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Hey, this is Leo, for actualised.org. And in this episode, I'm going to be talking about science versus religion. And what I see as the sheer absurdity of the modern science versus religion debate. It's shocking to me how ignorant modern rational thinkers are, about what spirituality actually is, and how it works. And so here, I'm going to be talking a lot about some of the fallacies that rational thinkers very intelligent, scientifically minded people make when it comes to this topic. In fact, my brother sent me this book recently, which he wanted me to read. It's called a universe from nothing. And it's a science slash physics slash cosmology book written by a theoretical physicist, pretty popular guy called Lawrence Krauss. And it was interesting, I was reading this book. And you know, this book talks about basically, how can you have a universe in the first place? Where does it come from? What if it came from nothing, literally nothing. And he talks about some of the modern theoretical physics and relativity theory and quantum mechanics, how all these theories different, different theories connect together, and how they could explain that the universe could in theory, materialize out of nothingness. And so it's kind of cool. But what's interesting, what I found really baffling about his arguments here is that the way he's arguing in the book is like, he's kind of presenting the scientific paradigm of like, rational thinking and analysis and fact based science, basically. And then also, on the other hand, he's talking about the religious, the Christian faith, or whatever faith you want to take about God, and how, how the two can be reconciled. And also, it's kind of like, well look at how superior sciences to this religious stuff here. And he basically tries to boil it all down into science. And it's very fascinating to me, because of the key fallacy that Lawrence Krauss makes here, which is something that Ken Wilber identified very pointedly he talks about this in many of his books. And it's called the pre rational post rational fallacy. And so I'm gonna go into a lot of depth as to what this is, because this is a very important fallacy to understand, if you want to be pursuing spirituality. And also if you just really want a very high level, very accurate understanding of what the hell is going on in life, and what the hell is going on with societies over the last couple 1000 years. Now, Lawrence Krauss is one example of someone who has no idea that he's a rationalist, and that he's missing out on something called post rationalism. There's basically pre rational thinking, then that evolves into rational thinking, and then that evolved into post rational thinking. Now, the problem that rationalists make is that they take post rational thinking, and they conflate it and confuse it with pre rational thinking. Also, the pre rationalists make the same mistake is that the pre rationalist looks at post rational thinking, and then brings it down to his level and thinks of it as a justification or a proof of pre rationalism. And this whole thing is a big mess. So we're going to sort this out right here. What's crazy is that I see, not just this guy here making this mistake, but I see a lot of good scientists, in modern times making this mistake. For example, I was reading a book by Martin Seligman, who's a PhD, and he's one of the founding fathers of positive psychology. And I really respect that guy for the research and the work that he's done. He's got some great books, but also, like, I was reading one of his latest books, and he was also struggling with this problem. Well, how do you reconcile God? And also, how do you reconcile that with positive psychology and evolution and happiness? And, you know, it seems like there's a certain directionality to evolution in life, and how do you reconcile all this stuff? And you know, I can just, I'm reading the pages and knowing some perspective that I know now. It's just so silly, looking at the way that this man is thinking through this problem, because he's thinking and he's trying to solve this problem on a level that the problem can't be solved that he's trying to sell On a rational level, where in fact it needs to be solved at a post rational level. And you see this with popular atheists, popular popular atheist writers and authors and scientists and speakers. So for example, some other people would be Richard Dawkins, who actually wrote the foreword, or I believe the afterword for this book here. Also Christopher Hitchens. He died recently, but he was a really popular and outspoken critic of religion. And he had debates and stuff and he wrote books about it, popular guy, he made the same mistake, all these people are making the same mistake. And even though their intentions are nice, and their intentions are basically to, to evolve completely out of pre rational and irrational and what they're trying to do is we're trying to take pre rational people and convince them of rationality. But the problem in doing that is that they're not seeing the thing that they're missing, which is post rationality, which is what I'll talk about in a minute here. Also, Freud made this mistake. When Freud was studying higher spiritual truths. What he ended up doing is he ended up boiling them all down to infantile notions of repressions. And in childhood fears and anxieties that we all have. So he he really missed the mark on that one. And also really, sadly, Joseph Campbell, Joseph Campbell, who I really love, because he's very central to what we do here at actualized. org, which is to promote, you know, living a purposeful life, and mastering your own life. And being on the hero's journey. He came up with the concept of the hero's journey, he studied a lot of mythologies around the world. And basically what he did is he started boiling them all down, he started finding the common thread between all these different mythologies from Western and Eastern and other types of cultures, tribal cultures, and what he discovered is there a common threads and elements. The problem though, is that he didn't actually understand post rational truths, he boiled them down into rational truths, because he was at a rational place in his own life. That's how his mind worked. That's how it's like he was working. And also he basically turned it in like a form of poetry and into this mythos, which is nice. But that's not actually where these truths reside. That's not where they came from. And what's really fascinating is that all the religious truths that the common masses believe in the pre rational mind, most of them, I would say, 90% of them, if not more, come from actually post rational visionaries from 1000s of years ago, and those truths are still largely untouched by human beings, by the masses and by society, largely completely misunderstood. Not just by by the pre rationalist, but especially by the rationalists. And this is something that we need to really dig into. See, the problem is, is that the rational mind confuses spiritual, spiritual truths with religious myths. But that's not what they are. Not at all. The pre rational mind confuses spiritual truths with religion. But that's not also correct. To the rational mind. Spiritual truths and religious myths both smell the same, they seem very similar. And so what happens is that there's like a, an overreaction that happens. And we basically think about it, you know, rational person in modern times says, well, there's all these religions, and they saw all they say all these, you know, things that don't really seem apparent, and a lot of them contradict each other. And historically, we know that there's there's been war and violence in the name of religion, and nobody agrees with nobody else. And so it must be all nonsense. And