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[Music] in this episode i'm going to explain to you a core pillar of my understanding of consciousness and my teachings about spirituality and consciousness we're going to just focus on this one pillar here i've touched upon this pillar in other episodes but i wanted to devote a whole episode to it and that pillar is that state of consciousness is everything and sometimes i just shorten that to say that state is everything for me this one idea has been central to helping me to understand and wrap my mind around consciousness in a way that i wasn't able to get from any other spiritual teacher and so i'm going to explain what consciousness is to you here and this one powerful principle with many examples i want to try to help you to grasp it uh and it's going to be an explanation that you don't really hear from any other spiritual teachers or teachings and honestly i'm kind of surprised that nobody has spoken of it in the way that i like to speak of it and that i'll speak of it here today so in the past i've said this but it really bears underscoring and stressing but that there is nothing but states of consciousness that's it there's nothing but states of conscience that's all that reality is is it's states of consciousness reality consists of one thing consciousness and this consciousness takes different states that's simple the problem is that you probably don't understand what i'm really talking about here because it requires some deep awakenings to start to understand this but we'll we'll get to that so let's build up to it basically no object can exist outside of consciousness that is not what we're taught as we're growing up as we're growing up under the materialistic paradigm uh we assume that there are objects and that consciousness is a byproduct of certain objects physical objects or somehow is some extra layer on top of physical objects that's not the case all physical objects exist within consciousness and they are part of whatever state of consciousness you're in so no matter what is happening no matter what you're experiencing whether you're alive or even if you're not alive you're in some state of consciousness always that's the fundamental universal rule and sometimes i hear people even spiritual people will deny states of consciousness they'll say no there's something beyond states of consciousness or they'll say something like oh well leo but that's just a state of consciousness that's just an altered state of consciousness as if there's anything else but states of consciousness what's ironic about people who deny states of consciousness or propose something beyond states of consciousness or something more true than states of consciousness that they're doing all of that from within a state of consciousness so the denial of states of consciousness is of course just another state of consciousness now what do i mean by states of consciousness here are some examples that most of you are familiar with and then we'll get into some more wacky cases but the standard cases are dreaming when you're dreaming that's a state of consciousness ordinary waking life what you're experiencing right now probably that's a state of consciousness being drunk or high on a drug that's a state of consciousness being sleepy or dead tired when you're right on the brink of falling asleep you're so sleepy and tired you can barely think straight you've got a certain kind of like very tired fatigued mood remember a time like that that's a that's a distinctive state of consciousness that you're in and what you notice in that state is that your mind works differently your thoughts think differently you're drifting off half asleep but not fully asleep you're conscious but you don't have that kind of lucidity that you do in normal waking life that's a specific state or think about a time when you were really sick with a cold or with a flu that's also a very specific kind of state of consciousness maybe you have a high fever and also think about a case where you were very emotional you were very angry to the point of rage or very sad very depressed maybe very heartbroken after a a relationship of yours ended you're very heartbroken it feels like you're not even yourself at that moment you feel like you're you've become a different person have you noticed that so uh maybe if you're having some sort of manic episode if you're bipolar that would also be a state of consciousness that you're in and it doesn't have to be negative emotions it can also be positive emotions think of a time when you were really horny and sexually excited that's a that's a very distinctive state of consciousness it also affects how you feel it affects how you think the decisions you make and so on so these are the kind of states that most of us are familiar with and we don't spend a lot of time distinguishing them very carefully or thinking about them very carefully and notice i may be listed like seven different states here um [Music] but in reality it's not like there are clear boundaries between these different states see consciousness is you you better you got to think of it like a fluid medium it's very fluid so it's a mistake to try to just say well leo how many states of consciousness are there let's categorize them all this is a mistake i know that certain spiritual traditions make these sorts of various kinds of categorizations they start to enumerate the number of states of consciousness that there are this is a mistake this is artificial all these kind of categories of course you can categorize them but all these categories um they're very artificial and they're really human projections and so really the answer to the question of how many states of consciousness are there is there's infinite number of them infinite and they can vary one from another very slightly or significantly and so even to call it a state is in a certain sense not correct because that gives you the idea that like well there's the dreaming state then you flip some sort of binary switch and then you exit the dreaming state and you enter the normal state and then you flip another switch and then you enter the drunk state and you flip another switch and you enter the sleepy state or the sixth state or the angry state but that's not how it works of course all these states can flow into each other and it's not like a binary switch is being flipped it's more like a combination of different knobs and dials are being turned but the idea is that conscious can flow between all these different states and many other kinds of states and there's really no limit to what kind of state consciousness can put itself in so here now i want to introduce an additional idea which is figments of consciousness so really a state of consciousness is composed out of figments what do i mean by figments well i'm calling them figments like figments of imagination as opposed to how we would normally think of what reality is is we normally think it's mad of objects we think reality may is made of objects or atoms or molecules or we think reality is some sort of computer simulation but that's not what reality is made of reality is matter of figments of consciousness and these figments make up different states and then the state sort of determines how the figments combine together and how they interact and how they flow so here's an example of what i mean by figments of consciousness and now try to follow along and actually get a direct feel for this a direct experience because that's what's necessary here so imagine for example a snickers candy bar that somebody has taken a bite out of that right there is a figment of consciousness but i don't just mean that you imagining it in your mind as a thought because right now as i'm telling you to imagine it it's just a thought in your mind this snickers candy bar of course that's a figment of your imagination and a figment of consciousness but i'm saying something much more profound than that i'm saying that if you actually saw or held in your hand this sneakers candy bar with a bite taken out of it that that would also be a figment of consciousness the actual candy bar not just your idea of it of course right now you don't probably have a candy bar in your hand right this minute so it's just an idea but i'm not pointing to the idea i'm pointing to the actual thing that thing is a figment of consciousness and what i'm saying when i say that reality is made out of figments of consciousness is that see ordinarily you if you ask like a physicist okay what is this snickers candy bar made out of they would say well it's made out of um molecules and those molecules may have atoms and those atoms made out of quarks and it's mad of energy and blah blah blah that's standard materialistic story um and here i'm trying to get you to like look at reality from a totally different paradigm which is the figment paradigm rather than trying to reduce the candy bar down to some elemental particles just grasp the fact that reality can just be a snickers candy bar held within consciousness full stop no reductionism that means it's not made out of atoms it's not man of energy it's not an image inside of a brain it's not a network of neurons it's not a mathematical equation it's not a calculation in a computer somewhere if you think that reality is a simulation it's none of those things it is a figment within consciousness can you get a little taste of that no pun intended why do i call them figments of consciousness because they're like strands in a story or elements of a dream if you think about how you dream at night you might ask yourself like what is the dream made out of you might say well the dream is mad of adams again drop that idea the dream is not made of atoms it's much better to think of a dream like if you ask like what are the building blocks of a dream it's not atoms the building block of a blocks of a dream are the different elements i mean really figments of your mind people places occurrences within the dream but what are these things they're figments and you can almost think of like think of think of if you think of reality as like a dream machine a machine that can just come up with dreams in such a machine you don't need atoms or energy or mathematics or computer simulation you don't need any of that all you need are you need the actual elements of the thing you're dreaming so like if you want to dream of a snickers candy bar that's what you dream you dream that figment and that figment becomes your dream part of it now you can you can of course a dream can consist of many figments you can bring these figments together and weave them together so you might have a snickers candy bar in there you might also have a human body in that dream holding the candy bar you might have a table that the candy bar is sitting on you might have the grocery store that you go to the isle of the grocery store where you buy the candy bar you might have the money that you exchange with the cashier for the candy bar so all of these would be different figments right the money the grocery store aisle and so forth and you could almost like think of it almost like if you're a movie director trying to compose a movie you don't need to think about like the atoms you know a movie director isn't thinking in terms of atoms and energy and molecules when he's designing the movie he's thinking of the actual elements that he needs for the movie directly like i need an actor that looks is this tall and has this kind of hair and i need him to be holding a snickers candy bar that he's purchasing with this money right and those are the literal pieces of the movie that the movie is made out of and then those are we woven together to come up with some sort of you know story and you know a sort of a uh a timeline where experience is unfolding so here are some more examples of figments of consciousness and as i'm going to be giving you all these examples again i'm not talking about the ideas in your mind because all these examples are just going to be ideas in your mind yes those are all figments of consciousness but i mean the actual things that you think are solid and real that these concepts are pointing to i mean that those are figments of consciousness and i would like you to actually try to grasp that as i'm going down this list of examples so for example a yellow rubber ducky that a child might play with in a bathtub now if you ask a a physicist if you take the smartest physicists in the world and you sit them down and say okay here's a yellow rubber ducky what is it what is it made out of like really let's cut the [ __ ] and get to the rock bottom metaphysically what is a yellow rubber ducky they're going to go into their stories about its molecules its atoms its quarks its strings its mathematical equations it's it's this all of that is wrong they don't actually understand what a yellow rubber ducky is a yellow rubber ducky is a figment of consciousness that means what it means to say that there is a yellow rubber ducky that a yellow rubber ducky is real and that it exists to say that what it means to say that is that consciousness is imagining a yellow rubber ducky and not some other thing it could be imagining that is being held by consciousness now there's an additional wrinkle here because when i say that it's very likely that you might say oh yeah well yeah yeah leo my mind is holding that okay fine maybe it that's part of consciousness but then like but then actually that's like neurons in my brain yellow rubber ducky is part of my is part of my body it's in my brain somewhere like no or you might say well yeah yeah a yellow rubber ducky is like um is something that a living organism is experiencing it's part of a living organism's experience it's perceptual system it's nervous system no that's not what i'm saying that's not what a yellow rubber ducky is when i'm saying that consciousness is holding a yellow rubber ducky i'm talking about consciousness as an absolute as a universal that means consciousness ungrounded in anything else that means it's not consciousness grounded in a nervous system it's not consciousness that's part of your body it's not consciousness that's part of some neural network it's not consciousness that's part of a computer simulation