. Ultimately, at the rock bottom, the most common denominator between any two things will be the fact that they are both happening right now. In your consciousness. Right now. In fact, I dare you. I double dare you to find or think of two objects which are not happening right now. In your consciousness. Try it. Don't speculate. Don't argue with me. Don't Be arise, don't bring science into it, try it find it in your direct experience will she'll notice is that for a thing to exist, it must exist within your consciousness. Otherwise, it's not a thing at all. And so that gives you a clue. Maybe the one similarity that everything has in common is that it's consciousness. That's something I want you to contemplate. And don't take my word for. I want you to further notice that technically, every single object is different from every other object. I don't care what it is, in fact, to be to exist, is to be different. That's what existence is. Its difference. If we had two objects, and they were precisely identical, that means that they would be so identical that even their coordinates in space and time would be superimposed on top of each other, such that literally the two objects would fuse into one and we couldn't even speak of two objects anymore, there would only be one object to speak of, you get that make sure you get that this is super important. To have two objects, they must be distinct by at least one measure of quality. So if we want to use space as our distinguishing dimension, then we would say that at the very least, if we want to have two particles, they must be separate from each other in the x coordinates are in the y coordinate, or in the z coordinate, or in time, at the very least. But of course, they can also be distinct in their shape in a color in their smell, and they're truly in other things. But they must be distinct. Otherwise, they don't exist. You get that this is super important that you get this. Don't just believe me, pause the video, pause the recording and actually get this in your direct experience. Everything look around the room, everything you see is completely distinct from everything else. Otherwise, you couldn't see it. Otherwise, it wouldn't exist. For your cat to be a cat, it has to not be a dog. For your finger to be a finger has to not be a tow, for your head to be ahead as Nokia car. Get this. This is super important. So everything is different. But that's not where the story ends. Because of course, I told you earlier that everything is the same as well. Everything is consciousness. So now it seems like we're saying that everything is different. But at the same time everything is also the same, which is that which is true. could both be true simultaneously? Could this be the essence of relativity? Think about that. Further, I want you to notice that even though technically everything is different. If you only had the ability to see differences, then you couldn't function. And in fact, you couldn't even live. Here's what I mean, you couldn't recognize your own mother. Because the act of recognizing your own mother requires that you look past the differences to see the similarity. Because hey, your mother is different every single second, every single year. Your mother is very different from the way that she looks 20 years ago, and yet you can still recognize her. Your mother could have some new mole, a scar, a new haircut, new lipstick, new makeup. She could get disfigured in a car accident, horrible fire, half her face could melt off, you would still be able to recognize her. Even though she's technically different. And her brain and mind is changing all the time. She has new beliefs, new ideas, new experiences. So for you to say that that is my mother, and for you to be able to do that for the entirety of your life that requires that you be able to see sameness. And all that depends your entire life. Again, this is extremely significant. Because see, I don't want you to fall into this very naive, rationalist, scientific, atheistic materialistic trap of saying, oh, Leo, I'm very scientific. And I'm very rational. So I just stick to the facts, man is the hard facts. And the hard facts, like you said, is everything is different. So that's what I believe that's what's true. And what I'm telling you is that no, you're full of shit. That's not how reality works. If that's actually how reality works, you couldn't recognize your own mother, you will be a complete moron. You will be dumber than a rock. Computers are stupid. Because they lack the ability to recognize sameness. It's very difficult for computers recognize the sameness between a photograph of this hand, and this hand now, computer technology is advancing and our computers are becoming smarter. But notice what's happening as we're becoming smarter. They're getting better at recognizing faces, recognizing images, matching them up, and looking past the differences to see the similarities. And as that happens, they become smarter. But a computer is still so stupid that a computer cannot tell the difference. Or cannot tell the similarity, for example, between a photograph of me as I am today, and me as when I was a baby, a computer could not tell that similarity, a human being could it'd be difficult, but could I, at least I can. And you know, a computer, for example, cannot see the similarity between a Baptist and a Roman Catholic, or between Christianity and Buddhism cannot see those differences. Now, in the future, they definitely will be able to, but right now they can't. And that's why they're dumb. So if you keep insisting that you're just sticking to the hard facts, which just means the differences, then you're insisting that you're going to be the dumbest thing that is alive. But of course, you can't do this. Because actually, it's not possible for you to actually live while doing this. So you just be lying to yourself. And what I mean by that is that actually, the problem is even worse than I started with your mother, the problem is much worse. The problem is that you couldn't even recognize yourself. For you to know that you are you every morning that you wake up and look in the mirror, when you're brushing your teeth, you have to look past the differences, to see the same nurses. Because hey, your face is aging, it's aged over the last 10 years, probably quite significantly. You're different. All the molecules and cells in your body, according to science, have come and gone in the last 10 years have all been replaced. You're a completely new creature. You've experienced so much your beliefs have changed your your thinking mean, you're learning your knowledge has changed your attitudes, your feelings have changed. Everything about you has changed from when you were a teenager to when you are, wherever you are right now. Sometimes in radical ways, radical ways, might be difficult for you to even remember what life was like as a teenager, and the kind of ridiculous stuff that you believe that you don't believe anymore. And yet, you still consider yourself to be the same. So to accomplish that feat, what I want you to notice is that you have to look past a lot of differences, a lot of very significant differences, to see the dip, the deep similarity in order to exist as a self at all. That's profound. We'll return to that. I want to show you an example since we're on this, on this. On this point of image recognition, I want to show you example, here on the screen, take a look at this first slide. And what you see is you see the word hello written a bunch of different fonts and if you're an English speaker, then you have no problem reading all these different fonts as hello and in fact your mind accomplish the task and In a fraction of a second, you didn't even notice it was not even difficult for you. And yet also, now I want you to look very closely at each of the different letters, look at the cursive H, look at the different ways that h can be written. In all these different fonts, look at how radically different all of these are. So for you to be able to accomplish the rather intelligent task of reading all these words, and, and noticing that they all say the same thing. Hello, it's all the same one word for you to notice that your mind has to accomplish a very sophisticated thing. It has to look past a lot of differences. But it's precisely because your mind is so good at it, that you don't even notice that you do this. The reason I'm emphasizing this point is because people will get stuck in this trap. I'm telling you, especially scientifically minded people get stuck in the trap that hey, Leo, I'm just a hard, no scientifically minded person. And all I care about is the facts. And what I'm telling you is that no, you care a lot more about not the facts. You see, it's not a fact that all these words are the same word. That's not a fact. That's something your mind is constructing. And that's very important to start to see. That becomes very significant as we go along in this topic. And if you're still not convinced, and let me show you slide number two. Slide number two is the exact same phrase or word hello, in Chinese. But now, it's pretty difficult for you to see the sameness on the slide. Because in English, you learned over many years, how to interrelate and look past the differences of various ways to spell and write English characters. Whereas with Chinese, you didn't do that. If you're a native English speaker. And now though, as I'm talking, as I'm pointing this out to you, now your mind is starting to focus in on every little character. And now maybe you're starting to match up this one here with that one there. And you're saying, oh, yeah, Leo, you're right. This is the same character as that. It's not a big difference. On the other hand, if you were a new student of Chinese, and then you went to China, for a vacation, and you were asked to go around town reading different signs, even though you might know this word, this phrase other kinds of common phrases, you might still struggle very much to read the signs, because those signs will be written in fonts that you are not familiar with at all, such that you might be looking at the exact word that you know, but you're still not going to recognize it because it's written in a different font than the one that you're used to. Especially with cursive, kind of like calligraphy type fonts, it becomes quite, quite difficult or artsy, fartsy types of fonts, which have a lot of stylizing on them, they become quite challenging to read. So if you're learning Chinese, it will take you many years before you're actually able to read Chinese. Even if you already know it perfectly, you to read it in all the different fonts that it comes in. That will be many years of work for your mind to look past those differences. Because in point of fact, they are all different. If they weren't different, there would only be one set of characters on that page. You see. Further example of this is with children, object permanence and conservation of substances and liquids. And I'm actually going to post a video of this very illuminating video, I'm gonna post it on my blog after this episode releases, where it will show a toddler sitting there, and they will ask the toddler to look at two glasses of water. Both glass of water have exactly the same liquid, let's say they're half filled. Then the adult takes one of the glasses pours it into a tall champagne glass, same amount of liquid just Paul and takes the glass pours it into into a flat petri dish, same amount of liquid just now flat and ask the child this is like a three year old child or something. Ask the child which one has more liquid and the child will say the tall one. Even though they have the same amount of liquid. Now as an adult, you look at that you're gonna laugh and you say, Oh, that's so silly. How could that child be so stupid? But you have to remember you were that child yourself. You were that stupid, but also further there's the An additional, deeper mindfuck is when you realize that actually in point of fact, in a sense, to be able to look past the differences is to actually fudge the truth. The truth is that the differences are all there and everything is absolutely different. But this is not convenient to your survival. And so what you do is you look past the differences, to be able to live your life in a convenient and comfortable way. And you know, little babies, they don't have a sense of object permanence. That means that if you if you play the peekaboo game like this, and you hide an object behind your hand, they will actually think the object has disappeared. And then it'll reappear, disappear, reappear in the spirit appear as an adult, though, you know, the object didn't actually disappear. Now, you might say, well do that. Yeah, so what the kid was stupid, then the kid learned how it was, what what what reality was really like, what's true? And now the kid just knows that objects exist. And there we go. It's as simple as that. If only it were that simple. What if actually, it's you who's stupid one? What if the kid was right? What if actually, in truth, the object does disappear. But you as an adult, because it was necessary for your survival, you learned how to trick yourself into believing that the object was still there behind the scenes. That's not true. That means actually what you learn, you didn't learn the truth, as an adult, you actually learned to delude yourself. But Leo, why would I learned to delude myself? Well, we'll get back to that. I also want to show you an example of how sameness and difference are relative to context. So take a look at the following slide. We have two rectangles here on the first slide. Now answer the question, are they the same? Are they different? Okay, remember your answer? Now, I'm gonna show you the second slide. And now again, the question is, are those two rectangles? The same? Are they different? And now I'm gonna show you the third slide. And again, are those two rectangles the same? Are they different? Notice as as I'm introducing a more and more different third object, the original two rectangles appear to be more and more similar. Until we get to slide number four, take a look. And now they look even more similar than they ever did. And all that we're doing here is we're just introducing an additional shape, which is really what we're doing is we're, we're changing the context. And this is changing your perceptions of the situation. And now finally, I want you to take a look at the fifth slide. Are these the same? Or are these different? Be careful, it's a trick question. They can't possibly be the same, because they are distinct. It's precisely because they're distinct, that you can count four of them. If they weren't distinct, you could only count one of them, there would only be one square on that screen. So for there to be four of them. There must be at least one difference between each one. Get that that's super important. Can you see that? I mean, it's not rocket science. It's very simple. But but it's very easy to overlook, because it's so obvious. You get that? Good. Now let's talk about science. It's very important to notice that science cannot prove difference or sameness. You might be very tempted at this point, in order to deny the relativity that I'm proposing is to come in here say, oh, Leo, you're just you're trying to push relativity on me and I don't like relativity. Why don't we use sound? Why can't we just use science to adjudicate these questions? Science will tell us we'll just run some experiments. And what I'm telling you that you can't do that, because sameness and difference Prior to science because if you want to be technical, like already said, everything is different. But just because everything is different, so what? That's not enough. The problem is when you're doing science, you're going way beyond just looking at differences between things. In fact, mostly what science is, is looking for similarities between things, grouping things into various categories. Whether it's animals, or elements, or atoms, or some subatomic particles, or people or monkeys, or apes, or psychological diseases or disorders or whatever. Largely science is about categorizing stuff. And what is categorization? What is the category. And by a category, I don't mean anything complicated, I mean, something very simple. Like the category of cats. That's an example of a category that includes domestic cats, lions, tigers, ocelots, cheetahs, jaguars, leopards, and so forth. Right? So that's a simple category for you. But the question is, what is the category? And where does it come from? Is the category something you find walking around on the savanna? Do you like, go go on the savanna. And you see, you see a catch all look, that's, that's a cat. No, you don't see cats on the savanna, you see a particular thing sitting there, maybe it's a lion. By the way, a lion already is a category for many different kinds of individual creatures. But let's overlook that. So you see a lion sitting there. But you don't know that it's a cat, to know that it's a cat, you have to also create a higher category based on your experiences with tigers and domestic cats or other things to create a cat category. And then you have to create that your mind is creating, that's not something you find in the world. So this, this really stupid notion that science just deals with the fact man is just rational. This is this is flying completely out the window. This is completely naive nonsense. There's no such thing. Science is not objective. Science is deep, deeply subjective. These categories you're creating. These are not objective things. The similarities, you're drawing between different scientific fields and scientific phenomena. This is subjective stuff. It's not objective, despite what science tells itself. And this is the fundamental problem with science that science is not conscious of the way that it's, it's it's constructing these categories, and that it's constructing its own metaphysical understanding of reality. It's sneaking in hidden metaphysical assumptions, while denying that it's doing so that's the fundamental problem. And by the way, you want a definition for what a category is, I forgot to tell you a category technically, is a collection of different objects, which are similar. Again, let me repeat because this profound, a category is a collection of different objects, which are similar. But the question of course, is, who gets to arbitrate between what counts as different and similar. And notice that that is not done through any kind of mechanical means. You cannot go out with a ruler and measure the difference between or rather, you cannot measure the similarity between a lion and a tiger using a ruler. Now, if you're, if you're clever, and