that religion is somehow used as like, maybe a control mechanism or something is deeply flawed there. It's basically irrational. And wouldn't it be nice if we could erase that, especially on a societal level, if we could fix that would not really advance society to the next stage of evolution. And on the surface, you know, that sounds very reasonable. It sounds very nice. But there's more to the story than that. A lot more to the story. The problem here and the reason that I really want to discuss this issue in a lot of depth is because I'm releasing videos now about spirituality, and about, about enlightenment And the problem that creates for me is that it, it makes me look like a new age wacko. And that's how I look in the rational person's mind. Because again, when I'm talking about this stuff, it almost seems now as though I'm going to be making an argument for religion. And for pre rationalism, it's also going to seem to you, if you're in the rational stage of conscious evolution, it's going to seem to you that I'm either making apologies for religion, or that what I'm going to be saying is going to be like, a new form of religion or a way to kind of like mollify religion and to save religion. But that's not what I'm saying at all. Right, my point is a lot more subtle, and a lot more nuanced. So stay with me, don't just cast me into the pre rational category. Don't cast me off as a new age wacko, until you hear me out. So what's the problem here with rational thinkers? Well, the problem really is that enlightenment gets labeled as religious nonsense. And enlightened enlightenment is a real thing, which is accessible to every human being, every normal, well functioning human being, it's accessible, and enlightenment, simply the truth of no self. And I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about what that really means. I've got many videos on that. So you might want to check out my spiritual alignment intro video for what that really is. But basically, it means that this entity that you think that you are, who's running the show in your life doesn't actually exist? It's a fiction. The ego is a fiction, your self concept is a fiction. Now, the rational mind might listen to that and say, okay, that kind of makes maybe some plausible sense. But see, the problem is that the rational mind stays rational. And you actually can't access the truth of enlightenment. By staying in the rational mind, you have to let the rational mind go and evolved into the post rational. But this can seem a little bit like regressing into the pre rational. And so there's going to be resistance from the rational standpoint, for doing this. And that's the biggest problem. The problem here is that when you're entrenched in rationalism, you prevent yourself from growing to higher levels, you prevent yourself from self actualizing, you prevent yourself from tasting some of the most beautiful and profound truths in life. You cut that off for yourself as a possibility. And that's a shame. And I want to convince you that there's a little more out there for it than you think. There's a big difference between voodoo and shamanism, if we put that in one category. And then let's say, priests preaching to you at the pulpit, and churches and cathedrals, and mosques and the typical fundamentalist Christian or Islamic believer, put that in, let's say, second category. And then the third category, which is Zen masters and Yogi's. These, to the rational mind all seem similar. And in fact, you might lump them all together and say, Oh, it's all religious, jibber jabber. It's all mythology. It's all kind of wishful thinking. And it's all delusion of the masses. And none of it is rational. None of it is scientific. So let's just throw that out. But what you don't see is that these three categories are functioning at completely different paradigms of psychic development and conscious development. And in fact, you as the scientific rational thinker that you think that you are, are not above the Zen master yogi, you're way below him. You may be above in your mental development of a priest or fundamentalist believer, and you're certainly above voodoo and shamanism, but you're way behind. The more advanced than master yogi, and the Zen master and Yogi know something that you don't know. And it's not just a fairy tale. It's a real facet of reality. And it's a facet of reality that science and the rational mind has a lot of difficulty grappling with exactly because of the inherent limitations of rationalism. So let's talk a little bit about that. The rational mind creates a problem for itself. And this is a classic problem that has been well known in philosophy Be for 1000s of years, but especially 500 years ago, with Rene Descartes, it became very poignant. And that's the mind body problem. The mind body problem, it's a deep topic, I can't cover all of it here. But just to gloss over it. What the mind body problem says is, well, if we look around at reality, what we see is that there's really two fundamental substances, it seems like there's first person phenomenon, which we call the mind, tastes, and sounds and thoughts and feelings and emotions and colors. This is all found kind of in the internal world, in the mind. And then there's also the external world of matter and energy, and people and cars, and societies and outer space, and galaxies, and so on, and so forth. And that's the body. Okay? The problem, though, is that this creates a dualism. And basically, it's not clear how the mind affects the body, or how the body affects the mind how these two things causally interact with each other, if they're totally different substances. Doesn't make a lot of sense. Now, a lot of smart people have made a lot of different arguments and claims about how to resolve the mind body problem. You know, entire books have been written about it for hundreds of years. But really, the problem has not been resolved in modern times by science. And in fact, science does an interesting thing. And what modern, academic, strict science does, is it really does away with first person phenomenon altogether. It pretty much denies that it exists. And it just kind of skirts, this whole mind body problem entirely, leaving it to philosophers and metaphysicians. And saying, Oh, it's not really important. And the way it does this is either by denying first person phenomenon completely, or by reducing it to third person phenomenon, which is, you know, reduction of mind into body. So what is the mind? Well, it's just neurons in the brain. It's just, ultimately atoms and molecules and quarks and whatever else. Physical matters composed of. And that's all there is to the story. Sometimes the very hardcore, just blatant reductionism, sometimes scientists do it in a very subtle, sneaky way. But almost across the board, some kind of reductionism is going on. Or, if not reductionism, then the mind body problem is just there. It's the elephant in the room, and no one's looking at it. And this creates a problem, because really, science has not reconciled how matter and mind function together. It's a big mystery. And the problem is that science will never resolve this. It seems like well, if we just do more neuroscience will resolve it, actually, we won't. Because the problem goes beyond the rational paradigm. The rational mind doesn't like to admit that the rational perspective is actually a perspective. And that it has limits. Like every perspective, sometimes being hyper rational, it just seems like oh, well, you know, rationality is the thing. It's the thing. It's the tool, or instrument through which we get to understand how the universe is. And we get to understand the very fundamental workings of the universe, using our rational mind by modeling it and experimenting with its sign scientifically. But