it's not conscious that's part of a living organism it's just pure absolute consciousness it's not even consciousness that is inside of a physical universe you get that so in this example physical universe is a figment of consciousness consciousness is not inside of a physical universe a physical universe is inside of consciousness as a figment of consciousness and i don't just mean your idea of a physical universe i mean the actual physical universe is a figment of consciousness so look around you right now look around the room you're in notice that you have an idea of the physical universe obviously that's a figment of your consciousness can you grab that grasp that that's obvious but what's not so obvious is when you're looking around the room this is supposedly you're telling yourself this is the physical the actual physical universe not just my idea of it right the actual thing is right here i'm inside of it what i'm telling you is that that is also this is a figment of consciousness okay let's keep going with the list the smell of a skunk is a figment of consciousness a gallon of gasoline is a figment of consciousness braces on a child's teeth is a figment of consciousness a used condom is a figment of consciousness and acts to the skull is a figment of consciousness 1.28629 bitcoin in your bitcoin wallet that's a figment of consciousness albert einstein is a figment of consciousness now this is where it gets kind of heavy because of course there's nothing special about albert einstein that makes him a part of your consciousness a figment of your consciousness and somebody else like uh arnold schwarzenegger um or kobe bryant not a figment of your consciousness every person is a figment of your consciousness including me this is this is a mind [ __ ] right here because if you ask like a scientist you know what is albert einstein they're gonna say well albert einstein is a a homo sapien mammal living on a planet that used to live on a planet a hundred years ago and uh he was made out of uh cells and organs and those man out of molecules and dna and proteins and atoms and all this and he was a biological being a biological living organism that used to exist all of those are figments of consciousness that consciousness has woven together to create the larger figment called albert einstein and i'm not just talking about albert einstein your idea of him i'm talking about the actual albert einstein that your idea is pointing to so if albert einstein was sitting right before you looking you in the eyes he would still be a figment of your consciousness and so the way that conscious works is that it weaves together these figments into think of it almost like weaving together yarns right you have a large yarn woven together with smaller substrands of yarns and then you can you can do this infinitely you can nest yarns within yarns you can create larger larger threads of these yarns spin them together then you can take multiple of those and thread those together into an even thicker rope and in this way you can construct something as elaborate as albert einstein because of course albert einstein you can break that down into sub figments you can break it down piece by piece by piece you know into hundreds thousands millions and even trillions of figments of consciousness you could imagine every tooth in his mouth you can imagine every hair on his head and on his body you could imagine every cell in his body that make it up and you can imagine every molecule and atom in every molecule every protein all of that you can imagine all of that and all of those are figments of consciousness coming together in this brilliant way to create the larger figment of albert einstein and what's really crucial to get here is that part of materialism and the materialistic paradigm is this idea that reality is built from the bottom up using small elemental building blocks almost like you're building something out of legos and so a lot of times when you ask a scientist what is something they get lost in the process of reducing something down into its subcomponents thinking that that actually tells you what a thing is it doesn't this is a mistake and the even deeper mistake is the metaphysical assumption that reality is something that is built out of smaller particles or elements and that everything reduces down just to these elements and that everything needs to be built up from these elements that these elements came first and everything else was built up afterwards over time but this is not actually how reality works or how consciousness works so what's so remarkable about consciousness is it actually works top down not bottom up consciousness can just imagine an albert einstein from scratch from the top down it doesn't need to build albert einstein up from subatomic particles and molecules that combine to make proteins that combine to make cells that can combine to make organs and so on it doesn't need that it can just hold albert einstein in its mind and that is what albert einstein is and then when you start to do a deconstruction process on albert eins and you try to reduce it down in a physical manner what you're doing is you're you're not actually you're not understanding what albert einstein is what you're doing is actually you're spinning further fragments of consciousness figments of consciousness rather you're you're inventing more of them and then you're trying to ground albert einstein the figment of albert einstein you're trying to ground it into sub-figments you're using figments to ground other figments that's the name of the game and this is how you create reality this is how conscious creates reality so consider the radical possibility the paradigm shift that there wasn't some big bang 14 billion years ago that ultimately had to happen and led to the existence of snickers candy bars that exist today because some humans invented them and created them and put them into a grocery store where you went and bought one that whole paradigm and instead i want you to see that reality can simply spawn a snickers candy bar from scratch as a figment of consciousness and in fact that is what a snickers candy bar literally is and that whole story about the big bang and all that stuff that led to the existence of this figment of consciousness called a snickers bar that is a story that you are literally constructing on the fly in order to ground this figment called a snickers candy bar and that what you're grounding it in is not something more fundamental than a snickers candy bar you're grounding it in something that's less fundamental actually other figments of consciousness which are actually further removed from the figment that is right before you right now because mostly all of that story that you invented about the existence of this snickers candy bar and where it came from that's all conceptual you know the big bang molecules and people creating this candy bar that's all conceptual that's not in your direct experience so it's actually a lesser form of consciousness than the snickers candy bar that's right before your eyes let's say right now if there was one it's a very different paradigm a radically different paradigm than what you're used to and it's because people cannot even really fathom the possibility of such a paradigm that scientists are not able to make sense of consciousness and really they're stuck in their ability to do very deep science because their paradigm is backwards and the paradigm i'm describing here it sounds so fantastical it sounds like it's impossible this can't possibly be true and yet it's absolutely what's true and you can discover that simply by observing your direct experience this is not a belief system you have to adopt that's what's so cool about it you can become directly conscious that all of these things i've been listening to you are figments of consciousness that's not like a speculation it's not like i'm just sitting around here doing philosophy in my arm chair just kind of like speculating like oh yeah you know maybe maybe that albert einstein was just a figment of consciousness or maybe a used condom is just a figment of consciousness it's like no you can absolutely be conscious that a used condom is a figment of consciousness absolutely that's absolutely true right there's no speculation about this you don't need to go run a science experiment you don't need to ask some professor to verify it for you you can become directly conscious right now that a used condom is a figment of consciousness that's what it is literally let's keep going think of a pirate ship that you built out of legos when you were a kid that pirate ship is a figment of consciousness how about a racist tweet by donald trump that's a figment of consciousness an up quark is a figment of consciousness the milky way galaxy is a figment of consciousness a teen selling drugs on the sidewalk in a bad neighborhood that's a figment of darth vader is a figment of consciousness the game world of skyrim is a figment of consciousness the entire christian faith and mythos is a figment of consciousness christian hell you know with the fire and the burning and the eternal torture and the devils with pitchforks that's a figment of consciousness an atheist arguing that god does not exist that's a figment of consciousness a role of soft charming toilet paper that's a figment of consciousness the entire history of america that's a figment of consciousness the intel i9 12th generation cpu that's a figment of consciousness a swamp in lagoon in louisiana that's a figment of consciousness the ancient egyptian god osiris that's a figment of consciousness the art archangel michael that's a figment of consciousness a tesla model s being assembled in a factory that's a figment of consciousness the insta the entire state of california that's a figment of consciousness the city of new york as it was in the year 1950 that's a figment of consciousness do you understand what i'm saying when i say this is a figment of consciousness the actual city of new york as a whole can be a figment of consciousness that means you don't need to create new york out of molecules and atoms and individual bricks the entire city as a whole can just be imagined and held within consciousness and that literally is what new york city is now of course if you want you can further subdivide in fact you can infinitely subdivide any figment of consciousness into an infinite number of sub-figments of consciousness so while you can hold new york city as a whole you can also zoom into any part of that figment and then create finer resolution figments to fill in the details so to speak it's like a fractal zoom you've seen those fractal zooms on youtube where it just keeps zooming in and zooming in and the more it zooms in the more detail is revealed about the fractal it's like that you can keep zooming into new york city as much as you want you can zoom in onto an individual street corner you can zoom in onto an individual person on that street corner you can zoom into um you know an article of clothing on that person like maybe he's wearing a scarf you can zoom into that scarf on that scarf you can zoom into one thread uh of wool on that scarf then you can zoom into that thread of wool and find uh one one little fiber one little hair you can zoom into that one little hair that makes up that yarn and then you can you can zoom into the protein molecules that are making up those uh that hair and then you can zoom into further and further and further and you can zoom in forever consciousness is doing that you see but it's not that here's where people make the mistake is they think well the new york city is made of atoms no it's not made of atoms new york city as a whole is just a figment of consciousness and then you can you can keep inventing other figments underneath that to ground it you keep grounding it grounding and grounding it until you get bored of grounding and then you just say okay well [ __ ] it it's mad at something i don't really know what it is we can just keep going forever that's right you can keep imagining further figments forever this is otherwise known as infinite consciousness the pacific ocean is a figment of consciousness and melting ice cream cone in a child's hand is a figment of consciousness a mosquito bite is a figment of consciousness so ask yourself metaphysically what is a mosquito bite the actual mosquito bite not your idea but the actual mosquito bite let's say you had one right now on your hand and it was itching you what is that thing it's not a collection of molecules or atoms it's a figment of consciousness the mosquito bite is exactly a mosquito bite it's not anything else you might say well a mosquito bite is is a collection of colors no it's not colors are further figments of consciousness you can break it down into that but that's not really what a mosquito bite is a mosquito bite is precisely a mosquito bite the concept of hierarchy or capitalism those are figments of consciousness the category of insect insects as a category that's a figment of consciousness disneyland is a figment of consciousness five meow dmt is a figment of consciousness a memory of you going to grade school and learning the multiplication tables bring up that memory right now that's a figment of consciousness a helicopter is a figment of consciousness a stomach ache is a figment of consciousness a pina colada is a figment of consciousness the feeling of intense anger that's a figment of consciousness a sex a sexist joke is a figment of consciousness this is an interesting one see there's something funny about thinking of reality as being made out of a sexist joke like a scientist can't accept that a materialist can't accept that reality is mad of a sexist joke that that doesn't compute it's like no leo a sexist joke is just sounds and sounds are just reverberations of oxygen molecules or something like that nitrogen and oxygen molecules and then those are hitting the eardrums and those are reverberating and those are you know sending electrical signals through through a neural network and that's what a sexist joke actually is no a sexist joke is a sexist joke stop trying to break it down into its elements furthermore what i'm saying is that these different figments of