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[Music] bias it's time for us now to get serious this is a foundational episode within epistemology and also metaphysics and in fact we'll be bridging epistemology and metaphysics with this topic of bias now you might think leo you've covered this topic plenty in the past why cover it again and it's true i have a very important foundational episode called self bias that you should go watch which is a prerequisite for this one although this one can stand on its own too you can watch them in any order you want but i have covered self bias and now i want to speak about an even more generalized notion of bias which is just bias without a self of course it's going to be very related to self bias that topic we covered but i just want to talk about bias period and its epistemic and metaphysical significance so we're going to be talking about what is bias and why is it so important what is its existential role and this is a rather unique perspective on epistemology and metaphysics that you won't hear covered anywhere else sure you can hear people talking about cognitive biases and this sorts of stuff but to really get to the bottom of how significant bias is towards the very structure of existence and your consciousness this is utterly profound if you grasp the things i'm saying in this episode this will change how you see reality for the rest of your life it's that important so my claim is that the notion of bias the concept of bias lies at the very heart of metaphysics and epistemology in that you actually cannot understand what metaphysics and epistemology are nor can you have an accurate metaphysics or epistemology unless you have a deep consciousness of bias much deeper than any scientist or philosopher has bias explains the very core of reality all human behavior all self-deception all of consciousness and all epistemic error it's not possible to understand existence without a deep understanding of bias and nobody in your education has ever explained this to you no scientist no academic no psychologist no philosopher and probably not even any spiritual teacher which is a little bit baffling how can you do spiritual work without a deep consciousness and a teaching about bias but you know i've read a lot of spiritual books a lot of nonduality and vedanta and this sort of stuff and they don't they don't cover bias very explicitly which has me rather surprised which is why this episode will be so valuable to you because you're probably not going to hear this anywhere else if you don't hear it here so stick with me so of course we have to wonder to get us started to get the ball rolling what is bias well bias is a preference for one thing over another thing it's not complicated that's basically what it is but think about what that really means a preference for one thing over another thing if we assume for a moment that reality is one which it is we've covered that elsewhere i just take it for granted then now you understand why reality must be one so reality is one but it contains many parts many partitions which are what we call parts so what's going on is that as a living organism you have a preference for one of those parts over other parts but now really contemplate this with me why would one part of reality be better than any other part why would one part be more important than any other part have you ever wondered this have you ever contemplated this deeply you should because if you can crack this nut this will unravel the mystery of life and reality for you we tend to take our biases for granted first of all we don't even notice them we're just unaware of them that's the first problem so you gotta raise your awareness uh secondly we're in denial about our biases and thirdly we don't think critically about our biases we don't really question them we just take them as a given as the only way that things can be for example you have a bias towards room temperature 75 or so fahrenheit i don't know what it is in celsius like 15 or 20 something celsius uh you have you have a bias for that temperature as a human and maybe a little bit higher maybe a little bit lower but very close to that range especially when you're not air conditioned and heated and wearing a bunch of clothes and things the tolerance you have for what temperature you prefer out of all the possible temperatures think about all the possible temperatures in the universe what slice of that do you prefer do you enjoy are you biased towards or biased away from see your bias towards a a very tiny sliver of all the possible temperatures that exist and you just take that for granted and you go about your life as though well yeah okay and so what and you just you just mosey about your life as though there was nothing important about that but that's hugely important have you ever wondered why why are you so sensitive to temperature why do you care at all why would one part of reality or one condition of reality be better than any other part is 75 degrees fahrenheit is that like uh because you prefer that and you have a bias towards that does that mean that like that's what's good for everybody in the universe everybody enjoys that temperature kind of silly isn't it to put it like that but of course this is just one example you have hundreds and thousands of these kinds of biases and this is a rather innocent example that we're discussing right now there are a lot more problematic examples that we'll get to soon but very existentially very abstractly speaking what i want you to contemplate for now is why would one part of reality be any better than any other part and deserve preference over any other part better to whom for whom is it better and better by what criteria and who is adjudicating or selecting the criteria by which you are judging which part is better than some other part and why would it matter at all to whom would it matter would it matter if you were not alive would it matter if you were not human for example if you weren't human would it matter what temperature it is let's say you were a rock does it matter to you if it's negative 100 fahrenheit or positive a thousand fahrenheit would it matter to you actually contemplate that don't just believe me think about it pause if you need to and think about it what you should start to see is the relativity of these situations and this now connects with the topic i've covered in the past called understanding relativism part one there's also going to be a part two and probably a part three so stay tuned for those we have a lot more to talk about in terms of relativity but here i want you to start to see the relativity of all biases this is going to turn out to be crucial for the very structure of how consciousness and the universe works for example does a rock care if you place it into water or into outer space or on the moon or in lava what does the rock care see it doesn't care because it doesn't have a sense of self the rock doesn't have a bias but now if we take you you care you care if we place you into lava now you must say leo but the rock should care shouldn't it care if it gets placed into lava because it'll get destroyed but that assumes the rock has a sense of self that it would be afraid to lose or that it would care to lose but does it no you can put a rock into lava it doesn't matter to the rock the rock will dissolve and the rock will cease to exist as a rock and it still won't care that's how selfless a rock is now if you take a stripper with big hot tits and you rub this rock on her tits is the rock gonna care no but why do you care whether you're a guy or a girl why do you care why do you care if your dick is rubbed on some hot tits or if you're a girl why do you care if your boyfriend's or husband's dick is rubbed on some big hot tits that are not yours see you care very much you have a bias towards that or against that why i want you to really question this why should it matter at all i want you to question it so deeply that you realize that it doesn't actually matter but at the same time you still want it or you don't want it you still maintain the bias so even though you can sit there and logically philosophically abstractly question this sort of stuff the reality is at the end of the day once you're done with all your philosophy you're still going to maintain your bias that's how deep your bias runs that it doesn't it's not it's not penetrable to logic it doesn't matter what the logic is logically you can know it makes no difference but you're still going to be hung up on it and it's going to be driving your life it's going to be driving your behavior your thoughts your emotions your goals and dreams so the fundamental question if you want to really understand what's going on in the universe is you want to ask why does why does anything matter at all why does it matter what happens to you and of course what you'll realize of course is that uh survival is why things matter to you see my episode called understanding survival part one part two those are also foundational for this talk as prerequisites but survival is what's going on and so uh what i want you to notice is how your attachment to the persistent of finite things necessitates bias do you understand what i mean by that i mean that if you exist in the universe willy-nilly without any attachment to existing as a specific thing then life is easy and you don't care about anything it's carefree but as soon as you get attached to some finite form that you want to exist as or if you want that form to exist near you or within your vicinity like let's say you you purchase an expensive sports car you want that thing to persist you didn't just purchase that sports car and then you just kind of enjoyed looking at it for a few minutes and then you're okay with it getting destroyed or stolen tomorrow you're not okay with that sports car being driven into lava you're attached to it because you paid for it and you have to work really hard to earn the money to pay for it and also it gives you some kind of pleasure in return every time you look at it in your garage it gives you a little bit of pleasure you're invested in it financially and also more importantly even emotionally and uh even egoically maybe it's even part of your self-image part of who you picture yourself to be as a person who drives this sports car you're a sporty type of person and maybe you even have convinced yourself that by by driving around town in the sports car you're going to get women to notice you and that's how you're going to get laid and that's how you're going to find a wife and that's how you're going to have children and that's how you're going to reproduce and leave your offspring and your legacy in perpetuity this is in a sense your ticket to immortality the sports car at least if you're foolish enough to believe that and plenty of people are but see as soon as you want that finite object to persist you now need to have biases you need to be biased towards car washes and biased against lava and hurricanes and hail and birds and their droppings and teenagers who are going to key your car or steal your car you need to be biased towards good neighborhoods and biased against bad neighborhoods where they will uh you know break in maybe steal your radio or something you need to be biased towards good weather bias against bad weather you need to be biased against potholes you see what i'm explaining is not rocket science it's very simple but this simplicity adds up very quickly and that the trick is that it gets ignored very easily because it is so obvious and because it is so central to our survival so we tend to ignore it and then we run into all sorts of problems which we'll get into here in a moment because fundamentally you see uh what you should care about if you want to understand the ultimate nature of the universe is that you need to have clear perception clear perception of reality but how can you have clear perception of reality when you are attaching yourself to various things for purposes of survival and then that necessarily creates biases and then these biases get get baked into your mind and psyche and then you operate based on these biases and you just take them for granted as a given you stop even questioning these biases and a lot of these biases are not even obvious to you until they're pointed out to you so see you might have a bias against hurricanes but you don't even realize where that bias comes from you just see a hurricane is coming on the news and you're like well [ __ ] hurricane is coming i got to do xyz to prepare myself and do all this sort of stuff and now you got to worry you have fear you have anxiety you have whatever and you just take that as just well that's just how what it means to be human is to be afraid of hurricanes and what you're not realizing that access at an existential level that's not what it means to be human that's what it means to survive as the thing you're identified with your car your house your body even see even your body is something you identify with you might say well leo but the hurricane even if it even i didn't have a house and a car i would still be worried because i i you know i'm human humans just have to worry about hurricanes no that's something you're proactively doing and you've see you've internalized these biases so deeply you take them for granted and then this goes on way beyond hurricanes you see this this is this ripples and cascades through your entire life your moral system your views about what's right and wrong your spiritual attitude or lack thereof your religion your politics and all this sort of stuff it's all infected by these biases you have which are run by survival also see my episode called how survival shapes who you are very closely related to this topic so i won't be rehashing that we're going to go further here so one thing you need to start to do is you need to start to notice how profoundly biased you are and everyone is around you you got to keep contemplating this week by week by week month by month year by year by year you got to grasp it to your bones how utterly biased you are in all these different domains of life whether it's in relationships in business in school in in the church that you go to wherever you go even when it comes to the kind of youtube videos you click on or don't see your biases even determine what you're going to click on or even how you react to these words that are coming out of my mouth so let's point out to you a little bit of how just how ridiculously biased you are and how much you take your biases for granted so here are some examples so here's a question for you have you ever contemplated this why aren't you if you're a man why aren't you interested in your mother's vagina and actually this works well for women as well if you're a woman why aren't you interested in your mother's vagina sounds like a ridiculous question right it's so obvious you're so uninterested in your mother's vagina that you even cringe when i say that and that image pops into your mind you see that's a bias right there already just even your your little kind of gut response to first hearing my words right now a few seconds ago even a little gut instinctive response you've had of cringe or whatever or awkwardness that already reveals how biased you are see if you're a if you're a normal sort of heterosexual guy you uh you spend a lot of time thinking about vagina don't you a lot of time uh but not a lot of time thinking about your mom's vagina why is that why are you so biased don't take that for granted don't just say oh well leo that's disgusting or something like no why why are you disgusted why are you squeamish why are you afraid to go there why don't you want to go there why are you uncomfortable why don't you fantasize about your mother's vagina with the same lust and passion that you do about the other ones and if you're a woman why aren't you as interested in your mother's vagina as you are in that hot guy that you want to date like have you ever thought about that why are you attracted to that guy's dick but not to your mother's vagina after all what's the difference between a vagina and a dick see you even take for granted the physical difference between these things you actually think that the physical difference between a vagina and a dick somehow make one more appealing than the other but that's not what's going on because see in the case of a guy there is not much physical difference between his mother's vagina and the vaginas that he's chasing after so see a guy can't have that excuse of like well but leo that's just because you know uh one is physically different from the other not in the case of your mother and you might say well leo but that she's my mother of course i'm like i'm not gonna have sex with her but why have you thought about that why and what's even more interesting is why are you so instinctive about it why are you so unreflective about it why do you take it so for granted that you can't have sex with your mother where did you get that idea do you think the universe at large has a bias against your mother's vagina like somehow your mother's vagina is just uninteresting to the universe but that other vagina over there that's really interesting and exciting do you think the