actually, that's not really how it works. Rationalism is a perspective, in the same sense that religious thinking, pre rational thinking is a perspective to let's talk a little bit about this, because it is very important. A man by the name of Clare graves, did some brilliant research in the last century, and following him and even preceding him. There's been a lot of research done in the last 100 years about the stages of development of the human psyche. And this research has been done by serious hardcore scientists. And what's shocking is that they develop models of psychic evolution, which are extremely consistent and explain a whole hell Have a lot. In fact, when you understand one of these models, the entire world opens up to you, in a sense, you start to have an understanding of how you fit into the world, and how societies evolve and how they work and why people behave the way they do. And a lot of stuff that hadn't made sense to you previously, all of a sudden starts to make a hell of a lot of hope, a whole lot, a lot of sense. So let me explain, take some time to explain this graves model. And it's such a deep concept that I'm gonna shoot more videos on this in the future. But this is going to be, you know, an introduction here. So basically, what graves did is he interviewed a lot of human beings. And he was looking at what they valued the most. And what he found out is that what a human being values actually depends on his level of development. Development here, think of it in the sense that if you take a take a chicken, first, it's it starts out as an egg, then it hatches, it's a little chick, then it grows up until bigger chick, then all of a sudden, his feathers, which were yellow, for, you know, start becoming whiteness or scrolling up, and it becomes a real, you know, adult chicken. And then if supposedly, if you'll know, you'll let it live for a long time, usually, we don't eat them. But if you let it live for a long time, it will become kind of old and decrepit. And so you've got stages of which stages through which this organism passes through. And what's interesting is that it's not just that one chicken does it this way, every chicken does it this way. And it turns out to be the same for human beings. But what's interesting for human beings is we're not just talking about physical development, through, you know, childhood, teenage years, early adulthood, midlife and then late, elderly adulthood. That's obvious. But also there's cyclic development. And this is something that most people miss. In the grace model, he had stages. And to each stage, he gave colors, and he gave numbers and various labels. What's really interesting is that not only the the stages, but I'm just going to tell you right now, they not only apply to you and to your potential psychic development, but also to the development of societies, because societies reflect the individuals that constitute those societies. And so that has huge ramifications. So basically, one of the earliest levels, I'm not going to go to the very basic levels, because they're so basic for our purposes, like level two or three is called Purple, in the graves model. And purple is what he calls magic thinking. This is where human beings come together. We're talking about society here, and they form a tribe. And they count as a tribe and live together as a tribe. And they're very tribal. So you can still find these kinds of tribal societies living in the Amazon and other, you know, underdeveloped, places, wild places, still left on Earth, so you can find them. And what is characterized here is a lot of Magical Thinking, because the mind is pre rational. It doesn't have scientific paradigms, it doesn't know how to do empirical observations, it doesn't really understand how the universe works. And so the universe seems very mysterious and kind of mystical. And so this is where you get shamanism and voodoo and stories and myths about spirits and dragons, and ghosts and all this kind of stuff. Magic type thinking, what happens if you take that and you evolve it to the next stage? Then you go from purple to red. The red stage is egocentric. egocentric, interestingly enough, is breaking away from tribalism. And instead, it's asserting individuality. And now, actually, the society in the tribe starts to break down. There's not a society, there's a tribe. Society comes later, before you can have a society what happens you have chaos and kind of lawlessness. So what happens is that people within the tribe realize, Hey, why am I behaving cooperatively in the tribe when I can just become the king or the ruler for monarch, and basically, dictate orders and take all the women for myself, and all the money for myself and all the food for myself? Seems a lot better than what I've got now. And so that's exactly what happens is that there's a vying for power. There's like a power struggle, and then someone prevails and becomes the dictator. So the tribe evolves into dictatorship. then, from that stage, you can evolve higher into the next stage, which is called Blue. Blue is the absolutist stage. Here, another evolution happens. And what people realize as society is like, wait a minute, we don't like living and working under a dictator. It's quite brutal. Let's take his power back and form now a society, not a tribe, but like a real society with laws and a constitution, and a lot of hierarchy, a lot of bureaucracy. And so here, you have the creation of the modern civilizations, and even the ancient civilizations. So think about Egypt, ancient China, Greece and Rome. These were absolutist. Why absolutist? Well, because they set a lot of rigid hierarchies and standards and cultural norms. No longer could one individual just come in there and dominate everybody. Now, there has to be laws, and there has to be a constitution, there has to be some sort of process for how to rule. And even though sometimes, you know, people might come and seize power, in the end, society takes it back. Because we're moving on in our evolution. What's interesting is that the blue stage here absolutist is where a lot of religions start to happen. Why do religions happen here, because religions require bureaucracy, and rigid rules. And also, in order to have stability as a society, you need some, you know, something like a cement holding it together. And a lot of times that is religions job. And it functions very well. The mind of a human being, psychologically speaking, who's at this stage as an individual is the dogma, extreme dogma, fundamentalism. That means this is my society. This is the the unit of which I'm a citizen, I'm going to fight to the death for it, and all my beliefs, and all my cultural heritage and traditions, I'm going to treat these with a lot of reverence. Because these are absolutely correct. I don't see it any other way. I don't acknowledge that there could be other cultures out there somewhere. Beyond them, the mountains and beyond the ocean, that could have a different culture, and a different set of values and a different societal structure. No, I'm at the point where I'm still blind to all that. So at this stage, basically, what happens when you see this in history, is that what the Europeans go and they start conquering and colonizing the New World, right, and they start converting all the heathens into Christians, and to Catholics, and they start teaching them the language, and they start enforcing their customs and habits in their system of government. Because they're absolutist. And if you don't believe like I believe, then basically, you're a heathen, and I should either convert you or kill you. That's the level of thinking that goes on there. But then, after a while of that, we evolved to the next stage. And the next stage is called Orange. Orange is a very interesting stage is called