consciousness no one figment is more fundamental than any other figment therefore you can't say that reality is made out of certain kinds of figments of consciousness reality is made out of as much a pina colada as it is a sexist joke as it is disneyland as it is a helicopter do you see how radically different this way of looking at reality is ask yourself why reality can't just create a sexist joke because see it might at first on first glance it might seem like no that's leo that's preposterous reality can't be mad at sexist jokes um but why is that any more preposterous really than it being made out of what what do you think isn't preposterous you think atoms aren't preposterous you think quarks are not preposterous you think energy isn't preposterous you think mathematics isn't preposterous it's like it's okay if riau is mad at mathematics and computers and molecules that's all fine but if you say it's mad of a sexist joke or a pina colada oh that's impossible do you see how silly and arbitrary that is when you recognize the relativity of substrate you recognize that one thing one building block is no more preposterous than any other this is what really frees your mind up this is like the thing that unlocks your whole mind and turns your mind infinite because as long as you think that one thing is more plausible than something else that for example it's easier for reality to create an atom than it is for it to create a pina colada or sexist joke you or if you say well leo it makes sense that uh reality is made up of something small and fundamental like a molecule you know because it's so simple but actually if you zoom into a molecule it's not simple at all if you zoom into a single atom it's not simple at all that's what science has discovered and it's discovering more complexity to all the subatomic particles such vast complexity that you can't even create an image of what an individual subatomic particle like an electron you you can't create an image or even a diagram of an electron because of how complex it is um and yet you think an electron is somehow simpler or easier for reality or more natural for reality to create than just a pina colada what you have to understand is that the complexity of a pina colada versus a electron is identical actually there's there's no more complexity to a pina colada than there is to an electron they're equally complex you can zoom into an electron forever just like you can zoom into pink collada forever and so therefore it doesn't matter where in the infinite zoom scale you're at you can keep zooming in or out infinitely and so it doesn't really make a difference from reality's point of view there's there's nothing that's easier or harder for reality to create you have to understand this right this is a silly relative human idea that some things are easier for reality to invent than other things no if reality has the power to create an electron it has the power to create a pina colada just the same doesn't matter they're both figments of consciousness really the the mistake you're making here is that you're not recognizing that a that that an electron is a figment of consciousness and you're trying to you have this sort of idea that well somehow i can take all the figments of consciousness and boil them down to something so fundamental that it's not a figment of consciousness and then i can say i've got it i figured it out it's all made of electrons or something and that whole idea that whole endeavor is foolish and faulty and it rests on the um on the fact that you you're in a state of consciousness where you're not conscious that an electron is a figment of consciousness and furthermore you're not conscious that no matter what it is that you would try to posit as the ultimate substrate of reality that it would just be another figment of consciousness you might say well leo maybe it's not an electron maybe it's a string and then if i say no it's a string it's just a figure of conscious then you'll say well leo it's not okay maybe it's not a string maybe you're right a string is a finger of conscious but maybe there's something deeper underneath that maybe we're in a computer simulation like no you're not getting it you're not getting how how radical this goes how absolute this is a computer simulation is also a figment of consciousness and what you need to grasp is that no matter what you come up with as the grounding source for all the figments of consciousness that's just gonna be another figment of consciousness and so when you grasp that then you can say okay [ __ ] it's not this is not going to work i need a totally different way of understanding reality and now what i want you to consider is the possibility that your entire life as a whole think of your entire life your entire life as a whole as you've lived it that that is a figment of consciousness woven together out of strands of sub figments of consciousness so that memory you have of you in grade school learning the multiplication tables that's one strand of the larger yarn that is your whole life which is just a figment of consciousness and when you say that you were born in such and such a city in such and such a country at such and such a date that's a figment of consciousness and when you tell yourself that you're going to die 50 years from now maybe from old age let's say if you're lucky to live that long without any diseases uh on your deathbed you'll be lying there and you'll be dying that's also a figment of consciousness and when you think about the dreams you've had when you were sleeping in your bed last night those are also figments of consciousness even your dreams are figments of consciousness and when you say yeah leo but what about when i'm not conscious what about when i'm deep asleep and i'm not even dreaming what about the time before i was even born i was not conscious at all i didn't even exist what about that that is also a figment of consciousness so try to really grasp experientially what a figment of consciousness is this is the key either do this as you're meditating do this right now as you're sitting there or do this on a psychedelic if you really want to go deep with this um there's various ways you can do it but like try right now for example just as an exercise try to grasp that all the material objects around you are figments of consciousness so like pull out a material object take out your smartphone hold your whole your phone in your hand right now as i'm talking to you hold your phone in your hand look at that phone as you're listening to me and try to grasp that that phone is not a material object matter of atoms that phone is a figment of consciousness your consciousness this object that you're holding in your hand is qualitative that's what consciousness is consciousness is qualitative it's also holistic it exists as a whole this phone is an entire chunk of consciousness that you're holding it's not built up from the bottom up of atoms neurons or pixels or whatever you think it's dreamed up from the top down so to speak it's crucial that you get this this is the whole point if you can get this you're going to be so close to understanding the nature of reality it's absolute nature figments of consciousness have no size no shape no bounds and no ground there's no limit to how large a figment of consciousness can be what shape it can have or what it can do a figment of consciousness can be as tiny as an ant or as large as the entire galaxy it makes no difference to consciousness because consciousness is infinite in all directions it's scale invariant because scale is a completely relative notion the way you get a sense of scale is by comparing one figment of consciousness to another figment of consciousness and scale itself the very idea of scale or resolution or finiteness or a bottom layer to reality those are all figments of consciousness so if you're sitting there thinking but leo you know there's a there's a bottom level to reality reality is quantize at the bottom level it's sort of like a grid of pixels at the very bottom it's discrete it's not continuous there's a plank length and you can't get below the plank length something like that if you're saying that what i want you to recognize that plank length is a figment of consciousness discreteness is a figment of consciousness if you're imagining that at the very bottom of reality if you keep zooming in more and more eventually you get to the very bottom and it's just like a grid of pixels if that's what you're imagining it is that's a figment of consciousness consciousness is unbounded stop trying to bound it or to ground it also stop trying to think that one figment of consciousness is somehow easier to create because it has a simpler shape or because it has a smaller size like you might think well it's easier to create an electron than it is to create an elephant because an elephant is created out of many millions of electrons whereas an electron is just like this simple circular object you might think elephant is a very complex object and it's made of many electrons so the elephant is harder no that's a mistake adopt the attitude that any object of any size of any shape of any complexity is equally as easy for consciousness to imagine as the simplest object you can think of that's the proper attitude there's an additional layer of mind [ __ ] to this is that an implicit assumption that's baked into materialism is the idea that that reality is concrete like if you ask a scientist what is reality actually whatever answer they give you that answer is always going to be something concrete like it's this it's that it's math it's equations it's numbers it's strings it's quarks it's it's one thing versus another thing right concrete but what what really boggles the mind is to open your mind to the possibility that reality could be uh it's not limited to being concrete it could also be abstract and vague so for example if you ask a traditional scientist in a university like is reality made out of um little subatomic particles or do you think it's made of like waves discrete particles or continuous waves they're going to say well it's either one or the other or you might say is it a computer simulation or is it not a computer simulation they're going to say well it's either one or the other and they're going to debate each other about this or you might say is is reality made out of language or is it made out of neurons or is it made out of qualities like colors they're gonna these scientists and academics will take definitive positions on these things as though it has to be like this way but not that way but what will never occur to them is what if there actually isn't an answer to that question what if the actual nature of reality is that there actually isn't some one way that it is because at the bottom you might say you zoom in so so so deeply into at rock bottom there's not a collection of objects it's made out of but that the objects actually lose their their definition and they actually turn into an indistinct soup of pure abstraction and vagueness that is in fact what uh quantum physicists are discovering when they try to peer into the subatomic particles is that they realize that um the the more they look for something concrete it slips through their fingers and it just becomes something abstract and indistinct so you have to recognize that concreteness itself is a bias of your mind you're expecting to find some concrete substrate that itself could be a flawed metaphysical assumption that you're sneaking in to your inquiry into the nature of reality but at the same time i'm not also saying that it has to be abstract because you might say well leo but if it's abstract isn't that also a bias yes that's also a bias so it's so abstract that it's like meta abstract to the point where it could be concrete it could be abstract and it's unspecified but then you say leo but then it's unspecified that's what it is and it's like no it's so unspecified that you can't even say it's unspecified because it could be specified but then you say no believe so then it's specified which is it leaves it specified or is unspecified well specified and unspecified are again two figments of consciousness if you take pure consciousness you can ask okay leo yeah you're saying figments of conscience but what is consciousness leo you're just you're just kind of kicking the can down the road you're not actually answering the question because now it all hinges on the answer to the question of what is consciousness because you never explained what that is but that's not uh that's not a that's not a bug of my system um it's because and it's not because i don't know what consciousness is or that you don't you can't know what consciousness is that's not what i'm saying what i'm saying is um you can't reduce it it's irreducible see you're asking me to reduce consciousness but i can't reduce conscious because conscious is the rock bottom what is consciousness consciousness is infinity that's what it is the problem is that you're not conscious enough to understand what that means consciousness is the sum total of every possible fragment if you take not fragment but figment if you take all the figments of conscious that we talked about every but that's just the tip of the iceberg every possible figment of consciousness literally imagine every possible figment of consciousness ever that could ever exist that is infinity and that is what consciousness is it's every possible figment of consciousness but if you if you fuse every possible figment of consciousness into itself what you end up with is a is nothing you end up with just pure consciousness or pure emptiness or infinity here you need a deep awakening to to understand what this is um what i'm pointing to what i'm talking about you can't know what consciousness is without awakening so that's something you have to work on but for now let's keep going consciousness and reality same thing uh is unlimited and holistic it can weave together any figments it wants to create a cohesive life or state the state could be flowing it could be frozen it could be any possible way there's no limit to it and this state and this weeding process of these figments can happen from the top it happens from the top down not from the bottom