you keep insisting on your materialism, because they Leo, but we can use DNA testing to measure the similarity of DNA between a cat and our tiger and a lion. And through that we can create categories. But you're still overlooking the obvious. Who is determining that DNA is what should be the criterion that accounts for the similarity or the difference? And how much of a difference in the DNA counts as the determining factor is that 1% 5%? I mean, science tells you that you're 99% chimpanzee. So why don't you call yourself a chimpanzee? Who is determining all this stuff you are? And if you're just believing some scientist, then the scientist is so you're just seeing authority. And here's where science gets very similar to religion. Scientific people like to tell themselves that, hey, man, I don't I don't buy into authority. Religious people who will justify their beliefs by citing authority like the Pope or the Bible, but science doesn't do that. Yes, it does. Science builds a consensus around categories. These categories are arbitrary. These categories are created by the ego mind. They're constructions. But science needs to build a consensus in a community precisely because there's no reality to, to those concepts. They're arbitrary. So the only way to win that battle is to win the battle, through consensus, not through truth. Science isn't went through truth, science winds through consensus. Just like religion, which is why science needs to fight for its ideas, just like religion. Ah, now we see some deep similarities here. Now, things were getting a little clearer. You see, science is far from some objective, pursuit of the ultimate truth. That's not what science is about. Science is about creating categories that serve the ego mind. But that's a very deep point, there's so much to unpack in that we'll we'll keep chipping away at it. I want you to notice that identity is not an objective fact, the way that most people assume it identity is not an objective fact. Yet this science cannot determine if two things are identical. Can't do it. Because by definition, if you have two things, they are distinct. So if you if let's say you want to be super, super rigorous, super truthful, then you would have to just say that absolutely. Everything is unique and distinct, and different from everything else. And that's the end of the story. But but if you said that there could be no science, you understand this, there is no science if you say that, because science is all about finding the similarities between things. So that doesn't work. Not to mention what you still wouldn't have the whole truth, you'd only have half the truth. If you said that. Well, we'll get to the other half in a moment here. So what I'm I'm literally what I'm saying is that science cannot determine there is no objective determination within reality, for the identity one equals one. Because in point of fact, one is not equal to one, because if we write out the formula one equals one, that one is distinct from this one, so literally, they're different ones. So if you're equating the number one with another number one, you're actually lying to yourself. They're not equal, they're actually different. So you're, you're you're finding, you're finding a hidden similarity. But that hidden similarity is not an objective fact. It's something your mind is constructing. It's not just a given. And science also cannot tell you which two objects are distinct. So science cannot tell you that a lamp is distinct from a coffee table. Or that you are distinct from the earth. Or that a black person is distinct from a white person, science can't tell you this. Only your mind subjectively can tell you this. And in fact, science cannot even occur or arise until your mind starts doing this. Your mind has to start making distinctions long before science is invented. You see? For you to even say that. This here, what I'm doing is science. And that over there, what you're doing that's pseudoscience, or that's religion, or that's fantasy or something else already. Look what you're doing. You're creating a distinction between science and its opposite. You're looking at noticing a difference between science and not science. And in fact, that's what science is. What is science science itself is a part of reality. And for science to exist a part of reality it also has to be distinct. Otherwise, there's no such thing as science. So you invent science at the very moment where you make a distinction between science and non science. Which is first Eisley why. And we'll get to this a little bit deeper in a minute, which is precisely why scientists and defenders of science are very, very touchy when their their metaphysics was questioned, because when I questioned a scientist, metaphysics, what it does that actually it dissolves the boundary that a scientifically minded person has made between science, religion and everything, and not science, basically, pseudoscience. And so what this does is this actually threatens the very life of science, sciences life depends upon it being a specific thing. Again, this goes back to the earlier point that I said that to be is to be a specific way, you cannot be as a nonspecific thing, you have to be a specific way. That's what your being is, that's what you are, is whatever differences there are within you. So if I start to remove the differences between you, and some other thing, then literally what I'm doing is I'm killing you. Or I'm killing that thing. If I remove the difference, for example, between your car and every other car in the world, if I remove all the differences, what's going to happen is that all the cars will become one car. And so by definition, your car will cease to exist. But of course, this is a much bigger problem than just with your car. Your car is peanuts, compared to where this really leads us to. Which is the ego, and self. What you are, is not a body, or a creature, or ape, or a living being what you are, and you're not a molecule, you're not a bunch of molecules, you're not a brain, you're none of that. What you are, is you are an identity, a set of differences. You are different from your environment, you have differentiated yourself. And through that differentiation, you came into existence. You weren't born in the conventional sense that you think of as like you came out of your mom's vagina. That may have happened, but that did not create you. You came about years later, only when you became conscious of a distinction between yourself and your environment. And the way you did that, you just said, Oh, I'm different from everything else. And that's how you were really born. And that's also how you're gonna die. When you die, what will happen is the difference between what you thought you were your identity, and your environment will collapse. And you will merge back into the totality from which you emerged. And so your very life depends upon you being different from your environment, and other people. Let me repeat that, again. Your very existence hinges on you being distinct. If you stop being distinct, you will physically die. That's what I'm saying. Are you getting this? This is some heavy stuff. So now you start to realize that this notion of identity is a very, very tricky business, and it's much more significant to you and your mind than you ever thought. So maybe as a kid you you were like a part of some group identity in school. Like maybe you were a goth kid. Maybe you were some emo kid. Maybe you thought of yourself as a nerd or as a jock. Or as a cheerleader or whatever you thought yourself. You were and you you built up your identity. And basically you spent your teenage years and all your early 20s building up your identity. I'm a man I'm a woman, I'm Republican, I'm a Democrat and I'm American. I'm a Russian or I'm a Chinese or a Muslim or I'm a Muslim or I'm a Christian. I'm a good person, a bad person. I'm, you know, I'm a moral. Or, you know, I'm attractive. I'm attractive. I'm, I'm tall, I'm fat. I'm skinny. I'm successful. I'm irresponsible. I'm lazy. I'm ugly. I'm addicted to porn. I'm this I'm that I love video games. I love fast food. I love pizza. I like sushi. I like this. I hate that I love baba, baba, baba, baba, what is all of that you are differentiating yourself to create an identity. It's like a snowball that starts rolling down a mountain and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it accretes more and more stuff. And then it gains momentum. And as it gains momentum, eventually, it gains a sense of mass and solidity until this giant Snowball is so big, and it's rolling so fast. And it's got such a force behind it, that it really feels solid. This is a force to be reckoned with. That's your ego. That's who you are. That's your very life right there we're talking about. And now when we're starting to talk about self actualization, changing yourself getting some kind of new result in your relationships, in your level of happiness, in your career, with your finances, with your spirituality, whatever. We're talking about changing the trajectory of that giant snowball that's rolling down the hill. And now you can see why that's difficult to do. Because the thing you identify with is the thing that keeps you alive, your very life hinges upon your identity. So while we try to create a significant change to your life, so you can get different results. The reason you resist it so much. The reason you go through all these ego backlash is the reason that you refuse to listen to the things I say, the reason that you are lazy, the reason you don't take action, the reason that this should goes in one ear and out the other ear, and you keep struggling and trying and trying and trying and nothing is working, nothing is changing. The reason is, is because fundamentally, you don't want to change. Because deep down, you know that change is death. To get real change, we need identity level change, change of your being change of who you are. That's not what you want. You want the results of the change without changing your identity. But unfortunately, it's precisely the shitty results you're getting that are the result of your identity. So the to change your shitty results in any area of life, you got to change your identity. But of course, that's the last thing you want to do. So that's the catch 22 of all personal development. That's why it's difficult. That's why nobody does it. That's why your friends don't care about any of this stuff. That's why nobody listens to this stuff. That's why this stuff isn't talking about on TV or anywhere else, because nobody wants to do it. And really everything that society sells you all the books and cars and advertisements and all the shit they tell you on TV and in the media, all the intellectuals you listen to Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, blah, blah, blah, Richard Dawkins, I don't care who it is religious people Sudoku, what are they telling you they are? They are, they are serving your ego to build up your identity, because that's what sells because your ego will only pay money for that which builds up its identity, your ego doesn't want to pay money. For breaking itself down. Your ego wants to live, it doesn't want to die. So your ego is gonna run far, far away from anything that destroys its identity. But paradoxically, that's what we're doing here today is we're laying the groundwork for destroying your identity. But of course, your ego is gonna be very sneaky. It's not gonna let you get away with it so easily. What it's going to do is going to take everything that I'm saying. And it's going to turn actualised.org and all these teachings into an identity building exercise. So even though actually that org is supposed to help you break down your identity, what your ego is going to do is going to, it's going to flip it on its head and it's actually going to use it to build up your identity. You're going to build up the identity of becoming a self actualized or someone who's pursuing enlightenment, someone who's coming to consciousness, someone who's a vegan or vegetarian, or this or that. And there you go again. You see how tricky this is. That's your life. You're fucking with your life here. And your life is not gonna go without a fight. But nevertheless, if you keep persisting with it, eventually you'll die. and that will be like, and then you'll be finally happy. And you'll realize how stupid this whole this whole game was. Because the entire time really what you are is you were the whole shebang, you were infinite, you were everything, you were everything and nothing. And you were sameness and difference. And that there is no difference between sameness and difference. But until such time, you are going to keep struggling and keep trying to differentiate yourself. The ego needs this. This is why the ego creates enemies. That's why the ego demonizes this, whether you're criticizes, that's where the ego builds up ideologies. This is why the ego joins groups, cults, sects, philosophies, scientific schools, you name it, political groups, economic groups, ethnic groups, racial groups, family groups, national groups. All of this is building the egos identity. The ego needs to be able to say, I am different from you. Because if I'm not different from you, I am starting to become more and more like you more and more and more, we're getting closer and closer and closer until we we literally join and we become one, I become you. And holy fuck you don't want to become like everyone else on the planet. That's scary. That's a lot. That's a big burden. You know, it's a big burden to realize that you are Hitler. That you are Donald Trump, that you are terrorists, that you are a fundamentalist, that you are murdered, that you're a rapist, that you're that you're everything that you've ever hated in your life, you're all of it. That's a big, bitter pill to swallow. See, the whole reason that you hate in the first place is precisely because you are denying the very thing that you are. And so the reason that you're unhappy is because you're fundamentally in denial about your true nature. And your true nature is infinite. And your true nature is indiscriminate. It's all but that's too much, that's too much for you. So what you want rather than the see that the whole cake, the whole cake of reality is so big and so delicious, and so beautiful. That it's too much, you can't eat so much fucking cake, you think you want cake. But after you've eaten 50 slices of cake, and there's still a million slices left to go. You're like, Man, I'm done with cake. I'm tired. I'm sick and tired of cake. Right? So then you draw lines, okay, 50 piece, that's where I'm drawn line 50 pieces. That's where I'm drawn line. And the whole challenge of life. And the whole purpose of life is to say, Fuck it, I'm gonna go for the whole cake, you go for the whole cake. And then you realize how huge that is, you realize that you couldn't have even imagined what you're really what you're really in for until it's already too late. But luckily, by that point that goes dead and you realize everything is peachy. Want you to realize that the mind works by tuning into differences in sameness is like a lens, it can dilate and focus on whatever it wants to see. And what does it focus on? It's never a question of objective truth or objective difference or sameness. It's always a question of what you select, which differences are significant, which are insignificant, which sameness is are significant, which are insignificant. And of course, how do you determine that how does your mind determine that based on who you are as an identity. So you will select those similarities and differences which are most conducive to your survival as the identity that you have identified yourself to be. It's not a matter of truth. Your mind doesn't give a fuck about truth. It cares about preserving your identity. And it will cite all the scientific evidence all the rationales all the justifications, all the logic, all the religious scriptures, everything. It will muster and marshal everything in its power to see reality as selectively as they possibly can, such that your identity is preserved despite the changing circumstances of the environment and And that's, that's a struggle. That's why you're struggling in life all the time. If your life feels like a struggle feels difficult, that's because fundamentally, that's what you're struggling against. And because you will lose that battle, you cannot win that battle, you will always be lost in the end, your identity will collapse. Because ultimately, what you are is you are the whole. And you could only remain the part for so long to remain the part, when you're really the whole, that means you have to be deluding yourself constantly actively, that you are the part. And that can only go on for so long until finally the game ends. And you will merge in back with the whole, because that's the truth of what you are, you cannot be other than what you really are, other than for a short period of time, which is what your life amounts to. The ego mind is terrified of deep sameness. This is why it clings to ideology. And it clings to anything that it identifies with. Do you know why a white supremacist or a racist hates immigrants? You might think, well, Leo, that's because he sees immigrants as different than him. That's why he hates them. Role, precisely the opposite. The reason that xenophobia exists, is because people are afraid of the deep similarity that they have been denying their entire life. So racists hate immigrants, or people of different color. Because deep down actually, the truth is that we're all the same. And that's what the racist doesn't want to admit. And he's in denial about it. And of course, he hears me saying this to him, he will of course, deny it as well, and accuse me of being deluded. But that's just a defense mechanism that he has, from admitting that actually, we're all the same. Because you see, a racist or white supremacist as someone who's built his identity, on being a certain ethnicity. And he's built this identity so much that now it's a deep part of him. So now to tell him that actually, he's the same as a black person, or brown person or Chinese person or either chimpanzee or whatever. This is going to threaten his identity, it's going to feel very painful. He's not going to be conscious of the fact that is threatening his identity, he's just going to react in a knee jerk way, with anger, with violence, with fear, with denials, with criticism with blaming with scapegoating, and so forth, which is why very conscious people who become very grounded in their metaphysical identity. They don't, they don't care. They don't care about other races, other races don't threaten them, they don't get angry, they