individualistic, which is different than egocentric from before where we had dictators. Orange is individualistic in the sense that now it becomes again about the individual. It's not about the society. Let's take power away from the society and let's honor individual rights, liberty, and justice and freedom and consumer culture. And also reason. At the orange stage is where business flourishes and science flourishes and the individual flourishes. This is the stage that American culture, a lot of American culture right now is that also a lot of European Western European cultures are also coming in to this orange face. The orange face is all about the individual, how do you make the individual's life better? How do you improve yourself? How do you have a better business? How do you have a better family? How do you have more sex? How do you have more love? How do you have a better marriage? How do you earn more money? How do you have cool gadgets and technology? This is why this is where and why science really flourishes in this Phase, because this is getting into the rational phase, right? Rational phase. And here, science is serving business. And business is serving science. And science is empowering the individual. So that's the stage here. This is probably the stage that you're starting to see as Oh, yeah, that that's pretty accurate as a description of me. But then what happens is you can go beyond that stage, you can go from orange to green. And green is called relativistic. Green is what it sounds like. It's kind of hippy, new age. It's that stereotype. What is the hippy New Age stereotype? Well, it's people who are now expanding their sphere of concern beyond themselves as individuals to the environment, and the globe. So now I don't just care about myself, and I don't just care about America, and I don't just care about my country, or my family, I care about everybody, I care about human beings, I even care about animals, I want to go save the whales. And I don't want, you know, polar bears to go extinct from global warming. And so I care about preserving the environment, I want to make sure that we're all living in peace and in harmony. Notice that if you're at the orange level, individualistic, this whole new age hippie paradigm, it just, it makes you feel very weird. It makes you feel kind of wrong. Like, what do you what are you smoking? What do you smoke it over there? That's kind of how you look at it. Right? But nevertheless, there is this element in society where people are expanding their sphere of influence, I mean, the sphere of concern. And also very interestingly, the reason it's called relativistic is that now they're taking into account other people's perspectives. So it's no longer just me and my absolute perspective. Now, it's like, hey, let's take that culture into, into account too. And that culture, and this culture, let's hear what the scientists have to say, and what the religious people have to say, and this and this, and we'll bring it all together. That's relativism. But then, there's another level, yellow, the systemic thinking level. And here, now I need to pause and make a few comments about these different levels. Because once you move into yellow, your entire worldview changes. There's a quantum leap from green to yellow, in a sense, there's purple, red, blue, orange, green. And then yellow is like an order of magnitude above. It's a leap in development. And it's one that very few human beings make. Here's why. One characteristic of these levels, first of all, is that you actually move through them, and you can't skip stages. So it's not like you are just kind of born or you just somehow happen to fall into one of these categories based on around circumstance. No, there's actually a chain of, of evolution that happens. And if you take a look at history, this is how societies evolved. First, it was very basic tribes, then from tribes to dictatorships, then from that to societies, then from that to, you know, modern governments. And then, you know, beyond and beyond and beyond, this is what's happening, you must pass through every stage, you can't just skip around, in the same way that a chicken, that a chicken can't just go from an egg to a full grown chicken, it has to pass through the baby chicken phase. And this has been shown by many studies. So all the stuff I'm telling you, this has been verified by many studies. This model is just one model. This is the graves model, there are perhaps a dozen other models with slightly different categorizations and labels and colors and distinctions. So the labels are somewhat arbitrary. But there's certainly this sense of directionality to the development of the psyche and also the society. So that's interesting, because what you can do is you can take a look at this spectrum and you can say, wait a minute, where am I at? Where is my government at? Where are my friends at? Where are my coworkers at? And you can peg yourself on one of these stages. The other interesting thing here is that each stage, before yellow denies and doesn't understand this entire model. So this model is completely opaque. You don't see this until you get really high in your conscious development. Maybe it's the first time you're hearing about this. And so now your eyes are kind of opening. But before that you didn't know where you were, why it was happening, what was going on, you had no idea. Not only do you not know, but you actively deny that there are stages above you. So when you're in the magic, thinking stage, that's all you know, you don't know rational thinking you don't know higher levels of individualism and societies and relativism, you don't know any of that. Magic is all you know, you're completely bought into it. It's like a perspective. It's like colored glasses through which you see the whole world shades, everything you look at, then you move up to the next level. And that level thinks now oh, now I'm at the top, I've evolved. Look, I'm so much better than those people down there. But this stage still doesn't recognize it, there's a stage above it, that it could evolve into, and so on with the next one, and with the next one, and with the next one, and with the next one, all the way until you get to yellow, only at yellow, systemic thinking, can you finally make the quantum leap. And you can actually see this model for what it is. And it's like, oh, it's almost like it was pre ordained, this whole thing has been laid out. And this whole time, I've been denying that I've been going through these stages. And now I can see that I have gone through all these stages. And now finally, I can actually reflectively look in on myself and say all, that means there must be an even higher stage than yellow. And in fact there is in yellow is the first recognize that there's something beyond it. Beyond itself. It's kind of like a self consciousness that evolves. Very powerful. When you see this all the sudden, it really opens you up. Another really important facet of this whole model is that when you're going from one stage to the next, it's not that you're abandoning the stage and you're doing something totally new. No, you're assimilating fully integrating, and then transcending that stage to evolve to the next stage. And then again, and then again, and then again, and then again. So you're never abandoning, you're transcending. And this is very difficult for the lower stages to accept. Because what they do is that they cling to the stage that they're at, and they don't want to transcend it. Because each stage, and there's a lot of depth here that I won't go into each stage has its own pros and cons. There's some good stuff about it, but also some bad stuff. And right now, this should be explaining a lot to you about human history. Because if you're a student of human history, and you look