up therefore it's irreducible therefore any attempt to try to reduce it the way that science tries to do it's it's never gonna get it you have to grasp it from the top down not from the bottom up now what's what's so striking about how this process works is that consciousness has to weave these figments together perfectly and cohesively in order for you to have a sense of sanity and really this is the obstacle that we're dealing with here in trying to explain consciousness to you is that you're sort of assuming that you can understand what consciousness is and what reality is while maintaining your sense of sanity and that's not the case you have to recognize that that's that's a very sneaky assumption sort of an epistemological metaphysical assumption that you're sneaking in when you're trying to question reality is you're just sort of assuming aren't you that you can question reality and understand it while maintaining your sanity what if that's not the case what if to understand what consciousness really is you'd have to lose your sanity what if the actual process of getting it leads to you losing your mind that would be very challenging now if that was the case because see when you begin inquiring into the nature of reality and yourself and consciousness it's sort of like an armchair philosophical exercise for you it's it's it's interesting you can sit around and kind of speculate and theorize maybe we're in a computer simulation maybe we're in a matrix oh that's kind of cool you know maybe it was evolution maybe it was god who created us okay that's kind of interesting right you can you can sit there and speculate and debate about these things that's all fine fine and good but it never occurs to you that to really get the answer you might have to lose your sanity then if it was posed to you that way like do you want to have the answer to the ultimate nature of reality and where it came from and how it is work how it works or do you want to maintain your sanity what if you had to lose your sanity to understand how many people would choose to understand over losing their minds very very few and that's why this is not very well known so the key insight here is really appreciate that your sanity is at stake here you wonder leo why does reality feel so real and solid and material i mean leo if this is all a dream and these are just figments of content i mean you're saying the wall the walls of my house are just figments of consciousness well if that's true why can't i walk through them if i'm in a dream why does it not feel like i'm in a dream why does it feel so real and solid and if if mysticism is true why isn't my experience so mystical why is my experience of reality right now very non-mystical well understand the depth of the problem see if all the sudden you realized that you could walk through the walls of your house and that the walls of your house were not real or solid or physical but figments of consciousness you would think you've gone insane really appreciate that if you start to realize that physics is imaginary you would start to lose your mind and it would terrify you in a sense what i'm telling you is that your sense of physical reality and your sanity are intertwined such that if you want to experience non-physical reality you're going to have to go slightly insane and the more insane you go the less physical reality will seem and if you want to completely pierce the veil of physics and physical reality you're going to have to be insane because that is how you literally define what sanity is if you woke up tomorrow got out of your bed and fell through your floor because you realize your floor was non-physical think of how terrified you you might say leo that's so cool i want that but think of do you really want that think about that think about how terrified you would be think about how you would carry on with your normal life how would you go to work how would you take care of your children what would happen if you took your hand and you tried to comfort your your crying daughter and your hand just went through your crying daughter's face because you realized she was just a figment of your consciousness how would you feel again you might be tempted to say oh leo that's so cool i want that but do you understand how attached you are to your little existence to your little life the way that it is you're very used to life unfolding in a very specific particular way and as soon as life unfolds even in a slightly different way you get all pissed off angry outraged depressed your whole life is about surviving within the dream that you're dreaming and anything that disturbs your dream too much or shakes its foundations this terrifies you because you're no longer able to survive you don't know how to survive you don't know what to do you don't know what to do with your life you don't know should you go to work what's going to motivate you if you realize that your daughter is imaginary what's going to motivate you to keep feeding her to keep going to work to keep loving her how are you even going to know if you're experiencing truth or if you've just lost your mind see if you woke up tomorrow and you fell through the floor of your house as you got out of bed it's not merely that you couldn't survive you wouldn't even know what's true anymore you wouldn't know is that true did that really happen to me or did i just fantasize it am i losing my what's happening am i schizophrenic see you would need to invent a whole story to explain to yourself what's happening you would rush to the um to the emergency room or to a mental hospital you would try to find the best psychotherapist in the world to try to help you you would start stuffing your mouth with the antipsychotic medication just to get back to where you were to get your mind back and of course you would tell yourself that this isn't happening something is wrong with me i'm having some sort of brain disorder and the doctors you would turn to to help you all of them would tell you no no no yeah you're you're you're this isn't actually happening this isn't this isn't real you're just you're just hallucinating things your mind is going unstable you probably have some schizophrenia or some psychosis it's just a psychotic episode relax we're gonna give you some medication here uh you know watch some television play some video games we'll give you some good food stay with the with us here in this hospital you know our therapist will take care of you and they will reassure you that actually your daughter um your daughter is not a figment of your consciousness and the floor is not a figment of your consciousness they're all real calm down relax you're gonna be back to normal in a few days and this would all reassure you and eventually you would fall back into your normal state of consciousness see all that mental illness and insanity r is a loose incoherent state of consciousness and so what you think of as material physical reality this is just a very very coherent well woven together collection of figments of consciousness and you're mistaking its coherence and its consistency it's internal consistency you're mistaking that for materiality or for truthfulness or for what you call reality and as soon as that consistency starts to unravel you think you're losing your mind and you are terrified you scramble to get it back together again to be coherent and if you're unable to do that then the rest of society and your children and your parents and your spouse and all your friends we will all tell you that you've lost your mind and that you're sick and eventually we'll lock you in a room or inject you with medication why because for us to maintain our dream of coherence we need to make sure that there aren't crazy people running around who are questioning material reality because if too many people start doing that then eventually we'll realize that [ __ ] maybe this is not as material as i thought this was maybe i'm in a dream maybe i'm not as sane as i thought i was maybe what i call sanity is just a very narrow spectrum of the full range of what consciousness is capable of and i only call things sane which are within my comfort zone of what i'm comfortable with being conscious of and the stuff that i'm not comfortable being conscious of that stuff is so insane i don't even want to look at it so here's the next mind [ __ ] states and figments of consciousness are not merely personal experiences happening inside of a brain a body a physical universe or a computer figments of consciousness are absolute absolute again this is not something you're going to understand until you awaken because until you awaken or have at least one awakening you don't have any reference point for what absolute is but what i'm saying is that red is absolutely red mickey mouse is absolutely mickey mouse evil is absolutely evil that's what it is every quality of consciousness every figment of consciousness is exactly itself it's self-identical making it absolute so when you're seeing the color red or mickey mouse that's not merely as philosophers of mind would say some sort of qualia or some sort of perception underneath which there's the real reality no no that is absolute reality mickey mouse is absolute reality everything is absolute reality there's nothing that isn't absolute reality reality is absolute whatever quality it takes whatever figment is arising in your consciousness right now is absolute reality brain is a figment of consciousness physical universe is a figment of consciousness atoms are a figment of consciousness science is a figment of consciousness history is a figment of consciousness computation is a figment of consciousness and you're trying to use all of these and more figments of consciousness to somehow ground absolute the absolute and relativize it and turn it into something like a a field of perceptions that you a biological creature who is made out of matter sitting on a planet earth is having situated somewhere in history in the history of the universe so to really awaken what you have to do is you have to cut all of these figments you know these figments are all tightly woven together almost think of it like a sweater knitted out of yarn and really it's just one one long strand of yarn making up this whole sweater but it's the way it's knitted it seems like it's more than that and it and it the the yarn is like you know it's tight like this so when you pull on it it seems it kind of like it's just one solid object when you're pulling on it pretty much you know you can flex it a little bit here and there it's flexible but you can't really pull it apart and so the process of awakening to really fully awaken to understand what consciousness is and what reality is you're gonna have to you're gonna have to unravel this whole yarn and you have to realize that the whole yarn the whole sweater is just made out of one chunk of yarn and you're gonna have to untangle all of it to realize that that's what a sweater is it's just one long piece of yarn another way to to explain reality is to call it mind i call it mind with a capital m infinite mind now what is the difference between whether we call it mind or whether we call it material well here's the key differences a mind unlike material a mind is fluid and it can work holistically top down material has to be made of little simple elements and it has to work bottom up because of this kind of bottom-up approach material actually can't be intelligent mine since it works top-down it actually can have sentience and intelligence this is the key difference between materialism and what i'm describing here you could call it idealism i guess mind materialism can't have intelligence you might say oh leo but yeah material can have intelligence you can have a brain with neurons neural networks and that creates intelligence no intelligence has to be top down it can't be bottom-up so all the bottom-up explanations of intelligence uh they actually they don't work i can't explain to you why uh because you'd have to awaken to understand that you'd have to actually awaken to absolute intelligence to what intelligence says you're not conscious of what intelligence is therefore i can't explain it to you and the reason i can't explain it to you is because the only way you can understand what intelligence is is to be top-down conscious and intelligent and right now you simply lack the intelligence to understand what intelligence is you lack the consciousness and that's because you're trying to understand intelligence from the bottom up by dissecting it into little you know reductionistic pieces like neural networks and molecules and neurons and atoms and computation information flow no none of that is intelligence intelligence is an absolute and has to be understood from the top down so um the only reason you are intelligent to whatever degree you are there's many degrees of intelligence but the only reason you have intelligence at all is because you're a mind you're not matter your mind that's why you're intelligent if you are intelligent and see intelligence can reduce itself from the top down it can't build itself really from the bottom up it has to reduce itself from the top down so what you have from the highest level is you have infinite intelligence and that intelligence can dumb itself down infinitely low to turn itself into something dumb like a doorknob so a doorknob it's not that in something highly intelligent is built up of simple dumb objects like doorknobs or neurons or nodes in a neural network no no it's the ups it works the opposite way it's that you have infinite intelligence which dumbs itself down puts itself to sleep reduces its consciousness until it reaches the level of a of a neuron or a doorknob and then it looks dumb so the dumbness of material objects is actually an illusion because it your entire field of consciousness is actually infinite intelligent infinitely intelligent but it's it's acting dumb because it's trying to construct a finite life and it's also trying to maintain your sanity in the same process because if you actually experience infinite intelligence you're going to be so intelligent you're going to feel like you've gone insane high intelligence feels like insanity most humans don't understand this