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[Music] in this episode we're gonna be taking a look at what is duality understanding dualistic cognition that's quite a mouthful there but this is a very very foundational topic and you're probably thinking Leo I've heard you talking about duality a bunch already so what more is there to say well actually I've spent the last two years compiling a list of dualities or dualistic categories that the mind uses to try to understand reality and so this episode and the next one is going to be a miniseries here probably two parts maybe a third part I'm not sure how much I can cram into two two episodes I'll try to do it in two but in these two episodes I'm gonna give you my master list of over 250 very common and important dualities and this is gonna help you to understand how your mind make sense of all of life the entire worlds this is this is very foundational stuff and I haven't really covered it as directly as I'm going to cover it here and I'm gonna address every single one of these dualities to lesser and greater degree and we're gonna break them apart into three groups the first one is going to be just common dualities the second group is going to be scientific types of dualities for scientific thinking and the final category or group is going to be existential dualities so the most important part of this series is going to be part two so make sure you stick around for part two I get the sense that most people they watch part one they get bored with it halfway through then they ever gets it part two but part two is usually the most important part of my series or the last part of the series is always the most important because we're building something up throughout the series that's why the series is needed in the first place because there's a lot of content so I've been compiling this list for for a couple of years I want you to understand how much work and thought goes into this thinking about this stuff so let's begin so what you got to understand is that the human mind when it tries to understand things the way that it thinks and in fact all thinking is basically dualistic you cannot think you cannot speak you cannot write you cannot communicate you cannot do science even nor philosophy or any other kind of intellectual human activity without creating dualities dualities are like the structure of the entire universe and the way we come to know the entire universe every concept that we have have you noticed it's defined against its opposite so if we have a concept like energy then the only value of that idea of energy is precisely that it designates some thing which is distinct from some other thing which is not energy because if everything was energy then in a sense you couldn't use the idea of energy in any practical way because every time you spoke of it you'd be speaking about the entire universe so it wouldn't really be a handy word or a handy concept and so when we're thinking we're creating these dualities all the time with our mind we're doing it when we're doing science we're doing it when we're in casual conversation we're doing it when we're talking about politics when we're talking about religion when we're talking about our opinions about things and of course we're doing it when we're doing philosophy or trying to understand the nature of ourselves or reality or anything else but the problem is is that we create these dualities but we're not conscious of the fact that these are dualities and this leads us astray so firstly you got understand that your understanding of the world is composed of these dualities what do I mean by these dualities I mean for example things like up versus down that would be a duality you're defining up but up is defined relative to down such that you can't have a down without it up and you can't have an up without a down this seems very simple it seems very obvious and of course in the case of up and down it is very simple and very obvious but not always in fact there was a time when most people on the planet did not understand and appreciate the relativity of the notion of up and down they literally thought there was an up direction in the universe and a down direction in the universe and that object just naturally fell down that's what objects did of course later we realized that that's not how gravity works it took a genius like Newton to realize that up and down or relative and of course the Greeks before him realize it as well I've also talking about dualities like success versus failure or reality versus fantasy or life versus death or a good versus bad or science versus religion so even though most people understand that up and down or relative notions and that they depend and are defined in relationship to each other such that you can't have one without the other they then don't understand that when it comes to other categories and they don't understand that their own mind is creating these categories so it's relatively easy to see how the human mind is creating the category of up versus down which doesn't exist in nature otherwise but it's a lot harder to see how the human mind is creating the category of life versus death or a good versus bad or reality versus fantasy or science versus religion these things they seem like they're out there in the real world and not something that our mind is creating but of course the distinction between your mind and the world what is that but another duality you see so everything that you say and any model that you constructed the world it always relies upon these dualities but the problem is is that there's a very fundamental law of epistemology that I want to share with you that you really need to start to appreciate is that all dualities are ultimately untenable and temporary all dualities are ultimately relative and they must eventually collapse this is something that we don't like to accept because it's very threatening because we build our lives and our societies and our cultures upon certain unquestioned categories and dualities for example man versus woman in a lot of cultures what is a man and what is a woman is very strictly defined by certain conventions and tradition traditions and orthodoxies and then it's taken as an absolute not as a relative thing and then people struggle with that especially we need to blend and blur gender roles and identities so all conventional traditional Orthodox and even scientific cognition is dualistic you have to understand have you looked at how conservatives for example think about politics and gender and religion and the world it's extremely dualistic now of course liberals are not completely free of dualistic thinking either most liberals are are full of dualistic categories but they're a little bit less dualistic and so as you become more conscious you become less and less dualistic and you start to realize that more and more of the dualities that you thought were fundamental and unquestionable the lines between them start to blur and you start to see the interrelationship between these various polar opposites that you've always just taken for granted since you were a child mm-hmm because your culture just told you that they were true so one corollary of this law of epistemology that all dualities are ultimately untenable and the reason that is by the way is because reality of course is non-dual that's why all dualities are untenable is that dualities only hold when they are not deeply explored so you can create a category like man versus woman or man versus machine or progress versus regress and it might seem at first glance that well yeah it's pretty pretty there's a pretty clear line Leigha there's a pretty clear line between for example man versus machine it's not hard to distinguish those two but what I'm telling you is that yes it's not hard to distinguish those two and usually it's not hard to distinguish a man from a woman but there are edge cases that you're not taking into account and also what's gonna happen is that as we move forward into the future you're gonna see that these dualities start to bleed into each other more and more to the point where maybe 500 or a thousand years from now it will be pretty hard to distinguish a man from a machine already we have human beings who have pacemakers which are machine components embedded into the body various kinds of implants artificial hips and knees made of titanium and other kinds of metals and new materials and this is just gonna keep happening more and more and more to the point where like seriously like in five hundred years Society culturally is gonna have a problem distinguishing a man from a machine and then you know questions will arise of course as they do in science fiction movies about you know do machines deserve human rights the same rights that a man has that a woman has or the machines have a different set of rights is it for example is it ethical and moral to force a machine to work 20 hours a day in a factory without any