universe sees it that way interesting huh here's a question for you why don't you dream of [ __ ] a goat you've had a lot of sexual dreams in your life whether you're a man or a woman but have you ever dreamed of [ __ ] a goat why not you say well leo but a goat is not human okay so what who says that you have to have sex with humans where is that written in the universe where did you get that idea see when you actually start to question these things this is what i mean by existential questioning you're you're really questioning you're you're truly questioning you're not taking anything for granted nothing is obvious and also nothing is off limits and in fact those things that you would consider off limits or those things that you would find squeamish or uncomfortable or scary to contemplate you actually prefer to question those things because you have an intuition that the reason that that is taboo or the reason that that is scary or uncomfortable is because there's something hidden there that your mind doesn't want you to see and what you should further notice is that even when you do this sort of existential questioning and you probe honestly and deeply into the truth of the matter the truth of the matter in this case is that your mother's vagina is no more important than any other um that's the truth of the matter and the truth of the matter is that having sex with a with a woman or a man or a goat makes absolutely no no difference in any kind of absolute sense can you see that now you can say something like oh leo but i can't have children with a goat that i can't procreate okay true but who says you have to procreate who says that's important why do you have a bias towards procreation you say well leo because that's what all all animals do so who says that you should do what all animals do who says that's important who says that's significant who says that's good who says that's right where is that written this is the kind of questioning you have to do if you want to be a serious seeker of truth and so what you're going to start to realize is that all of this is relative but even as you realize that logically what you will further notice is that even though you can spend five hours sitting here deconstructing who you're having sex with and who you're not at the end of the day you're gonna go have sex with the thing you're biased towards you're not gonna go have sex with a goat even if you're conscious that there's no reason why you shouldn't there's no good reason this is crucial for you to actually see actually happening don't believe me do it and see how it happens and by do it i don't mean have sex with a goat i mean question this stuff and see that you're still going to be averse to having sex with a goat now maybe maybe some of you won't be i don't know there's some twisted people in the audience but then again you see even when i say something is twisted that's just twisted according to social convention is it actually twisted who's to say what's twisted and what isn't it's very important for you to see how your biases run you despite any logic you have because there's this fantasy going around these days in materialist circles among scientists and academics and philosophers and logicians and so forth public intellectuals the sam harris types there's this there's this sort of air of of rationality wafting through the air as though we're all rational actors and then as soon as we understand something rationally logically we understand the truth of it that then we're going to act in accordance with that and that that is what's running the show but that is obviously not what is running the show because your biases are not logical there's no logical reason why you shouldn't have sex with a goat now you might say leo but it's you know i might get a disease that's a that's a good logical reason that's not a good logical reason because why are you biased against disease and you say well because it's going to cause suffering and death well why are you biased against suffering why are you biased against death you see the problem here is that the human mind is so stubborn and so biased that it it's too biased to even want to question these things what it does is it just draws a sharp line it says beyond this line i will not go so leo maybe i can question you know having sex with goats okay i'll i'll i'll go that far with you but i won't go and maybe even i will go far enough to say that maybe catching a disease maybe that's a bias of mine doesn't really matter okay i'll go that far but when it comes to suffering or to death that's where i draw the line i'm not going to question that suffering is just bad it's self-evidently bad and we're not going to question it any further and death is just self-evidently bad and we're not going to question any further and these are just logical biases to have and yeah i have these biases but so what it's logical you're biased you're stuck on your biases when you reason that way what i want you to actually do is i want you to i wanna i want you to reason so objectively so to speak with so little bias when i say objective what i mean is no bias reason about these things so objectively that you penetrate down to the very bottom of of the the issue and you realize that even suffering and death and disease that these are things that are just arbitrary biases that you have and there's no reason why you should have them or that you should act in accordance with those biases why aren't you interested in having sex with your children if you're a parent see you don't even want your mind to go there because you might even fear that you might even have like a fantasy or two you're too afraid to even go there because the consequences of it are so horrifying to you see you're you're biased you don't want to reason about this logically you're so you might say to yourself well leo but but i want to keep my children safe you know if i was molesting my own children that they would grow up all twisted and and um uh psychologically damaged and by the way leo it's a crime too you know it's a crime molesting children is a crime so that settles it right but do you think that from the universe's point of view molesting children is a crime no a crime is something humans invented and there are plenty of people in the world who do not believe that having sex with children is a crime there are even people in the in the world many of them hundreds of thousands maybe millions of people who believe that having sex with their own children is not a crime in fact for the majority of human history having sex with children was considered perfectly normal most girls and women were married off at the age of 15 13 12 even 10 even younger than that and for centuries and millennia uh noble and royal families would intermarry and interbreed with each other deliberately deliberately in order to maintain the purity of their genetic offspring and they consider that not only not twisted and weird they considered it the highest good for example in ancient egypt the pharaoh would have to marry his own sister or a close relative in order to maintain the purity of the royal bloodline it would be outrageous to try to marry somebody who's not part of the royal family this would be considered a sin and a horrible thing to do and he also probably married her when she was very young too you see so none of this stuff is as obvious as it seems or as obvious as your culture has told you that it is and i want you to notice your emotional reactivity and sensitivity to these topics i picked these taboo topics as examples for a good reason not because i have a personal fetish for this stuff but precisely because they are taboo and precisely because they're going to evoke emotional responses from you and if you can't if you can't bite this bullet if you can't tackle this problem head on then what what chance do we have to talk about truth what truth can there be you might say oh leo but i can investigate truth without these questions no you can't actually you can't this is the delusion of rationalism and materialism and scientism is this idea that you as a scientist sitting in your cubicle can objectively uh study reality investigate reality without actually addressing personal issues within you as though your ego is detached from the world and that you can somehow access truth or find truth in this way you can't you'll never find truth unless you're willing to to to face your deepest biases head on there's a whole host of biases that come with having children why should your children get special treatment why should they go to the best schools than other better schools than other children why should they get more food than other children why should they get dessert and toys when other children are starving why should they go to the best doctors do you see how biased you are when you become a parent now again i'm not judging you be careful i'm not judging you so i don't have children which makes it easier for me not to have those biases but i can empathize with you and i can understand those biases if you are a parent if i was a parent i would also have some of those biases all right so i'm not judging you for your biases i'm just asking you to to think about them critically and objectively if you think about it honestly you'll have to admit to yourself that there's no reason why your children are any more important than any other children and you will see that i want you to get to a point to see look at your child and see that your child is no more important than any other child in the world and one way to help you to do that is to again you can sort of ask the question like from the universe's point of view from god's point of view does god care about your child more than he cares about your neighbor's child or a child in africa obviously not right obviously not why should god care about more about your child you might say well leo because my child is so beautiful and special but if you look a little bit deeper you'll realize that every parent thinks that his or her child is is beautiful and special and and more important and somehow deserves some special treatment but from the universe's point of view and another way to put this if you don't believe in god and so forth and that word rubs you the wrong way you can just um you can almost look at it from a physics point of view like from the point of view of physics like let's say we take a totally impersonal force what's nice about physics is that it's impersonal so an impersonal force like gravity does does gravity care about your child more than it does about your neighbor's child let's say your child is really really good gets straight a's is really cute looking and uh you know is a great artist and and does all is nice to all the other children like just a straight a student just a perfect child you couldn't ask for a better child and let's say your neighbor's child is like the worst kid you could imagine he uh you know he bullies other kids and he he tortures little animals squirrels and stuff that he catches in the back of the house he tortures those and um he's got some screws loose you know some mental issues and and he he does criminal activity and he smokes drugs and heroin and this sort of stuff um does gravity care does gravity apply more towards the good child than the bad no gravity doesn't care but why do you care you see gravity in this case is unbiased you're very biased why who's more truthful are you more truthful in your attitude towards children or is gravity more truthful in its attitude towards children so i want you to start to intuit that there's a connection between truth and between even-handedness or lack of bias with a lack of bias comes in even-handedness a sort of equality we might say is what we get with bias i mean with without bias and conversely if we have bias then we get inequality now isn't that interesting those are two interesting concepts equality and inequality which do you want in the world do you want a world that's equal or unequal see here's where it gets a little tricky because on the one hand you want to treat your children very unequally you want them to have the best schools the best doctors the best food the best toys the best house to live in the best part of the world to live in that's what you want for them and on the other hand if you're a good progressive type let's say hopefully hopefully you don't have a worldview where you want society to be deeply unequal let's assume you're a little more conscious than that so if you're sort of a progressive type then you want equality in the world you want equality in our school system right like you don't want your teacher your kid's teacher to treat your kid worse than all the other kids that would be unfair that would be unequal you don't want the principal of the school to be for example racist against your child you don't want other children in your school to bully your child because he's too short or too tall or too fat or got too many pimples or whatever or got red hair or wears glasses you don't want him to be treated unfairly and equally by by anybody see do you see what's going on here already look at how your attachment to this child has completely distorted your perception of reality and how corrupted it's made your mind because literally you look at your child on the one hand you want to everything unequal that's positive for your child and then all the negative stuff you want to protect your child from and then any kind of inequality that would happen to your child you would at the same time be very opposed to that if it was against your child's interest and your therefore your own interests you see that and in your mind you can invent stories and rationalizations to square all of this so that it makes sense in your mind but no matter how many rationalizations and denials and stories you make it's never going to solve the fundamental problem that your perception of reality in this situation is untruthful you're conflicted on the one hand you want inequality when it serves you other on the other hand you don't want inequality when it doesn't serve you and you're you're cherry-picking and then you're creating justifications for why you should be cherry-picking and why your cherry-picking is is proper and correct all of that needs to be completely deconstructed and questioned and of course see now you start to get a sense of why truth-seeking is so challenging and so rarely done by people because see when you're sort of like a scientist sitting in a cubicle and you're just constructing a theory of everything in your mind or you're solving some calculus equations or you're running a computer simulation this is so detached from your life and from your emotional system and from your ego it doesn't matter what the results are it doesn't really matter what the result of the computer simulation is you'll accept those results for the most part but i mean even there scientists have attachments to pet theories and in reality they will not accept any result they will only really accept the results that that reflect their their their worldview but anyways let's not get sidetracked into that but see what i'm saying is that when you start to actually look at an issue that touches you something you're really attached to like your children and you try to see that truthfully that's where it gets really difficult so one of the tricks of the mind that causes most people to never be able to find truth is that the mind cordons off truth-seeking into a safe conceptual domain which is detached from any kind of connection to your survival conditions and this is what most academics and scientists do and this is not an accident they do this very deliberately although unconsciously it's actually a systems-wide corruption within all of science and academia is that the way it's all geared is that you can do that stuff while having a firewall against the consequences of your intellectual constructions and investigations so in universities they literally have something called tenure tenure means that no matter what you publish basically or or do in a university once you reach a certain level of experience they give you tenure and as a professor you get tenure and then you can never be fired you can basically write any kind of book you want and they don't have legal grounds to fire you and this is kind of nice because it gives you shelter it gives you a firewall and the justification behind it is that well professors need tenure because then they can explore whatever ideas they want but actually this is a ruse in a certain sense that's true and i'm not really saying you should get rid of tenure but what i want you to notice is that this sort of firewall is created and then the professor can just go off and explore various kinds of ideas and all those ideas are going to be detached for the most part from his survival concerns and then the professor can explore all sorts of interesting philosophy and abstractions and models and science and so forth um and he will never find the truth because you know why he's gonna get so comfortable with his tenure and his salary and all his colleagues and all the awards the university uh gives all the credentials all the status all the accolades and all of this and