because they're simply not intelligent enough but i've reached levels of intelligence that are so high states of intelligence that are so high that it feels like i'm losing my mind and it would terrify you if you had that level of intelligence you would be so intelligent humans would perceive you as other worldly as an alien or as a um some sort of supernatural entity as a as a deity so mind has a fundamental capacity for sentience and intelligence in fact that's the actual nature that's the that's the highest nature of what mind is is infinite sentience and intelligence consciousness mind is also capable of comprehension unlike material a material system is not capable of comprehension a mind is again you might say well leo but but i know material systems which are capable of comprehension like the human brain no no um all those material systems you think are capable of comprehension they're they're not material systems there are no such thing as material systems everything you call a material system is not a material system it's mind so the only reason the material system is capable of comprehension is because it's actually mind masquerading as material you actually can't point to an example of a material system because they don't exist because mine is absolute there is no such thing as a material system material is just a dumbed down state of infinite mind when you're not aware of that then you can think that well oh but there can be a material system that's also capable of comprehension no there can't there absolutely can't but to understand that you'd have to awaken also a mind is creative a material system cannot be creative again you could say but leo i have a computer that's running an ai and it's a material system and it can be creative no the only reason your computer is creative if it is if it's running an ai is because your computer is a figment of consciousness an infinite mind it's mind that's doing that only mind is capable of creativity another feature of mind is that mind can remember and mind can forget and material systems don't have this capacity another feature of mine is that mind has no substrate or ground whereas material systems need to have a substrate or ground uh why is that well because mind is infinite that's what not having a the only reason you could have no ground is if you're in the only way you can have no ground is if you're infinite if you're finite you need to have a ground um but it's i mean it's it's funny because you can't have something that has a ground because where would it be situated in it there always needs to be an infinite regress in terms of grounding something so actually there can't be anything finite everything has to be infinite so there actually cannot exist a finite material system a finite material system is actually an infinite system which has dumped itself down from the top down to pretend as though it's finite and limited and the the last feature of mind is will a mind has will whereas the material system cannot have will so the way it works is that a mind can imagine dumb dead matter but matter cannot create a mind and the reason that can't happen is because matter is mind now you said malia can't there just be matter with no mind no mind is absolute you can't have anything outside of mind you might say malia that's like a tautology you're not like you're not leaving any wiggle room here it sounds like you're very closed-minded and absolutist about this yes mind is absolute you have to open yourself to the possibility that there literally is not even space in existence for anything but mind because everything is mind what you call matter is mind if you imagine something that's not mind and you say ah leo but i can i can think of something we can open our minds to the possibility there's something outside of mind but that's inside of mind you're doing that with mind that's a figment of mind you can think of reality as an infinite field of pixels all communicating with each other and coordinating intelligently from the top down although you have to be careful with this metaphor of pixels because when you're imagining a field of pixels this is actually sort of a materialistic analogy because the pixels become finite as soon as you start to imagine them you start to imagine sort of bottom lower resolution to the pixels but the infinite field of pixels you might maybe even better is to call them voxels not pixels because they're three-dimensional um or they're even more than three-dimensional you can have as many dimensions as you want it's not limited to any number of dimensions but let's call them voxels for now so you have this let's say 3d infinite field of voxels but these voxels have like sort of like minecraft right but these voxels you know minecraft has some sort of smallest resolution unit but the way that consciousness works is it doesn't have a smallest resolution unit it's just infinite all the way down and all the way up and then you might ask well leo are the pixels square or are they circular like atoms and of course the answer is since it's infinite it goes infinitely far down um the question doesn't apply uh because the pixel itself has no boundary or shape so imagine a screen made of pixels or voxels that have no shape to them they're unbounded that also means that each pixel is infinite it can be infinitely subdivided it has no lower resolution it's an infinitely resolution high resolution reality and that is what you see before you right now you're inside of an infinite resolution field of consciousness see and then you can't even call them pixels anymore or voxels anymore because what is a pixel what is a voxel um that already assumes a certain shape but if there's an infinite number of them and they have no shape they're not square they're not round they're not anything then what is the difference between having an infinite number of pixels versus having no pixels at all of course they're identical infinite pixels zero pixels is the same thing infinity is zero so um or you can just think of it as one single pixel but it can subdivide itself infinitely so conscious is an infinite field that has infinite potential for subdivision and then infinite communication between all the sub divided parts infinite possibility to coordinate them this is intelligence the possibility to coordinate and to unify or to subdivide all the pixels without any limitation whatsoever from the top down and this if you look at your hand right now if you pull out your hand and look at your hand this is exactly what your hand is your hand is a figment of consciousness a field of infinite pixels that have infinitely subdivided themselves and also intelligently unified and coordinated themselves and are communicating with each other to render this object that we call a hand intelligence is the communication and coordination between all of the subdivisions of an infinite field of of these pixels of consciousness and this is not occurring with within a brain and it is not occurring within neurons and it is not grounded in atoms or molecules pretty cool huh see the actual structure of reality is pure [ __ ] genius it's way more genius than anything you could possibly all the [ __ ] that humans have invented to explain reality all the models all the quantum physics that is like kindergarten crayon drawings that's like horseshit compared to the actual genius design of what reality the way reality actually works the actual mechanism of reality so here's a here's an important additional insight for you about consciousness consciousness has the remarkable feature of remembrance and forgetfulness think of it as though there's a a switch in the universe you can you can it's not really a switch it's um it's a dial you can you can turn this dial this knob and as you crank it up the universe remembers itself and as you crank it down the universe forgets itself it literally forgets parts of itself this is completely unlike a material system see in a material paradigm you can sort of ask the question like well what is the state of the universe and you could say well it's a bunch of atoms with these xyz coordinates located here and there and and so forth and if you ask the question like well does the universe know all of its parts so to speak um the materials would say yeah the universe kind of knows all of its parts it kind of sees itself the universe like is just all these arrangements of atoms it's a funny way of speaking about it but just kind of go along with me here um it's really hard to articulate these these things because we're really talking about things that do not exist or do not make any logical sense within sort of normal human discourse or language or logic we're talking about translogical things here things that i've accessed from ridiculously high states of consciousness uh so um what was i saying yeah so so if you sort of ask the question of a physicist like does the universe know all of its parts the physicists would say yeah um and there's not a possibility the universe can just like forget parts of itself like can the universe forget that the the earth exists just kind of forget you flip a switch the universe forgets that the earth exists and then you flip a switch and then it remembers all of a sudden see in a material model there's no there's no room for this but in the model that i'm describing where you just have consciousness one of the features of consciousness is remembrance and forgetfulness so literally right now the state of consciousness you're in the switch of forgetfulness is cranked all the way up that means you're you're very forgetful that means you have forgotten literally how you have constructed the planet earth you're not conscious of that right now if i was to flip this switch and turn you on to full remembrance you would actually remember how you constructed the planet earth see under a materialist paradigm to say this to a to a serious physicist the physicist would say like that i've lost my mind or that i'm talking complete nonsense the reason they say that is because their minds are so narrow that relative to the narrowness of their minds yeah what i'm talking about is insanity um but if you expand your mind very far then you become very conscious and very awake then and then you find this switch you can find the switch to remembrance and then you'll remember how you created the whole earth see this this kind of idea doesn't fit within the materials paradigm and if a materialist experiences this switch being flipped the materialist will [ __ ] his pants and will think he's lost his mind he'll he'll check himself into a into mental institution and he'll take antipsychotic drugs because from his little narrow paradigm you can't have such a switch such a switch can't exist well maybe that's because you've lost your mind or maybe that's just because your mind was very small to begin with and you were very deluded and self-deceived about how well you understood reality and maybe reality is structured in such a brilliant way that it it it goes way beyond anything you you could imagine was possible so consciousness has the ability to hide things from itself at will this is impossible under materialism so keep that in mind this switch is actually the switch of awakening when you are waking up you're flipping this switch you're twisting this knob and you're going from forgetfulness to remembrance for example you can remember how you imagined and created your own birth here's another key insight for you thinking modeling and conceptualizing all the stuff we're doing right now together cannot substitute for states of consciousness so even though i'm telling you all this interesting stuff and you might even agree with all of it it doesn't matter because your state of consciousness actually probably hasn't changed since the beginning of this episode and the things that i'm talking about will only make sense from very high certain states of consciousness and since your state of consciousness hasn't changed you don't understand what i'm talking about even if you tell yourself that you do you actually don't and you will not understand that you actually don't until you access these higher different states of consciousness which is why we're talking about this all thinking and logic takes place from within the frame of the state of consciousness that you're in right now that means what you're able to think and understand and communicate to yourself and to others everything you're able to model all of science all concepts all explanations every single book that has ever been written it can only make sense within a certain frame of consciousness then it's all relative to a certain frame of consciousness state of consciousness which creates this frame and to experience and understand things beyond this frame you have to go outside of this frame and no amount of talking within the frame will get you to understand what's outside the frame this is crucial crucial crucial crucial what you're able to think and how you think is completely bound up with your state of consciousness and right now you're not in a high state of consciousness therefore some of the things that i am trying to explain to you you cannot understand and they are impossible to communicate to you and also it's not just your limitation it's also my limitation the state of consciousness that i'm in is also preventing me from communicating to you and even the method i'm using to communicate this linear method of putting one word after another the english language it's way too limited it doesn't have enough bandwidth to communicate the things that are beyond this narrow ordinary set of consciousness that most humans are in most of the time the material state we could call sort of the default human state of consciousness of waking consciousness the material state there are things i'm trying to communicate to you from beyond the material state but i can't because you're in the material state and the language i'm using to communicate is also part of the material state but what's really interesting is that a lot of spiritual teachers frame thinking as an obstacle to spirituality and to awakening and they teach you to shut down your mind and stop thinking but that's not technically correct and it took me a long