rest or relaxation is that ethical well right now it's not a problem because this easy distinguished man from machine but it's gonna get harder and harder and harder another example is like I sighted progress versus regress a lot of people especially progressive people liberals they tend to have a very simplistic dualistic notion of progress versus regress and so they see the Conservatives as being the ones who are regressing Society and then the progressives or the Liberals they're the ones who are progressing or advancing Society and generally we tend to look at the world we see well that case right there is either a case of progress or regress but it's not so simple because what you're not taking into account is how the to play into each other in a certain kind of liberal progressive fantasy you might imagine that well wouldn't it be great if there were no conservatives and all we had was just pure progress all the time we're always hitting the accelerator with no brake this is a dualistic delusion and fantasy it can't be that way because reality always has complimentary and opposite forces that are at play with each other and oftentimes what ends up happening is that in order for us to progress we first need to regress and you can notice that both collectively throughout history in how societies and cultures and nations evolved but you can also see it individually within yourself in your own life there are moments in your life where you're gonna be progressing and it'll be moments in your life we're gonna be backsliding and regressing and we tend to get mmm we still don't we tend to feel guilty when we're regressing in our lives especially with personal development and if you're a self-help junkie then you get guilty about this stuff and you just have this again this kind of self-improvement fantasy is like well what if I could just be progressing all the time with no backsliding and no hiccups whatsoever but again that's a that's a dualistic delusion it can't be that way and you need to understand that your progress comes about precisely oftentimes because of your regresses so those moments when you're the most depressed when you're backsliding the most when you're cheating on your diet when you're cheating on your plans and you're you're failing to fall through on your goals it's that it's it's your failure which then ultimately leads you to your next great success but most people think way to do listicle ii to simplistically too much black and white to see these these dialectical interplay that happen between these opposing forces and also of course you have to recognize that these these categories of like man versus machine progress versus regress these are not just found in the world as if they're just kind of floating around in the universe somewhere these are things that your own mind is creating your own mind is defining what is a man and what is a machine and so of course you should expect that the categories that your mind comes up with they're not going to be able to be true to ultimate reality they're not going to be absolute none of your categories are gonna be absolute same thing with progress or regress nothing in the universe there's no like book in the universe that's floating it around in space that you can go and you can look up and see okay here's a list of what qualifies as progress and here's a list of stuff that qualifies it's redress no we're determining what progress and regress are and so a lot of what politics is is is about it's a battle about how to define various terms whether it's man versus machine or progress or regress or man versus woman or anything else like that so what I'm telling you here we're still talking about this one corollary of this law of epistemology that all dualities collapse so the corollary is that if you deeply explore any duality to its ultimate root what you will discover is that as you get further and further away to the edges of this duality is you will see it collapse and bleed and the edges will come back and circle back around and embrace each other in a unity and you will realize that the entire time the two were defined in terms of one another because fundamentally what you're doing is you're using your mind to to place boundaries within reality and so you're carving up reality but then who is carving up reality while you carve it up one way your neighbor cards it up another way I carve it up another way and then we all disagree because we've carved it up in different ways and then who gets to say which way of carving it up is the best way well of course that depends on your goals that depends on your survival agenda that depends on what your need ego needs but we don't admit of that usually what we say is we just say well no mind you ality is just the way that reality is it's not something that I created it's not something relative it's how it actually is and my way is the right way it has nothing to do with me this problem of drawing lies within reality is really tricky it's notoriously tricky in philosophy this is known as the the Heep problem how do you define what a heap is so if you take a couple of grains of sand and you put them together does that constitute a heap or just a few grains of sand well you might say it's just a few grains of sand okay but then if we take a million of them a million grains of sand and put them together would that be a heap you say yeah it's probably a heap okay but where do you draw the line between a few grains of sand and a heap is it ten grains a hundred grains a thousand grains who gets to say if I say it's a hundred and you say it's a thousand which one of us is right see but this goes way beyond just grains of sand it's much more significant I'll give you a scientific example for example a lot of scientists and people who follow all the space launches that are happening these days with various companies you know they argue about what qualifies as outer space what is outer space we have the earth and then we have outer space but how many miles above the earth is outer space is it fifty thousand sixty thousand one hundred and twenty thousand or a hundred and twenty miles above not thousand hundreds of hundreds of miles above above the earth what qualifies is outer space do you have to actually like be in geosynchronous orbit do you have to be out of Earth's orbit to be in outer space or is it enough for you just to fly out the atmosphere he's a jumbo jet in outer space when it's flying speaking of which you know where is that boundary like if you really think about it I'm sitting in outer space right now because there's no boundary between where I'm sitting right now and you know 120 miles up there which would be considered outer space by most I most scientists well there's no boundary I mean how are spaces right here of course there's air here but the space is all the same so you see so who's defining this so a lot of debates and misunderstanding and miscommunication and confusion comes precisely because of this because we're drawing these lines but we're not admitting that we're drawing these lines or here's another example when does a molecule or a collection of molecules become a living cell who determines that is there some law in the universe that says well if you have a hundred thousand molecules arranged in this fashion that all the sudden now it's a living cell but before it wasn't si or going up a little bit further another level up from that is when do a clump of cells become a human this is a very tricky issue for for abortion rights and for religious people when they think about reproductive rights who's defining when a clumps of cells equals a human is is it precisely at the moment where that the egg meets the sperm it's like and does the egg just need to touch the sperm for it to be a human or does it thus perhaps actually enter into the egg and then stay there for some time and how many how many seconds does it need to say how many minutes how many hours who gets to say see it's very tricky or how about the question of when did an ape become a human mm-hmm it's pretty easy to tell a chimpanzee apart from a human but there was a time in in in the past where there existed hominids something between a chimpanzee and a human some common ancestor and it would really it must have had traits very similar to half chimpanzee half human something quite similar to that I mean there are plenty of fossils in the in the fossil record too to give us good evidence of this and it must have acted really similar to humans in certain ways but also it wasn't quite human he's a Neanderthal a human or not see really interesting so when did the first human get born really interesting question and and who determines that that was a human is it the human that s born it says I'm a human but of course that's very self biased because of course yeah you get to say you're a human but does that really mean that you're a human what if you get what if you teach a a hominid on the and earth all to