he's going to become some sort of you know big status guy in his field he's going to have a reputation to defend and once he has all that he's done he's cooked he's never going to find truth because questioning all of that is going to be too uncomfortable it's going to be too threatening just as it is to question the situation with your child because you see if you truly take on this project of questioning your biases with regards to your child you might actually reach a point where it's not going to be philosophy anymore it starts his philosophy but eventually gets to a point where it's like but tomorrow i have to select a school for my child i could select the expense of school i could select the cheaper school which one am i going to select if i don't question my biases i'm going to just select the expense of school because i'm trying to i'm trying to you know maximize and survive with my child if i question all this i might say you know what maybe my child maybe it's not fair that my child gets to go to some uh preppy elitist private school that most children can't afford maybe he's just gonna go to public school and this significantly harms your child's survival because your child's survival all else being equal is going to be much greater putting him in a private elite school than into an ordinary public school because the elite school has much better teachers it's much better funded it's got smaller class sizes it's got better resources better books better computers better prestige better reputations better chances of getting accepted into higher universities and all of this and this will set your child up for life now imagine being so unbiased that you would actually say no to that say no to your own child and put them in a public school and and this will especially present a cognitive dissonance for you if you're a progressive type of person because as a progressive you believe all children should have access to good schools on the other hand when it comes to your child even if you're the the best progressive when it comes to your child you're going to be very tempted to cut a corner here to say yeah all kids should belong to good schools but you know what we live in leo we live in this in this shitty capitalist system i can't change it so i'm going to put my child in the best school that i possibly can because yeah if we had good schools i would put them in there but we don't we don't have good public schools therefore i'm going to put them into a private school this is exactly how your mind is going to rationalize it if you have the money now if you don't have the money it'll be easier for you if you don't have the money for private school it's not even an option then it's easy for you for your ego to say ah well leo but there's no problem i'm i'm a i'm a totally consistent progressive i believe at all children should go to private to public schools i believe private schools are evil but it's very convenient that you believe private schools are evil as long as you can't afford them you see that's the trick that's the bias at work and so yeah you'll put your your child in a public school but that's just because there's no other option but then you'll take credit for that and you'll actually use that to build a sort of progressive ego now if you're a really high integrity person and you're really conscious you might have so much integrity that you might actually do that even if you could afford the elite private school but you see there's little different gradations here so my question to you is this fundamentally what do you care about more if you have a child do you care more about realizing what's true or do you care more about improving the survival chances of your child if you had to choose between those two which would you choose over 90 of people would choose their child over the truth why are you then surprised at all the inequality in the world we have all this inequality we have racism we have sexism we have income inequality we have people bullying each other we have inequality in terms of what school you can go to what part of town you can live in are you cool with that is that the kind of society you want to live in is that a good society is that a healthy society how would you like it if i had a bias against you i have lots of people who watch my videos but let's say i knew you personally and i just developed a bias against you i didn't like you i didn't like your race i didn't like your face i didn't like how tall you were or how fat you were or whether you're a man or a woman or whatever you are i didn't like your sexual orientation and i treated you badly i charged you more for my courses than everybody else i served up more ads on my videos specifically for you because i don't like you how would you like that see you would be outraged and yet when you do this in your life relative to your children or to your career or whatever else you're you're involved in you act out on your biases all the time and you rationalize and excuse it away as that's perfectly fine and then you turn around and you get upset at all the unfair treatment in the world you get upset that women don't have sex with you equally as much as they do with the chads or you get upset that men will cheat on you with more beautiful women you get upset at that you don't like that you see so fundamentally what selfishness is selfishness is trying to get unequal treatment when it serves you and then trying hard as hell to avoid unequal treatment when it doesn't serve you that's what selfishness is and that's what ego is all about that's what your whole life has been about are you upset at the elites who are running the country and running the world are you upset that it's unfair that these giant multi-billion dollar corporations are lobbying the government and corrupting the government with their donations and lobbyists and and political action committees and so forth and they are buying the politicians are you upset at that why after all your whole life revolves around inequality in favor of yourself but that's what those elites and corporations are doing they're just following exactly the same principle that you've been following their bias towards their own corporations and interests they want subsidies and tax breaks for their company they want laws that favor their company so for them inequality when it serves them is great it's your own logic reflected back you but you see the whole um the whole trick of the ego is that it sort of uses a two-way mirror it lets the it lets the inequality sort of shine through in one direction but then when it tries to come back in the other direction it reflects it off so when you're being unequal and it serves you you're happy you're happy as hell but as soon as someone else is being unequal to you in exactly the same manner under the same conditions and principles just tit for that now all of a sudden you're outraged is so unfair life is so unfair but you don't care when life is unfair in your favor notice that it takes a lot of self-honesty and integrity and commitment to truth to notice that by the way see my episode what is integrity part one and there will be a part two in the future too about that so ask yourself this question why should your company get to get subsidies or tax breaks more than any other company question why is order better than disorder or chaos why is peace better than violence and war why do you like food x but hate food why does the universe have the same preference for the food that you like or hate why is one style of clothing better than another style of clothing why do you like butterflies but you hate spiders and snakes why is being rich better than being poor why is being free better than being a slave you might say that leo these things are so obvious but they're not obvious i want you to question these so deeply that you realize that it's actually not better to be rich than it is to be poor and it's not better to be free than it is to be a slave these are biases you have these are distortions in your worldview and your perception and your cognitive processes processes as a result of survival and in fact you are so attached to survival that you can no longer even honestly admit to yourself that these are distortions you have internalized the distortions so deeply that you actually think that these are somehow absolutely true there are millions of people in the world who actually honestly believe that freedom is better than slavery in some objective sense and they call that objectivity it's a complete perversion of what objectivity is objectivity says that there's no difference between freedom and slavery it's subjectivity and bias that says that there is the only reason you don't like the idea of being a slave is because it wouldn't feel good but who said that your feelings should dictate what's true or what's important or what should or shouldn't happen in the universe is the universe supposed to honor your feelings is that what you want your personal feelings to run the universe think about that for a moment what that would mean if your personal feelings ran the universe you feel this way today you feel that way tomorrow your feelings are up and down you're depressed you're miserable you're hateful you're bitter you're fearful is this what you want running the universe think about how deeply selfish and biased you are and you want that to run the universe are you [ __ ] insane and you get upset at god for not catering to all of your stupid petty little whims and biases and fetishes and fears and aversions and you curse god for constructing this horrible universe why because it doesn't cater to your every whim and comfort need you're literally crazy with what you're doing you have the entire thing backwards furthermore question why is science better than fundamentalist religion you think god cares more about science than fundamentalist religion why is rationality better than irrationality you think god is bothered by irrationality you think gravity doesn't work on irrational people it only works on the rational ones why is pleasure better than pain and suffering why don't you want to get tortured why is life better than death and here's a really twisted one for you to contemplate why is truth better than falsehood the way i've been describing all this up to now it might almost feel as though you're saying well okay leo so so leo your bias is truth that's your bias so you're contradicting yourself leo because you're telling here you are chiding us about our petty little human biases but then truth itself becomes your bias so we can now judge you for that who says that truth is better than falsehood but i've preempted you because i already told you to question that who says truth is better than falsehood why not live a totally false and deluded life why not be completely self-deceived who's to say that that's any worse than the pursuit of truth question that too question everything make no exceptions don't make exceptions for the things i say so contemplate all these examples and more this is just tip of the iceberg you're way more selfish than just these examples there's just a little a little smattering of the stuff you're selfish about and now ask yourself what effect do you think all of these biases have on your life on your sense making capacity on your epistemology on your ability to understand the world on your ability to be happy on your perception of reality on your worldview on your truth-seeking pursuit if you fancy yourself a truth seeker of any sort on your ability to love on your mental health and on your emotions and on your relationships to other people organizations and society at large and then to yourself too your relationship to yourself how do you think you relate to yourself if you are so biased you can't see the world properly do you think then you can see yourself properly and do you think maybe that has some effect on your ability to be happy to love yourself to be confident to have self-esteem to be able to attract the women you want or the men you want to keep them to make them commit to you to love them to even love your own children you see what's really twisted with a child example is that you might say well leo i just you know leo i'm just acting out of love see yeah you're gonna get really tricky with me you [ __ ] i'm leo i'm acting out of love for my children and therefore out of love for my children i'm gonna i'm sacrificing the truth and all that stuff i'm sacrificing it for love love is more important than truth that's why i'm sending my children to this elite private school and to hell with equality and all this stuff i want love for my children but you see again there's going to be a boomerang here it takes a while for it to boomerang but it'll come back and hit you in the back of the head so here's how it's going to work you're going to you're going to tell yourself that you're doing this out of love for your children but as you're doing so you're going to create distortions in your perception of reality and then those distortions remember here's how the karma gets you you're going to be using those lenses that you used to manipulate reality for the benefit of your children you're going to use those lenses to see your children for the rest of your life and you might say leo will so what well so what is that every time you look at your children you're going to see flaws in their behavior and in who they are and in their appearance you're not going to like this about them you're not going to like that about them why because according to you you know you want the best for them you know they shouldn't be smoking they should be having sex they shouldn't be doing this and this and that and then you're going to be controlling them and micromanaging them and you're gonna call that love and then your children will learn that crippled twisted form of what you call love from you and then they will become actors in your little game to please you for the love that you're trying to give them and then they're going to learn that twisted form of love and then they're going to transfer that twisted form of love onto their children and their children and their children and their and their children what you need to see is that when you can't see reality honestly without bias this corrupts your entire sense making and perception system which of course affects everything else you do in life all of your future interactions with your children will be corrupted by that whether you realize it or not and not just your children with all humans and with society at large and with even with your own self see when you become this judgmental with your children when you become so biased you're cherry picking everything to optimize everything that's why you're doing this survival always backfires because then you're going to look at yourself in the mirror and you're also going to start to optimize yourself too you can say i don't like this i don't like that i don't like this note i don't like the teeth i don't i don't like how i am and then you're going to hate yourself and you're going to be depressed and you're going to wonder why am i so depressed you're depressed fundamentally because you have a corrupted way of seeing the world and these corruptions are your very biases you see the world untruthfully and from that you are actually disconnected from truth you're disconnected from love you're disconnected from god and then you suffer and see when you suffer in this situation you have a bias against suffering so ultimately what's going to kill you the ultimate boomerang is your bias against suffering because in the end of the at the end of the day after all of your manipulations all of your selfishness all your biases all of your distortions and self-deceptions at the end of the day all that's going to lead to suffering and guess what you're not unbiased when it comes to suffering see if you were doing what i was telling you maybe you could have developed the capacity to be totally unbiased and then if you suffered it wouldn't be so bad but now you get a double dose of suffering because now you're suffering and then you're suffering that you're suffering and you hate the suffering and that just doubles your suffering and you want to break free of the suffering but you can't because you can't see the world clearly and then you're just suffering more and more and more and you become this toxic victim and you hate yourself and you hate your life and now you're depressed and suicidal and all that and you're stuck in it so deeply because you actually believe that there's something wrong or bad about your suffering when in fact there's no reason why suffering is any worse than not suffering if you look at it objectively look at it from a sort of scientific point of view where in science does it say that suffering is bad and pleasure is good nowhere nowhere in science as it says so does it say so and that is in fact true can you see how arbitrary all these biases are from an existential universal absolute point of view so now we get to the fundamental intuition behind this episode this is the fundamental intuition that you're missing if you are trying to make sense of all of reality the ultimate nature of reality if you're trying to come up with