time to to figure this out but i finally did is that actually thinking comes in various kinds of degrees and your thinking expands and becomes what i call hyper thinking thinking can acquire extra dimensions to it that it simply cannot have within the material frame and so as you expand your state of consciousness and your frame expands your thinking can expand it can turn into what i would call hyper thinking and now all of a sudden you can reason and think in i would call hyper dimensional ways and you can literally think things that are impossible to think in your current state of consciousness and that hyper thinking is a new dimension of intelligence that most of mankind doesn't know exists it's a kind of thinking or intelligence that you would imagine an alien that is a million years more evolved than the human species if we ever encountered such an alien and communicated with it somehow it's the kind of intelligence that that alien might have like if that alien had a brain that was 100 times larger than ours try to imagine what kind of intelligence they could have and what kind of ways of thinking like imagine an alien mind thinking in sort of hyper um in a sort of a hyper manner like hyper intelligent not just i'm not just talking about the difference between like 150 iq points versus 200 iq points i'm talking about the difference between like 150 iq points versus a million iq points like that level of difference so imagine what a million iq mind could think this would be a a super intelligence that maybe you would only attribute to some sort of ai you know if we if we linked every computer on the planet together every supercomputer and somehow it turned into some sort of you know sentient ai or whatever you know in these sort of science fiction um scenarios you can kind of imagine how much smarter it would be than the average human right well um well the funny thing is that i've already accessed this intelligence and you can access it too the reason we're talking about this because i want to help you to access this intelligence it's [ __ ] amazing to access this intelligence you can access a million iq points and see what that's like you're able to think thoughts that are impossible to think in your current state of consciousness imagine a mind that's able to think like a hundred different threads of thought at once and then interconnect them together it's not just more thinking it's not just faster thinking it's a it's a much it's a much more robust um uh higher bandwidth multi-dimensional way of thinking it's incredible um and it doesn't just scale linearly it like scales exponentially it's not just more thinking it's it's a much higher quality thinking and all the limitations of normal human thought those are all transcended and the thinking process itself becomes spiritualized it's a mystical kind of thinking it's rationality but it goes beyond rationality it includes rationality includes logic but it becomes a sort of a hyperlogic plus it combines with with visions with uh you know with with mis with mysticism it all kind of combines together with a hyper intuitive understanding and just as just profound intelligence and so when your state of consciousness expands your thinking expands and all of a sudden shutting off your mind is no longer the goal it's no longer desirable you can think and your thinking is so powerful that you can just cut through all the [ __ ] of normal human thought and you can access spiritual truths that are impossible to access otherwise and in fact there are spiritual truths you could access through this what i'm going to call hyper thinking that you're not going to be able to ask if you just shut off your mind and go into a meditative state like the zen buddhists do which is one of the limitations and problems that i've always had with stuff like buddhism and zen buddhism and so forth where they teach you to shut off your mind is that yeah you can do that you can access some cool states of consciousness and you can even have some awakenings but you don't access hyper thinking and you might say well leo i don't need to ask hyper thinking but you don't really know what you're missing until you access hyper thinking some of the coolest deepest insights require access to this hyper thinking furthermore some states of consciousness are so radical that they cannot even be remembered or explained to oneself so there have been states of conscience that i've accessed that are so radical that even as i sit here now because my state of consciousness is lower than it it was at that peak as i sit here now i can barely remember those states and i can barely even explain them to myself let alone to you and that's astounding because it just shows you how crucial your state of consciousness is my current state of consciousness does not give my mind enough bandwidth to access the deepest and most profound insights and thoughts that i've had even my memory in this current state of consciousness is not sufficient to hold truths and insights from those higher states of consciousness my current state of consciousness does not allow enough bandwidth and memory for that and it does not allow enough um processing power and verbal communication power to even explain those states to myself but i have you might ask well then how do you know about it well i have some very vague fuzzy recollections of those insights intrudes and states but it's it's like very very um um diminished so think about taking an hd 4k image and then compressing it down into like a 6 pixel by 6 pixel square that's black and white that's how much you can do that you can do that compression process but think about how much you lose going from a 4k hd image to a 6 pixel by 6 pixel image um that's kind of like how it works and it's almost to the point where this little image i mean it's better to have this little six pixel by six pixel image than nothing at all but it's so degraded that like you you can't really it has like almost no comparison so much has been lost that um you can't even really use that image to navigate in this ordinary life it's it's insufficient to navigate it's insufficient to really transform you so so part of what we're dealing here we're dealing with sort of a lack of bandwidth problem by sort of accessing these higher states of consciousness and coming back down to our normal states of consciousness there's not enough bandwidth really and so ideally what you do with spiritual work is you got to open up that bandwidth so here's the key and some more key insights right now you are in some kind of state of consciousness whatever that is uh whatever state of consciousness you're in that state completely determines the parameters of your experience what you're able to think what you're able to communicate what you're able to understand how you emote how you feel what you think is right and wrong sane or insane logical or irrational possible and impossible and you cannot imagine or think beyond the state of consciousness that you're in right now without expanding it it can also contract further too so it can it can contract a lot as well um and there exist radical new states of consciousness beyond your current state of consciousness which you cannot even imagine it's something totally new and if you were to experience it it would completely shock you and you would think that it's impossible but that's only because what you think is possible or impossible is defined by the frame of your current state of consciousness which is not very high by the way you cannot avoid being in some state of consciousness no matter what you're doing or how you are you're in some kind of state it could be a low state it could be a medium state it could be very high state but you're in some kind of state states have trade-offs and pros and cons some states are more resourceful than other states there are certain things you can do in certain states but not do in other states for example in your current state you can open a book and read it there could be another state it could even be a high state of consciousness where your conscience is so high that it's beyond your ability to read a book you might say well how can that be if it's so high shouldn't i be able to do all the stuff i used to do no there's actually trade-offs you can have a state of conscience that's so high that paradoxically it cripples you you're not able to walk you're not able to talk you're not able to think you're not able to read a book you're not able to even see the material world imagine state of consciousness where you're so conscious you can't even see a a cup of water because you're too conscious to see a finite cup of water this actually explains why humans have a relatively low state of consciousness because in a sense that's what comes with being human to be human to perceive as a human to experience the world in a human way to have a family to have children that you care about and to um go to work and do all this sort of human stuff that we like to do to have sex to be interested in that kind of stuff to be interested in money to care about pain and suffering to want to avoid it to even care about living these only make sense within a low state of conscience if you were in a higher city college you wouldn't care about any of these things you wouldn't care if somebody shot you you wouldn't care if your children got raped you wouldn't care about going to work you wouldn't care about being on time you wouldn't care about taking a shower or brushing your teeth other things would these things wouldn't matter so that explains why humans struggle so much to understand reality is because there's just there's such higher dimensions of reality that are so beyond being human i want you to really grasp that this idea of something being impossible impossibility is a function of your state of consciousness and at the highest state of consciousness nothing at all is impossible the high state of consciousness is infinite possibility there's literally nothing that consciousness cannot imagine when it is fully conscious because consciousness is unlimited that's what infinity is it's complete lack of limitation we could call that god mode that's what god mode is nothing is impossible from god mode but from a lower state of consciousness a lot of things are impossible because the lower states are filled with finite things and limitations so changing your state of consciousness is the number one most significant change you can make in your life it's more important than earning money having sex or anything else there's two kinds of changing your state of consciousness one is a temporary state change and two is a change a permanent change to the baseline of your consciousness the state that you're usually habitually in most of the day when you're not sleeping let's say you can even change the baseline state of how you sleep the state you sleep in you can even change that something like lucid dreaming or whatever um but um but yeah so raising your baseline both are both are very important both have their utility obviously the more you can raise your baseline the better that would be the ideal the problem is that it's actually very difficult to change your baseline state of consciousness it's much easier to get a temporary peak and then it's hard to maintain um that peak and you come crashing back down to your baseline or even sometimes lower than your baseline then you kind of even back out and you stabilize at your baseline um but a lot of times the mistake people make is that they dismiss the importance of a temporary peak they say well leo if it's just a peak and it's just temporary that it's not true it's not as true it's not permanent therefore it's not real it's not absolute or what's the point even because you're going to crash back to the baseline anyways so what good is it this is a huge mistake these peaks are a lot of good first of all because you're never going to be able to raise your baseline if all you're doing is focusing on raising your baseline your baseline it's it's much harder to raise your baseline and you're never going to be able to to reach the the kind of level you can get at a peak as your baseline in practice you're never going to reach that so people who just do work on their baseline they might think that they're being like all disciplined and you know traditional following some traditional buddhist path that's all fine and good but the problem is that you're not going to access the highest states of consciousness and so you're you're going to be deluded even if you do manage to raise your baseline significantly of course the other problem is that if all you do is chase the peak experiences and you do no work on your baseline then you're going to be very frustrated and spiritually unrounded because um you're just going to be jumping up and down on these peaks but your baseline is not going to be shifting and basically you're going to have a lot of maybe intellectual understanding but your ability to embody and to actually transform your life and to have the happiness and all the benefits that come with with the higher states you're not going to have those consistently and that's going to cause a lot of problems for you too so really you need both you want both uh it's not one or the other and there's different techniques for accessing or training up one or the other so science rationality skepticism thinking physicality these only happen within certain states of consciousness birth only exists within certain states of consciousness death only exists within certain states of consciousness science doesn't understand this and science doesn't understand that science itself is a state of consciousness all science is relative to this low state of consciousness that most of us are in most of the time it's important to understand that there is no best state of consciousness and there is no invalid state of consciousness so just because you have a higher or a lower state of consciousness doesn't mean the higher ones are better again it all depends on it's all relative it all depends on like what you want to do with it if your desire is to understand the entire universe then higher states are better but if your desire is to live as a human and just do normal