say that it's a human does that does that mean it is and does it have human rights at that point see how tricky it gets how about what determines when a computer becomes intelligent that's very tricky as well very tricky problem in computer science and that problems going to only become more and more thorny in the in the next couple hundred years as all these AIS become more sophisticated and more developed it's going to become harder and harder to to distinguish human intelligence from computer intelligence so that's that's very interesting it used to be thought that well if a computer could couldn't beat a man at chess that it would be intelligent well that happened in the late 90s and but we still don't consider computers intelligent so what is what does that boundary there how about the boundary between the thought and an emotion when does a thought become an emotion in Windows an emotion become a thought have you ever noticed this how closely related the two are and oftentimes though we talk about them as though they're two different things like well I'm thinking now and I'm feeling something else later but then of course they're very related because what you're thinking now affects how you feel later and in fact people have been asking about this on the on actualised forum they've been asking about pain is pain thought or is pain and emotion and a feeling well of course the answer is that pain is a complicated thing which includes both a thought component and an emotional component and if you understood that you became fully conscious that that might allow you to overcome some serious chronic pain that you're having that otherwise you wouldn't be able to overcome because you're not conscious of the interplay between thoughts and emotions and how that affects the pain you feel or the suffering you feel most of the suffering you feel is fought driven and not just purely a feeling or a sensation or how about where do you draw the line between love and hatred where does love and and hatred begin now you might think well leo these are two clearly different things there's no problem distinguishing love from hatred they're opposites really are they really see it seems like they're opposites but then when you like I tell you if you if you really explore the duality in a lot of detail and you go all the way out to its edges you're gonna see that they're gonna loop back around and come together for example a lot of people who are filled with hate are actually filled with love for some partial thing within reality so for example a man who feels hatred towards someone who physically abused his daughter is he acting out of hatred or out of love you might think well he's acting out of hatred for that guy who who beat up his daughter and that's wrong and that's evil and so he's he's right to hate that guy because he shouldn't have slapped around the daughter okay that's one way to look at it but another way to look at is that really um he's doing out of love his hatred is out of love you see because he loves his daughter so much um so see it's not so simple not so simple at all and in fact for for that guy who's filled with this hatred in order to overcome his hatred he's gonna have to recognize that there's this interplay between these various forces within him so it's not just hatred it's also love and he needs to recognize that that hatred itself comes from a certain partial kind of love and when you realize that then you can kind of let go of that and you can expand your love to even include those objects that you hate and that's exactly what you need to do in order to have a a non dual living experience of life so our goal ultimately is to sort of take the rigidity of all these categories and then shake it loose so that you're liberated and you're free your mind is free to explore reality without being straitjacketed by all these categories that you've constructed or that your culture has constructed and programmed you with but of course the problem with that is precisely that our mind is so rigid and so closed from exploring and breaking apart these rigidities we don't want to explore these dualities too deeply because if we do ultimately what's gonna happen is we're gonna get not just to the simple dualities of like 8 versus human or man versus machine these are simple they don't affect your life too much one way another they're kind of philosophically you might almost say but you start going down this rabbit hole eventually you're gonna start to get to dualities like reality versus fantasy or sanity versus insanity or good versus evil oh boy now we're getting into existential dualities and these really are the things that shape how you perceive the entire world and shape your entire attitude towards people things yourself and the world and these are very very practical and significant and not just merely philosophical and most people don't want to question these dualities they don't want to admit of the possibility that the boundary between reality and fantasy might not actually exist for example or that the boundary between the mind and the world the inner mind and the outer world might not actually exist or that boundary between the mind and the brain scientists love to cling to that boundary and they love to prioritize the brain over the mind such that the mind is inside the brain rather than the opposite possibility see so you sort of play around with this stuff and all of a sudden you get into some very mind-bending territory and a lot of stuff becomes a very fluid and your reality starts to melt before your eyes and fall apart and that can be very scary and very threatening which is why most people don't want to go down this route so for now I just want you to remember that your mind creates categories and then what it does is that it cleverly denies that it created these categories and this is how reality arises which of course is itself a category all these words that I use mind creation denial world self category good love what are these these are all categories even the word category is a category and so by denying that we create these categories this creates enormous degrees of ignorance resulting in deep misunderstandings of how reality works as a consequence human understanding is then very partial biased and lopsided and very confused mankind tends to hold these dualities and categories as sacred as dogmas trying to resist their collapse but of course one of the key laws of epistemology is that every duality will eventually be subverted so just keep that in mind so with that introduction out of the way let's actually get into the list of these dualities so let's start with some very simple ones that don't eat that much explanation up versus down left versus right East versus West hot versus cold soft versus hard small versus big front versus back forward versus backward clockwise versus counter clockwise so you've heard all these before you learn them when you were young as a child and to you they just seemed very obvious but I want you just to start to notice that always these are relative terms defined in terms of each other so for example what do I mean well let's just take left and right is this left or is this right or is this right and this left it depends on whether you're looking at it from this direction or from that direction so for me this is right but for you it's left and vice versa and it's important to understand that in fact I had to teach myself as I was shooting all these videos over the years I had to teach myself that what I'm talking and I'm presenting something to you I have to point in this direction like if I'm trying to show you a graph of my progress if like I let's say I'm showing you my progress in person about I'm growing right see I have to draw it this way because from your perspective that's the right way but for my perspective it's backwards so I have to train myself to think backwards ly as I'm showing stuff to you through this camera and a lot of times I watch for example CNN or some other news network and some expert that they have there is is sitting there and he's trying to draw some sort of graph with his fingers but the way he's drawing it he's drawing it backwards from the viewers perspective because he's drawn it from his own perspective and I can see that he didn't train himself to look at what he's doing from the viewers perspective see so this is just gives you a little a little example of of how powerful it is to be able to look at the world from other people's perspectives because then you can present information in ways that will work for that person that of course facilitates communication facilitates relationships facilitates teaching but it also facilitates understanding the other person which is a very rare very rare it's very rare that people go to great lengths to try to understand somebody else's perspective usually people are just stuck in their own perspective all right so so left and right is relative and as are all