a grand unified theory of everything this is what you're missing listen close here's the fundamental intuition why would ultimate reality have any biases at all can you intuit that ultimate reality should be perfectly symmetrical perfectly unbiased think of bias as an asymmetry within consciousness if consciousness was purely symmetrical the highest form of consciousness is so purely symmetrical and even-handed and even-minded that it has no biases or preferences whatsoever for any part of itself it's a complete unity but then it develops biases and finite forms in its pure state in its highest form when consciousness is just a pure formless singularity completely undifferentiated that's the godhead when that is the state of consciousness it's complete it's undifferentiated and there is no difference between one thing another thing it can't like one part of itself more than any other part because they're indistinct literally there are no physical objects yet physical objects didn't come into existence for a physical object to come into existence within consciousness what has to happen is that it has to develop a form which is already a sort of bias at the physical material level so at the metaphysical level which is the deepest level consciousness is completely unified this is like what consciousness was before the big bang we might say or what the universe was like before the big bang then for the big bang to happen the big bang event we might say at the physical level what it is it is a development of bias it's a bias towards form away from formlessness so forms get created those forms fractionate and break apart and subdivide infinitely to create all of the plethora of forms that you see around you today star dust and planets and suns and moons and uh trees and rocks and rivers and asteroids and humans and everything else and as the forms are are are subdividing the forms take on biases especially as the forms get attached to surviving and maintaining their form because initially in the universe no form cared about maintaining his form and so all the forms were just flying around then you had rocks and rivers and stuff and they also didn't care about maintaining their forms and they didn't survive very long and then you had living organisms arise and now you have forms which care about maintaining their forms and as soon as they had to care about maintaining their forms that was the bias bam right there you got bias but also there was bias before that at the physical level so that's bias at the sort of psychological level within the animal mind but there's bias first at the physical level which is literally for formless consciousness to even to create a single atom or a single particle that's a bias conscious has to undertake it has to be biased towards existing as a particle rather than something else a non-particle as a circle or a sphere rather than a cube for example as a proton rather than as an electron as a quark you know up quark rather than a down quark as a muon rather than a gluon or whatever or a photon and so it's creating these biases already at the physical level and then these biases after billions of years will percolate into the the animal mind and then they will become psychological biases too and even a plant already has biases you know you put your plant near the window where the sun is shining and you have two windows one where the sun shines one where it doesn't the plant will actually turn itself towards the sun how is it doing that has biases towards light and towards warmth or whatever you know has biases towards oxygen and other things and biases away from certain chemicals and certain animals and other stuff even in a plant that exists already so first i want you to see that every finite object in the world is a bias within consciousness even a physical thing like a chair a chair is a bias within consciousness if it wasn't biased it couldn't exist as a chair it would be infinite it wouldn't be finite and then of course i want you to notice that all human minds and animal minds are biased whether it's plants or or ants or your cat or your dog or your child or you or your spouse and also all institutions you know we can go and order above that to a collective level all institutions all groups all political parties all corporations all clubs guilds military units nations tribes sports teams they're all biased can you see that every sports team wants to win the championship for itself not for somebody else do you think god cares which sports team wins sometimes it's funny to see sports team players in the nfl or something you know they do an interview before the the game or after the game and they're thanking god for the victory or they're praying to god for the victory or you know the people and you know like the terrorists in the middle east are praying to allah for victory over the infidels and then american soldiers are praying to god for victory against the terrorists what do you think god is doing about all this god is sitting up there and god is hearing all these prayers what do you think happens oh can you see how all these prayers cancel each other out into a perfect cemetery if every sports team prays to god to help them to win the championship and god helps everybody equally then it's as though god didn't help anybody at all so now i want to show i want you to try to imagine what would a totally unbiased mind look like see your mind is biased we've established that i hope i hope you're honest enough to admit that to yourself but what would try to imagine a mind that is completely unbiased try to imagine what it would be like for you to drop all of these biases we've been talking about for your children and for the temperature and for your sports team to win and all this sort of stuff drop all of it for your favorite food drop all your biases how do you think you'd feel part of the problem here is that you're not even conscious of all of your biases yet so when i tell you to drop them it's hard for you to even imagine it because you don't even know what your biases are other than the ones i've hear made explicit but you have way more than that i can't tell you all your biases that's some work you got to do yourself because selfishness is blindness to one's own biases that's what selfishness is if you were conscious of all of your biases and the consequences of them on your life you would drop them the reason you don't drop them is a you're not conscious of them at all and you're busy defending and justifying them so thoroughly that you're completely blind to them and and two you're not conscious of all the consequences and you're not you don't have enough consciousness to see how it's going to boomerang on you if you cleared that up by raising your conscious you would drop many of your biases to a point there are limits we'll discuss those in a minute so the absolute truth is that all biases are existentially arbitrary and meaningless they don't have any reality no objective reality to them all biases are subjective all value and meaning is relative and imaginary and as a result god does not have any biases so one definition of what is god people sometimes wonder there are many ways to define what god is very profound ways but here's one that we're going to focus on in this episode i've given you many definitions elsewhere but this one is specific to this episode um well actually i have talked about a bit elsewhere too but anyways um god is a mind that has absolutely no biases that's profound think about that and try to draw some connections with you what this means for you what i what i mean if god is a mind that has no biases and your mind right now your human mind has a bunch of biases then the only difference between your mind and god's mind is literally your biases so if you drop all of your biases guess what you become god this is i'm describing uh the gateway to god to you here but leo where is this magical god you talk about this is so new-agey and so woo-woo and all this sort of [ __ ] i i want to see this god prove to me that this god is real but if god is nothing other than a mind which has absolutely no biases and yet your mind is so full of [ __ ] biases how can god be proven to you even your demand for a materialistic proof or a rationalistic proof can you see how that itself is a bias that's the mind [ __ ] here be intelligent i'm telling you something very profound you can access the mind of god but only if you drop all your biases especially all the ones you don't want to drop especially rationality especially science and now you say bullio if i drop my science and my rationality then i don't what's that what's the point even then there's not even a point to live anymore then it's just all nonsense and self-deception no it's not how you imagine it to be that's your mind and your bias he's fear-mongering to you you see every bias you have you have has a very good self-justification mechanism the bias doesn't just live by itself the bias is almost like an organism that lives inside your mind like a parasite it feeds off of you and it defends itself and one of the ways that the parasite of rationality and science defends themselves is that they say that if you let go of me then horrible things will happen to you you will fall into self-deception and delusion and religious fanaticism and whatever else every bias behaves this way if it's a nice juicy deep bias because if it didn't you would have gotten rid of it a long time ago these biases sap and drain your energy they'll certainly fear monger you as in this case so anyways god is a mind that has no biases and that is just equivalent to saying guess what guess what i'm going to say god is love that's right god is love now you can appreciate a little bit what god is love means god is love is not some hippie wishful thinking saying god is love means a mind with no biases guess what love is guess what absolute love is the realization that there is no difference between anything that's a technical definition of love love is not a human emotion or feeling like they taught you at school or in biology class love is the metaphysical realization that every difference in reality including all the physical differences between all physical objects is imaginary so when you realize when you become conscious enough and your mind becomes pure enough to realize that the difference between a kangaroo and a terrorist is imaginary when you realize that's an imaginary difference then you can love the kangaroo and the terrorist identically because they are literally physically fused and undifferentiated within your consciousness at a physical level i'm describing the most physical level really it's more proper to call it a metaphysical it's it's such a deep physical level it's it's metaphysical it transcends or is prior to physics and then if you can if you can get that at the physical level then it's even easier to get it at the psychological level because at a psychological level you have let's say uh your favorite food maybe sushi and then your least favorite food maybe a dog turd and when you realize that the difference between sushi eating sushi and a dog turd is purely relative and arbitrary it's just a subjective bias you have then you literally don't care which one you eat and then you can love them both equally and as long as you are fooling yourself to believe that the sushi is better than a dog turd you will forever love the sushi more than a dog turd and your love will be less than infinite less than total do you realize what infinite love requires infinite love requires that you love everything equally you can't love one thing more than another because look let's say let's say the universe here's how i'm gonna explain this let's say the universe is filled with a million objects different kinds some of them you love some of them you hate now the question is what percentage of them do you love and what percentage of them do you hate if you're if you're a very picky person let's say you're the most pickiest person in the world here you're very difficult to please let's say actually let's simplify this example let's say we have a hundred different foods at a buffet this is a better example all right a hundred different foods at a buffet you have filet mignon and you have lobster and you have uh you know soups and salads and uh hors d'oeuvres and olives and salami and cheeses and all you have all these different dishes pastas and rices and all this all right vegas buffet the caesars buffet if you want the best buffet in vegas go to caesars all right so you'll get something like that it's really good anyways um how do we determine how loving you are well how many of those foods do you love if you're a very picky eater and you know maybe you are one i used to be a very picky eater i still am somewhat picky but not as picky as i used to be i was sort of raised in a family where my brother was very picky eater was a very picky eater and then he sort of influenced me in terms of that anyways that rubbed off on me from my older brother but anyways if you're a picky eater then you go to this buffet and most of stuff you don't like you hate it you only love one percent of the stuff so that actually literally is your love that's that's the level of love you have one percent so how do you become more loving well you open yourself up to loving other stuff you become less picky less biased huh biased less biased if you're too biased you're only going to love one dish and not the other ones so your love will be limited literally your love is crippled because there's all these dishes to explore house you can kind of think of it like how sad that a person is so picky and so biased and so close-minded that he can only love lobster and nothing else isn't that a limited way to live life imagine if you only ate lobster for your entire life and nothing else that would be kind of sad even though lobster might be great you don't want to eat it every single [ __ ] day you want to explore different all the the the the cornucopia the full cornucopia of taste buds and uh and pleasures that you can experience right so so you open your mind some more you drop some of your biases and you learn to love other dishes and you actually literally can do this you can you can open your mind in the world of cuisine to love dishes you didn't previously love and learn to enjoy them and then when you do your experience blossoms and becomes richer for doing that huh maybe you've experienced that hopefully you have so um and if you haven't you actually you can actually practice this go to a sushi buffet restaurant or something and start to order sushi you've never had before and actually try it and then learn to appreciate it or whatever restaurant doesn't have to be sushi um sushi's just convenient because it's little bite-sized pieces you can order you know a la cart rather than order entire dishes that fill you up so maybe you've tried that go to a sushi by the way in vegas we have some great sushi buffets check them out if you're in town so um but now imagine what would be the maximum love in this example maximum love would be to surrender all of your biases and to open yourself up to every single experience at this buffet all 100 dishes if you could do that you would be at a hundred percent love that's maximum love we would call that infinite love in this example of course it's still finite in this example but you know analogously we'll extend this to become infinite love in a minute so there you go that's infinite love now um what is stopping you from accessing infinite love your biases and what is stopping you from surrendering your biases your closed-mindedness and your fear and your unwillingness to experience certain experiences maybe you're biased against sushi because you think it's all you it's raw fish see your mind is closed have you even ever tried raw fish it's like well no because it's disgusting it's raw fish i don't want to eat anything raw but you eat raw tomatoes and you eat raw lettuce and you eat other things raw so why not raw fish it says my culture tells me it's wrong or something see that's a bias that's a that's a closed mindedness that one has if you let that go then you're more open to trying the raw fish but still you try it and it kind of tastes kind of weird to you it's it's unfamiliar to you you don't like the experience of it you haven't yet learned to adjust your palate and your sense of taste it's too unsophisticated you haven't learned to enjoy it yet so you might try a piece and you might not like it so actually you have to train yourself to like it you do that enough times then you actually start to love it and then you say oh my god i was so stupid and close-minded for not liking the sushi i spent my whole life dismissing sushi and now i love sushi it's my favorite food okay great so you've got sushi down what about pig intestines are you open to pig intestines like oh no that's gross i hate pig intestines that's some nasty stuff i'd rather eat filet mignon but have you tried the pig intestine no it's just yeah i don't like it but try it maybe you'll like it now this is i'm mixing metaphors now this is reminding me of the dr seuss green eggs and ham but that's exactly how it is green eggs and ham here so see you're