don't get fearful of them. Or any of this kind of stuff. They are unfazed by this stuff. Because their identity transcends all of that. And that's ultimately what you should be working for. The mistake that xenophobic people make is that they double down on their xenophobia. And they try to justify and rationalize it and say stuff like, oh, but but but those people have done IQ tests. And you know, black people have a lower IQ than white people. It's proven ilio it's proven science. Or they will cite other kinds of studies and other kinds of evidence, it doesn't matter. The ego will use any studies or any evidence or any science to justify whatever the fuck it wants. The ego doesn't play fair. It doesn't care about the truth. It doesn't care about being honest. It's not honest with other people. It's not even honest with itself. The ego lies to itself first and foremost. The ego is built upon lies, self lies, self deceptions. That's what you are. That's the very mechanism by which you have come into existence. So it's a sunk cost. Bias. You see, I mean, you have sunk so much energy into defending your current identity, that you will not admit that it's a lie. That's the last thing you want to admit. So what you have to do is you have to come up with justifications and further lies, to explain why what I'm saying isn't true. And why what you believe all the lies that you believe their whole life, that they were actually not wise but real. So you gotta you gotta keep playing the line game. That's the prom with lies, you start lying, gotta keep lying, keep lying, keep lying to sustain the lies. The ego mind does not care about truth. If the ego wants to see difference, it will see difference where there isn't. And if the ego wants to see sameness, it will see sameness, where there isn't one or rather, the reason they can do that is because sameness, and difference are in the same place. They're always there. At the same time, everywhere. Everything is different, and everything is the same. And that's why the ego can cherry pick whatever the fuck it wants. Whatever it is, is most self serving. Look, look at this happening. Look at this happening in the news. Look at what's happening with Donald Trump. Look at this happening with politicians, with people on TV, your favorite speakers, your favorite scientists, your favorite, whoever, it isn't matter. They're all playing this game. So what it is, it's the game of life. This is what business is built on. marketing, advertising, whole society, culture, religion, economics. Everything, everything socially constructed, is based upon this fundamental principle of helping you to maintain your identity, both individually and collectively. Remember, you have an individual identity, you also have a collective identity. Those people who fancied themselves as individualist like those libertarians, maybe some of those Jordan Peterson followers who fancy themselves as, oh, I defend free speech and individualism. And I follow an iron Rand and I'm an individualist. I mean, it's the most preposterous thing, because of course, as you're saying that what you're doing is you're actually building your libertarian ideology, which is your collective identity, your collective ego, and then these people complain about identity politics. The entire right wing is pure identity politics, that's all it is. That's all libertarianism is its identity, Pa has nothing to do with truth has nothing to do with reality has nothing to do with improving society. It's pure identity politics. That's what it is. It's a defense of identity. Why do people defend guns and an abortion? And it's not because I like you might be saying, Leo Oh, why are you railing against the Conservatives here but I mean, the liberals do it too. But the Liberals are, are more conscious of it than conservatives are. Which is not to say liberals can't do stupid things. They can't. They can, they can be diluted, they can be very diluted, they cannot come up with very bad policies. There's far higher to go beyond liberalism. But um, but for conservatives, mostly, if they defend an idea, all they're doing is they're they're just defending an identity. That's all it is. That's why Republican politicians, they don't they don't talk about policy. Republicans don't care about policy. The Republican base doesn't care about policy. They don't care about the economy, health care, they don't care about the spirit. They don't seriously study, like how to improve the health care system in this country or the school system. No. What they're doing is they're they're, they're defending their identity. Republican politics is all about identity. You know, are you a patriot? Are you a true American? Are you a conservative? Are you are you fighting for freedom? Are you sticking sticking it to the social justice warriors and the snowflakes and, and the liberals? If you are, then you're part of the identity. And life is good, you feel good, you feel happy? And so to rally up the base, what does Trump do Trump just Trump Trump just pushes that identity politics button all the time, just pushes it all the time. That's what all Trump is doing, right? He doesn't really know consciously that he's doing it. He's just doing it out of instinct. I'm telling you what he's doing because I've studied this stuff very deeply, in a way that he hasn't but he that's how he's usually pushing that button. And intuitively, he understands that's what's actually going to get people riled up. And that's what good sales marketing is. It's all about riling up people's emotions. It's not about truth. Nobody buys anything for truth. Nobody votes for politicians based on truth. They vote for them based on Whether those people are able to push their their most base psychological needs because most people the majority of society is operating at the at the bottom third of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right. So you can't motivate the majority of society by appealing to their higher interest, to love to truth to beauty to creativity to, to spirituality to kind of it doesn't work, because most people aren't there yet. Maybe in 1000 years, they'll be there but right now they're at the bottom. The bottom is what sex food, partying entertainment, identity politics, ethnocentrism. Yeah, that's it. So that's what you hit if you want to win. Pretty interesting that works. Why am I telling you all this? Well, we live in a time of seeing differences. A lot of people now are emphasizing differences. The entire materialist paradigm emphasizes differences. It's built upon that, including science business, and basically all of Western society is built upon the materialist paradigm at every level. So in school, the tissue analysis and university you're analyzing, you're using the reason you're using your left brain, your left brain, this leads to reductionism, atomism, and fragmentation. Everything is fragmented, broken down to little pieces. That large unity that reality is, is all fragmented. That's the state that we find ourselves in today. And because of this, we have all the crazy stuff happening in our politics, in the media, and everywhere around the world violence, evil suffering, all of this comes from fragmentation, fundamentally, the ego, otherwise known as the devil, the devil uses fragmentation to achieve his aims, why does the devil do this? What is the devil? The devil is that which separated itself from God, the devil is the fallen angel. See, a true Angel understands that the angel and God are really one. But an angel who is arrogant and deny that it is God hates God starts to criticize God deny the God that God exists. What the devil does is the devil fragments. And the devil depends upon fragmentation because that's ultimately what the devil is very existence is the devil's body is made into a fragment of God. So of course, if the devil wants to stay separate from God, God will allow it as long as the devil keeps insisting on fragmentation, and the only way fragmentation can happen is through delusion, through lack of consciousness. So the devil has to limit its own consciousness to maintain its devilry. And so that's what the ego mind fundamentally does. That's what you are, you aren't the devil, the devil is not some, some red guy with a tail and with horn the devil is you? The fragmentation that you create. It's the demonizing the scapegoating, the denying the hatred, the criticism, the crusading, the separation of you against other groups, the splintering the the sex that you create, it's the not sex, sex. Make sure you hear me right. It's all the cherry picking that you do. It's all the differences in sameness that you see which serve your identity, rather than the truth, and of course, God is the truth. Eventually, the the devil will lose the battle and the devil will merge back into God, but not without a good long battle. You know, they say Barack Hussein Obama, Barack Hussein, so people who say Barack Hussein Obama, what are they doing? They're emphasizing the Hussein. Why are they doing that? Because they don't want to acknowledge the sameness between Barack Obama and themselves. They need to differentiate. So they're going to cherry pick their mind is going to go out there and cherry pick every single difference between themselves and Barack Obama so they can demonize Obama and think of themselves as superior righteous. By the way, this is not something exclusive. I'm I'm don't Don't get the wrong idea here that I'm just saying this as though like from a liberal position to defend liberalism. No, not at all. Liberals definitely do this as well. Liberals also love to demonize Republicans I love to demonize corporations love to demonize Trump, love to compare Trump to knots, Nazism to Hitler and so forth. So, I'm saying this as a general characteristic of every human mind, it doesn't matter whether you're American or Republican or Democrat, and Iranian and Iraqi, you know, a European, a Scandinavian, an African, it doesn't matter who you are, you're doing this. That is one of the deep sameness is that we all have is that we're all doing this all the time. The only question is, how conscious are you of the process, and the more conscious you become of the process, the less you will do it. So while materialism emphasizes fragmentation, and seeing differences, spirituality is the opposite movement. True spirituality is an emphasis of deep sameness. And this is done through the right hemisphere, the right hemisphere responsible for intuition, integration, consciousness and wisdom. It's taking all the fragments that materialism has left on the floor, and piecing them back together, which is what actualize that org is helping you to try to do if you notice, in all my episodes, what I'm really stressing, as I'm stressing the deep sameness is between a bunch of different topics, between spiritual schools, various religions, between religion and science, between different emotions between different meditation techniques, whatever we're talking about, I'm trying to show you the deep sinuses, precisely because the rest of society has already filled your mind with all the fragments and all the differences. What do I mean by deep sameness? I say deep sameness, as opposed to surface sameness. The ego tends to like to use surface sameness, but avoid deep sameness. So, it's not only the ego just focuses on differences, but the ego also focuses on surface sameness says, between things, the sameness of the appearances, whereas deep sameness is, is penetrating through to the profound similar essence behind all the appearances. And that's what intelligence and genius are. You want to know what makes a genius. A genius is someone who is able to see deep sameness, where other people only see differences and surface similarities. By surface similarities, what I mean is similarities that that, that the ego deliberately uses to try to create an identity for itself. So for example. Atheists create an identity for themselves by saying that all religion is delusion. So there, they think the atheist thinks that he's come up with some brilliant genius insight, that all all religion is delusion, and I'm above that. But actually, what he did is he fell into a surface sameness, the similarity of religions is actually, on the surface, at least the way that the atheist thinks about it, there actually is a deep similarity between religions. But that's the opposite of what the atheist believes. It's actually enlightenment, awakening God. But the atheist denies this, because he's only looking at the surface similarities, the delusion. Or, for example, when conservatives called all liberal social justice warriors and Marxists, which is popular these days, that's a that's what I would call a surface similarity. See, they're lumping all of that together. And why are they doing that they're lumping it together such that now that is going to be distinct from what I am as a conservative wishes. I'm not that I'm an anti social justice warrior. I'm an anti Marxist. I'm a capitalist, I'm a libertarian, I'm a freedom fighter, whatever, you fancy yourself as a conservative, however, you justify that to yourself. So, deep sameness is opposed to that. Deep sameness is not about using sameness to try to build your egoic identity. Deep sameness is about actually dissolving your going identity into your ultimate true identity as everything. Wisdom comes with deep sameness. Why As people are able to see the date, the deep sameness between phenomenon between various appearances. What are some examples of what I mean by deep sameness, for example, I talked about paradigms and paradigm lock, that is present within religion and also within science. And I actually draw sameness. For me, unlike, for example, someone like Sam Harris, who's going to emphasize the difference between science and religion, I actually do the opposite. Because see, what he's doing there is he's actually he's drawing up a very shallow phony distinction between religion and science is actually much more profound and much more useful to help to draw out the, the sameness between religion and science. And what we mean by that is that both are dogmatic. Both are ideological. Both are sneaking into metaphysics without realizing that they're doing so both are locked into a certain paradigm, without realizing that they're locked into that paradigm. That's a sameness, that's a very profound sameness, which is not easy to see which is lost on most people. And if you can see the same as and be aware of it and be conscious of it at all times, that's going to produce enormous growth in you and wisdom, takes genius to see that. Another example of deep sadness is to start to understand where all the suffering in the world comes from, and that it comes from selfishness to draw that connection between all the suffering you've ever had in your life, and selfishness, and all the evils in the world war and violence and corruption and, and theft, and murder, and all this sort of stuff, to realize that all of that comes from the selfishness, which is there present within you and present within all people, to see that that's a deep sameness. And that's not easy to see, takes genius to see that. To realize that all living beings have equal worth. And that no living being is has more value or worth more than any other living being. That is the deep sameness, which is lost on most people. So if you want to really be intelligent, don't bother taking IQ tests. Don't bother reading textbooks. What you need to do is you need to develop your capacity to see deep sameness. Douglas Hofstadter has an interesting theory that they're all thinking is done using analogies. And while I think that Douglas Hofstadter is ultimately wrong in that, all thinking is not done via analogies, because I can think of, well, I can think about going to eat a sandwich, and that has nothing to do with analogies. But Douglas Hofstadter, point though, is still important. And his point is that the most creative thinkers that have existed in mankind, whether they were philosophers, or mystics, sages, or even visionary scientists like Einstein, Newton, liveness, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, all these people their wisdom, and intelligence was based upon their ability to make analogies between unlike things. For example, the story about noon, I don't even know if the story true, but it's, it makes a good example, the story of Newton sitting sitting under the apple tree, the apple falling on his head or whatever. And then him making the analogous connection of like, wait a minute, the apple fell on my head. That means there's a force pulling the apple to my head. But then he looks at the moon and he sees all that means there's also maybe a force pulling on the moon, that means the moon is also falling towards the earth. Oh, that's a deep, profound fucking similarity. And that's how gravity was admitted. Or so the story goes, who knows that that's how it actually happened. Probably not. Many of these stories are apocryphal and you know, spruced up to make it look more interesting. But anyway, I mean, you if you go look at some of Douglas Hofstadter books and work, he has several books, where he just talks about many, many, many, he just pummeled you with examples of how analogies are used within science and within intellectual disciplines to develop deep insights about reality in nature, because that's what's happening. People are looking for deep sameness and the way you do that is through analogies, sometimes very simple analogies like Apple Moon another example where this This applies for example, with lessons in history. If you want to be a good student of history, and you want to be able to apply history, to the present into the future, you need to be able to draw analogies between this similar events, something might have happened within Roman history, Greek history, or Chinese history, if you're a really good student, and you're also intelligent, in that you can see deep sameness is, then you will be able to see Aha, so what the Emperor did in China back in 1700, is very similar to what our president is doing here today. I'm just making this stuff up. But you know, something like that, you can draw those connections. And that's what actually makes you intelligent. Another example would be integrating all of religion, to understand how all of religion interconnects with itself requires seeing details. And the ultimate deep sameness, like I said, is that everything is consciousness. There are no two objects in existence, which are not occurring right now in your consciousness. Think of any two objects, and you will realize they're occurring within your consciousness, they are made out of consciousness, they are consciousness, everything