these other things who gets to define for example what qualifies as forward versus backward let's go on with the rest of the list weak versus strong slow versus fast easy versus hard smooth versus rough short versus long empty versus full odd versus even you might think well Leo odd and even that's that's very clear-cut that's a mathematical notion so it should be easy to know if something is odd or even well let me ask you this is zero even or odd is pi the number pi 3.14159 etc is that even or odd see so when you start to think to simplistically with these categories what they do is they limit your imagination see if you take a little child and you teach him about even and odd and you tell him all numbers are even and odd or odd one or the other at first glance he's just gonna believe you and he's gonna accept it it's gonna look from his perspective it's gonna seem like yeah that's right look here's number one it's odd here's number six it's even here's a num number 500 that it's even and so forth he can go through a few examples and he can learn the distinction of odd versus even but then you asked the child what about zero and now he gets confused he doesn't know how to answer that or you give him a decimal point and he doesn't know is it odd is that even is it neither you see when he then understands that Oh even an odd doesn't automatically apply to all numbers then that sort of opens up a new possibility for him but imagine a child who's just been taught from an early age in a dogmatic fashion that numbers must always be odd or only be even and that this is a just like a brute fact of the universe is that if it's a number it has to be odd or even and it can't be both and it can't be neither you see he's gonna have real difficulty in the future when he does advanced mathematics and he's dealing with fractions and decimals and imaginary numbers and transcendental numbers and God knows what else he's gonna have a real difficulty with that so that's that's sort of what we're dealing with here a lot of the stuff that I try to communicate through my speaking is these sorts of advanced mathematical concepts to use this analogy but many of the people that I'm communicating with they're using this very simple black and white dualistic thinking to try to understand some of these trans rational truths that I'm trying to communicate and then what ends up happening is that it doesn't compute for them it doesn't make sense and then of course if it doesn't make sense for you you can't understand it if you can't understand it you're missing out on the most advanced wisdom and lessons from life so you have to evolve your cognition in order to be able to really understand the deepest truths that's why we're talking about all this moving on with the list high versus low decrease versus increase heads versus tails narrow versus broad shallow versus deep these are all relative you know what I consider a shallow book for me a shallow book might be very deep book for you just depends if you're just a newbie getting into self-help then most books will seem very deep to you which for example to me after I've been doing it for five or ten years now seem very shallow aren't really worth my time and of course that it depends depends on where you are on your personal development journey and what I consider a deep book today is gonna turn into a shallow book ten years from now see but most people you know they don't they don't they don't really appreciate this this relative nature of these categories and now on the list we get to the category of good versus bad and good versus evil and this is this is a very important one and we're gonna pause right here in order to introduce an additional concept we're going to need as we're talking about these dualities going forward and that is the concept of the absolute or that transcendent so usually we set up a category like good which is defined as the opposite of bad and then what what I'm gonna tell you now is that their relative good and bad is relative so what's good for me might be bad for you and vice versa for example if the government confiscates all your money and gives it to me that's good for me but it's bad for you and vice versa of course it can also do something that would be good for both of us or bad for both of us but might be good for some other group like for example if we're mmm if if you and I are in the upper class of society and the government starts taxing the upper class well that's bad for us but it'll be good for the lower class so most people don't even admit this about good and bad how relative it is to to our self agenda so that's just a basic point of relativity but some people then get trapped in the in the trap of relativity they think well all good and bad is just relative and that's the end of the story except it's not the end of the story so in certain cases there are absolutes so with the case of good and bad there's absolute good what is an absolute well that's the deep topic I'll have actually episode on in the future about what is an absolute and what is absolute truth and we're also gonna be talking about absolute and relative in the future as well cuz there's so much to say about that but um briefly here an absolute is that which has no opposite is transcendent of this duality so for example when I say good as an absolute or good with a capital G this is a good that knows no opposite that has no opposite so really what it does is it takes the lowercase G good and the lowercase B bad and it sort of recognizes them as a duality and then it it incorporates all of that and transcends it at the same time and that that unity is what we're calling good with a capital G now of course someone's gonna wonder here well Leo but what about bad with a capital B isn't there an absolute bad as well if there's an absolute good no there isn't because if there were that would again create a new duality so what I'm talking about is good as a non duality now you might wonder well Leo if your emerging the lowercase G good with with the lowercase B bad you're merging those together into one thing why are you then calling it good with a with a with an uppercase G aren't you being biased shouldn't you give it some neutral term and the answer is no because from from an absolute level of consciousness what you can realize is that there actually never was such a thing as bad dad was always relative notion and as an absolute all there ever was was good so all that stuff you thought was bad was actually always good but it wasn't the lowercase G good it was the uppercase G good so I understand this is a bit confusing and all but this is a very powerful notion that I want you to understand because we're gonna be coming back to it over and over and over again especially in part two of this series so keep that in your back pocket and while we're talking about this let me of course bring up the very well-known symbol of the yin-yang sign this is the universal symbol of non duality and also duality so understand that non duality contains within it incorporates within it duality so non duality is a transcendent or absolute which contains within it here you see the the white and the black the white we say let's say it's the good or the light the dark is the bad or the shadow but but notice that the symbol requires both parts in order to be complete so you might focus on the white and think of that as the good with the lowercase G you can focus on the black and see that as the lowercase be bad and then you can look at the entire symbol and see that the totality of it as a whole and what that is is that's the unification of everything and that is the transcendental or the absolute with the capital a/c and also what I want you to notice here is that very interestingly there's a dot in each of these teardrop shapes there's a dot so the black has a dot of light and the white has a dot of black so that's very important because what that is communicating to you is that there's this dialectical interplay and that it's not so simple to separate the white from the black or the good from the bad always within the good you're gonna find a little bit of the bat and always within the bad here to fine a little bit of the good kind of like that example I was giving you with love and the hate see there's this kind of dialectical interplay there there there's this interconnectivity between whatever categories you create within reality and so just keep that in mind there is a sort of unacknowledged unity that we are denied which you will start to admit and see more and more of as you become more conscious and do more of this work so let's keep going with the list right versus wrong this is very similar to good versus bad and on this duality we can also we can also say that there is an absolute are with a capital right with a capital R that would be the absolute which is when you realize that everything is right there's no such thing as wrong see you can become so conscious that