resisting the whole process you're resisting the process of love and a lot of times you resist it out of fear it's like you fear eating the green eggs and ham you fear eating the pig intestines do you want to try to try some some [Music] some some crickets maybe you'll enjoy those you want to try some eyeballs maybe you'll enjoy enjoy those it's like no oh that's gross and you fear what that cricket is going to taste like in your mouth where those eyeballs can be all squishy and nasty in your mouth and it looks gross but what if it tastes good how do you know you haven't tried it see you're you're stubborn you're closed minded you have your biases you have your prejudices and this prevents you from exploring the entire buffet and and and so there's a lot notice that there's fear there there's fear that well but if i eat this i'm gonna i'm gonna throw up or if i eat this i'm gonna hate it i'm gonna spit it out or if i eat this then uh maybe i'll like it and then that means i was wrong in the past and i don't want that you see you have so many excuses and so um but if you're if you intuit that you should push yourself through this process you push yourself you expand yourself you love more and more and more you surrender all your biases and eventually you reach maximum love you love the entire buffet you have no more biases and now you look at and you say my god what an ordeal all this resistance and finally i've reached heaven i've reached paradise now i can eat anything and i love it all now i don't have to worry when i go to a buffet i don't have to worry that oh they're not going to have my my one only favorite dish it doesn't [ __ ] matter i love them all can you see how powerful that is contemplated god is not biased towards any experience or part of itself because it is an infinite mind as an infinite mind it must embrace and accept all of the things it can imagine since it is itself god can have no biases and the reason that is is because literally the physical differences or distinctions that separate all objects are imagined by god therefore they have no real existence or objective reality that means that literally in the mind of god the difference between a kangaroo and a sushi and a piece of turd doesn't matter it doesn't exist these differences only appear to exist within the human mind therefore god can embrace all of its forms all forms are embraced within the mind of god and arise from the one mind of god after all why would god have any biases if everything is one if all difference is imaginary how can any one part of reality be better or more important than any other part here's an analogy to help you to understand this because see there's a there's a isomorphism between god's infinite mind and your mind because actually they're they're literally identical but anyways you think they're different so we're taking it from your point of view from your point of view still there's there's isomorphism a similarity an analogy we're going to draw here right so your mind can think thoughts and it can think any kind of thoughts think some thoughts right now notice that your mind is seeing thoughts whatever they are you can think of a of a cow of a kangaroo of a sushi of a turd of an apple of a tree of a house it doesn't matter these are all thoughts now notice when your mind is thinking thoughts the actual mind space within which thoughts arise your mind space we might call this pure mind free of any thoughts or forms that empty mind space does it care which thought you think like you can think of a kangaroo right now close your eyes think of a kangaroo notice that it freely enters into your mind into the mind space now now clear that image and now think of a of a dog turd that in image that form has entered into your mind space and notice that it entered as freely as the kangaroo now maybe you have a little bit of squeamishness you don't like thinking of a dog turd you might even have a little bit of revulsion towards it well that's some resistance notice that that's some bias you might have but if you're truly open-minded then literally your mind can think any kind of thoughts like your mind doesn't care whether you're thinking the number one two three four five it doesn't care all of these thoughts are are equivalent within from the perspective of sort of the empty mind space and so now you can just extrapolate and notice that since no thought is better than any other thought literally within your own mind all of these mental forms or images are arising they're arising from an emptiness and as they arise they separate themselves from each other that's what it means to arise from emptiness like literally from emptiness uh a kangaroo the form of a kangaroo is is differentiating itself and holding itself as a mental image and then dog turd and then a piece of sushi or an apple or whatever that's what's happening when you're thinking thoughts if you introspect that's what you'll discover and if you're truly open-minded you can love all those thoughts equally there's no reason that one thought is better than another thought now you could say well but leo some thoughts are kind of gross and i don't like them like i don't like the thought of uh having sex with my mother whereas i love the thought of having sex with some person that i find attractive again those are your biases if you remove those biases and you're just very neutral about it stop playing games stop being emotional and just be neutral and you'll notice that you can think any kind of thought without getting attached to it or without any you know prejudice for or against it and you can enjoy that you can you can literally enjoy sitting there thinking different kinds of thoughts it's just interesting like i can think of a kangaroo right now that's kind of cool i can think of a of a dog turd and i can even appreciate you know the thought of a dog turd uh i mean it doesn't it's not like i like it or anything but it's like i don't have to hate it either it's just kind of interesting that i can do that you know it might be useful to be able to think of a dog turned once in a while you know if i gotta clean up some [ __ ] it's useful to remember that so you know i'm not talking about the utility of these thoughts some thoughts have more utility to you than others but again notice that that's only because you have certain biases which determine what the utility of a thing is but if if you have no utility for anything and after all does god have a utility for things does god need a [ __ ] hammer to hammer in a nail you see in the mind of god anything that arises in the mind of god has no utility in the same way that thoughts in your mind they really have no utility you could use them but um you don't have to and so anyways the analogy we're drawing here is that just like your mind is free to have all these different thoughts likewise god's mind is free to imagine literally any physical form that it wants and it doesn't love one form like god doesn't love a kangaroo more than it loves a dog turd lying on the street so in a sense we're we're realizing what mind is mind is an infinite field that's completely open and unbiased which is open to creative imagination that's what mind is it's open to any figment of itself any part of itself and since it's infinite it has all the possible parts in other words what mind is is mind is self love you get it love is not an emotion love is the actual substance of your mind before it has been corrupted with attachments and biases now notice as soon as your mind wants some imaginary thing to persist it has to acquire a bias for example if you want your dog to live a long life you got to be attached to that dog and have a bias towards feeding your dog saving your dog from a fire and other things like that if you want your child to live same situation if you want your body to be healthy and to survive and to persist you also have to develop biases for your body you gotta feed the right things avoid eating the wrong things and so on avoid jumping into a fire avoid jumping into a pit of lava if you want your pleasure to persist let's say you're having an orgasm or whatever and you want that to just continue over and over and over again you have to be biased towards doing the activities that will produce that pleasure again and again and again and in this way you become biased you become biased towards pleasure and biased away from from pain and from suffering so now you can see the connection between bias and attachment anything you become attached to as a form will then create a bias in you and then even if you get detached from that form that bias can still remain for example you could get attached to your dog that develops a bias for caring for your dog then your dog will die in 10 years you'll be sad but you'll get over it you'll lose your attachment for that dog you'll let go of the dog but you will still maintain your bias for taking care of dogs instinctively and then even your neighbor's dog you will take care of it and then if you get a new dog or if your kids get a dog you'll take care of that the bias can remain now you've heard it say i'm sure you have that spirituality is about letting go of attachments but do you understand why that is most people don't understand but now that you've heard what i've been talking about now you're in a position to understand see because every attachment you have is a bias and bias prevents you from realizing the truth that everything is equally good literally the more attachments you have the more limited your perception of reality is the more biases you have the more uh the more limited your capacity for love is and the more you suffer as a result because you are separated from your highest potential see your mind's highest potential is not just to love a few dishes at the buffet your mind's highest potential is to love all the dishes at the buffet likewise your mind's highest potential your we might say your soul's or your spirit's highest potential is to love everything in the [ __ ] universe not just the few things that you've selected up to this point and so the more attachments you have when you're attached to your house to your car to your children to your dog to getting sex to avoiding pain to this to that to money to blah blah blah you are investing your love into those things in a limited capacity which is preventing you from expanding your love into the full infinite capacity because to have infinite love the love needs to be completely equal and unbiased do you see why that is you can't love one thing more than another thing otherwise your love is not going to be infinite infinity has to be perfectly symmetrical that's the key intuition here symmetry i'm talking about a sort of a absolute symmetry to the actual metaphysics of reality and consciousness why is deeper love linked with a lack of bias because how can you love a thing if it threatens one of your attachments you see if i invest my love into my child or my dog that becomes my attachment you might wonder well leo why can't i just love my child and my dog and still have infinite love well because if you're attached to your dog and your child surviving as a finite form what happens if your child or dog gets run over by a car can you love the driver of that car no because they killed your child or your dog so anything that threatens your attachment you're gonna hate do you see that do you see the problem with asymmetry in one's love when your love becomes asymmetrical all of a sudden you're playing the sort of pick and choose game now you're forced to cherry pick and you're forced to get defensive about the stuff that you love you're forced to freeze reality into a certain state like when you love something you want to freeze that thing and maintain it like if you love your child you want your child to live forever you don't want to die if you love your dog you want to live forever if you love your business you want to live forever if you love an orgasm you want to last as long as possible and as soon as something interferes with your orgasm lasting as long as possible you get frustrated and angry your child might catch a disease and then you get angry at the disease and you start to believe [ __ ] that disease i hate that disease why does that disease exist it shouldn't exist there's something wrong in the world for that disease existing why did god create that disease that's how you think this twists your perspective you see whereas if you didn't get attached to that child you could look at the situation you could say the child is beautiful the disease is also beautiful the disease has as much right to exist as the child maybe the child will conquer the disease maybe the disease will conquer a child either way it's okay it's all part of the majesty and beauty of the entire universe of what the mind is and i surrender to whatever's going to happen but when you get attached to something you're not surrendered to how it's gonna you're not open you're not open enough to let reality do what it needs to do you literally are trying to contravene god's will by imposing your egoic will your finite will on the will of god you think you know what's best for the universe you think that the universe would be better if your child didn't die from this disease that's the delusion you only think that because you're attached you're not looking at the situation objectively you've actually convinced yourself that there's something wrong with this disease and that your child should be getting special treatment that's your selfishness that's ego that's attachment and when you do that you diminish your capacity to love and what's so tricky about it is that while you're doing that in the midst of doing that because you're just the perception is distorted and your consciousness is not infinite you manage to convince yourself that actually you're doing it out of love so when you are bad-mouthing that disease and demonizing it and when you are being selfish and unequal in favor of your child you've actually convinced yourself that this is love well it is love but it's a finite limited selfish form of love it's not infinite love and so in this way you have literally severed your connection to infinite love and you don't even know it exists because you've got blinders on you've got filters on that are filtering out infinite love to get you your twisted form of partial love you've traded infinity for finite love can't you see that the highest power in the universe is to love everything equally if you love everything equally nothing can be hated and nothing can be bad if you love everything equally then literally everything is perfect absolutely perfect if you love the disease as much as the child if the disease conquers the child you will still be fine you'll be happy you'll still be in love and notice this dilemma exists this existential little a corner that you've painted yourself in as long as you're biased and attached reality will always be less than perfect for you can you notice that always so that's the mind [ __ ] people think that all reality is just this this horrible world is so imperfect why couldn't it be if god is real why didn't he design it perfectly when actually god did design it perfectly but you're so biased that you literally filter out the perfection because your definition of perfection is a finite selfish form of perfection your definition of perfection is having lobster every single day for the rest of your life but that's not true perfection that's your bias true perfection is having all the food that could ever be invented all the time that's true perfection loving it all equally that's true perfection but you're too squeamish for that there are certain experiences that you don't want to experience for example from god's point of view torture is a part of perfection from your point of view you hate torture you're biased against torture and so therefore you consider as evidence of imperfection if torture occurs that's because you don't want to experience torture you're afraid of it you don't like it now what i'm saying here is extremely radical i'm talking about opening your consciousness up to literally every single possible experience that could occur including all the most horrific ones you could imagine all the worst stuff in your worst nightmares i'm saying that god is open to that the question is are you open to that the extent to which you're not open to that is the extent to which you are not god so some people say oh leo but you know we humans we're not god we're just a part of god yeah you're just a part of god as long as you're maintaining those fears and attachments and biases that's correct if you want to literally become god you have to surrender all of your selfishness because god is perfectly selfless so that is the trade-off now we got to tie this in this attachment story tie it in with impermanence the concept of impermanence from buddhism this is a pillar of buddhism is the recognition of impermanence i have an episode about that called what is it called understanding impermanence i believe it's called go check that out tie that in now with what we're talking about here so see one of the features of reality as the buddhists like to teach is impermanence that means reality is fluid and