is consciousness. That lamp is better consciousness, that cat is made of consciousness, that treatment of consciousness, your body is made of consciousness, your brain is made of consciousness, you are made of consciousness. The floor, you're standing on it then of consciousness, signs made of consciousness, Isaac Newton was man of consciousness. Albert Einstein was made of consciousness, your reason and rationality is made of consciousness. They reduce. That's the second half of the equation. You need both. What consciousness is, is it's all the differences that are possible, infinite differences. And since everything is different, that makes it all the same. The deepest sameness is to realize that all of reality is alive and intelligent. Everything look around you everything around you. Everything in your room is intelligent. Everything is alive. Intelligence and aliveness is not something that human beings possess, or that creatures possess is the quality of the universe itself. And which finally brings us to love and compassion. True love, unconditional love comes from seeing deep sameness. Whereas hatred comes from emphasizing differences between things. But see, I'm not trying to demonize make sure you don't make this fun. I'm not demonizing differences, you can see differences because technically everything is different. So seeing differences is not bad. What is a problem is when you make an identity out of your particular set of differences, and then you need to defend it, and to defend it, of course, then that's where hatred comes in. When your identity isn't small, but it is big. And in fact, when your identity becomes infinite, your love will become infinite. So your capacity to love is directly proportional to how big your identity is. You want infinite love. You need infinite identity. That's why fundamentalist religious people are not capable of love and compassion. Have you wondered why religious people are some of the most violent and vicious and unloving people in the world, despite the fact that all their holy books teach them to be more loving? It's because they can't. Because you can't get there through belief. You can't just believe that you're going to be like Christ, and all loving, while at the same time maintain the little itty bitty identity. You need to actually develop the identity of Christ, which means you need an infinite identity. If you have an infinite identity, love and compassion come naturally and easily. And you don't need to sell flagellate, or go to church and pray or, you know, read holy books, to be a good human being. For someone with an infinite identity Being a good human being is just spontaneous. The mistake that religion makes is that religion what it does is it tries to teach you how to ape enlightened beings. So they look at Christ or the Buddha, and they say, Oh, look, look at how wonderful this person was in the world. Without realizing that the reason this person was wonderful in the world, was because they had an infinite identity, they surpassed all they let go of all they're clinging to every possible difference. And they realized the same as the very thing. And from that naturally came all the love and the joy and all the magnificent qualities that you want for yourself all to happiness, and so forth. But now, religion just tries to teach that to you through dogma and beliefs. And you can't do that. Because doggone beliefs just build your identity even more. So it has the opposite effect. So the most religious people actually become the ones who are the guiltiest, who hate the most, who are the most bitter inside who are the most xenophobic, the most ethnocentric, the most racist, the most violent, the most vicious, do the most torture and, and so on and so forth. All right, let's pause right here for a quick intermission, I need a break. But we're still not done. There's a lot more to be said. So stay right there. All right, let's talk about applications of this topic of sameness and difference. I want to show you just how much stuff there is here to work with and where you can apply this and basically, almost any human fields and domains of study. And it's very broad in terms of its application. And, as you should, of course, expect, it would be that way, if what we're talking about here is sort of the very nature of existence itself being sadnesses and differences. So first of all historical analysis. In order to do proper historical analysis, it's all about making differences or distinctions between things, and also bringing things together and finding deep similarities and then applying those to the future or to the present. Also medicine, can you see how in medicine, it's extremely important to be really good at using your mind to both make distinctions and find differences, but also make deep interconnections and find the same bonuses between, let's say, your patients, symptoms, or illnesses, or the spread of diseases or any kind of research that's being done within the medical field. Speaking of research, we've got science, science is a huge can of worms, there's so much that we can say about science, and how science is limiting itself by not deeply studying the essence of what reality is the metaphysical nature of reality, being sameness as in differences. See, science, generally, generally treats reality as though it's an objective external object that can be studied in an objective manner. And that really all you're doing is you're finding the differences in similarities that are just they're kind of given to you, and you're just discovering them. And science isn't that good at seeing how the human mind plays a role in constructing various models and category schemes. And in this way, science lacks self reflection. It lacks the ability to observe itself with conscious awareness to see how it's creating these categories, how it's slicing up and carving reality. And therefore science likes to say that what it's doing is just a simple objective process, when in fact, that's not the case at all. And so by denying the subjectivity which, which is inherent in science, science is limiting itself. And it's overlooking important discoveries, which will be made in the future. And of course, one of the key problems with science we have today is that science is fragmented. It lacks integration. It lacks holistic perspectives. So some of the most important work that's going to be done in science over the next 100 years is going to be done at the intersection of various disciplines. So over the last two or 300 years, science has fragmented itself more and more and more. So you have a lot of very intelligent scientists and academics, sitting around in universities and in laboratories around the world, but they are hyper hyper specialized, such that they're not even biologists or physicists. They're much more deeply specialized in that they're like a microbiologist who studies evolution in fruit flies, have one particular kind of species or it's a physicist who studies the movements of electrons in one particular type of substance like cold liquids, right or some plasma. And that's all they know is they know that one thing. But the problem with that is, is that when you really want to understand life and reality and your place, within reality, what you need is you need the ultimate big picture. And you can't get that by hyper specializing into some technical field. And so what's going to have to happen with science going forward in next 100 years, most of the big breakthroughs and all the really interesting discoveries are going to happen now with people who are able to straddle multiple fields. So it's someone who's going to come in there and integrate, find a way to integrate biology and psychology, or sociology and chemistry, or some other you know, thing. Bridging multiple disciplines, not just two, sometimes three, sometimes four disciplines, and coming up with an integrated holistic model or picture of what's really going on, that's going to be necessary. And so if you're a budding young scientist, and you're looking for a research field for yourself, what I recommend for you is don't just do what your professors tell you to do, don't go into their little box, you got to think outside the box, you got to be an integrator, not a fragment, er, because our science right now has is sort of starting to sort of reach the limits of fragmentation. There's only so much you can do with that. And we've been doing a good job last couple 100 years, fragmenting and analyzing reality to death. But what we're really lacking is in integration, seeing those deep same misses, that's where the really groundbreaking stuff is gonna happen. Of course, science, just like religion, fragments itself into various schools of thought, various schools within physics, various schools, within biology, within chemistry, within psychology, within sociology, and so forth. And, and these schools, they go to war with each other. They're ideological, just like religious sects are, they have their own premises, they have their own biases, of course, they fight to defend the school, they have a collective ego. And by school, by the way, I don't mean, like, a university, I mean, a scientific school like, for example, behaviorism, or you consider psychoanalysis, even science, I mean, there's a lot of bunkin in psychoanalysis, but you can call that a school, or maybe string theory. String theorists might be like a sub school within quantum mechanics or within theoretical physics, you know, you have various kinds of schools of scientific thought. And what what defines a school is their assumptions, metaphysical epistemic assumptions, and so forth. And the procedures and methods that they use. And so yeah, so these schools, they have egos and they fight with each other. And wouldn't it be nice to be able to understand that rather than just participating in these scholastic battles that have been happening for hundreds of years, and they'll they'll keep happening for hundreds of years more. And it's easy to get sucked into, that doesn't matter if you're a really intelligent academic or scientist, you're still going to fall into these traps. And you're still going to fail to see how sameness and difference plays a role in you becoming ideological sucked into these debates and games. How about application within the legal system? What is the legal system, but adjudication of various sameness as in differences? That's what justices, Supreme Court justices, various judges all around the country, and all around the world are doing all the time, they're faced with the tough job of of getting particular situations showing up in their courtroom, or whether it's lawyers that are arguing for various things, what are they doing when they're arguing? They're drawing similarities or making differences? So if I'm trying to defend my client who's a murderer or accused of murder, then I'm gonna go in there, I'm gonna say, Well, really, it's not the same as murder, what he did was different. It's really different. And I'll cite excuses and reasons and rationale for why it's different. And then conversely, if I'm, if I'm the one who's prosecuting this murder, then I'll say no, it actually is murder. It's just this it's exactly the same as all the other murders. And I'll present evidence and this is this to, to make my arguments. And that's that's what crime and law, the whole legal system is all about this. Justice is all about this. What is justice about? It's about looking at a situation and telling yourself well, to correct this wrong to make this just then it would have to be like this. It would have to be the same Amos, this situation or This is unjust because it's different from that situation. So you're making these sorts of comparisons. And who's doing that? You of course, your ego is doing it. And then of course, it's going to pick the arguments that that skew the deck in its favor. So this whole notion of fairness is a very tricky notions very egoic notion. People love to act like they're victims, like they're being treated unfairly. And of course, that's mostly all ego. But that's coming from but then of course, the mind comes in and starts to justify all that stuff with with excuses and reasons and scientific facts and data to build a strong case. That's basically what lawyers are about. And your own mind is just like a lawyer. What does the lawyer do? A lawyer argues, without any moral qualms, or any consideration for truth on behalf of the defense of his client. And that's exactly what the left hemisphere of your mind is constantly doing, which is why reason cannot be trusted. for discovering truth. The domain of law enforcement, we have a lot of discussions these days and societies about well as law enforcement truly fair for different people. And for some people, it seems like it's the same. And for some people, it seems like it's very different, depending on your skin color, or your ethnicity, or the language that you speak, or how much money you make, what what social status, what class you're in. How about the application in the domain of politics, politics is all about sameness and differences. That's fundamentally what politics is about. All politics is basically identity politics. Politics is about fighting for your egos agenda, your individual agenda, but also the collective agenda that you've built up, even if you're fighting for politics that are supposedly, for the good of all of mankind. Like a lot of liberals would like to say, well, Leo, I'm for universal health care, and I'm for universal rights. And I'm for this and that, how can that be ego, that's not ego, that's the opposite of ego. But of course, you've built up an ego or identity around the fact that you are this self sacrificing fair, just humanist, social justice warrior type who fights to defend the downtrodden. And so this has become your identity, which is why you're very passionate about it. And which is why you get triggered a lot by not getting your way. What is civil rights, the whole Civil Rights Movement was basically about correcting and shaping and changing cultural notions of difference and sameness. That civil rights, that's what desegregation was about. And you notice how much resistance there was to that. And really, basically, it's still happening today, there's still a lot of resistance to it basically, still today. So you have to understand that your notions of sameness and difference, they don't just come from you, and from your own personal ego, as though you invented it. Actually, you're not that clever. Most of your notions of sameness and difference. They came from your culture and your society. You were programmed with them. And now all you do is you run around like a robot playing that programming. So if your parents told you that black people and white people should be separate, because one of them is inferior, one of them is superior, that's what you're going to feel is correct, you're going to feel like black and white people really are different. And that's what you're going to spend your whole life defending. And likewise, if your parents were hippy liberals, and they taught you that you should love all all of God's creatures equally, and that nobody is superior to anybody else, and that men and women are equal and all this, then that's what you're going to believe. And you're going to defend that for the rest of your life. Not because it's actually true, that, that all people are the same. But because that's just what you're comfortable with. You picked it up from your culture. So you need to get good at not only becoming more conscious of your own notions of sameness and difference in how your mind is, is always cherry picking stuff. Of course it is. But you also have to be very conscious about how your culture is doing that too. And how that is very arbitrary, and also needs to change. And a lot of people have problems with this is why we have the culture wars. What are the culture wars all about? The war on Christmas and the people who people who complain about the war on Christmas people who say that there is no war on Christmas Eve blah, blah, blah. And I mean, these culture wars go on and on and on and all these different areas. What is this about? This is all about how are we going to draw the distinctions. And of course, every part of the culture wants to draw these distinctions, and similarities and differences in its own way, which is going to favor its group. And it's going to favor the individual ego. That's what culture wars are about. You're defending identities. Or you've got people who feel like they've had identities that were subjugated for a long time and treated unfairly. And now what they want is they want a more equal decent distribution. And so now they're also fighting for from a position of ego, because they're fighting to get certain rights that they were denied. Now, of course, they're gonna justify it as well, I'm fighting for the good of mankind, or for the good of my race for the good of my ethnicity for equality. But why do you really want equality, the only reason you want equality, love equality, care about equality, is because it serves your agenda, it serves your survival, that's the only reason. If equality actually hindered your ability to survive, you wouldn't like it very much, you'd have to really go against the grain to like equality, when it would lead to your own death, or to the death of your children, or to the poverty of your family. See, the Gender Wars, say same kind of thing. We've got the feminist movements in various subgroups, and feminist movements who fight with each other. But then, of course, now we've got the men's rights movements who fight back with the feminist movements, this is going back and forth. And of course, these feminists and anti feminists and men's rights and the red pill movement, the MGTOW, movement, the pickup stuff, the Jordan Peterson, install stuff, all of this, it's all about trying to draw sameness in differences in a favorable manner, which will advance the egoic agenda of, of the people who are participating in these wars. The reason these wars go on, and the reason people get so animated and passionate about it, and build entire careers around talking about it, is because identity is what everybody cares about most. If you're pissed off about something, if you're angry about something, if you don't like something, almost anything, if you have a problem in the world, and you probably don't care what problem it is, the only reason you have a problem with it is guess why? Because it threatens your identity. That's it. If your identity was universal, if you weren't identified with a particular gender, a particular race, a particular way of being the particular family, that you're part of the