you realize that wrong is it's just a concept and then everything is perfectly right going along with the list positive versus negative you can also realize that there is a positive with a capital P positive as an absolute such that you become so conscious that you realize that there's no such thing as a negative everything's a positive there's a relative negative but as an absolute there's only positive are you following me I know it's a little tricky it's tricky because most people don't have a reference experience for what the word absolute means so when I say absolute if you've never experienced or become conscious of the absolute then you don't know what that word means it might sound like a belief or an idea the absolute is not a belief or an idea it's something you can become directly conscious of it's a way of looking at the world let's just say for now it's it's a more accurate way of looking at the world from a higher consciousness elevation next on the list is moral versus immoral this trips a lot of people up a lot of people believe that certain things are just fundamentally absolutely moral and other things are absolutely immoral and in fact our legal system is sort of built upon this fiction of this duality in fact our entire sense of morality and even a lot of our emotional system is built upon this fiction of this duality because when we think that someone did something immoral usually the way we think of it is that that guy did something truly immoral truly evil and wrong and so he deserves punishment he deserves to go to prison he deserves to be executed he deserves whatever suffering he's receiving from the universe for that he deserves his bad karma or something like this see and then of course we get angry when that person doesn't get whatever we think he deserves for being immoral but you always have to wonder who is determining what is moral and what is immoral have you noticed that every tribe of humans across the entire planet across all the different eras that humans have been alive have had their own unique senses and notions of what's moral and what's immoral oftentimes exactly the opposite how can that be the case well it's because actually moral and immoral are relative they're not absolute so one of the key mistakes that people make here especially if they're at spiral dynamic stage blue level of development or below is they mistake for example lowercase G good and lowercase G be bad they mistake these two as if they're absolute rather than relative because stage Bleu is absolute istic in the way that it thinks it's absolute istic cognition so beware this trap all of your morality all of your ethics everything you think is positive or negative right or wrong or good or bad or evil all of that I'm telling you right now is relative and on top of that there is an absolute but the absolute is not what you think it is it's not what you think it is in fact it's usually the opposite of what you think it is which is why this is so tricky so most fundamentalist religious people the thing they think is the absolute is actually relative the thing they think is moral is actually just a fiction of their own mind but there is an absolute that they could access there is a good with the capital G that they could access but they'll never access it precisely because they're so stuck on defending this relative duality as if it were absolute you see so they're clinging to a false absolute is the problem which prevents them from being able to access the true absolute and of course to make this all even more confusing true and false we'll be talking about that part two is itself a duality that you're creating but on top of all that there is an absolute truth which is not something you're creating got it okay good now we'll be talking more about it in part two we're getting ahead of our skis here next on the list should versus shouldn't this makes a lot of people feel very guilty and bad about themselves is they they think of their stuff they should be doing and stuff they shouldn't be doing and they take it as absolutes that's sort of the whole function of the notion of a should is if something should be done that means it everyone has to do it it should be done like you should not kill people that's an absolute well really it's not an absolute it's a relative because of course we kill people in war we kill criminals we kill we kill all sorts of people all the time people getting killed but still we have this absolute silly idea that people shouldn't get killed but you can transcend that and you can get to should as an absolute shoot as an absolute with a capital S is simply everything that is so whatever is happening in the universe right now is precisely what should be happening such that there isn't any shouldn'ts there's only shoulds so is there a war going on that you don't like well you tell yourself it shouldn't happen actually it should because it is happening so therefore it should and whatever else you think shouldn't be happening if it's happening it should be happening who are you to question what should be happening really as an absolute what you realize is that everything that is happening is what should be happening and there's no such thing as something that shouldn't be happening because you're fully accepting it so what you realize is that the notion of something that should not be happening is itself a fantasy and then you surrender that and you just accept everything exactly as it is and that's what should be happening and now you don't have a constant back and forth anymore between should and shouldn't and in general that's the whole value of realizing the true absolute when you realize the true absolute you transcend the pettiness of the sort of bickering and dialectical tug-of-war that goes on between these these relative dualistic notions so you rise above good and evil you rise above should and shouldn't you rise above morality and immorality but that threatens a lot of people because they think well leo but if I'm gonna rise above good and evil that means what I'm gonna I'm gonna be okay with evil happening but that's not what it means but you had at the same time that is what it means so it's tricky it's very tricky you're transcending both of them you just have to trust that when you truly transcend both of them what you're gonna end up with is something better than what you had at the level below where you were stuck in this tug of war so this is how liberation is achieved have you noticed how much tug of war there is going on within life in the news in politics in religion in science and academia and universities at your job within your family within yourself everything's a tug of war so in a certain sense what we're looking for with with spiritual work and with personal development is to rise above the fray as they say and to transcend this tug of war how do you do it well you can't do it by engaging in more tug-of-war you need something new you need something Metta which is a higher elevation above the tug of war so for example if if you're in some political battle and your opponent is slinging mud at you well you have an option one option is to sling mud back and then you get into a tug-of-war I'm right he's wrong and of course he says that he's right and that I'm wrong and then this tug of war goes back and forth and some debate starts and this is very unproductive and you see this everywhere you see this for example with with the israeli-palestinian conflict the sort of tug of war that never ends you see both sides sides are fighting with each other not really understanding the other side so um so the solution is to rise above that how do you rise above it well that requires becoming conscious of transcendent absolutes which of course most people are too busy engaging in the tug-of-war in the debate in the conflict in the battle in the struggle to to have time to become conscious of the transcendent and the absolute because if they if they became conscious of the absolute that whole conflict would automatically melt away and it wouldn't exist as a problem for you anymore in fact problems and solutions what is that but another duality see so long as you believe in that duality so long as your mind is creating that duality then you're always gonna have problems have you noticed that every problem you have you create a solution for and then just another problem pops up and you never run out of problems life is just a never-ending stream of problems wouldn't it be nice to find a way to transcend that well and what you need is you need the ultimate solution and what is the ultimate solution well that would be awakening waking up from the dualistic dream that you're stuck in next continuing down the list worst versus best how many times have you caught up got caught up in this duality trying to determine well who's the worst who's the best out of all these people or out of all these objects judging and evaluating and ranking and then arguing that