back at all the wars that have been fought, all the religious struggles, all the political and social and economic problems and scientific problems, and agricultural problems, and ecological problems that have ever happened in history, are all perfectly explained by this model. It's really quite amazing. And what happens is that when you get to yellow, you finally see, oh, all the struggle and conflict in societies and with governments across the entire globe has been happening because different people are stuck at different stages. Each stage clings to its own position, and then it fights with the stage below it or above it. And none of the stages until they get to yellow understand what the hell they're doing. They're completely unconscious and blind to it. And this is an amazing realization to have. It's also important to note that you can't just pick a stage and then start to inhabit it. So just because I told you about yellow and you understand yellow logically doesn't mean that you have actually evolved into yellow. If you're at Orange Juice first have to pass through orange, learn everything Orange has to teach you. Then you have to start to reconcile the limitations of orange and start to see green, you have to move into green, then you have to live through green, experience that limit, see the limitations, start to accept the limitations, and then start to transcend green into yellow. And that is a process that will take you years. It's not something you can just choose to do. And in fact, graves himself, the guy who made this model, he himself put himself pretty low on the on the hierarchy. He said he was blue slash orange. He didn't put himself at the very top. It's very interesting. So that's the graves model. Now, why is this significant here? Well, first of all, where are you on this model? Peg yourself. Oh, also, I should mention that generally, what people do when you ask them to peg themselves on this model, is that they rate themselves to levels higher than they actually are. So often, what happens is that if you're at individualistic orange, you rate yourself at yellow systemic. If you're at Green, relativistic, you rate yourself as even higher than yellow. If you're at Blue, absolutist, ik very fundamentalist, religious, you rate yourself as green relativistic. Pretty funny how, how the ego plays these little games with us. So you have to be very honest, when you rate yourself. The problem we have with the modern science religion debate, which is why we're talking about all this is that what we have is we have orange people who are individualistic, arguing with blue people who are absolutist IK. And they're not seeing anything beyond. And that's the problem that a lot of these very intelligent scientific thinkers make. And the problem here is that you can't actually access spiritual truths until you get to the very, very, very high levels. The mind body problem cannot be resolved at the rational level. On the other hand, the mind body problem is perfectly resolved, completely resolved. It's been resolved for 1000s of years, but only to those people who have evolved to the very high levels. Do you admit that there could be levels beyond you? Here's a verifiable claim that I'm going to make. Because I know how much rationalists love verifiable hardcore claims. You know, one of the arguments that rationalists make against the pre rationalist is they say, well, religion and myths and all this, you know, it's so vague, you're not stating anything concrete, nothing, testable, nothing empirical. But actually, the spiritual truths are perfectly testable and empirical. But what you have to do is you have to open your mind to this idea that actually there are first person phenomenon, that stuff that you've been denying, and that you've been reducing. That doesn't work when you go higher. That is a limitation of the rational paradigm. So here's my verifiable claim for you, because I know how much you liked it. The self image what you consider yourself as a human being, I mean, you consider yourself a human being this ego that thinks it's there, that I'm pointing at it right now, that this thing is an illusion. It's not real. It seems rational, that it's real, but actually, it's not real. It's an illusion. In the same way that Santa Claus is an illusion, or in the same way that Luke Skywalker is a fictional character. Well, you who I'm pointing to right now is as well. And rationalism is a tool that keeps that illusion alive. Transcending that is very difficult. Because this tool is almost perfectly designed to keep itself stuck in the status quo. The problem is, is that this can be empirically verified. And I'll tell you how, in a little bit. An additional point is that all the models that you have about reality how the world works, including the self model, because you have a model about how reality works. But you also have a model of how you work and the fact that there even is a you. That's not a real thing. That's a model. And the famous statement comes to mind here, which is very appropriate, is that the map is not the territory. And the mistake you're making as a rationalist is that you're always confusing the map for the territory. And then, in fact, all your models are rather arbitrary. You think they're very powerful, because you can make technology with them. And you can fly to the moon. And seems like you can predict particle physics and all this kind of cool stuff. And you can. And I'm not saying there's anything bad about that. That's great. Science is useful. I'm not saying science is wrong. But I'm saying that the models that science builds are based on a language system. And they're based on human rationality, which kind of seems like, Well, what else is there but human rationality? Well, there's something else, there's something else, don't mistake the model for the territory. That's what you're doing. And this can be discovered that you're doing this, this is verifiable empirically. Beliefs are not what they appear to be. And even though you like to think of yourself as scientific and empirical, actually, the whole of science is belief systems. And one of the things you really don't like, is admitting that you hold beliefs, really no different than the pre rational mind. So one of the arguments that atheists like to make is that they don't actually hold any beliefs. But that's not actually true. They're not being self honest and aware enough yet, to understand how many beliefs they are holding, you are holding 1000s of beliefs. And what's fascinating, and this is something you can discover if you evolve to higher stages, is that all beliefs are false, because all beliefs are just models. And models can just be whatever you want them to be, in a sense, I mean, not anything goes. But you can adjust your models to fit whatever reality you want them to fit within limits. And as much as religious people do that, and you hate that religious people do that. Right? How Wofully and Weasley they are, we'd have a debate with them. While you do that, too, as a rational scientific person. The boundaries and categories that you create for life. And the most fundamental boundary that you create is the boundary between self mean here and not self, everything out there. That's a false boundary. It's a pure fiction, even though it feels very real. It's a fiction. And if you go and you scientifically, empirically investigate it, really, from the first person phenomenological perspective, you're gonna discover that there are an illusion. And when you do that, you can become enlightened. And when you do that, your entire reality changes completely, just like you could not imagine how much your reality will change. Once that happens, once you actually see that the barrier between what's me and what's not me is a fiction. Imagine that