particular country, that you're a part of the human species and all of that, if you were literally, if you didn't care how you were to the point where you allowed yourself to die, because you didn't care, you didn't even make a distinction between living and nonliving. Because to you it didn't matter. Then would you have any problems at all? No, of course, not. The only reason you have a problem with anything, is because it threatens the way you think you should be. The difference, or the difference that you are, which separates you from your environment. And so you're gonna go to war to defend that. And that's what people do. And that's why they get so passionate about it. It's got nothing to do with truth. It's got nothing to do with reason. So I've got nothing to do with logic. It's not got nothing to do with science. But all of those things will be marshaled, of course, and front and center, right, because you're not going to fight in identity war over gender, or culture, or civil rights, or politics, or justice or, or science or anything. You're not going to fight this war. If if you're not attached to some position, and the reason you're attached to this position is because it's a part of your identity. That's why you're passionate about it. You need it to come out some particular way. Another area of application here is religion and spirituality. There's a lot of religious conflict that goes around on around the world. And it's gone on for 1000s of years and it will continue to go on for 1000s of years people killing each other, abusing each other demonizing each other, criticizing each other, debating each other, arguing with each other, splitting off into sects forming various groups, yada yada yada conspiring against each other. What does all of this this is all about. For argumentation. It's all about people trying to draw distinctions and then create an identity, using their religion because religion and spirituality is a huge component of one's identity. And even if you're not religious or spiritual, even if you think your name is atheist, that's, that's part of your identity. See, the mistake that religion that atheists make is that they, they think that oh, well, atheism is not a religion. Leo don't don't mix atheism in with religion and spirituality, it's, it's the opposite of that. It's the default state. Actually, no, you've made an identity out of your, your atheism, or agnosticism, or whatever else, which is why you get triggered by religion, spirituality, or, or whatever. That's the only reason because you've made an identity out of it. See, the problem with religion isn't really the content of religion. The problem is that people make an identity out of it. But you know what, that's not exclusive to religion. That's also happening within politics, within economics, within science, with atheism, with rationalism, with materialism with a bunch of other stuff. The common denominator is not the content of your beliefs, it's that you hold certain positions, and you don't want to give them up. And so of course, that's why we have 1000s of various sects of religion and spirituality all around the world. And all of these sects basically hate each other, demonize each other, fight with each other, don't understand each other almost at all. Because they don't have an understanding of the relativity of sameness and difference, they cling to what they think is different between them and some neighboring sect. And then they go to war with each other over that, whether it's physical war, or intellectual war, doesn't really matter. Another area of application is conflict negotiation, basically, was in any conflict. The reason there's a conflict is because people are not, or the parties are not able to see the situation from the other person's point of view. That's largely what contributes to conflict. And so to be able to negotiate these various conflicts, whether they're religious conflicts, or political ones, or whatever. It boils down to helping people to see how they are using their own mind to construct these same misses and differences in ways that are favorable to them. Once you start to see that, then you start to let go of your positions, you're not attached to it anymore, and then you let go of the conflict. How about in relationships, in your intimate relationship, for example, you might have various problems, simply because of the way you're using your mind to look at differences or sameness is an and the situation can be resolved just by getting you to change your perspective. Like, maybe you have a girlfriend, and you're not happy, because you think that all, she and I are so different. We can't get along, she's always doing this thing there. And I'm always doing this thing here. And we're so different, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that's because your mind is is focusing on those differences. You could also conversely, train your mind to focus on the similarities that you do have to emphasize those and to let go of the differences. See the deeper similarities between the two and that could actually make your relationship work. And see the problem is that if you're using your mind improperly to be always nitpicking at the differences of things, that means that the current relationship you're in, you're going to nitpick the differences until you reach the point where you're just going to get so fed up, you're gonna say, I fucking fuck this, I'm leaving this relationship. We're two different, we don't get along. And then so you go to the next relationship, but guess what your mind comes with you. Your same as in different filters, they don't change, they come with you, because they're a part of who you are. And you don't want to give those up. So in your next relationship, you're gonna do the same thing, you're gonna nitpick, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, and then of course, you're gonna, in the end, get fed up, you're gonna blame the other person, and then leave and then go to the next one. And you're going to keep doing this until you wake up and you realize, oh, it's me, it's my mind. It's the filters that I have. I gotta learn how to use my mind differently. And then you'll see, oh, shit, all those relationships that I thought were so bad that I left, I could have actually salvaged all those. If I was just using my mind properly. Even as an area of application, let me just point out to you even finding, for example, new music that you like, or new movies that you like, or new books that you like, or new teachers and gurus that you would resonate with. What is that? Oh, What you looking for sameness is in between differences. And there are in fact, many music services available online today, who will do this job for you, they have various algorithms or editors who try to create music lists for you such that whatever music list you currently have, they will try to match you up with some other music list, which is very similar to this kind of music that you like, whether it's techno or pop, or dance or hip hop, or whatever you like. And the success of their entire business depends upon their algorithms or their editors, being able to properly match up the sinuses or differences. The the music app, Shazam, you press that button on that app, and it just listens to some music that's playing at a restaurant or whatever, they're faiz, that music for you in a couple of seconds. That's a pretty amazing technology. But what is that technology doing? It's filtering out all the noise, all the differences, because, you know, if you're listening to music, and in a noisy restaurant, that music is different than the actual original song. So this program has to somehow use some fancy algorithms to remove all the noise and match things up such that it says, oh, yeah, this is a match. And these are actually the same, when in fact, they are technically different. You see, so in a sense, what scientists have had to do in order to create smart technology, or like facial recognition, technology on your smartphone, you press the button, and it recognizes your face. And that technology is getting better every day. It's still pretty crude, though, is what they had to do is they have to kind of actually build in a fudging factor. Because when I take a photograph of your face, every photograph is going to be different. So I need to create some kind of algorithm which is going to fudge the truth and actually say, wait a minute, that first photograph, and the second photograph, they're actually the same. It's the same person. The mistake that people make is they think, well, the smartphone really is tracking the same person. And what what I'm telling you is that, no, that's your mind fudging things. Your smartphone is not tracking the same person, your smartphone is, is tracking stuff phenomena. There's no law in the universe that says that you are you. Only you say that you're you. And therefore by saying that you're you, and believing it, you become you. And so you are born. That are that's how identity happens. Identity is not found out in the world. Identity is what you create to be. And then of course, we're building machines that are also going to be capable of doing that. getting better and better at that. Keeping track of these similarities and putting in these fudge factors, and so forth. What I want you to really understand is that there's no like scientific fact of your identity out there somewhere in the universe. See, you construct it, like a story. And because you construct it, you can also deconstruct it. And only if you fully deconstruct it, will you possibly ever become aware of what your identity is, without any constructions? What is your identity without any kinds of stuff added on to it? What were you before that giant snowball? Even started rolling? What was that? And that's a pretty radical thing to discover. Let me also point out specifically applications of sameness and differences. With respect to self actualization. For self actualization, you need to really get good at seeing the deep sinuses. For example, when it comes to integrating all spiritual schools, and understanding what spirituality and religion really are, and why they originated in the first place, for that you need to be able to see deep, deep, deep sameness. And this is something that I see very few people are able to do because they get too stuck on the differences. So you'll have someone like Sam Harris, who comes up there's as well but Islaam is is actually really different from Christianity and from Buddhism. Because in the Koran they say, bla bla bla, bla, bla bla, and this and violence and that and, and so because of this blah, blah, blah and because of this all the violence in this Yeah, if you want, you can definitely use your mind to see that in the Koran. On the other hand, you can also look at the Quran and see the deep similarities between the Quran, the Bible, and Hinduism and various Buddhist texts, sutras. And actually, you would be more right, by seeing the same nurses than the differences. Because you know what, there's differences all the time between everything. And it's very easy to get lost in the differences, just the way that Sam Harris, Sam Harris doesn't the way he, he, he gets all of his his audience members lost as well, because they start to believe it, and then there'll they're lost in all the differences. As you get lost in the differences, you lose the sight of the deep, deep, deep similarities, and also you develop hostility. And in the case of Sam Harris, he's stoking up xenophobia, or Islamophobia in this case. And then, and then people can't even open their mind to a teaching like what I teach. Because what I teach is, is radically looking at the deep similarities between things. And when I even bring up the idea that Islam could be similar to Buddhism or to Christianity, people balk at that idea. Because already their minds have been filled by the media and folks like Sam Harris, and others, with just this general vibe of xenophobia, and that there can't be anything worthwhile in the Quran. Because now people have been built up their identities around that. Right, they've built up an identity around hating Islam. And while there are many problems with Islam, you know what, there's a lot of problems with everything. Fast the problem, there's nothing that's problem free, in a sense, there's deep problems within Islam. There's deep problems within Catholicism. There's deep problems within Buddhism, there see problems within every single religious tradition. But not only that, it doesn't stop there. There's deep problems in capitalism. There's deep problems than socialism. There's deep problems within modernism, there's the problems and post modernism, there's deep problems within every single country, there's deep problems with every single economic system. There's deep problems within every single political party. There's deep problems, even within science, even within mathematics, even within rationality. So where are there no problems. There's always problems. And so of course, what the mind will do is the mind will ignore all that, and the mind will select those problems, which it needs. such that it can create a differentiation between those people over there. And us over here. Because we're over here, this is our identity. This is our tribe. This is our nation. This is our religion. This is our second this is our group, this is our second, whatever it is, whatever you're subscribed to. Another area of application is integrating science and religion. If you really want to understand how science and religion fit together, for that you're gonna need to see deep sadnesses. For Understanding the blunders of epistemology. for understanding how the mind misuses beliefs, are the problems of ideology and fundamentalism, the problems of paradigms and people getting locked into various paradigms. For that, you're gonna need to apply deep sameness. Because you see, the biggest problem with people who believe stuff and who are ideological is that they don't see the deep similarity between their fundamentalism and the fundamentalism, fundamentalism of everybody else. So what happens is that people become a fundamentalist. But then they can't see how my being fundamentalist is the same thing as those fundaments over there. So for example, Christian fundamentalists in America can't see that their fundamentalism is really just the same thing in different clothing, as Islamic fundamentalism, and it will have the exact same problems. And even scientists and atheists, they can't look past the fact that their own atheistic fundamentalism, the rationalist fundamentalism is also just another form of fundamentalism, and it suffers from exactly the same problems as Islamic fundamentalism. Now, of course, see, the atheist mind of the rationalist minds they all do, but rationalists Don't. Don't commit suicide bombings And that's true. But what you're doing there is you're, you're nitpicking the differences. See, it's true that rationalists probably won't do a suicide bombing. But you know what a rationalist will do a rationalist will start a corporation, for example, that tries to squeeze a bunch of money out of third world countries create sweatshops in Indonesia somewhere, or, you know, cut down rainforests in the Amazon or something for a profit, because that's what the rationalist is about rationalism and materialism go hand to hand. And when you're doing that, you don't care really what the impact is on the environment for the most part, other people a lot of times and, and so, in that sense, you're going to heart or you're going to hurt harm a lot of people. And now, of course, the rational say, oh, but I'm not intending to harm people. I'm just doing business. I'm just involved in business, whereas the terrorists, they're really evil because they want to harm people. But again, see, the fundamental similarity is not in that that's all window dressing. You got to see the deep sameness, the deep sameness, is that the Islamic fundamentalist, what is he really driven by? He's driven by defending his identity? Why is he blowing people up? Because his identity is in danger, and he wants to protect it against an existential threat? What is the businessman doing, when the businessman is paying money to lobbyist to go in and fix the laws in the country such that they favor the businessman? What is he doing, he's doing the exact same thing. So it's not the content of your beliefs, or the content of your fundamentalism that matters. We have fundamentalist scientist, like people who have Nobel Prizes, and who have won procedures award the universities, we have scientists, like people who are involved in quantum mechanics and so forth, who take up a fundamentalist position, about their ideas about string theory, or quantum mechanics, some interpretation, they think this is the right interpretation. And then they, they cling to it, and they will spend the rest of their career defending that, never realizing that exactly the same thing that Islamic terrorists is doing, or that the businessman is doing, or that a football fan is doing when he is defending his team, against some other team and starting some riot. Now, all of these various things play out in different ways. So there's a lot of differences between how all this gets played out, and people get lost in the differences. And they start to blame each other for the differences. But really, what they're missing is the deep, fundamental similarities. You're also going to need to see deep similarity for understanding how evil works, how corruption works and how conflict works. It's really the same product as I was just describing. See, the problem is that people don't understand evil, because they're too self centered. And they don't see their own evil. They look out at the world and they say, Oh, look, that person is evil, that company's evil, that organizations evil, that country is evil. But what they don't really see is the deeper connection of like, what, what is causing that evil, that company, organization or person, whatever they're doing, they're doing it to advance their self agenda. Because they're self biased. But guess what, who else is self biased? You are, who else has a self agenda you do? Who else is ignorant of their own evil that they cause you are just like they are. Because every evil person believes they're a good person. Just like you believe you're a good person. But to see that requires you really looking past the differences. And it means admitting some bitter truth. Like that. There's not much of a difference between you and a Nazi, or you and a terrorist, or you and a fundamentalist. And especially a lot of scientifically minded people, they like to think that they're above