people like you and your friends you start arguing about what's the best movie what's the worst movie and then everyone has a different opinion right because it's relative how about sad versus happy this is very tricky a lot of people who get into personal development really what they're looking for is happiness but they don't really understand how tricky and counterintuitive happiness is they think they can get happiness by developing themselves being successful getting money getting a six pack abs and getting a hot girlfriend or a nice husband or whatever else they think this will make them happy of course it's not realizing that you can't just have happiness without sadness because the way that you're defining happiness is just one pole or end of this duality and so the way that you're going about life you're gonna have a lot of sadness as you're simultaneously creating a lot of happiness and at some point you get fed up with this sadness and you gonna say [ __ ] man I want I want true happiness is that is there a possibility for transcending this this back and forth tug-of-war this up and down between being happy and sad I'm tired of this I just want to I want peace and I'll do whatever it takes to get peace and then you do that and then finally you awaken and you realize that to transcend happiness and sadness you discover the absolute which is happiest with a capital H you transcend both of them and then you can be happy all the time without sadness but that's something that's completely outside the realm of possibility for most human beings because they're stuck in this the dualistic relativistic tug-of-war between their emotions continuing on with lists old versus new have you noticed how everything new becomes old very very quickly what's new today will become old tomorrow fashions video games movies technology you know take the newest smartphone that came out this week well it's gonna be old news by next year hmm interesting how that works so is there actually anything new you might wander in the universe is there actually anything old see what's old is a is is is the first iPhone is that old or is some dinosaur bone that's 50 million years is that old or is some some galaxy which is billions of years old or is that is that old see it's all relative who gets to say and then of course these terms are always context-sensitive so when we're talking about technology we're using a very narrow a span of time when we're talking about old and new you know usually if it's if it's more than a year then it's old as far as technology it within the context of technology but we're talking about in the context of dinosaurs or astrophysics or societies and now we're talking about thousands of years millions and billions of years how about moving on with a list foreground vs. background inefficient versus efficient useful versus useless this one is really important people don't realize that usefulness is relative so whether something is useful to you depends on who you are and what you need to survive consider the following possibility that if you weren't you and if you didn't need to survive then nothing would be useful to you or just more practically if your goals change then usefulness changes too maybe you have some goal in life like you have the goal of earning a lot of money so then you look at the whole world and perceive it in terms of what's useful and what's useless to you in terms of achieving that goal so maybe a relationship or a marriage time with your kids that might all be useless if your goal is to earn the most money but then your goal changes and now your goal is love to maximize love in your life and not to maximize money let's say you get to that point in your development well now all the sudden a lot of useless stuff now all the sudden looks very useful to you it's a useful towards maximizing love so now spending time with your children and with your family and maybe doing some charity work and doing some meditation and whatever else now or some psychedelics maybe now all that has become very useful and now running your business that's become useless looking at your bank account and counting your money that's become useless to you now see not only is it useless it's actually negative it detracts from your time pursuing love for example not to say that they'd necessarily have to be in opposition you can you can earn lots of money doing stuff you love for example so again they're not they're not opposites you always have a little speck of one within the other sometimes a lot of speck and not just a speck but an entire ocean of one within the other going down the list boring versus exciting have you noticed how relative boring and exciting are some game that you just buy some video game you play it's the hottest newest game it's so exciting you're playing it and then a week later now it's boring did the game change nothing in the game changed it's all you your mind is doing it it's crazy crazy how that works huh sometimes you're sitting there meditating you're bored out of your mind other times you're sitting there meditating you're excited just like your meditation is going good you're in the zone you're locked in you're all focused you feel like you're getting some good gains out of it now it's exciting for you and then you get bored again how do you transcend that so that your life is always exciting exciting with a capital e is that possible maybe maybe could it be that boredom is something that your mind is doing maybe going down the list here versus there near versus far rich versus poor you know it's funny it's so funny because with rich and poor a lot of people think that rich and poor are like these fixed categories but of course they're not even the poorest person in America let's say still lives like a king compared to how people lived 2,000 years ago even the most lavish kings like think about the the Pharaohs of Egypt or some you know some emperor of Rome or whatever you would think well these were the richest these were the richest people in the world and they lift laut live lavishly but they didn't have air conditioning didn't have refrigerators they didn't have ice cream they didn't have fast food McDonald's that you can buy for five dollars they didn't have cars didn't have a bunch of stuff so I mean we're all in the 21st century living like rich kings and yet it's still not enough for you you're still miserable so this tells you it doesn't matter how rich or how poor you are of course rich and poor is also relative in the sense that what really matters is how rich or how poor are you relative to the people you surround yourself with see if you're the richest among all your friends you're gonna feel pretty good whereas if you're the poorest among all your friends even if you let's say you've got a million dollars but all your friends have hundred million dollars are you gonna be happy of course not you're gonna be miserable you're gonna feel poor like you're really gonna feel poor because you're gonna see all your hundred million dollar friends you know buying expensive yachts and helicopters and other things jumbo not jumper just but private jets let's say and you won't be able to afford those with a million dollars but you see what Ann went up went up even a poorer person looks at that situation that they will that Leo that's just ridiculous that's so ridiculous if I had a million dollars I wouldn't be like that I would be happy I don't need yachts and helicopters and and private jets right that's because right now you're so poor that you only have like ten thousand dollars if you're earning a couple you know a couple dozen like what let's say you're earning $30,000 a year if that's your salary then of course a million dollars to you is like it's like a pipe dream it's a fantasy you think it's gonna make you happy until you get it and then what you'll realize is that it's not all it's cracked up to be and then you're actually gonna be depressed you're gonna be depressed when you get it cuz that fantasy is gonna be is gonna be rudely popped a little bubbly yours is gonna be popped so I'm telling you all this so that you see your mind becomes flexible enough to see this relativity then you can start to like look into the future and kind of start to plan and figure out how things are gonna work in counter intuitive ways that's important for the kind of work that we're doing here how about the duality of normal versus weird that trips a lot of people up I know personally had a huge influence in my life because we go to school right and in school we're at school for 12 years basically and then we go to college to most of us and and through peer pressure and various kinds of cultural norms people pick on us they laugh at us for being weird and we're taught that being weird is wrong or bad and so we're taught that we have to be normal we have to fit in so we have to check ourselves when we're going out we check ourselves in the mirror are we Norma do I look normal