for a second, that there's not actually a barrier between who's talking to you right now. And who's looking at me. You What if that barrier wasn't real? So these are some of the verifiable claims that I'm making. I'm not asking you to believe me. In fact, they won't help to believe me. Because to advance beyond this stage, the rational stage, you have to start to transcend beliefs. And this is something that you've never done before. You might think you've done this before. But you've never done this before. This is a whole new ballgame, here. And it's extremely tricky. And it's extremely difficult. Because what you have to do is you have to start to study your psyche, and all the traps and pitfalls that come with the ego. And that's a really big hornet's nest to study. So, the reason I say all of this is basically that you know, the modern debate that goes on between science and religion and It is ridiculous. Because really, we've evolved way past that debate, not as society, you know, society is still very uninvolved. In fact, there are no societies that are yellow. And they're not even are any societies that are green. Most societies are blue or orange. And in fact, if you want to take a look at the Middle East crisis, and the problems that the US in the Western world has with Islamic terrorists and other countries in the Middle East, what do you think that is? What that is, is that blue societies fighting with orange societies and not understanding what they're doing? So illuminating? But the reason the debate between science and religion is ridiculous, is because what I see scientists doing is saying, Well, okay, so, God, the religious, pre rational people say that there's a God, well, clearly, there is no God, because we haven't proven it. In fact, it makes no sense, scientifically, what that would even mean. And so God is taken to be like the old man in the clouds, sitting above judging you with the big white beard. But that's the pre rational understanding of God. Not the post rational. And now, right here is the, the place where I'm gonna start to sound like a, like a hippie, or a new agers, though I'm making excuses for the pre rationalist. But actually, this is, this is the case. Right? When you take God to be an old man in the sky, what you're not understanding is that what God actually is, is the removing of your self concept. Not an old man in the sky, there's no old man in the sky. But if you actually go through and remove yourself concept, who you think you are, and you remove the boundary between me, not me? What does that do? You realize how profound that is. What that does, is that actually merges you with the rest of the world. Not just as a belief, not in terms of faith, but as reality, you become the entirety of reality when you do that. And that's what post rational people mean, when they say God, they don't mean old man in the sky. That's just the metaphor. What they mean is all of reality, as you see it, is you, you are it. And that takes a lot of conscious development to see. That's not easy to get to, because you have to abandon and pass through all these different stages. And so what happens is that the pre rational post rational fallacy gets committed. So the scientific rational person, how does he commit the fallacy? Well, he takes everything I'm saying and says, Oh, Leo, you're just being religious, or spiritual or hippie ish, you're not very being very rational or scientific need more evidence, you need proof, you need this, and that double, double blind experiments, and yada, yada, yada, right. And so he basically just ignores what I'm saying, because what he does is he loves the post rational, I'm giving you a very high level right now, post rational truth that your mind is probably not primed to understand or accept. Because this is not a truth that I want you to believe. This is a treat, I want you to go discover for yourself. There's an invitation here for you to do that discovery process. But see, if you take what I'm saying, you reduce it down to the pre rational, then you commit the fallacy. And the rationalist likes to ignore and deny the post rational stages. Notice that you don't just value rationality, but that you actually cling to it. And the way you can actually prove this to yourself, and you can actually see this in debates between religious people, and atheist, you can see that the religious people are dogmatic and our claim to beliefs. But actually, what you also see is that the atheist is doing the same thing. But the atheist is lying to himself about the fact that he's doing it. And in fact, what the atheist does, he points the finger at the religious person says, Hey, you're being dogmatic. How can you be so closed minded and short sighted, but from the higher perspectives here from yellow and beyond? When I look for example, at at the atheist, I see him making the exact same mistake, just the content Just different, different content. Same exact mistake. So the similarity between the pre rational and the rational is actually much closer than the post rational, and the pre rational, very freaky. And you can notice this in yourself. So for example, if you're having a debate, for example, you're an atheist, or rational, scientific minded person, and you're having a debate with a religious person. If you're very careful, and you wash your ego, in that debate, what you'll notice is that actually, what you're doing is you are debating that person, which means that you're trying to prevail, and spread your beliefs on to that person. Because you actually believe that your beliefs and models of reality was a map, you believe that the map is real, you've confused the map for the territory. And now, this is why you get excited you get passionate in that moment. It's also why if that other person makes a clever remark, or somehow makes a point that kind of shakes your foundations a little bit, that you have difficulty rebutting, you're going to actually feel tension and fear in your body. Why is that? Because your self image is getting eroded. When that happens, and you start to sense that oh, shit. I'm being dogmatic, just like he is. But let me quickly cover that up and ignore it and get it out of my consciousness. And the way that I do that is by projecting onto him onto that other person onto religious person, all the problems with religion. And so by doing that, it's a very sneaky subterfuge, by which I deceive myself and keep myself in the dark. And this is that contraction that you feel when you're being dogmatic. And you know what I'm talking about, you felt this before, if you've ever engaged other people in, you know, intellectual conversations or arguments or debates, you get that contraction, when you start to do your lawyering. And you try to try to win arguments through lawyering. Well, what you're really doing there is you're trying to not convince the other person trying to convince yourself and you're doing that because your ego is on the line, not the truth. The truth is never on the line, even though you tell yourself the truth is online, no, your ego and your self image is on the line. Why? Because it's bullshit. It's an illusion. So fiction, truth can never be on the line, the only thing that can be on the line is fiction, especially fiction masquerading as truth. See, what we're doing here is we're doing very careful observation of how our psyche is working. Because if you want to advance the higher stages, you have to really start to understand how the psyche works. The mechanism by which you're exploring understanding reality, the thing you call rationalism, the thing you take for granted? Well, you can't take it for granted anymore. You have to question every foundation of your rationalism, you have to question every model and every belief that you hold. And you have to