all that, which is precisely what gets them to commit their own versions of evil. Now, of course, all these groups commit their own unique versions of evil, which are different. So there are important differences. I'm not saying that, that a quantum physics professor commits the same level of evil, that some is radical, Islamic suicide bomber does their different versions of evil, but it's stemming from the same source. And if you want to understand that, you got to be able to see the deep sameness. If you want to understand human motivation, why human beings do what they do, you got to be able to see deep sameness is because fundamentally All human beings are driven by exactly the same psychological drivers, which are good out and even further even deeper into existential drivers, or motivations, which have to do with like I said, defending one's identity, because that's what life is about defending one's identity, because without an identity, who are you? What are you What is there to defend? A lot of people who buy into science, again, rationalist type, skeptic types, atheist types, they just assumed that oh, well, Leo, that's easy. Natural selection. And evolution explains all this. So human beings were just like, biological machines who grow up and are supposed to replicate. And that's described by evolution. It's not so simple, though. How does evolution know that something is a thing that needs to be perpetuated, or survived at all. And, of course, people just naively assume that well, creatures are just creatures, and they just, they just are themselves. Because you're already taking identity for granted, you're already assuming that the creature knows it itself. But that's not at all obvious. It's not at all obvious that when you're sitting there eating your food at dinner, that you shouldn't eat your hand as well. It's not obvious at all, that this hand is not something that ordered that rather than this hand is you and therefore you shouldn't bite it. Right? So somehow, your mind had to actually draw a distinction between what is acceptable to eat what's not acceptable to eat. And that is based literally on what you believe you are. That's not a given. That's not a physical given. Nowhere in physics, does it tell you that you are you and that your body is you. Science doesn't tell you that. And also, as an area of application for self actualization, for understanding all of human suffering, if you want to understand where all suffering comes from, you're going to need to see deep sadness, because all suffering basically comes from one source. But because suffering proliferates in so many different ways, you can be depressed, you can be angry, you can be bitter, you can be mad at some political group, some religious group, and it seems like all your problems are such specific problems out there, you have a problem with your wife, with your boss, with your children, with your work with this with school, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you're solid. You're trying to solve these problems all the time. And you're just inundated, never ending problems. Have you ever wondered why you never run out of problems in your life? There will never be a day where you just kind of sit back and say, Okay, that's it, I solved all my problems. No more problems left anymore. Why is that? Could it be because you're creating the problems yourself. And all the suffering that comes along with it? Well, maybe you could start to become aware of that. But for that you would need to be conscious of deep sadnesses, which you're not conscious of right now, because you're overly focused on the differences. It's very important that you understand here that even though I am stressing deep sameness is here, and I am sort of presenting them as superior to seeing difference. It's really important to understand that sameness is not better than difference. Nor is difference, better than sameness. Both can be traps, there are trade offs with both abilities of seeing sameness and seeing difference. Seeing difference is very important. And it's very good, especially for developing technical mastery in some kind of field, which is why it's used so much within science. You need to be able to make fine grained distinctions. To become a technical master anything, whether it's a sport, and art, business signs or anything else. The danger in doing that is that you lose sight of the bigger picture as you get lost in the details in the minutiae of your technical craft. So the opposite thing you could do is you could develop a really strong filter for sameness. And seeing sameness is good for holistic understanding big picture stuff, which is why I emphasize that so much with actualized at Oregon in this particular episode, because that's what we're concerned with here. We're concerned with the very big picture, the largest, broadest, most, most possibly broadest context because we're looking to recontextualize our life in the in The most powerful way possible. But the danger with that is overgeneralization. Because if all you see is sameness everywhere, and you fail to make distinctions and to see the differences, then that will create all sorts of problems and evils in and of itself. So you need to be able to do both don't fall into this black and white trap of being only a sameness person or only a difference person. Or it will become pathological. In fact, what I want to do right now is I really want to give you some examples of how sameness and difference turn into pathologies, because this is eye opening. And it's super important because these here are some of the biggest traps that minds fall into. So first, let's start talking about sameness pathologies. There's a really great example that I love, which comes from the early scientific revolution, and the discoveries of Galileo. So Galileo, created a telescope, he didn't actually invent it, but he created his own. And he started looking out into the stars, Jupiter, the various planets and moons that are out there, he started just counting them up, he was very empirical. And the numbers that he came up with with the various planets didn't correspond with the classical medieval notions that existed in his society. And so he brought up this discrepancy to their attention, thinking that they would be open minded and that they would listen. But of course, the church and the prevailing intellectuals at the time roundly rejected him. And here is their justification for why he was wrong, this is very, very illuminating, because it is a sameness pathology. So look at this, read this with me. They told him quote, there are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head, through which the air is admitted to the tabernacle of the body, to enlighten, to warmth, and to nourish it. What are these parts of the microcosm, two nostrils, two eyes, two ears and a mouth. So in the heavens, as in the Macro Cosmos, there are two favourable stars to unpropitious to luminaries and mercury, undecided and in different from this and many other similarities in nature. Such as the seven metals, we gathered, the number of planets isn't necessarily seven. And end quote. See, see what they did there. They had a reasoning based on sameness, because they thought that God created the human body, and the head, and the head is the most important part of the body, and it has seven orifices in it, that means there must be a sort of isomorphic morphic similarity between the number of holes in the human head and the number of planets and to them that made perfect sense. Now to us today, after all, the centuries of various kinds of discoveries and changes in our philosophy and metaphysics and epistemology about how science works. And all of this, because, you know, back then scientific method was a totally new invention didn't really exist at that time. So back then this reasoning was perfectly valid. Of course, today, to us, it seems ridiculous. Why would there be a similarity between the number of holes in your head, a human head, and the number of planets, that seems to be such an arbitrary correlation? And that's exactly the problem is that the mind will pick these arbitrary correlations, but then hold them up as though they're the truth as though they're somehow physically mandated by God, or by atomic theory, or by quantum mechanics or by whatever else. And the mistake here that rationalists and scientifically minded people make is they say, oh, Leo, but this is actually an example of how religion corrupts science. And this, though, is the wrong conclusion to draw. Because what you have to understand is that this type of reasoning, wasn't really religious reasoning. This was the prevailing signs of that time. This is how scientists thought at that time, by scientists, what we really mean is people who think about the nature of reality. This is what those people thought. Today we have visionary scientists, just like Galileo, who are advancing radical theories about the nature of existence, the nature of the mind, the nature of consciousness, the nature of psychic phenomena, the nature of psychedelics, and so fora which are being roundly rejected by materialist scientists, in universities and an academia using similar kinds of ridiculous arguments as this now, of course, they're different. They're based on atomic theory and whatever other materialist nonsense the scientists believe in, but the similarities that they believe in it, is become a dogma for them. And so therefore, just like with Galileo, they're not able to really see the cutting edge that is being shown to them. You know, the way that Galileo responded to this sort of criticism is he said, but look, guys, here's my telescope, look in the scale scope. See for yourselves, that count up how many planets there are, you'll see that there's, there's more than seven of them. One of these intellectuals of his time tell him they told him that that instrument is the work of the devil. And that nothing that could be seen through that instrument can be counted as evidence or truth, because it's the work of the devil. So of course, we're not going to look into your devil instrument. Sound familiar to what's happening today? That's precisely what's happening today. Modern science has very compelling evidence, for example, for psychic phenomena, indisputable evidence, not to mention millions of anecdotal accounts not mentioning that I'm talking about statistical analysis, meta studies that have been done by serious accredited scientist on psychic phenomena, which are absolutely indisputable proof of the existence of psychic phenomena, indisputable. But of course, it doesn't matter. Because as soon as you present this evidence to any kind of material scientist, because what they really believe is materialism. First and foremost, anything that contradicts materials and by definition must be false. So it will be rejected. In the same way that for these people during Galileo's time, anything that contradicted the seven orifices, and the human head must be false. Because we know by definition, God created the head and God created the heavens, so therefore it must be seven and seven. That's the deep similarity that's being missed. Nowhere is this more true than with psychedelics, you know, I could take a materialist scientist and turn him into a believer in 15 minutes, by giving him five Meo DMT. People criticize me for, for being mystical for talking about woowoo subjects and New Age stuff and God and this and that, look, I'm telling you straight up right now. Just like Galileo told those guys, three, four years ago, I have an instrument, we have this instrument, five Meo DMT, you take this instrument within 15 minutes, you will realize what God is, and you will realize that you are God. And that all of materialism is false. Within 15 minutes, you will realize this, just take 30 milligrams of this substance and wash out. Will you do it? Will any serious scientists and some serious University actually do it? Of course not. Because they'll just say, oh, Leo, psychedelics, those are just hallucinations. How can you possibly trust psychedelics? Leo, that's like the, that's like some kind of devil chemical, which can't trust anything from that. Therefore, I won't even try it. It's the exact same shit 400 years later, the exact same shit. And the really funny thing is, is that 400 years from now, once people have tried five Meo DMT, and they will come to realize that I was one of the first people in human history to really advocate it as strongly as I am. They will say, Yeah, Leah was totally right. But they will still not learn the lesson, the really deep lesson of the fact that even 400 years, whatever science is doing, it will still be locked into some further paradigm. Further stuff that people are dogmatic about, and it will still deny certain kinds of evidence, simply because there will be some new technology that reveals some new part of reality in some radically new way. And of course, people will say that, Oh, well, that's just the work of the devil or whatever, whatever the fashion is at the time. So right now, you wouldn't say it's the work of the devil, you would say it's just some hallucinations in the mind because that's what the materialist paradigm believes 400 years ago was the work of the devil because that was the religious paradigm in 400 more years is going to be some, I don't know. You'll have some other excuse. Your mind will always come with an excuse. That's what The mind is a master of. So this example here was an example of sameness, pathology. Another example of sameness, pathology is what happens within, again, science at large within academia and universities. And this is the same as pathology of confusing the map for the territory. This is a very broad pathology, which applies to many fields in many particular cases. But generally, what happens is that scientists and mathematicians get good, so good at quantifying reality and building models, that they build these models. And then after a while, once they get research funding and grants and and they write books about in this, their models start to seem so real to them, that they actually start to confuse the model with the territory that they were modeling. And they actually start to believe that their models are the territory and to the point where they actually start to deny that territory. And, I mean, this might seem like I'm making this up. But there are serious academics and scientists right now in the top universities, in Harvard and Princeton, and elsewhere around the world. Who actually, for example, believe, because let's say they were a physic quantum physicist, who was doing some equations, you know, created a bunch of equations for gravity and this and cosmology in that. And he's been doing this for 40 years of his life. And he's made some great discoveries, for sure. So we're not we're not trashing his discoveries. But he now actually has convinced himself that his formulas and his equations are literally our the truth, literally our reality, to the point where he can't distinguish anymore. And he can't see that his equations and models are not reality itself. And that is the same as pathology. Because, see, he sees the sameness between his equation and reality. He sees some kind of sameness. But the problem is, he's so locked into that same as he also can't see the difference anymore. And now he's falling into a very deep delusion. There are scientists right now. Alright, around the world who actually believe that the universe is mathematical. Or that theory, physical equations actually are like the laws of the universe is preposterous. They're not conscious at all. If healthy, invented this. It would be just as ridiculous as a pig believing that God looked like swine with snout and bristles. Why would the pig believe that? Because he's a pig. So why would a mathematician believe that the world is mathematical? The mathematician has how he sees the world. But he's not conscious that he's the one who's projecting the mathematics onto the world. There's nothing mathematical about reality whatsoever. It's a projection. But to see that requires overcoming this sameness, pathology. Another really good example for you from the social domain, I read an article recently, that in Scandinavia, some Scandinavian country, maybe Sweden or something, I forget exactly which one. They're becoming very sort of politically correct, as they say. And so what they want to do is they want to remove gender stereotypes between men and women. And so in Sweden, let's say they had a catalog with, with toys for boys and girls in school. And this catalog would feature you know, the traditional gender roles, they would show a boy playing with a Nerf gun and a girl playing with the with a Barbie doll. But in the name of equality, because there's this kind of movement of, of social justice warrior equality. And so what they want is they want to remove these stereotypes because you know, we don't want to pressure boys to necessarily have to act macho, we don't want to pressure girls necessarily have to be housewives and so forth. So why don't we just kind of like mix it up. And so what they decided to do is they decided to switch the roles such that in the magazine, they will show the girl playing with the guns and the boys playing with the dolls. But of course, this creates a problem. This is going to create a whole generation of boys and girls who are confused about how to be masculine and how to be feminine. Now, of course, these people who are planning this equality, they they're doing it from a good intent. Tension. Because it's true that you know, not all boys want to be masculine. Not all girls want to be feminine. But it's also true, that it's certainly not the case that boys and girls are indifferent to which toys they play with, or who they are going to have sex with when they get older. And one of the wondering, masculine or feminine, it's overwhelmingly the case that most boys will skew masculine, and most girls will skew feminine. And the problem is, if you're gonna raise boys and girls in an environment where you're forcing them, like, literally in some of these Scandinavian schools, they will take a toy away from the boy, like, they'll take away his gun and give him a doll. See, but the problem with this, of course, is going to be that you're going to raise a generation of boys and girls, who are not going to understand what it really means to be a man or a woman. Because that needs to be taught, that's difficult to suss out all by yourself. And I speak as someone who's struggled with that myself, and had to really work hard to overcome that to really learn what it means to be masculine. And also learn to, to understand what femininity is. Because the way I