it's nothing is permanent it's always changing in fact the only permanent thing is impermanence itself we might say a bit of a paradox there but anyways so forms is like you're in the middle of a sea of shifting forms all the time so you see the problem is that if you get attached to something if you develop a bias for one thing you're effectively like i said before you're trying to freeze reality which means you're trying to go against impermanence but since everything is impermanent that's a recipe for hell because your happiness is contingent on permanence and nothing in reality is permanent your children's not permanent your dog is not permanent your orgasm is not permanent your life is not permanent your youthful appearance is not permanent you're not going to be pretty forever so a lot of suffering comes from that because you've set yourself in opposition to reality you've set yourself up in an adversarial relationship with the highest truth which is one of which one of the fastest of which is impermanence all form is impermanent so that's why this is so important in buddhism [Music] this is why spiritual teachers and and ascetics have talked about surrendering attachments to the material world and not chasing pleasure or not getting too tied down with your relationships and your family and all this sort of stuff it's called they're called renunciants renunciation you renounce the world what are you renouncing you're renouncing attachment and why are you renouncing attachment for infinite love materialists think that all those aesthetics and renounciants and monks uh they're so stupid you know renouncing all the material pleasures in life like what why are they doing all that they're doing it for some sort of stupid moralistic puritanical reason ideological reason no i mean some who are brainwashed are doing that who are fundamentalists yeah fundamentalist religious people do it for stupid reasons but the true monk the true yogi the true renunciant the true ascetic he is renouncing all of that because he's so intelligent and wise that he sees in renouncing that he's actually making the most counterintuitive and intelligent move to access infinite love so the joke is on you the materialist who's clinging to all these things so you think you're clinging or chasing after orgasms you think that having a hundred orgasms is ever gonna amount to something great but it's not because nothing is gonna match infinite love the bliss you experience the ecstasy you experience when you access infinite love free of all biases and attachments is literally infinite it it it makes the pleasure of an orgasm seem like a like a candle flame next to the radiant sun an orgasm gives you the amount of light generated by a candle flame infinite love that i'm talking about here free of all bias is like launching yourself into the middle of the sun that's how much the pleasure differential is but you're too scared to experience that much pleasure it's literally so much pleasure it'll kill you and you're too attached to the candle flame see you're so you're so empty you're so spiritually bankrupt it's so it's like you're so blind that even to to get a glimpse of a candle flame to you is so amazing that's what you're that's what your orgasm is and you and you you cling to that little candle flame and it's like it's like the one thing that keeps you going it's a little bit of candle flame because that's all the light you know how to get whereas the mystic and the ascetic and the monk and the renunciate in the yogi they go straight for the sun and you don't have the courage to do that so you remain stuck with your candle flame at least for this life here's another explanation of why the impermanence is operative here is that the infinite mind needs to be able to dream without getting attached to its dreams otherwise it can't dream forever and what infinite mind is what god is here's a definition of god is that it's an infinite dreamer an infinite dream how can you have an infinite dream if it's frozen it has to be fluid to dream every possible dream you need to keep dreaming more and more and more forever with no end that means you can't get stuck on any one dream it's sort of like if you have one movie one favorite movie you can keep looping that movie over and over and over and over again forever this would be a very shallow experience of what film is if you want to explore the entire domain of film what you have to do is you have to keep playing new movies every single time don't watch any movie twice in fact this is a rule i've adopted in my life is that i don't watch any movie twice anymore i used to in the past i don't now if i watch a movie it's only a new movie i refuse to watch any movie i already watched why is that for this reason because i want to maximize the diversity of of movies that i watch replace movies with dreams and you got now you understand how god works all attachments are finite and ultimately false because the highest truth is oneness and lack of difference so again i want to underscore here's a technical definition of love love is the realization that all difference is imaginary write this down tattoo it on your forehead probably don't take that last recommendation too seriously but it's that important the realization that all difference is imaginary that is the definition of love now you might say but leo if i had no biases then wouldn't everything be neutral no everything would be love i can't really explain this to you in any logical way um [Music] but it wouldn't be neutral it would be love love is not neutral love is an embrace of everything it's a metaphysical self-embrace now also don't make the mistake of thinking that love necessarily means you're going to be feeling blissful all the time right so love metaphysical love that i'm talking about transcends positive feelings and emotions it can even include negative feelings and emotions too it's an absolute it transcends everything it transcends and includes and incorporates and embraces everything that's what true love is so if your notion of absolute love doesn't include the pain of the the feeling of torture then it's not true love so make sure that you don't just buy this sort of new age hippie version of love which is all positive rainbows and butterflies that's not what i'm explaining to here so i want you to matt to become a master at noticing bias with the hope that you're going to clear up your perception over time and let go and surrender various kinds of biases which will inch you closer to love but you have to be careful not to weaponize this ability because what's going to happen here is that for many of you you're gonna say aha yeah leo told me to to be a keen observer and a master of bias so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go walk around and criticize everybody else's biases and not observe my own no first and foremost start by observing your own biases and then also notice the biases of everybody else too uh you're going to be doing both these in tandem and start noticing existential biases within various kinds of thought systems and worldviews and ideologies such as christianity islam science atheism rationalism libertarianism progressivism conservativism capitalism socialism and so forth in fact now let me help you more practically to do that we've we've gone through the heavy metaphysical theory here now let's get into some applications so this one's going to be focused on science let's focus on the domain of science what i'd like to do is i'd like to articulate every most important bias that science has to illustrate what i'm talking about so i want you to become so good at spotting bias that you can look at a system like science for example and identify all of its biases so what are the biases of science there's quite a few and i could talk about this for an entire episode all on its own there's so much to say here but let's go through it quickly so one of the biases that science has is being rigorous and factual believe it or not that's a that's a bias you might say oh but leo you know being rigorous and factual that's good we want that we want that we don't want to be all fantastical and then loosey-goosey that would be bad that's a bias notice that i'm not interested in your rationalizations for your biases i'm also not interested in your fear-mongering about what'll happen if you surrender a bias i don't care part of this work is facing your fears be courageous here and be very honest and neutral so you might you know people don't question this but like a lot of scientifically-minded people they just think that like you know living life in a factual rigorous way is the best way to live life or how life should be lived but that's not true at all what's to say that you can't live life in a totally imaginative fantastical way where you are not a factual person if you think about it for a moment like really open your mind try to imagine what it would be like to live life in a non-scientific manner in a non-factual manner where you didn't care about the facts you didn't care about being rigorous in fact you you lived your life in such a way where you leaned into and you embraced the fantasy the illusions the hallucinations the uh wishful thinking the woo-woo stuff the the um the magical thinking you actually enjoyed this stuff and you you knew it was magical but you played into it anyways almost like like you're an actor on stage in a shakespearean play you know it's not you're not really hamlet you're just playing hamlet for a little while here while you're alive and so you're going to be playing up you're going to be fantastical and you're going to be buying into all this new agey stuff and it's okay that's not scientific or that it's even real or factual it doesn't matter you just enjoy it and that's how you want to live your life see if you tell this to most sam harris types they are going to uh [ __ ] their pants in horror to them this is their worst nightmare but actually it's just a different mode of living there is no one to say that this mode that i described is any worse than the scientific mode now see a sam harris type here would come in and say oh leo but but but but you know um there is an important difference because you know the factual people we make all the technology and we let them in on the moon whereas the hippie uh magical thinking people the deepak chopra people all they do is just talk about stuff and they don't do anything and and uh and whatever and they they have sex and they smoke weed and they get into into cults and they brainwash each other so so what that's your bias landing a man on the moon having technology that's your nerd [ __ ] bias recognize your [ __ ] nerd you're addicted to it and that you're stuck on that frame of living that is not necessarily the best way to live but here's the real kicker and this is what's really going to sting uh someone like a sam harris type is that the sam harris type is going to run a retreat here he's going to want to do sort of a a very sneaky maneuver he's going to want to try to retreat into truthfulness and say ah leo yeah okay fine maybe you're right you know people can live however they want but in the end you know we value truth and science is just more truthful and this nerd way of living is just a more truthful it's a yeah i have a left brain way of living but that's more truthful than the the more artistic romantic way of living and in fact all that romantic stuff that's all [ __ ] that's falsehood and that this here this science and rationality this is the actual truth this is the objective truth but that's a lie that is not objective truth because by definition consciousness is infinite therefore consciousness includes within itself both the rational and the irrational both the uh left brain nerdy and the right brain artistic and creative and the mystical and the mystical and the new agey and the and the and even the fantastical even even lies and stories even pure fantasies of imagination flights of fancy poetry all of this sort of it's as real it's as much a part of consciousness as is the logical factual stuff and this is what the scientific mind cannot fathom fundamentally they're in denial about this so i'm not saying that santa claus is real in the sense that you can go to the north pole and knock on his door and talk to santa claus what i'm saying that santa claus is a feature of infinite consciousness not as a guy in the north pole as a physical guy santa claus exists as an idea as a as a fantastical archetype as an abstraction as a fantasy as an illusion not in the physical realm and who is to say that the abstract realm is any lower than or less important than or inferior to the physical material realm see that is a bias within the scientific mind but it gets worse than that because you as a scientist might say well who cares fine leo who cares about that i'm just going to do my science and be very factual and i'm going to develop my theory of everything and i'm going to understand all of reality while you guys you know stay there and play around with your elves and [ __ ] the santa claus and all this sort of [ __ ] the flying spaghetti monster i'm gonna while you're doing that i'm gonna do some sort of newton [ __ ] here and figure out everything figure out the truth but here's where it's really gonna sting is that you will never figure out the truth because the truth includes everything and you by definition have cut yourself off from half of reality by your method you have a methodological bias and you're not aware of this bias and you're not aware of how deep this runs and how it disconnects you from reality and furthermore it disconnects you from love see you're not able to love half the world or even more because more than half the world are not nerds like you they're not factual they're not objective people they're not rigorous people they are fantastical people they are artistic people they are sloppy thinking type of people they are religious fundamentalists they are new agers they are types there are mystics and so forth and you can't love those people in the same way that you know like for example richard dawkins cannot love that he cannot love that aspect of infinite mind because he's in opposition to it fighting it because that's his shadow he's demonized it and because of this richard dawkins i'm not just saying that he's going to have a bad life i'm not just going to say he's going to be miserable i'm not just saying that he's going to be depressed i'm not just saying that um what i'm saying is is that he will not understand what reality is he will not understand what consciousness is and he will not access the highest ultimate truth and he will actually corrupt and distort science itself so it ends up boomeranging like i said every bias boomerangs and here's the boomerang now it hits in the back of the head so what happens is that actually science itself is now corrupt because material of science is literally unable to make sense of what consciousness is as a result of this sort of methodological bias it's unable to make sense of ufos unable to make sense of paranormal phenomena unable to make sense of telepathy of mystical experiences healing enlightenment awakening um psychedelics and many many many other things in fact the majority of the universe is not able to make sense of so ironically the the the bias the rationalist scientific skeptical bias that a scientific mind has it has that bias and justifies that bias out of a just with with the justification that it's a love of truth and a love of science and it's a you're protecting science as you would protect your little child in a selfish fear-based attached way that mind is attached to the biases of science the methodological biases of science and therefore it's unable to let that science grow and flower into incorporating more of consciousness and just like with your little child in the previous examples this bias ends up backfiring and undermining the very spirit of science the spirit of science is to understand everything but you can't understand everything when your method is so biased that it excludes the majority of reality from its investigations do you understand how [ __ ] profound what i just said is your jaw should be on the floor when you realize what i just said and i've only touched upon one bias within science another bias within science is a sort of conservativism scientists tend to be very conservative about their predictions about their theories they want to over qualify everything they don't want to speculate they don't like to speculate they don't like to theorize they want to have rigorous proofs for they want to overprove they want to have it over abundance of evidence so that something is so overproven that it's just beyond any kind of possible denial but this creates a methodological bias also because when you're when your filter is set so strict it's almost like setting an email filter in your email you know a spam filter in your email software if if you're if you have no filter at all and it's too loose then you get a bunch of spam and it's a problem so what the scientist does is the scientist is almost someone like who's so paranoid who got so much spam he sets all of these filters and he sets filters even for like