start seeing that the world is A. C, seeing from perspectives, always from perspectives. And that even as I'm talking to you, right now, I'm talking from a perspective, not from some absolute position, but from a perspective. When you start to see that, you start getting towards yellow, when you start tasting yellow, your attitude towards the whole science versus religion debate changes very radically. Why? Once you get to yellow, the yellow person sees what's going on at each stage. He's been through all the stages, he doesn't deny the stages, he's assimilated and fully and now transcended them. So when the yellow person systemically in person looks at this science, religion debate, he clearly sees that both people are being dogmatic. And he understands that he himself is dogmatic, and he sees that oh, that's happening because of the way the psyche works. And what this does, very practically is it creates tolerance. One thing you notice about the higher stages is that as you evolve up this ladder, you get more and more tolerant, especially when you start getting past green and into yellow and beyond. Why is that? Because all of a sudden, you actually understand the conditions and you have sympathy and understanding because you have conscious awareness of different stages, which you didn't have before. And so you don't actually get fired up because you don't have to clean into anything anymore the way you did in the past. Right, so whereas an atom an atheist who's very rational, stuck in rational, irrational paradigm, he can get very fired up and maybe even pissed off and angry, start yelling at this religious person, the yellow person who's evolved beyond that, he just sits there. And he just watched the whole thing that he's had, I just, hey, that's cool. It's normal. Color it because he understands what's going on at a higher level. Be careful about interpreting what I'm telling you here, as a descent into pre rationality, what I'm encouraging you to do is to transcend your rationality. And to transcend typical science, mainstream academic science is actually a very narrow science. It needs to be broadened to also include post rational truths. And also first person phenomenon which has been reduced or denied or suppressed or just ignored for a long, long time. Right? The post rational person still uses science, and can think scientifically and logically. They don't abandon that they transcend and include that. In fact, science exists at the post rational levels. And you might wonder, well, what's post rational? What does that actually mean? Well, one thing that means is increased use of intuition. Not just formal rationality, and logic and proofs, but intuitive thinking. And if you're a student of scientific history, one thing you realize is that some of the best scientists that have ever lived, that have made the best breakthroughs, they were actually very intuitive thinkers. And they didn't just arrive there through pure rational thinking, you know, Einstein comes to mind, Richard Fineman comes to mind. And many, many others. So it's interesting how that works. They call it vision logic. At the rational stage, you have logic. Next comes vision logic, and there's stuff beyond stuff way beyond. Be careful about holding on to your rationality, like a child holds on to a baby blanket. You know, after a while, you have to outgrow it. And be careful also about overreacting against religion, and saying something like, Well, you know, religion has been the cause of wars and genocide and famine and problems for 1000s of years, so we just want to abandon all of it, you're doing yourself a disservice. Yes, we want to abandon that stuff. But we do that by moving beyond even beyond rationalism. See, the core problem here, especially with all the lower stages, is that dogma runs rampant. Clinging to beliefs. This is perhaps the biggest problem in the world, for individuals and societies right now is how much people cling to beliefs. Take a look at it. politically, religiously, scientifically. Doing personal development. improving yourself you cling to beliefs. You cling to beliefs within your business, how you think you should run your business. You cling to every belief imaginable. Because your self image is largely composed of beliefs. If we remove all the beliefs, you unravel, literally, you unravel, not metaphorically, not politically, but literally, you unravel. Because you are a dogma you yourself, you think you're a human being, you're not really a human being. What you are, is you're a dogma, who believes it's a human being. The problem here is that you refuse to investigate this matter for yourself. Because it seems silly. But I assure you, it's very real. If you want to go investigate. How do you investigate? Well, I have a lot of videos about spiritual alignment and go check those out. And other videos tell you how to do some investigating. But basically, you have to investigate first person phenomenon. You're not gonna be doing scientific studies. And you're not going to be reading textbooks. Because in the end, all that stuff is just hearsay. Anyways, what you need to investigate is actually what's really true, which is First Person phenomenon, the stuff you actually know. colors, sounds, smells, tastes, thoughts and emotion. Since in your own self image, who can investigate that for you, nobody can only you can investigate it for yourself. Right? So why are we talking about the mind body problem? Well, if you don't actually admit first person phenomenon that prevents you from doing the first investigation necessary to arrive at some of these empirical understandings that are much higher than just rational. And no one can investigate your mental space for you what's going on in your mind, you understand that everything you know, from the moment you were born has been filtered through your psyche, you understand how pap, how how significant that is? Everything, everything you learn, every book, you read everything you believed me, even the fact that you think that you're a human being, which would be the most, you know, taken, taken for granted assumption. Maybe second, only to the fact that you think you exists in the first place. You know, all these assumptions were just taken on by you not really questioned in exactly the same way that religious people take on their religious dogmas. No different, you're no different than them. So you think it's silly that, and you also think it's sad, right? Is it is sad that, you know, a child could be raised, for example, somewhere, you know, in the Middle East in a very fundamentalist community, where he's just like, beaten with sticks and taught the Koran. And then he grows up, really believing in the Koran and then becomes like a suicide bomber. And you think that that's sad? Like, how can he not see what's going on, you are in exactly the same situation. Exactly the same. Now what the Qur'an within our society, really not much different than that kid, that's you. And you have no idea what's going on, you're completely blind to it. And you're so blind, that you refuse to investigate this for yourself, in the same way that the kid refuses to investigate other religions, other belief systems, other schools of thought, science, etc, you know, you just totally bought into it. You are to that that's the, that's a that's a real shocking, that's a real shocker of a truth right there, when you actually get a taste of that. Man that really opens your eyes, really opens your eyes. No longer can you have one of these silly scientific, religious debates, like in this book here. You can't have this after you've had one of those insights, you know, your awareness is too wide open. too wide open, because you see yourself as being dogmatic. And the worst thing about is that, you know, you're dogmatic and you