used to treat girls and women in general, is just as just like boys, because no one really taught me in my early years, that actually, girls need to be treated differently than boys, especially if you want to be in a relationship with them. And you want to make it successful. And you want to make it exciting and passionate and all this. So this becomes another example of a sameness pathology. Certainly, we need to be careful about not pigeon holing boys and girls. So we don't want to force masculinity or femininity on anybody. But like, for example, what would be nice, what what I would like to see is I would like to see in high school, every high school to have a class called, How to be masculine, and how to be feminine. And the boys and girls can decide which class they want to enroll in. And it's going to be a whole semester, where they get really good, solid practical advice, theory and practice on what it means to be masculine, what it means to be feminine. And maybe, in fact, you you force, the boys and girls to take both classes, so that you can see the world from both sides. And then they can decide after that for themselves, which way they want to be which ideas they want to adopt and which ones they want to leave. That would be a much better model. And in this case, you don't force anybody to be any particular way. But you do give them the options to learn what it means because it is important to learn how to be a man and how to be a woman. Otherwise, what happens is that you're going to be a boy into your 30s and 40s. Or you're going to be a girl into your 30s and 40s. And are going to be lost and confused. Because in traditional cultures and tribal cultures, this kind of stuff was taught by the tribe to the boys and girls. And it's important to proper functioning. Otherwise, what you get is you get these entire generations of boys and girls who grew up and they're sexually repressed, or they're incompetent in bed, or they don't really understand the opposite sex and then of course, because they don't understand them, and they can't attract them, then they get bitter, they get mad and they get angry. They get depressed, they get suicidal, they go shoot up a school or something because of a simple problem like this. That's the same as pathology. lumping together fundamentalist religion with mysticism is also the same as pathology. This is what Ken Wilber calls the pre rational trans rational fallacy. So this is something that scientific and atheistic people make all the time is this fallacy is whenever they hear the word God or spirituality or religion spoken. They automatically assume that what that is, is that that's just like old school Christianity fundamentalist religion. They equate it with Islam and fairy tales and nonsense and flying spaghetti monsters. And they don't make any distinction between that and no non dual teachings, Buddhist scriptures, mysticism, they consider all of that just one thing all of it is fairy tales. All of is that anti scientific, which is of course precisely wrong. Because even though science and rationalism is one evolutionary step above, fundamentalist religion, mysticism is a few evolutionary steps above. Rationalism and science. But that's lost on most people these days, especially within universities, where mysticism is not allowed, because it's considered to be religion. or if it is allowed, it's lumped together with religious studies, which is, which is a real shame. That Satan theology and other saints pathology is lumping together all forms of sexual harassment like I said earlier. Like, people will just ask for free people to get fired and, and sued for exactly the same kinds of crimes or abuses. Even though they're not really the same. Like they will start to treat a serial rapist with the same outrage as, as someone who Pat's a woman on the butt with the same outrage as someone who tells a dirty joke with the same outrage who was something something else, right? I mean, there's there's different degrees of sexual harassment. And so you got to be careful about lumping them all together. Another same as pathology is with psychedelics. People generally lump psychedelics in with hard drugs. That's what our US government does. The US government lists, weed, mushrooms and LSD and DMT as a Schedule One Substance the same as heroin, cocaine and other hard drugs. Which is preposterous, if you've ever taken a psychedelic. And so in general, our entire culture stigmatize a psychedelic so much, that they're not taken seriously in the medical community not taken seriously in the scientific community, not taken seriously, by the culture at large. And so therefore, this powerful, powerful tool is, is going to waste really, the evolution of mankind is being significantly retarded by this lumping together of psychedelics with hard drugs. And, of course, that's done on purpose. A lot of this lumping together, it's not an accident, the same as pathologies, if they're done by the ego, mind on purpose, precisely because the ego mind doesn't want the truth. The ego mind loves being diluted. Because it doesn't know it's deluded, it tells itself that delusion is the truth. So therefore, it only thinks it has the truth. Once you think you have the truth, why go looking for the real truth, you already have the real truth in your estimation. Another example of Samus pathology is with Jordan Peterson. And his lumping together of spiral dynamics stage green, or what are the what he calls the Neo Marxist, lumping stage green, post modernism in with Soviet style of Marxism and communism and all the evils of the of the early 20th century. And what this does, in many people's minds who listened to him is they start to think that Oh, my God, stage green, they don't know what stage green is. That's as far than Amex concept. But basically, they think all those hippies and those liberals and those progressives, really, they're taking us back to Soviet Marxist era days. And it's gonna be terrible if we let them do that. So now they start a war, they sort of cultural war against this, and that's what you're seeing right now in the media. But, of course, what they don't realize, and what Jordan Peterson doesn't realize is that actually, what what he's railing as post modernism, this is stage green, on spiral dynamics. He's railing at post modernism. From below, not from above. So it's true that post modernism definitely has its excesses and its problems, just like every stage does. But the solution is not to rail against those problems. But to realize that actually, you have to grow through that stage and then evolve up it, not to resist it and to try to repress it, which is what Peterson is trying to do. PISA is basically advocating for a sort of stage, orange and maybe a little bit of stage blue society, which is actually the greatest danger that we face right now is we have an overabundance of orange, orange materialism is destroying the entire planet, creating gross income inequality and other sorts of social problems corrupting our politics with with lobbyists money. This is very toxic and very problematic and unsustainable. Not to mention all the ecological problems that come from orange. And stage blue. Well, hey, that's just takes you back to the medieval era. We've already had stage blue. If you want stage blue, go live in the Middle East. You'll get plenty of stage blue. That's not what you really want. What we really need to we need to get more people we need more Americans who are stuck in blue and orange, we need to get them to actually start To open up and accept green, which is the hippies, we need more people to become hippies and social justice warriors, and quote unquote, Marxists, that's not going to lead us to Soviet communism, for sure that's going to lead us to certain problems, there will be problems, there will be excesses to green, of course, there will be every stage has excesses. But we will move past those, and then we'll go to yellow and so forth. And then that will auto correct itself. But demonizing green is only gonna make things worse. Another Samus pathology is calling all corporations evil, which is the same as pathology that green makes, in fact, stage green. And one of the one of the biggest problems with post modernism is that actually, stage green people, they are the ones who come in a lot of sameness pathologies, because they tend to see everything as equal, so equal, that it's too equal, they make all sorts of false equivalencies. And also, they start to lump together, stage blue and stage orange. And so green, looking down in orange will say that orange all the orange corporations and people are evil, and they're greedy, and they're money hungry, and they're showing suicide and all this. And so it's, it's also a same as pathology. And the last example give you same as pathology is I showed a video called why people seem crazy. And in that video, basically, what I explained is that the reason that most people seem crazy to each other, is because we just have a fundamental assumption when we're born. And the way that we're raised is that all human minds and all human consciousnesses are basically the same. Meaning that like, the reality that I inhabit is the same as the reality that you would have it. And that's not at all the case. That's a false assumption. That's the same as pathology, you just assume that what you're conscious of is the same stuff that other people are conscious of. That's not the case at all. There are people who are conscious of aliens and extraterrestrials and fucking psychic phenomena and auras and chakras and higher states of consciousness, God, angels, demons, I mean, you name it, there's so much shit that people are conscious of, that you probably have never been conscious of. But you could become conscious of if you open your mind, if you maybe started a spiritual practice, or did some psychedelics or maybe had head injuries or whatever. I mean, there's lots of ways to alter your consciousness radically, radically such that you're living in a different reality. People don't have to understand this. Scientists don't understand this, the scientific paradigm paradigm does not understand or account for radically different degrees of human consciousness. It just assumes that all human consciousness is the same. And that what the scientist sees what everybody sees, no, that's not the case at all. Most scientists are at a very, very low state of human consciousness, which is why they're materialists. And it's because their materials that they stay in that low state of consciousness, so it's a self fulfilling prophecy. So if you want to, if you want to understand that famous pathology, check out that episode, why people seem crazy. I think it's one of my better ones. Of course, we shouldn't forget about the difference pathologies, we have plenty of different pathologies. Perhaps the quintessential example of which is literal demonization, which is done during war time. It's pretty amazing. Go Go google for world war two posters, typing into Google Images, some phrase such as demonization poster, World War Two, and you will see some pretty crazy stuff. It's hard to believe that the government actually did this. Here's an example I'll show you just as a teaser of a kind of poster that the United States created during World War Two. Pretty crazy, pretty racist stuff. Why does this happen during wartime? Of course, it's not the only the US that's guilty of this basically, every warring nation, demonizes its opponents. Why? Because it's pretty hard to kill other people in a sustained fashion, without separating oneself from them without demonizing them. So literally, or we draw people with fangs and claws and, and devils tails and horns and pitchforks. we demonize them. A very interesting example to illustrate this is that in the 60s or 70s, I believe the CIA, CIA and the US government wanted to use LSD thinking that it might be great for creating super soldiers because they thought hey, if we give them this mind altering drugs, and maybe they will have become super warriors and be able to indiscriminately kill on the battlefield with no remorse and no moral compunctions or anything. So they gave some soldiers LSD as a test. And then what happened was the exact opposite of what they expected. What happened was that the LSD expanded their identity so much such that they became so unified with their environment with all the people around them, that they couldn't shoot the enemy, because they saw themselves in the enemy. And there was no point in shooting yourself. So instead of shooting people, the soldiers were just loving their enemies, such that there could be no war. So of course, they had to nix that whole thing real quick. And that's a very funny story. So another difference pathology is what you see with the men's right movement, which is rather problematic. You see it with pickup you see it with MGTOW with red pill, Jordan Peterson's so called insoles, this sort of stuff. What is the men's rights movement? Really, it's a bunch of guys who have dysfunctional problems with their entire relationship to womankind as a whole, because of the way they were raised. They were raised in such a way that they didn't know how to attract women, or they were, they suffered some suffering from women. And, and so, because of this, now, of course, their egos are wounded. But at the same time, as their egos are wounded, of course, they have their biological needs and their hormones. So they love to have sex with hot women. But at the same time, they actually have a secret hatred of women. Because really, what they want is they want to be able to use the woman have sex with her from a sort of dysfunctional position, but don't want to really commit to a serious relationship, because they don't really know how, because a lot of these guys are very difficult dysfunctional on the inside. They just don't even know how to approach a woman. They don't know what really masculinity is, or what femininity is, or how to treat a woman properly. And so because of this, they develop very dysfunctional views of women. And they start to blame women for their own inadequacies. Because of course, for a man to admit that he's not good with women is, is a rather ugly, and unpalatable thing for the ego to admit. So what the ego dues will do is, it'll exteriorize this problem, and it will start to blame the women, it'll start to blame the feminist movement, it'll start to blame the social justice warriors, it'll start to blame. Political correctness, it'll start to blame the repression of men and the taking away of men's rights and all this, you see, it'll start to act like a victim. Which is, of course, ironically, the very opposite of what a true man would do. A true man would never bitched and moaned about the problem, that he's not getting enough sex, a true man would go out there and say, Okay, I have a problem attracting women, it's probably because I was raised by a bad father, bad mother, or whatever problems happened in my childhood. And now I have to take responsibility for it, it's my problem, I'm gonna go out there and fix it, I'm gonna read the books, watch the videos, take the courses, go out there, socialize, meet women, and solve this problem. And I'm not going to develop any kind of ideologies, I'm not going to blame women for my problems. And of course, in a certain sense, that's what pickup artists try to do. But even as they're doing that, they're still wounded inside. And they're still not really addressing the root problem, because what pickup usually teaches men is that it teaches them how to attract women, but it doesn't really teach them how to understand women. And in fact, it feeds their ego centric view of women asked sexual objects and how to have transactional relationships with them. And in fact, the more POA gets good at that. It still doesn't resolve his problems. Deep down, he still has insecurities about women. He's still using women to try to feed his own, sold out the hole in his own soul that's there, because he hasn't really done any really deep inner work. And so because of this, he even though he might get good with sleeping with lots of women, he still can't really develop serious relationships with them. He's still extremely immature, and he still has an ideology of blaming women in the back of his mind. And so, this is a difference pathology because what this creates is creates a fragmentation in the P ways mind or in the in cells mind or whatever they are. They're creating a rift between themselves men, as an identity and women as an identity. And then they start to blame the women as though the women aren't giving them enough sex or they aren't doing something right or whatever. they're cheating on them. Women are cheaters. And so there's all these stereotypes. Women are cheaters women are sluts. Women aren't doing their the, their job with men blah, blah, blah. It's the feminist. It's the radical crazy feminazis and this and that. And so this this turns into not just a problem with women, it turns into a whole political ideology. And that's, of course, where Jordan Peterson comes in. Because Jordan Peterson feeds into this. The reason Jordan Peterson is so popular with these types of folks, is precisely because he comes in there and he says, Hey, you guys are insults and I, I know why you are. And I will provide you on a silver platter with a political philosophy and ideology that will explain to you why you're a victim, and why in fact, you're being mistreated and why in fact, your identity is threatened and how to get your identity back. And that's by attacking those people over there. It's the post modernists, it's the Greens problem is green people. It's the women, it's the feminist, this all this. That's why this is happening. If we just revert back to old school, deep orange, and even blue traditionalist society, then you'll get all your sexual needs met. And of course, this is preposterous. This is preposterous. It's the opposite of taking responsibility for the problem, blaming scapegoating somebody else. But of course, this serves the needs of Jordan Peterson. It serves his identity needs because he himself is coming from a wounded place from having these sorts of problems on university campuses with with feminist women. Look, you can have legitimate problem not saying all women are angels. I'm not saying you can't get hurt by a woman. I'm not saying a woman can't cheat on you. She can. The problem, though is is that when you start to create an ideology about it, just because someone woman offended you, or didn't give you sex, or mistreated you or whatever, that doesn't mean that you get to create an ideology, anti women, because of that. That's preposterous. And so Jordan Peterson will come