I'm right weird am I being weird is it weird if I say this is it weird if I act this way is it Moo is it weird if I if I ask this person for something and then I guess the point where we really start to feel like well all that that thing is really weird no we laugh at other people see we participated in all this ourselves so we see some some some kid who dresses funny and so oh look at like that weird kid let's laugh at him let's pick on him see we do this and in our mind as we do this as we believe others and others bully us we reinforce this notion of what's normal and what's weird but of course all this is totally relative you go to a different school you go to a different country you go to a different time take a time machine go back a thousand years normally weird are gonna be totally opposite so then why do you take them so seriously why do you invest so much emotional energy into being normal or maybe the opposite maybe you're sort of the contrarian and you actually have taken on the identity of being the weird one and so now you've acted up and so like you dress weird on purpose you act weird on purpose you get weird tattoos and facial piercings on purpose to kind of freak people out cuz you're gonna like a sort of a anti-authoritarian streak in you but see you're playing a role that role is now defining your whole life you're a prisoner to that you're a prisoner either to being normal or you're a prisoner to being weird and as you're engaged in this tug of war you're not able to be authentic an authenticity would be sort of the absolute or the transcendent in this case it would be authenticity with a capital A which transcends normality and weirdness how about black versus white racially speaking African versus European millions of people are hung up on this as though it's important as though it matters as though these categories are somehow given to us by God given us to us by nature given us to us by genetics but you know what many good biologists and and serious scientists when they actually look into the data they look it into genetics it's actually very difficult genetically to distinguish many Europeans from Africans a lot of Europeans have DNA that's closer to an African than to Africans have to each other if you select the right throughout European the right Africans see so a lot of these categories though that we've constructed culturally just don't pass muster they don't pass muster scientifically in many cases but even even deeper than that there they don't pass muster even if they did pass muster scientifically even if you showed me all the genetic data that said that well there's a very clear difference between Africans and Europeans or males and females you know all males have a Y chromosome and all females have two X chromosomes you might say that means nothing that's only the scientific level you got to go deeper to the existential level because what is a chromosome and why do you hold it as being important at all see a chromosome itself is a distinction X versus Y chromosomes that's a distinction who created that distinction you did of course who's giving that distinction importance you are of course see where in the universe does it say that there should be importance given to an X or to a Y chromosome no where we made it up why do we make it up because it's convenient for our survival and to realize that we made it up gives us the freedom to change it to let go of it because you know what a lot of times we make up [ __ ] that we think is gonna help our survival but actually it hurts our or it used to help our survival but now it doesn't now it's become counterproductive because we've evolved beyond that you know when we were living in the in the savannas and the forests and jungles thousands of years ago there was a much greater significance between males and females and those gender roles than there is in 21st century Western democratic society because most jobs today don't involve heavy manual labor which was that distinguishing important factor between men and women and most people today they're not engaged in warfare tribal warfare and most women can do most of the jobs that men can do and vice versa see but if we get stuck on our old paradigms and dualities and categories that holds us back and then we get silly notions thinking like well but women aren't as good engineers as men are we create these sort of very simplistic black and white generalizations and then that can harm people too it keeps us from interfacing more accurately and directly with reality because really what we're doing is were we're filtering reality through our categories and that radically changes how we conceive a reality and then how we relate to reality and then what we do with reality and that's your whole life right there see so if you really want to change your whole life start changing and questioning these dualistic categories that you always take for granted that's just a given has absolutes they're not absolutes being black or white is not an absolute there are people who were half and half what do you call a person who's 50 percent black and 50% white 50 percent African 50 percent European are they black are they white a lot of whites would call the black isn't that interesting very uh very a biased way to look at it and even many black people would call that person black precisely because they know that even you have a little bit of black in you you're gonna be treated like you're black because that was the the way that Europeans acted towards Africans for a long time and that's that's still a trend it's it's deeply ingrained in our culture very interesting isn't interesting when you have a person who's 50% African and 50% european he's going to be considered african not european by most people by our culture very interesting and then of course look we create entire identities you know people spend 50 years living this identity of being african or being european they get wrapped up in it whether they're reacting against it or whether they're embracing it doesn't matter you could be some white nationalist thing that europeans are the best or you could be an african american spending your whole life building an identity fighting that but in either case you're trapped in it you're in this tug of war how do you transcend it well of course you have to transcend race even transcend the notion that you're a human being that you're an animal that you're even a creature all of this can be transcended if you access the absolute but take some work and you can't do that work so long as you're clinging to your African identity or you're a pure European identity or your human identity what you need to discover is your absolute identity and that's what awakening is that's what non-duality is see when you fully awake in what you'll realize is that your African your European your Chinese your Asian your your Eskimo your Japanese your your your all animals your dog your cat you're an elephant you're a fly you're a mosquito you're a space alien floating around on some planet inside their galaxy all of it is you no boundaries no dualities no categories see that's the power of questioning these categories these categories are not just a conceptual thing you have to understand and we'll we'll talk about this when we get into part two but just to give you a preview here these categories go to the very bone a reality such that reality itself like I said before is a category your body you think your body is a physical body says who says you and what are you you think you're what whatever you think you are that's a category you're creating you is a category body is a category you're creating these but you're not taking them as something you create you're taking them as a given as reality so what you have is you have this nested web of belief which has been built up this sort of operating system that's running your entire mind and your entire life which is sort of categories nested within other categories going all the way down more and more and more fundamental and then there's a few super fundamental categories at the very bottom the rock bottom that solidify your entire life such that if these categories were seriously questioned and unraveled your entire life would dissolve the notion of you having a body would disappear you see most people aren't open to this possibility but you are gonna be practicing radical open-mindedness so you should be open to it okay next moving on next duality flawed versus perfect we tend to treat these as real like that's a perfect diamond and therefore it's worth millions of dollars or no that's a flawed diamond it's only worth $100 and you might determine how much your husband loves you by the size and quality and perfection of the diamond he gives you and of course your husband will be judging you based on the perfection of your beauty so he will judge your body and your face and your butt and your boobs and everything about you and your personality and rank