are so weak and powerless to stop it. It's like a tidal wave. It's like a tsunami hitting you. You can't stop it. And you're, you're drowning in it? How do you get yourself out? tough to do. But it can't be done. requires an open mind, though, requires that you start to accept some of the limitations of rationalism and you start to open your mind to the possibility that there could be something beyond it the next stage that you might want to ascend to. But will you very, very few people do. less than 1% of people, even within Western countries are yellow, systemic thinkers. Less than 1%. And that's just yellow, in yellow doesn't get you into the truths of enlightenment, you have to go beyond that several stages. Yellow just get you to the point where you can actually see some of the structures that I was describing here doesn't get you to actual truth and understanding of enlightenment. That's, that's way over your head right now. What's interesting is that there's a shocking amount of agreement between post rational people who are up here between what enlightenment actually is shocking agreement. There's no fighting going on over there. Not really. If you start to do all studying, sniffing around, dig into this topic. You're gonna start see shocking similarities. And these similarities and these, these understandings go back throughout literally 1000s of years. 1000s of years, but see the dogmatic mind misconstrues them so easily in the same way that the pre rational mind misconstrues it, the rational mind misconstrues it because the truths are just so beyond you. So beyond your awareness, and your awareness is the bottleneck, the biggest bottleneck in life is awareness. Because everything you call life has to come through awareness. That is the ultimate bottleneck. So if you don't understand what awareness is and how it works, and you don't, then you've got a lot of work to do. Here's a good analogy from Ken Wilber. Imagine the plagorism theorem. Now, if we take the Pythagorean Theorem, which basically states that if you have a right angle triangle, that this side squared plus this side squared will equal the diagonal squared. Pretty basic, algebraic or geometric proof. But now, what if we take someone who doesn't know algebra or arithmetic or geometry, and we try to teach them the Pythagorean Theorem? What's going to happen? We a problem. Because we can just tell him about the theorem. And we can tell Hey, believe it. But that doesn't quite sit, right. Because it's not like we're just saying, hey, just believe it, because it's my opinion that the Pythagorean theorem is this way. It's more than that. What we want to convince them of is, hey, come actually do the math here. Take a look at how these things add up. You'll see the Pythagorean Theorem, you'll have this insight which millions of other people have had who have learned arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, and algebra. Come take a look. But now what happens if that person says, Well, you mean, you want me to spend 10 years learning arithmetic, and then another five years learning algebra, and another couple of years learning geometry, I had to spend 15 years sitting in a classroom reading books to understand your stupid truth here. Fuck that. I don't believe you. Chris prob. Now what you're doing right now as a rationalist is you're doing exactly this thing with the higher spiritual truth. Exact same thing. Because all the post rational people have gone and have seen the birth algorithm theorem. I mean, not all of them. But enough of them have, that you can see the consensus is there, it's obvious that they see it once they get there. The problem, though, is is that you have to go and get there. You can't just understand it from where you're at. You have to evolve yourself there. But you can't evolve yourself there if your mind is so closed, and you're so dogmatic about staying where you are, just like this guy here with not wanting to learn arithmetic. So that's on you, that burden of proof is on you. Because there's a lot of consensus about what you'll see up there, and you will see it if you want to. Will you be open minded enough? Can you see that you need to grow yourself? Can you acknowledge yourself that there is stuff beyond where you're currently at that you can grow to? Do you have the courage to admit that you were wrong in the past, and that you may be wrong right now about a great many things, you're going to have to relinquish many beliefs and models that you're going to have to release your hold over. Let go of that baby blanket. Hmm. Remains to be seen if you'll actually do that, you know, because if you want to evolve yourself to the point that I'm talking about to the very highest stages, we actually see what enlightenment is where you can remove this distinction between you and reality itself. That might require five or 10 years of real serious work, serious introspection, contemplation, meditation, really looking inward, dissecting all of your beliefs in a way that you've never done before your entire life. And if you think you know, you're a scientist, and you've done this kind of work, no, you haven't done this kind of work. This is work that almost no one on earth has done. Because it's the scariest work that you can do. In fact, your entire life is designed to prevent you from doing this work. Because yourself in your life as you know it is a lie. You understand this? And this lie needs to be protected. Why be because you will unravel in doing this work, you will, you will unravel yourself completely. That's a very scary notion. And also, the forces allied against you in doing that are overwhelming. Overwhelming, it is like a tsunami heading right towards you. And you need to swim right through it to the other side. And that's not easy to do. And that's why so few people have ever gone up here. Takes a lot of balls to get there. Tough, right? But you're well on your way with this information. So I'm going to wrap it up here, a lot of information here, a lot of stuff to digest. And there's so much more I could still say, but I'll pause it here. So this gives you some perspective on the science, religion debate, I hope, I hope that from now on, you're gonna see it from my clo level systemic thinking perspective. And you're not gonna get caught into the petty stages below that are bickering and arguing with each other. If you really want to understand the science, religion debate, stop debating and go develop yourself in consciousness to the highest stages, where you will actually become it. You won't even know it, you will become it. Which is fucking cool. Alright, this is Leo, I'm signing off. Go ahead, post me your comments down below, click the like button, please share this video with a friend, a very, very open minded friend. And lastly, come sign up to my newsletter right here, actualize that org. It's a free newsletter, I release new videos, every single week on self actualization. I want to help you to develop your understanding of life and your awareness to the highest levels possible. And that's not just book smarts. I'm not really interested in coming up here and giving you theories and beliefs and stuff. What I'm interested in doing is actually giving you very stripped down versions of the stuff you need to start doing in your life and also some motivation to get you to do it. But basically, I want to motivate you and give you the techniques you need to go out and do it and see it for yourself, achieve it for yourself. I mean, if you want the spiritual stuff, that's real powerful. But if you want some smaller, more practical stuff, like better business, better relationships, better psychology. Maybe we start there and I have a lot of videos that I'll still keep releasing on those topics. So check it out, and I'll see you soon