in and will say, Oh, look, there's really big differences is the liberals who are telling you that men or women are the same, but but really, in fact, there's a lot of differences. Let me bring in the studies and the science and the lobsters and this and that, to show you how we're really all different and how blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So what he's doing there is he's trying to fragment. And he's overly focusing on the differences. were, in fact, really what what these what these insults and DUIs and so forth really need to understand is that he just understand the deep similarities between men and women, we have so much more in common than, than not. And also a lot of these. A lot of these people, these insults and so forth, really, they're immature boys. They're immature teenagers who have spent the majority of their life playing video games. Going on Facebook, watching YouTube videos and watching porn, living in their mom's basement, not socializing, cooking on their smartphone. That's what they've spent a good 20 years of their entire upbringing doing cooking on an iPad since they were a toddler. And now they grow up living in this virtual world on chat rooms and read it and so forth. And then they wonder how come I suck with women? Of course, of course, you suck with women. Because you have no practice, because you grew up in a virtual world. And so yes, this is a problem in society. But of course, you don't see Jordan Peterson playing video games, and blaming Facebook and blaming YouTube and blame television and all this, because if he did, he would alienate his entire audience. Because his entire audience basically fucking gamers, teenage gamers who are immature and don't want to take responsibility for anything. That's his audience, primarily. And so they don't want to hear that. What they want to hear is who can escape goat goat and who can I blame him? Oh, the Neo Marxists. Okay, that's a perfect solution to my problem. Let me sit around blaming the the Neo, the Neo Marxist, but you know what? You're sitting around blaming, Neo Marxists isn't gonna get you late. It's not going to fix your problems. In fact, it's only gonna make it worse, because you're just doubling down on the problem. You keep watching those stupid Jordan Peterson videos over and over again. What does that do that just drives you deeper and deeper into the virtual world. You watch more porn, you play more video games, you go and you, you. You develop this political ideology of yours on online forums and chat groups and stuff. And not only just makes it worse, doesn't solve your problems. How do you think you're gonna relate to women, when deep down you hate women. And yet at the same time you need women to satisfy your sexual needs, that's a really tough place to place yourself in, you are really in a pickle there. Because what's gonna happen is that even if you do manage to accidentally bump into a woman, and she's beautiful, and you like her and all this, and you're gonna destroy that relationship, because deep down, you have this bitterness inside you, Jordan Peterson's bitterness will creep into your mind, and then you will go around spouting the bitterness. And yet, at the same time, you're gonna need that woman to have sex with her. And so you're gonna, you're gonna both hate her at the same time as needing her and loving her. And that's going to become a really dysfunctional thing. And then you're gonna spend your whole life bouncing between different women wondering what's wrong. And then of course, as you do that, you're gonna blame the women more and more, because the cash of course, the ego doesn't want to take responsibility. So it's not going to admit that it's wrong. He's not going to admit that all these Jordan Peterson ideologies are, are silly, and immature, and regressive. And so it's going to double down and it's gonna say, oh, no, it's really the women, even the good women, even the women that I thought were good, even they are evil. They are right, Jordan Peterson is even more right than I thought, the red pill movement is even more right than I thought. And so you will create your own living hell. Another difference pathology is Sam Harris and Islam. So Sam Harris likes to rant against Islam, drawing a sharp distinction between Christianity and other religions and Islam, saying that Islam is particularly dangerous and evil and bad and non humanist and against Western values and the mother lode of bad ideas. That's his direct quote. And then this ideology starts to pervade culture at large and those people who follow him, but of course, the thing that Sam Harris is missing, and that his followers are missing is that they're not seeing the deep sameness between what Sam Harris is doing, and actually what Islam is doing. So really, Sam Harris's greatest problem with Islam is that the problem with Islam and it's a real problem. So he's right, that it's a problem is that Islam falls into the trap of the lesser jihad. So there's the greater jihad, which is going inside and pursuing awakening. And then there's the lesser jihad of externalizing, that whole process attacking other people in the world, the infidels, or whoever else, are your enemies. And that's, that's a big problem, for sure. And it exists within Islam. But the problem is that it also exists within Sam Harris and within his whole movement, because even though Sam Harris is anti religious, and all this, he's a rationalist fundamentalist, that's what he is. And so the deeper similarities that the dog was within Islam are also materialist dogmas that exist within Sam Harris, and especially, especially his followers, because Sam Harris is fairly evolved. But his followers are much less evolved. But they, but they subscribe to his rationalist cult. That's what it is. It's a cult of rationalism, a cultivate theism, a cult of materialism. And they believe that this is the solution to all of religion, and all the evils of Islam and all of that, and that this will lead to the perfect society if we can just make the whole world rational. But of course, it will lead to its own set of problems which are parallel to the ones that Islam created. And in fact, this whole crusade against Islam really is just the lesser jihad. It's a waste of your time. It's a distraction. It's a red herring, what you really need to be doing is waking up the greater jihad. And the deepest irony of it all is is that this is what this has become for Sam Harris, because Sam Harris has not completed his journey. Despite what people think, despite writing books like waking up. He has a half baked sense of awakening. Not a full deep enlightenment, not a full deep awakening. And so rather than completing the greater Jihye what he's done is he's fallen to the lesser jihad, and what is the lesser Jihad fighting against Islam? So the time that he could have spent fully enlightening himself instead, he's spending now writing books and doing tours with Jordan Peterson is so forth to rail against Islam and other political things. So, so the very evil that Sam Harris is railing against within Islam is the very evil that he himself is committing, but not seeing and his followers certainly are not seeing it. Because to see it requires seeing deep sameness. And this here is a difference pathology. Now, you might say Leo, but But what about you, aren't you now right? Feeling good? Sam Harris. So aren't you committing the same thing? Why don't you go live in a cave and fully enlightened yourself? And then otherwise, you're doing the same thing. Sam Harris's and you're right, I have to be very careful about that. I have to be very careful about starting ideological crusades against any of these people, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, we'll talk about next, and so on, you know, I could, I could, I can get so many followers, I can write books, I could write books, tearing down and deconstructing all these popular fingered figures within politics, within science, within spirituality, within religion, all of this, you know, I could, I could go on TV shows and radio shows and podcasts and earn millions of dollars and do tours and speaking engagements and all of this, I could easily fall into that trap. So I have to be very careful. Very careful, I'm very careful not to do too much of that. And whenever I try to criticize somebody, I tried to not make an identity out of it. It's very easy to get an identity as a critic, and then that becomes your thing. And then you're criticizing everybody all the time. And that's really not my intention. I'm just pointing out traps do you hear? These are just examples. I'm not really using this to rail against these people, even though it might sound like especially to their fans. These are just examples to point out how relevant this topic of sameness and difference is to our time right now, and it will still be relevant 100 years from now. The details will change but the the traps will still remain the same. They've been the same for 1000s of years. Richard Dawkins creates a difference pathology between himself and creationists. So he's an evolutionary theorist, and he likes to advocate Darwinism. And he loves to bash and criticize and ridicule creationists. And that's fine. Yeah, I mean, in a sense, there's a lot wrong with creationism. I'm not here to defend it. There's a lot wrong with fundamentalist religion. But again, just like Sam Harris, there's a problem here, in that Richard Dawkins himself has taken on a materialist dogma, the dogma of evolution, and so forth. Through random mutations, he's taken this on, as his own religion. So the irony is that he's ranting against religion, but really, he has a different flavor of religion himself, which is the scientism version of religion. And he behaves if you watch his, his videos and talks pretty much like a religious person, just as dogmatic, just as close minded, completely oblivious to the truths of mysticism and non duality, lumping them together with those of fundamentalist religion. So the difference pathology here is that Richard Dawkins thinks he's very different from religion. But in fact, the more profound thing to realize there is, they're more similar than they are different. Of course, ethnocentrism and racism, which we're seeing a resurgence of lately, is a difference, pathology. That's what racism is. That's what ethnocentrism is thinking that your culture is, is a better culture than other cultures. And cherry picking the evidence to justify your beliefs. And the reason you're doing that is not because it's true, not because the science support you, supports you. But because it's your identity. And you're attached to it. And the last difference pathology that I'll mention is not seeing one's own evil. The reason people don't notice the evil that they themselves commit. And the reason that evil really exists in the world in the first place, is simply because every individuals thinks that they are different from all the evil people out there. So it's because I'm not like a terrorist. I'm not like a Nazi. I'm not not like a corrupt politician. I'm the good guy. I'm the hero of the story. Which is essentially saying, I'm different from all those. That I get to act in a self righteous manner, without self reflection. And whenever I act without self reflection, I will actually be selfish, and therefore commit the very evil, that every other person out there is also committing. That's how evil gets created. Selfishness, blindness of one's own self biases. And being in denial about the fact that evil doesn't lurk out there. Evil starts from within every individual. And it gets worse the less you self reflect about your own self biases. So the mistake is drawing too strong of a distinction between you and all the other evil people out there, really what you need to do is you do the opposite. And you say, if there's so much evil in the world, where's it coming from? It's coming from the human mind. And I have a human mind. And fundamentally, we're not that different from our Yeah, we're not that different from each other in terms of our, the way our brains and our minds work. So because of that, I should assume that I am capable of the very same evils that everybody else's. And therefore I have to be really careful about justifying my own selfishness to myself, using reason, science, logic, and all sorts of excuses and rationalizations. And if I do that, by seeing the commonalities between us all, then I will actually be able to transcend evil and commit less of it. So those are the pathologies, I hope you can see how many traps there are here. And that you need to be able to do both. See the differences and see the sameness is not one, not just the other. I have three powerful questions for you that you can use in all sorts of situations for the rest of your life from now on. That will, that will help illuminate a lot of stuff for you, if you ask them open mindedly with genuine curiosity. The first one is, how are these two things the same? Any two things? In any situation? Especially some controversial or tricky situation? Like religion versus science, or politics or whatever? The second question is, how are these two things different? And the third question is, how are these two things deeply the same? You want to make sure you get past the surfaces, and get to the essence of things. Those are very powerful questions. As a homework assignment, what I want you to do is I want you to contemplate this topic of sameness versus difference. What is difference, really, what is sameness? I want you to do a tricky thing here wishes to contemplate this from scratch. Despite all the ideas that I filled your head with, and all the examples, what I want you to do is I want you to develop a certain ability, which is sort of like walking and chewing gum at the same time. And this is the ability to be able to both rely on external sources, like myself, or books or other videos or teachers or courses and seminars and workshops, and so forth. But then be able to isolate yourself for 30 to 60 minutes, as though in a hermetic bubble. And contemplate a topic that you've studied and read about as though you haven't read, read about or study that ever in your life. This is contemplating it from scratch. Without assumptions, without preconceived notions without bringing science and philosophy and religion and all this sort of baggage into your contemplation, you need to be able to do both, because it's not a viable strategy to go through life without reading books, listening to great teachers and gurus and all the seminars and workshops that are available, that's critical, you need that, because you know what, if all you do is you just seal yourself in a room and you just contemplate for the rest of your life, chances are, you're going to fall into traps, and you're going to delude yourself. So one of the ways to prevent that is by bouncing your discoveries off of external sources, to double check yourself. And conversely, if all you do is read books, and you listen to teachers and gurus and videos, but you don't contemplate for yourself, then all you're going to have is a bunch of ideas that are not going to be your own, and you're not going to own them, you're not going to deeply understand them, you're not going to know why they're true. It's just going to be ideologies. And all you're going to do is be defending ideology for the rest of your life, which is going to be disastrous for you and for society at large. So what you need to do is you need to be able to combine both. You need to be able to study broadly. Then sit yourself down for 30 to 60 minutes, throw it all away, contemplate in your journal, have some amazing insights and epiphanies then come out of your bubble. And then you can think about and you can compare like, oh, what I discovered here matches up with what Leo said or this thing here. No, it doesn't it contradicts what he said. So who's right maybe he's right, maybe I'm right. And through this process, it's kind of bouncing back and forth. That's how you will develop a really deep understanding of reality and you will avoid many of the traps that would otherwise you would fall into So for the next week, every single day, I want you to contemplate what is difference, what is sameness for at least 30 to 60 minutes. not based on anything I said here today. And then after a week of that you can come back and maybe you can compare and see how you did. There's a lot there go deep, this topic is much deeper than even I'm making out to be in this very long episode. So in conclusion, you need to become mentally flexible, you need to get good at seeing both difference and similarity without getting trapped into holding an ideological position without needing a particular difference or particular similarity to be true. So this is the process of letting go and letting go and letting go. The goal is to develop an ability to be a really nuanced, greyscale thinker, not a black and white thinker. Plus an ability to see the deep interconnectedness of things, such that you're able to do both at the same time, you're able to integrate, and you're able to distinguish. And you're not using either of these to serve your egoic self centered agenda of survival. If you can do that, that is a really rare and powerful thing. And so now in conclusion, just notice, notice where we started with this episode, notice how much ground we've covered, notice how much practical stuff came out of it, all the ramifications, notice how far we've gone. We started with a very innocuous seeming topic, like sameness and difference. And you might think, Oh, well, what's the big deal about that? There's nothing special about that, I can contemplate that for 30 minutes, and be done with it. And now you discover No, that's not the case at all. In fact, ultimately, what we discovered is we got to the very root of reality itself. This very question has led us to the very structure of existence. And as it turns out, reality is really nothing but differences which are all the same. And at the same time, reality is nothing but sameness is, which are all different. And that's the end. All right, I'm done here. Please remember to click that like button for me, and then come check out actualize that org, that's my website, you'll be able to find some exclusive stuff there. My blog, the forum, the life purpose course, the book list. All of those could be life changing for you. So make sure you check those out. And the last thing that I want to leave you with is something really profound to ponder over the next week, something that puts a bow ties everything we've talked about here together, in in the deepest way. And this is the deepest truth about reality. And that is what I will leave you with