human stuff then the high states of consciousness are not good for you they're bad for you if your desire is to maintain your sanity as a human high states of conscience are very bad for you and there's nothing wrong with being in a human state of consciousness or being in a dog state of consciousness or a a warm state of consciousness that they're all equally valid they have their pros and cons spirituality basically boils down to changing your state of consciousness without changing your state of consciousness spirituality doesn't make any sense and it devolves into something stupid like organized religion most people have never experienced a high mystical state of consciousness which is why there's so much confusion about religion and also about the nature of reality why both the religious people are so confused but also the academics and the scientists and intellectuals public intellectuals are also so confused because they haven't accessed sufficiently high states of consciousness and they're trying to do their best to understand reality from their current state of consciousness and maybe they do a little bit of practice to expand it a little bit but it's not sufficient and they think they can just figure it out with their mind or through reading a book or through doing some math equations or doing some science experiments and none of that will work that's why i'm so stressing in this episode states of consciousness i really want to communicate to you how important this is this is the master key that unlocks everything and if you don't use this master key nothing else you do will compensate for that you can't compensate for it by saying a bunch of hail mary's and praying a lot and going to church a lot and doing good deeds and being nice to your kids and donating to charity and doing chanting mantra meditate like none of that matters none of that will compensate being the perfect buddhist will not compensate for your lack of consciousness so all religious teachings and religious wisdom and truths come from higher states of consciousness that's where they come from and then they get written [Music] and degraded and corrupted and passed around society and culture by people who have never accessed those states of consciousness and therefore these religious teachings do not make a lot of sense for ordinary people because you're trying to interpret truths and wisdom and insights from very high states of consciousness from super intelligence of like a million iq points and you're trying to understand that using your 100 iq point capacities from this current state that you're in and that's just it's never going to work there's way too much degradation way too much law is lost in the narrow bandwidth way too much is lost in translation and that's why you have people like sam harris jordan peterson um other folks who like to talk about religious topics or spiritual topics or even non-duality or psychedelics or whatever they talk about you know in this domain or science or rationality or logic or language or post-modernism right they talk about all these topics but they're always just like they're just going around in circles and very lost very confused um and like they just do they do not have a clear enough consciousness because they haven't accessed those higher states and yet they want to like make a whole career out of teaching these ideas and things to to sort of to normies to their audiences and they're just they're not able to do it and no matter how much they do what they're currently doing they're never going to make sense of it never no matter how many scientific books they read how many studies they run how much neuroscience they do none of it will ever be good enough the only thing that will help them is to access those higher states and of course they have a lot of defense mechanisms to prevent them from accessing those higher states because if they access those higher states then many of the things they teach and their ideologies and their models and systems would all collapse and also they would lose their minds in the process so changing your baseline state of consciousness is very important accessing those higher peaks is also very important and all of it takes a lot of work it's all scary it's all difficult and it's dangerous it's also dangerous and therefore almost nobody does it and that's why society is in the state of ignorance that's why we're living in the dark ages there are some people who do this but it's they're pretty rare um there's many different degrees of higher consciousness that could be accessed but few people access the highest um states and um even fewer people embody all those states it's one thing to access another thing to embody it um and so just um yeah we're living in the dark ages changing your state of consciousness can be scary threatening and dangerous it pulls the rug out from under you it dematerializes reality it can feel like insanity and it can also be very isolating and lonely because it feels like nobody understands you the higher stages you access or the higher states that you access the more you understand the more intelligence you access the more alone you feel because so few other people have accessed it that you have few people to connect with and the things you realize you have like nobody else to help you to validate those you have nobody else to bounce those ideas off of um and at the very highest levels there literally ceases to be an other whom you could communicate or validate these ideas or truths or insights to or against and there even stops being anyone left to teach at those higher levels because it just all boils down to your own consciousness and that in itself is very isolating lonely and scary or it can be uh as you're struggling to integrate it so you might be wondering now will leo changing states of consciousness sounds like it's very important how do i do it well here's a list of all the ways that you can do it meditation concentration vipassana really concentration is the key if you want to access the highest states you gotta concentrate like a [ __ ] i mean you gotta concentrate so powerfully that you can sit for a week and just concentrate for a solid [ __ ] week like imagine sitting staring at a wall for a week just concentrating on a [ __ ] wall for a week that would do it that's hard to do that's why nobody does this stuff do nothing meditation is good being present very present is good contemplation maybe i mean it's hard to access i mean contemplation by itself won't really get you to access very high states not in my experience you'd have to combine it with like intense concentration so but contemplation is good if you want to sort of like start to think in more abstract ways some of those hyper thinking qualities come from contemplation but it has to be combined with expanded states of consciousness because contemplation by itself doesn't really expand consciousness enough in my experience uh yoga various kinds of yoga and pranayama i've talked about korea yoga in the past that's that's a good way chanting in mantras even though i kind of made fun of that um if you do it very seriously serious chanting serious mantras as a meditative practice really as a concentration practice that can do it like tibetan style chanting and mantras or hindu style deep breathing shamanic breathing i have an episode on shamanic breathing check that out that can do it psychedelics herbs and drugs that's really the most powerful way that i've discovered nothing will shift your state of consciousness faster and more radically than the right psychedelic i've discussed that a lot in the past so i won't talk much about it here i have videos you can watch about that visualization can also be very powerful but visualization has to also be done with intense concentration and it's really it's about the qual like the intensity of it the intensity and just the sheer quantity of it right like if you're gonna be doing some yoga or some chanting or some mantras or some visualizations or whatever like it's not enough to just do it for an hour a day that's not gonna do it that's not gonna shift your state enough like you gotta be doing it for like a [ __ ] week straight for a month straight that will shift your state significantly prayer also can work in this way if you're doing serious prayer it's basically a combination of like visualization concentration practice and sort of like a mantra it's like all of those combined together and if you do that for weeks for months for years that that could work to expand your state shaktipat if you've heard of that that could work dark room retreats i've heard could work i haven't tried all these methods there's just so many methods to try but these are the ones that people report work for them and of course you also have to understand that this list some of these gonna work for some people not for other people so i'm not saying that all these will work for you or that all these will work for me um some of them just it depends on your personality type your brain your your level of consciousness the state you're already in like there's a lot of variation your genetics all that determines how well these techniques will work for you also how much you like the techniques because if you don't like a technique you're not going to be able to do it with sufficient intensity and duration to make it work so right you have to find what works for you so dark room retreats astral projection various kinds of work you can do within sleeping and dreaming like lucid dreaming type stuff um vision quests traditionally have been used for this extreme suffering danger and pain this can shift your state of consciousness being out in nature can raise your state of consciousness various kinds of radical experiences travel adventure know if you jump out of an airplane i've actually done this you can jump out of an airplane and that will certainly change your state of consciousness it'll make you a lot more present now will that actually transform your baseline forever no probably not um this whole problem of how do you how do you shift your baseline state of consciousness permanently this is this is still a open question for me that i'm still researching and experimenting with and trying stuff out honestly it's quite challenging to do um it's a lot easier to access the peaks than it is to raise your baseline um i've done a lot of work accessing the peaks at this point in my life and then i'm going to do a lot more work in the future to raise my baseline that's still something on my to-do list that i'm working towards so i'll i'll share more of that in the future as i have better more experiences and sort of more stuff to share there more understanding of what it really takes to do that um falling in love even and experiencing deep forms of genuine love can raise your state of consciousness so those are some of the ways if you're trying to raise your baseline the most direct method i would say is just it's really the hardest one sit and concentrate for weeks at a time without distraction that's basically it um [Music] maybe some yoga and breathing intense yoga intense breathing that can also work and then if you're if you're looking for ways to experience the highest peaks then nothing is better for that than psychedelics so there you go the function of psychedelics is to show you how consciousness changes how fluid it is go watch my episode called how psychedelics work where i explain that because a lot of people are confused about what the function of psychedelics are in spiritual work so as i've said your state of consciousness determines what you can do mystics can do impossible seeming things because they are in different states of consciousness paranormal abilities and cities are possible from certain higher states of consciousness stuff like clairvoyance telepathy that kind of stuff if you think it's [ __ ] that's because you haven't accessed those states of consciousness it seems like [ __ ] from your current state of consciousness and if you don't think it's [ __ ] but you're wondering like leo why how do i get telepathy or where do i get clairvoyance why don't i have these things well because you're not in the right states of consciousness and now you're asking me will you how do i change my state of consciousness to access those things i want those things well honestly i don't know i don't know what it takes to get those abilities uh i know i know it's possible because really nothing for conscious is impossible but um i don't know what you would have to do what kind of work you would have to do to get those as a baseline to access those as a baseline consistently i don't know that would take probably years and decades of practice that the majority of you don't want to do and that i haven't done yet myself so i don't really feel qualified to teach it uh every living being is in a unique state of consciousness whether it's an aunt a kangaroo a human an alien or even you versus your mother and your father you're all in different states of consciousness is god god is the highest state of consciousness but it's not just a single state there's many high states of consciousness and god is all those states but even more interestingly god isn't just the highest states god is all states but the trick is the wrinkle is that god is only self-aware of itself as god from certain high states of consciousness those states are what i call awakened states so even though all states are god not all states are aware that they are god so for most of you listening to this right now right now you're in a state you are god god is the state you are but you're probably not aware that you are god unless your god realized then maybe you're aware of it then you're in an awakened state but most of you aren't awakening in enlightenment is a state of consciousness it could be a temporary state or it could be a permanent state but it is a state there is not a single awakened or enlightened state there are dozens and hundreds of them awakening comes in many degrees it's not an on off switch it's like a volume knob there exist states of consciousness in which you can access omniscience from which you can be conscious of how you created all of reality and how you created your life the