you know normally you set a filter for a word like porn or [ __ ] or dick or something like that you set these filters and those emails go straight to your junk box but this scientist has become so paranoid he's so sensitive that now he sets filters for words like experience and sensation and emotion and feelings and uh consciousness and so anytime one of those words appears in an email which very common many good emails contain those words all those go straight to the junk box so the scientist has overcorrected and as a result his method is actually missing a lot of things that are valid and true that should belong within science but that he has just uh thrown into the trash uh other methods i i mean there's so much to say here um i mean sort of sorry other mythological biases there's so much to say here we're not gonna have enough time to cover them all so i have to go through them quickly is the avoidance of marketing poetic language and hype now again what's tricky about these biases is that most scientists actually say to themselves rationalize to themselves why these biases are good therefore they're not even biases but they are biases most scientists do not care about marketing this presents a problem scientists say that well that's good i don't want to care about marketing i don't want to care about poetic language and hype but when you don't care about those things that means that your scientific discoveries do not properly translate into the community at large who are not nerds like you are not going to read your research papers they need marketing the discovery of new scientific truths needs to be marketed it needs to be written in poetic language it needs to be hyped up certain truths for example the majority of mankind even though this has been well known for 100 years since albert einstein discovered it uh still don't fathom the significance of general relativity einstein's general relativity says that literally time and space and distance that these are relative things they don't exist as absolutes they're not objective in the way that humans ordinarily conceive and this has been so poorly marketed and so poorly explained and hyped up the significance of this has been so poorly taught to people that the majority of people on the planet don't understand that our reality actually doesn't have objective distances most people in the world think that you know if someone is six foot tall they think well they're just a six foot tall object no that's not true that's not true even according to science to modern material and science it's not true it's just been very poorly marketed and that's what happens when you have a method that is limited by a bias another bias within science is proving things trying to make things objective or rational i can see the good intentions behind behind trying to prove everything but the problem is is that as i've talked about in my metaphysical and complete metaphysical implications of google's completeness theorem is that truth is a larger concept than proof and that as kurt goodall proved in his incompleteness theorems and then alfred tarski later expanded is that you cannot prove everything that is true so if your method only relies upon proof by definition you will never have all the truth so by definition science cannot be truthful because uh by its methods it only relies upon proof and proof is a second order a smaller subset of the first order phenomena of truth if you want a more detailed explanation of all that go check out that episode about google's incompleteness theorem spelled g-o-d-e-l google another uh bias of science is it's very left brain is very analytical reductionistic and it expects explication i've talked about this in my episode called uh um implicit versus explicit a very powerful episode go check that out very foundational basically what i tell you there is that infinity cannot be explicated because infinity is that which is infinitely implicit it is endlessly explicatable but the scientific mind tries to explicate everything it thinks it can explicate reality completely it thinks it can just write reality down as a formula or as a set of formulas or as a set of propositions and you can't do that because reality is infinite other of these biases are like the analytical function of the scientific approach and the reduction the reductionistic tendency and attitude scientists tend to believe they can reduce everything down to subatomic particles and things like that or to mathematical equations this turns out to be false as i've talked about in my holism episodes go check out the holism stuff see we're really interconnecting everything here the analytical left-brained approach to studying reality is just one way of looking at reality there's also the right-brained approach which is actually more holistic and can actually get you better results in mary in many ways so in many ways modern science is suffering from too much analysis and not enough synthesis because it's biased towards analysis rather than synthesis and when you do that you get a distorted picture of what reality is so all of these biases that i'm pointing out here notice these biases are actually preventing science from having an accurate picture of reality another bias of science is the use of language models and quantification there is the assumption that all of reality can be quantified and if something can't be quantified it isn't even real this is baloney it's laughable also all science is done within language and language itself presents a set of limits upon ways of accessing interfacing with consciousness and with reality so there's language if if languages is a circle like this then all of reality and truth is like outside the scope of the of the camera frame in fact it's infinite so language is just a tiny piece of an infinite larger pie and so you can't actually use language to understand the entire situation uh uh other biases within science are a bias against contradiction paradox and confusion this is actually a point i'm going to go into deeper soon uh i have to publish my second part to the goodle's incompleteness theorem episode which is actually going to be called what is paradox i'm almost done outlining that one so that that's coming um in the weeks and months to come look out for that where i will explain the biases science has up on contradiction paradox and confusion that's going to be important but this this creates problems in short the problem here is that basically science assumes that reality is non-contradictory and that it's not paradoxical it assumes that every paradox is a mistake whereas actually in truth infinity must be paradoxical and must be self-contradictory when it is put into dualistic language or thought or as a model or when it is formalized in any way or explicated and so therefore paradox is actually a feature and not a bug the way that science assumes other biases of scientific method include the avoidance of first-person experience in psychedelics the avoidance of consciousness and intuition the avoidance of mystical methods and the whole idea of demystification so basically scientific method tries to demystify reality because it assumes that reality is non-mystical that turns out to be a false assumption and this leads to corruptions of science and a misunderstanding of reality um other biases include avoiding emotions psychology and philosophy there's a huge aversion to epistemology and metaphysics and philosophy within hardcore sciences and this is much to the detriment of those sciences there's an avoidance of religion god and wisdom within modern science this is also to a huge detriment for those who are trying to for example develop a theory of everything there is bias in terms of the bureaucratic and social and collective nature of scientific work scientific work is institutionalized it's academic it's collective it develops a collective ego it has aspects of social matrix within it go check out my episode called the social matrix which explains some of that so this creates biases the fact that science has to be done as a bureaucratic process with a group of people with whom you're collaborating and building consensus this already is a bias in the method which science is not conscious of other biases include pragmatism utilitarianism and the survival oriented nature of science so science is very much focused on the pragmatic aspects of figuring out how to manipulate reality how to measure reality rather than actually understanding what it is or caring about truth or caring about consciousness or caring about love and this is a misplaced [Music] priority i discussed this in my series called deconstructing the myth of science part one two three i think in part two or three i talk about very much about the problems with pragmatism and the limitations that come with that it it creates a divergence from truth um because truth is not just that which is pragmatic or helps one's survival or utilitarian in general one of the hugest biases of science is that it's what i would call constructivist what i mean by that is that science is trying to construct something is trying to construct a model a theory a system a technology a way of manipulating reality it's trying to construct a a body of knowledge and what has always shocked me since i was maybe 16 years old i started questioning this aspect of science this is what really led me to ultimately deconstructing all of science is that i saw that science was constructivist and i intuited that that's a bias and i saw sort of the opposite of it which was deconstruction and i was a skeptic back then and i was into deconstructing everything being skeptical about everything and so i started to become skeptical about the activity of being constructive and i noticed that you know the books that were being published the uh the research studies that were being published the stuff that was being done in university in academia it was all constructivist in the sense that to get a good grade to um to get your research paper done to get funding for some research project it has to be a constructive project but it never occurred to anybody how about could that be a bias though what if truth doesn't lie in the direction of construction but lies in the direction of deconstruction and most hard scientists don't care about deconstruction they're biased towards construction and in this way they cut themselves off from truth they cut themselves off from deconstructing science because science itself is a giant construction it's a meta construction it's a world view it's an epistemology it's an epistemology that's been constructed over the last five hundred years and really more like two thousand years another bias that science is technology focused it's way overly nerdy and geeky and it's a lot of sciences is about doing research that will help to build better technologies now that's great in a certain practical sense but again just because you can build technology with some sort of research or understanding does not make it true and also does not make it the thing that we should be pouring billions of dollars into nobody pours billions of dollars into paranormal phenomena research normal nobody pours billions of dollars into awakening or psychedelic research yet they pour hundreds of billions into battery technologies and all sorts of other technologies which are more practical which can be monetized and this creates a corruption within science i've also discussed this in in i believe part two of my series deconstructing the myth of science of course the elephant in the room with science as a bias is materialism and realism both of these aspects of science are deeply problematic and i've discussed them elsewhere so i won't go into here here too much here and then the final bias of science um is it's simply too serious most scientists are way too serious you might say well how is that a bias but it is it actually is a bias when you're more playful when you're willing to play with words with concepts um that's a different epistemic attitude it's a different way of understanding reality in a way different way of relating to your own ideas about the world than it is being dead serious and clinical like a [Music] like a lab technician the lab technician to epistemology is only one finite very biased way of interfacing with reality so there you go i mean i could talk about that stuff for hours there's so much there if you're a scientist what i just said to you is gold you will not hear this anywhere in university you'll not hear this from any scientist i'm just i've literally just deconstructed all of science for you your jaw should be on the floor right now if you can intuit the significance of what i just said i breeze through it as though it's nothing i breeze through it like it's just like a laundry list of [ __ ] this what i just told you here you could study this for 10 years when i just told you this list and still get more juice out of it and use it to revolutionize all of your scientific work you could revolutionize all of mankind's science from this simple list if you wanted to but most people they just skip over it see part of the problem here is that i'm presenting you with such gems and diamonds that um a seer and i'm kind of non-serious about it i'm kind of playful with it that most serious people like a serious academic watching this or listening to this will not even take what i just said seriously because they'll just say like well but surely somebody like leo can't possibly know these things surely this can't be real surely this can't be like like this can't really deconstruct all of science could it surely some guy on youtube couldn't just do this willy-nilly like off the cuff while he's also talking about 50 other things surely that can't be real anyways we're moving on we got bigger fish to fry than your stupid scientific dogmas see people will say here oh but leo science is objective and unbiased what are you talking about said who a scientist look at what you're doing you're believing a scientist when he tells you that science is objective and unbiased how stupid are you how gullible are you you're [ __ ] fool of course a scientist is going to tell you that science is objective and unbiased does that make it so no not at all you should be suspicious as [ __ ] of that because you see it's a feature of almost every paradigm and ideology in epistemology that it claims to be objective truthful and unbiased this has been a problem in every field of human sense making and knowledge it's been a problem within philosophy science religion morality politics medicine culture all of these have always been biased and they've always claimed that they're objective and unbiased and furthermore every new generation clings to new biases surrenders the old but clings to the new what you need to recognize is that listen to this this is profound this should blow your mind recognize that the pursuit of science itself is a bias in itself and because of this science cannot ever encapsulate or understand all of reality or truth just by the very fact that you want to do science and you have become a scientist you've already disconnected yourself from absolute truth you will already never understand the entirety of consciousness because the entirety of consciousness includes science but it includes way more than just science science rationality objectivity proof reductionism quantification formalization mathematics these do not circumscribe the entirety of existence this is a tiny subset of infinity it's a tiny it's a speck it's a [ __ ] speck of infinity if you want to understand how tiny of a speck this is imagine how many stars there are in the night sky in the universe there are like a trillion stars in our universe science the entirety of science that will ever be done by man is like a single star what about all the other stars those are not circumscribed by rationality science quantification mathematics proof or any of those other things so as we're getting to the end here sense making requires a completely unbiased mind the more unbiased your mind the bigger picture you can see of reality every bias you have will become a limit of perception imagination and understanding even a innocent seeming bias such as like i want to be objective and factual you think that's not a bias that is a bias and that will prevent you from making sense of all of reality you have to let that go if you think well leo i'm just i'm just trying to be like uh uh you know uh like a like a good lab technician that's a bias or it's like leo but i just want i'm a mathematician i only study mathematics that's a bias that means you won't understand reality not all of it because mathematics is not limited to i mean reality is not limited to mathematics alone every single bias you have will become a limit upon your consciousness making your consciousness less than infinite meaning that you will disconnect yourself from god and this is why scientists have such a difficult time with god because the scientist has chosen the lesser rather than the greater the scientist has chosen to observe ants down on the surface of the earth rather than living in a space station up in the sky looking down on the whole earth choose which one you want if you want to