point of this episode is to guide you towards that and to open your mind to that possibility and to explain to you why you don't have access to that right now now you understand why because you're in the wrong state why do humans disagree with each other so much about reality seemingly believing crazy things it's not because they're dumb per se is because they're in different states of consciousness which disagree with each other if you've only been in one state of consciousness your whole life then mystical teachings will seem insane and irrational to you and you will rationalize it to yourself that anyone who's teaching this kind of stuff or talking about it is delusional or insane or a cult leader or a grifter or charlatan because your mind needs some way to explain it to yourself otherwise your mind won't be consistent and so your mind comes up with these kinds of rationalizations and so it would be a lot easier if you submit to yourself that there are higher states you haven't accessed yet and that's why this stuff doesn't make sense to you if it doesn't make sense to you and so most the times when you think some spiritual teacher or teaching is coming from some idiot or grifter or cult leader who's delusional actually that's a projection coming from your own lower state and actually it's you who's the deluded idiot because you think you got all figured out in the state that you're in right now but there are much more expansive states where you'll realize how dumb you were to think that disputes between religions mystical teachings spiritual gurus and enlightened masters are rooted in access to different higher states of consciousness that's why there's disputes between your various spiritual teachers that you might have studied or read their books and you wonder well how come they're disagreeing well because they've accessed different states of consciousness and there are so many different kinds of states of consciousness that it's unreasonable to expect every spiritual teacher to access all of them there's way too many of them to access it's sort of like expecting your spiritual teacher to have visited every country on the planet there are too many countries for everyone to have gone to all of them and to experience them all and to be able to do a very precise comparison and contrasting between all the different countries that exist and all the different cultures all the different cuisines all the different languages it's too many of them usually what happens is that your spiritual teacher picks one language one country or maybe a couple of them and they can teach you about that but then they can't teach you about the places they haven't been to as we're wrapping up here you might wonder well but leo but you didn't tell us what consciousness is you spoke a lot about consciousness but you didn't say what it is you can't say what it is because it's infinite it's unbounded and it's everything and it's the rock bottom it's absolute it's more fundamental than explanation or language it's also beyond your current state of consciousness to grasp but you can figure out what it is for yourself just shift to a higher state of consciousness and that'll do it now you might want to but leo where did consciousness come from where and coming from are figments of consciousness so consciousness didn't come from anywhere because those are figments it invented which means that consciousness has always existed it's eternal it's always been here it didn't come from anywhere it's infinite it's been around forever it's not bound by time since time is some is just another figment of consciousness and then finally you might get a little smart alecky and say well leo but then what about god isn't god also a figment of consciousness if everything is a figment of consciousness then surely god must be a figment of consciousness haha i got you god is not a figment of consciousness god is consciousness god is all possible figments god is a meta thing god is you you you are consciousness and you are dreaming up various figments one of those figments that you're dreaming up is the biographical biological human self that you imagine yourself to be right now that was born and that's going to die that's a figment of consciousness that you as god are imagining so you can drop those figments but then you'll just be god that's it that's the end of this episode hopefully that clears things up now you understand what consciousness is and how it works now a few caveats and and sort of like final warning warnings that i want to give is my understanding of consciousness is still evolving it might seem like i'm presenting this as though i understand everything about consciousness but i don't i understand consciousness relatively well compared to most humans and i understand it very well at its absolute highest level but then where i still struggle is understanding all the nuances and mechanisms and details of how consciousness works that's that's still stuff that i need to research and experiment with and test and a lot of methods for how to raise your consciousness all that kind of stuff i'm still testing that stuff out i still struggle with that stuff i also struggle to articulate to model and to explain consciousness that's like actually a separate thing it's one thing to access the highest levels of consciousness and kind of get it for yourself it's another thing to then come back and then explain it to others teach it to others create models about it articulate about it and so forth that's that's a separate activity and just because you're good at one doesn't mean you're good at the other and vice versa like you can be very conscious but then bad articulating it you can be good at articulating it but then also not be that conscious and so yeah i'm trying to try to do both here also i struggle a lot with embodying it i've accessed very high levels of consciousness but i still struggle to live and embody like at a very kind of like micro day-to-day level i still struggle to embody all that i have a lot of work probably decades more work to do on that front and it's challenging work it's not easy i struggle with it every day um so don't think that i'm some sort of know-it-all i mean yeah i've accessed i've accessed omniscience i've access to absolute consciousness i know what that is but it's it's still a challenge for me to figure out exactly like why consciousness works the way it does at these finite realms uh it's i still have questions in terms of like um a deeper understanding of various facets and aspects of consciousness like love and intelligence i'm still trying to like grasp and understand like one of the questions i still have is like i'm trying to get a better handle on what intelligence is like i know intelligence is infinite i've accessed that but then to actually articulate what intelligence is um that's a [ __ ] that's a real [ __ ] that's hard to do so i spent a lot you know a lot of time thinking about that working on that um i understand that the highest level consciousness is absolute infinity like i know that that will never change but then what does it actually mean absolute infinity what are all the ramifications of that all the ways it manifests that i still struggle with and i work on that every week and i'll have more insights into that i'm sure in the years to come um so um so yeah there's a lot there's a lot to say about about consciousness it's a very tricky beast and it's it's very humbling um you would think that oh you just awaken you reach the highest level and you understand everything it's like no just because you reach the highest level doesn't mean you understand all the like intermediate levels and then how do you know you reach the highest level there's a higher level beyond what you you know maybe you reach something that you think is the highest level but there's something beyond that how do you know that well you have to stay humble and be open to the possibility there's something more that you haven't reached yet um and so there's a lot of potential for self-deception here so i want to refer you back to my episode three-part series called self-deception part one part two part three where i talk a lot about you know that that's a foundational piece of my work is self-deception that theme of self-deception and i i stress again i gotta stress to you guys because sometimes you get the wrong idea that like oh leo thinks that self-deception is so important and all that but then he's self-deceived because he doesn't understand that he can deceive himself it's like no as i explained especially in part three of that series i'm not immune to self-deception i always have to be double triple checking myself sometimes i'm i'm second guessing myself 20 30 times for years and months at a time about some point about this or about that because i'm very cognizant of how easy it is for me to deceive myself and at any point in time i know that i'm self-deceived about certain things not all things but certain things um there's things that i know i'm self-deceived about that will be corrected and improved in the future it's like you know i i can't be perfect it's kind of like as i'm teaching this stuff to you guys understand that it's sort of like i'm constructing the airplane as we're taking off on the runway it's like i feel like i'm a pilot in a jumbo airplane i kind of know how to fly it i have a vague sense of it but the plane is is only half constructed you guys are on the plane we're lifting off and it's not complete it's half complete and then and that that's just how this process is like it's not a perfect process you're going to be scrambling to scrap this stuff together and you're flying by the seat of your pants you're trying to figure it out as you go along because you know my life is unfolding as i'm figuring this [ __ ] out and i'm like i'm in the thick of it right it's not like i'm above it all teaching it to you i'm in the middle of it figuring it out making mistakes going through the process going through self-deceptions weeding out my own self-deceptions as i'm trying to teach this stuff so it's challenging and it's a big responsibility to teach this stuff because i'm very cognizant of the fact that if i say something wrong uh if i deceive myself the biggest problem is not that i deceive myself that's that would be okay but it's that i deceive you too right and so one of the safety mechanisms that we need here for this process to work is that you have to figure you have to do the work here you can't just sit back and listen to me passively and just accept it or believe it you have to be open to the possibility that i could be wrong about things you don't know what i'm right about and what i'm wrong about and so you have to be picky you have to think for yourself contemplate this stuff access your own insights cross-reference what i say with what other people say with your own direct experiences do the practices and that's the safety mechanism here that's what keeps you from falling off a cliff so make sure you take responsibility for that i take responsibility for trying to teach you the most accurate things that i know to not lie to you to not deceive you to not financially exploit you i take responsibility for all those things i'm not offloading that i am responsible for that don't get me wrong and if i make mistakes i'm going to try to do corrections and so forth in the future if you stick around many people don't stick around so they never hear the corrections um but i can only do the best that i can do and i am stuck in a finite form to a certain degree and so there's just going to be limitations to my own mind to my own thinking to my own ego my own biases these are all going to distort and corrupt my teachings and i'm very cognizant it's painful to me when i look back at my older teachings how corrupted they are by my own selfishness by my own pettiness by my own human [ __ ] by my own fantasies and like this isn't anything new i've been conscious of this from the very beginning but also it's like what do you expect from me do you expect me to like be perfect and to not have any of those that's also unrealistic right anybody who's going to be teaching you is going to have their own biases and certain traumas and shadow stuff and thing you know weaknesses and and vulnerabilities and things they're embarrassed like they're going to have all these things so it's important that if you're learning from anyone any professor any teacher spiritual or non-spiritual you have to understand that they're all fallible i'm fallible i make mistakes uh we all deceive ourselves we all have biases um we have different ways of communicating and so forth and you have to take responsibility and double check everything for yourself and run it through your own filters and see whether it applies to you whether it works for you whether it makes sense for you and that's this process and there's no algorithm for it it requires intelligence and wisdom on your part it requires work and effort on your part this is not like sunday school where you come here every sunday and i just give you a bunch of uh dogma and you just memorize it and then you're spiritual this has been a problem with spiritual teachings since the dawn of civilization and this problem is not going away because spirituality is deeply personal you have to be doing it for yourself so be you know i've told you in the past be the ceo of your life well be the cso of your life chief spiritual officer of your own life you have to take responsibility for doing spirituality this is one thing you cannot outsource to others it's okay to learn from others you know i've studied hundreds of spiritual teachers read hundreds of spiritual books gone to all sorts of retreats and workshops and this and that but in the end like one of the things i'm trying to model for you is like i take radical responsibility for my own spiritual work i'm not looking for somebody else to give me the answer i'm mostly struggling through it myself trying to cobble together ideas from other people and figure it all out test different methods and so forth and it's a very messy hairy process it's difficult but i don't know any other way it could possibly work so i hope you're doing that for yourself as well you