see the totality of the earth you have to zoom out to zoom out you have to remove all your biases in this example and if you're biased towards studying ants all you'll understand is ants if you're biased towards studying kangaroos if all you care about are kangaroos and nothing else then all you'll know are kangaroos if all you care about are numbers all you'll know are numbers if all you care about particle physics all you'll know is particle physics i mean isn't this [ __ ] obvious and yet we have particle physicists and mathematicians and psychologists and whoever else pretending as though they figure out all of reality through their little sub domain it's absurd it's [ __ ] absurd it's pure idiocy all of that is bias recognize that every subfield of science is self-biased see the mathematician thinks that reality is fundamentally mathematical the physicist thinks that physics is most fundamental the biologist thinks that actually biology is fundamental there are books written by biologists who say that physics is not what's most important actually it's biology consciousness is biology of course that's delusional too um now there are computer nerds and computer scientists who think that all of reality is fundamentally a simulation it must all be a computer why is that because all they [ __ ] know are computers when all you have is a computer everything looks like a keyboard perhaps that's a that's a bad way of stating the the old uh mark twain quote that uh when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail the astrophysicist thinks that the big bang is what explains everything is most fundamental the psychologist thinks that psychology and psychological archetypes jungian archetypes and so forth that's what's most fundamental myths are most fundamental which of them is right it's the old situation of the five blind men trying to describe the elephant none of them are right they all have a little piece of the elephant they don't have the whole elephant now you might say here but leo okay but but what about you what about you leo the mystic thinks that consciousness is fundamental so isn't that the same trap aha how is that any different the computer nerd reduces down reality to a computer the physicist to particles the mathematician to numbers the biologist to biology the psychologist of psychology the mystic to consciousness and therefore consciousness isn't the fundamental thing right wrong because the mystic is doing something fundamentally different than all the others the mystic is going meta and mystic is going holistic that means the mystic is incorporating everything mysticism is not another sub domain it is not a siloed subfield of any kind of science the mystic goes after truth and truth is consciousness and love and it incorporates all of the mathematics the physics the biology the computer science the astrophysics psychology all of that is incorporated and included within the larger system of consciousness consciousness imagines all of those things so while it might seem like i am as a mystic reducing all of consciousness down i mean all of reality down to consciousness in sort of in the same way that a materialist will reduce it down to atoms there is a difference the difference is that consciousness is imagining matter atoms and the materialist whereas matter is not causing consciousness that is the difference and you can become directly conscious of that because you are consciousness and because conscious is all there is how convenient right it's perfect so what i want you to really deeply understand here is that whatever finite method you use to study nature that method will be biased because nature is actually infinite your method will always crack under the strain of nature it's as though you're trying to wrangle a an infinitely sized elephant using some lassos and some rope which is made out of grass and it tears and it rips because this infinite sized elephant simply cannot be tamed it cannot be wrangled in any way i want you to further notice that even the questions you ask of nature are themselves biased every question you ask is a bias itself what kinds of questions you ask these are manifestations of your biases if you ask the question is reality mathematical that's the kind of bias you have and you might get a certain biased answer and if you ask the question like um um how does the brain create consciousness see that's a bias when you ask that question you're assuming the brain craves consciousness you're not you're taking it for granted that it could be the opposite it could be conscious that creates the brain but you're so biased you don't recognize that and you don't even care also your curiosity for nature is biased when you love kangaroos but you hate elephants that means you're going to study kangaroos but you can't study elephants properly when you love particles but you hate consciousness you can't study consciousness properly when you hate meditation you can't meditate properly instead if you love thinking you're gonna be lost in monkey mind all the time if you're passionate about numbers all you'll see are numbers so beware of narrow passions in this pursuit of ultimate understanding your passion has to be very wide your your passion literally has to be universal not narrow and you might say well leo but isn't conscious as a narrow passion it might seem that way but if consciousness is all that there is then by definition a passion for consciousness is a passion for the whole universe see now you might say but leo if i'm passionate about particles particles is all that that there is too so if i'm passionate about particles as a physicist doesn't that mean that i'm passionate about the whole universe actually no because particles is not all that there is that's an assumption that's part of your paradigm you got a question you're locked into that paradigm now you say but leo but isn't consciousness also a paradigm saying that consciousness is everything that's also a paradigm that also could be wrong no it can't be wrong because consciousness is every paradigm what imagines all paradigms consciousness consciousness is not a paradigm consciousness is meta paradigmatic it's meta everything it's infinite you can't be conscious see you materialists and rationalists and skeptics you're trying to like weasel your way out of consciousness somehow you're trying to come up with some sort of theory or idea or scheme or some sort you're trying to find some sort of loophole within within reality so you can avoid consciousness facing it directly but you can't because there's only one thing in in the universe and it's consciousness you can't escape consciousness only through delusions and mental gymnastics which is what you love to do your attitude towards psychedelics is a bias you have a lot of people argue with me that oh leo but how can you trust psychedelics psychedelics are are you know uh intoxicated state and then the sober state is the real state this is a bias you have you have a bias towards a sober state you should realize that now people will accuse me of having a bias towards a psychedelic state i actually don't have a bias towards a psychedelic state i spend most of my time in a sober state first of all um the percentage of my time that i spend in a psychedelic state is like less than one percent of my existence uh but also the thing you don't realize that the the difference between a sober and a psychedelic state this is an imaginary difference imagined by consciousness so there actually is no such difference between these states you take that difference for granted i realize that difference is something i'm imagining that's the difference between us so actually i don't have a i don't have a bias towards psychedelic states i have a bias towards truth you might say um and the truth is that there is no difference between a psychedelic and a sober state but anyways that's that's a topic for another time you can watch my episode how how psychedelics work if you want to know more about that another bias is your preference for thinking versus feeling that's a bias you can have another bias you have is a preference for vision for example versus sound if you're a visual person visual thinker that's one way of interfacing with reality sound is a very different way of interfacing with reality now you might say well leo so what all these biases what does it all matter in the end well look here's why it matters if you overlook your biases then don't come crying and acting shocked and horrified when others do the same and then it bites you in the ass because you see when you ignore your own biases you're so selfish you don't see the collateral damage your biases cause to others and so you're fine with it but then when others are biased towards you you hate it and you come crying and you come asking for government to help you and you cry foul and you cry how unfair it is you don't like it when religious fanatics for example or political partisans and ideologues are flagrantly biased when they present biased news information for example or biased narratives about reality you don't like that you could even consider that lying and yet you're okay with your own biases with your biases of science for example you make excuses for those because you think they're good well yeah those religious fanatics think that their biases are good and so all of us think all of our biases are good that's called selfishness and then collectively what that leads to is a dysfunctional shitty hellish social situation which we find ourselves in today and the ultimate reason that bias matters is because when we say bias what we're really talking about is a bias in love bias is the bias of absolute love into something finite so if you ever want to reach the highest love if you ever want to realize that reality is love if you ever want the ultimate toe the ultimate theory of everything then you need to drop all of your biases you need to be deeply concerned with ridding your perception and your world view of all bias and you need to start treating things in an unbiased even-handed manner in the way that god would imagine if you committed yourself over the next 40 years of your life to purifying your perception and your worldview and your mind of as many biases as possible what would happen your perception would become gradually more and more godlike until one day you would literally realize that you're god because your mind would become as pure as spotless as as even as gods now on a practical point you might ask is it even possible to drop all of one's attachments and biases and this is important because the answer is no not if you want to survive you see survival is bias and attachment you can't survive otherwise you need to be at least attached to water air food other things shelter in order to survive and you probably even want to be attached to more than just those things in order to survive well because you don't want to just basically survive you want to thrive a bit too you want to have some abundance too which requires some bias and attachment so i'm not saying something super naive here where you just throw away all your biases i'm not telling you to like stop loving your kids and whatever or stop sending him to good schools i'm saying something actually here um you know before you start removing biases such as those around your kids and your shelter and your career uh you know first there are many there are many smaller less important biases that you can remove like for example you might have some racist biases you can remove those and that will improve your life so don't get too perfectionistic here i'm not asking you to be perfect i'm not expecting you to remove all your biases i'm just looking for improvement i'm looking for you to become more conscious of your biases first of all even before you remove them just become more conscious of them that alone will help greatly at least know what they are if you're a scientist by all means remain a scientist but at least [ __ ] know your what your bi your own biases are so you don't embarrass yourself when you're talking to me stop making excuses stop making rationalizations admit that what you're doing is biased notice how it is that in and of itself alone will be curative remember awareness is curative i have an episode about that check it out it's called awareness security um so you can't really get rid of all your attachments and biases but you can improve and this explains why virtually all humans are so biased and so selfish and blind to it because they have to be in order to keep existing realize that those humans who were the most selfless and the most unbiased and the most truthful and honest those humans were killed millennia ago they lie buried in unmarked graves nobody remembers their names that's what happened to the most selfless among us and what remains today is the most vicious the most ruthless the most selfish the most egotistical the most narcissistic the most partial the most biased humans of all our ancestors they are who are alive today and you are the descendant of the most selfish [ __ ] who have lived on this planet for the last four billion years congratulations now you understand why you're so [ __ ] selfish and so biased and why it's so difficult for you to attain god realization or to love this also explains why truth is so well hidden and why people are so full of [ __ ] all the time while they're always why they're always lying see my episode called mankind is full of [ __ ] or um what would i call it mankind um something about [ __ ] mankind and [ __ ] search for that i have so many episodes i can't remember all their titles so anyways you can become less biased less attached and as you do so this will allow you to access deeper understanding more truth clearer perception less suffering tranquility love and better science and the last warning that i'll give you here to wrap all this up is beware of your bias against bias itself once you've taken on this project of shedding yourself all these biases and noticing all these biases then the final bias that will remain is your bias against the biases of others so you will want others to stop being biased and if you fall into that bias you're going to be in for a world of hurt because even if you become very unbiased everybody else around you is still going to be biased and selfish as [ __ ] and you might say well leo then what's the point if only i'm going to do it and nobody else is going to do it what's the point that's unfair yeah becoming a highly conscious god-like individual amongst the human chimps that are walking around on this planet is very challenging and it's ultimately very unfair they're not going to treat you fairly these chimps that's the difficulty of the mystical path of spiritual work you're not going to be very well understood and maybe even one day they'll crucify you just because you rid yourself of all your biases don't expect everybody else to alright that's it i hope you enjoyed please click that like button for me and come check out actualize.org that is my website on there you will find a list and actually reviews audio reviews of over 200 of some of the best books on these sorts of metaphysical existential topics that i've talked about here today spiritual topics i have many many profound books that also serve to reinforce and to back up and to provide evidence and sources for the things that i talk about here remember i'm not just pulling this out of my ass i do a lot of research i've read hundreds of books i've studied under many masters and so forth so i really expect you to be reading those check that out i have a course over 25 hours long of exclusive content which is not available on the free channel completely exclusive content about how to develop your life purpose and set yourself on a trajectory in your life how to develop motivation that is consistent and last throughout the entirety of your life and really what it is my life purpose course helps you to build a backbone that serves for all the other self-actualization spiritual work that you'll be doing by watching the normal free content so don't miss that it's a life-changing course if you take it seriously you can also check out my blog where i'm posting bonus videos recently just last week i i just recently i posted a like an hour long extra videos free you know adding extra insights on top of a previous video they released so check those out there's there's exclusive content on the blog that you won't find on youtube or anywhere else if you're a fan don't miss that i put quite a bit of work into my blog unlike other people you can also come to the 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surrender your biases we haven't done that yet here that's going to be a very practical episode here we were building the theory this is the foundation and i'm going to be referencing this episode now for years in all of my future work i'm going to be coming back and pointing to bias bias bias bias like all the time bias it's everything is bias all self-deception comes from bias right so we're gonna be pointing at this stuff all the time so this was a foundational episode i hope you made it this far but we're not done stick around in the future for that upcoming episode you