you on a scale of one to ten and depending on where he ranks you he'll give you a bigger diamond you see and while all of this nonsense is going on what will be missed is perfection as an absolute perfection of the capital P you can become conscious that everything is perfect all the time there's no such thing as imperfection imperfection is a relative thing wouldn't that be an interesting way to look at the world to see it as perfect all the time no matter what is going on that's a powerful that's a powerful shift in perception if you can accomplish that straight versus curved dark versus light dirty versus clean this one is interesting so notice the following if you take a piece of [ __ ] on the sidewalk is it dirty or is it clean of course everyone would say it's dirty well not to a fly to a fly that's that's a beautiful sight to a fly it's very clean the fly will actually lay its eggs in the [ __ ] feast off the [ __ ] so first of all notice that secondly though also notice if we take a microscope and we zoom into that [ __ ] let's say we zoom into it to the molecular level and we take one molecule like a carbon atom within the [ __ ] is the carbon atom dirty or clean see you can't apply the category of dirty and clean to a carbon atom because that category has been created relative to us humans it's not an absolute it's not like in the universe somewhere there's a database that says that dog should is dirty no we created that distinction what we mean when we humans say that something is dirty is we mean that it's it's got a certain relationship to our survival function so for example you know we wouldn't want to wash our hands in dog [ __ ] because we can get a disease and then we could die from that and so in that sense we call it dirty but that doesn't mean it actually is dirty all it really means is that this is something that might harm my survival ok that might be true I don't recommend that you go washing your hands in [ __ ] but see the problem is is that some people get in their mind that some things actually are dirty like sex is dirty the Catholics will will guilt you into believing that sex is dirty and then every time you have sex you're gonna feel dirty then you're gonna go run take a shower to wash yourself and you might say we'll leave with that that's good because you know I don't want to get some STD or something yeah but uh but you can never enjoy sex now ever in your life because you always think it's dirty see you're reacting against it you're not doing it consciously if you really want to see a shower go take a shower there's no problem taking a shower after sex if you feel you need to the problem is that you do it compulsively and you feel guilty about it and you suffer for it wild versus tame and what point does an animal become tame you know humans tamed cats and dogs and cattle and so forth I was watching a interesting documentary recently was advice maybe Vice or box I don't know what I was watching some YouTube video and they were talking about how some Russian scientists Soviet scientists in like the 1950s or 60s developed a program for for breeding foxes and it was thought that you can't tame a fox did you know that some animals are actually tamable whereas others are not for example you can't tame a rhinoceros we're so conventional wisdom says and in fact one of the one of the reasons that European civilization developed faster than all other civilizations for example Africa and other places like South America one of the reasons is because Europeans were fortunate enough that they had when they were you know still in there at caveman days before civilization is they had an abundance of tamable animals which is purely a coincidence it's a geographic and sort of coincidental factor Europeans had access to horses and cattle and sheep and goats and all sorts of animals that could be tamed relatively easily you now see you go to Africa and see a lot of white nationalists they'll make this argument they'll say well but Europeans were the most advanced race were the smartest way the highest IQs don't kid yourself don't kid yourself you know how hard survival is in Africa you know many how many diseases they have there of course that's because of the geography because it's much warmer wetter more humid there's a jungle there it's so much harder to survive in Africa in the wild than in Europe and they have a lot fewer table animals go try to tame a giraffe go try to tame an elephant go try to tame a rhinoceros or a lion or a tiger can't do it in most cases that you can tame elephants but but most of those other animals you're not going to be able to tame them because they're there their physiology and their genetics and their psychology actually determines whether it attainable or not so what this Russian scientist did in the Soviet era is he was trying to tame foxes and so he was selectively breeding foxes in order to to like breed breed ones that had the kindest dispositions to human beings you know the ones that would bite the least and so forth and eventually he was able to succeed to the point where now there's a semi tame version so it's not fully tamed it's like half tamed it's still half wild half tamed but you can actually keep it as a pet so if you're wondering why why aren't you know we have cats and dogs as pets we don't have foxes as pets well because foxes were difficult to tame and you know it took thousands of years all the way till the 1960s for someone to tame tame these foxes and even still they're not totally tame they can still bite you and you can buy these foxes they're very rare they're very expensive they cost like tens of thousands of dollars but you can buy these semi tame foxes very interesting scene so that just shows you how how much bleed through there is between these categories it's not so simple as just saying well that animals a wild animal that name animals a tame animal right but but at some point you got to figure that for an animal to become tame it had to go through a process of becoming more and more and more tape so there were degrees of tameness it's not a binary wild or tame next simple versus complex this is relative wet versus dry common versus rare pros vs. cons upsides vs. downsides fair vs. unfair a lot of people complain about the unfairness of life how unfair things are but that's only because they haven't transcended this dualistic notion of famers is unfair to get to the absolute which is fairness with a capital F so when you realize that you as universal consciousness will live through every single incarnation in lifetime of every human being in every animal in the entire universe that has ever occurred ever will occur which I talked about in my episode called the radical implications of oneness so when you truly realize that there's only one being in the entire universe that's gonna live through all of itself all of the permutations when you realize that you'll also realize that the universe is perfectly fair fair with a capital F what that means is that in one lifetime for example you will get robbed and that will be unfair for you in that lifetime but simultaneously you're also living as the person who robbed you you see so that person who robbed you they get to enjoy the money they stole from you so that's the fairness pay back but who's it paid back to you think it's paid back to them no it's paid back to you because you're gonna be the one who gets robbed from and the one who Rob's and then enjoys that money see so you're gonna experience both sides of every equation in life a very situation so whatever you think is unfair now you'll experience the opposite of it you'll experience everything and by doing that it will be one complete fare perfection but of course that takes a radical degree of awakening to realize how about winning versus losing gain verses loss have you noticed how relative this is people get hung up on being a winner or being a loser they build their entire identity around this look at our president he's obsessed with being a winner and not being a loser like it's driving his whole damn life look at what it's making him do it's driving him crazy he actually thinks it's that there are winners and losers in life success versus failure a lot of people get hung up trying to be successful in life and not being a failure because their father didn't give them enough love so they need to prove something to themselves and to their father or to whatever notion they have see without realizing that of course success is all relative what is what is success is earning a hundred million dollars is that success or is becoming awakened and raising your capacity to love or is that success or having a successful marriage with with beautiful children's that success what is success is there even such a thing as failure people become very depressed by believing that they've failed in life or they failed in their career they fail as an artist or they fail to as a husband or as a wife or as a son or a daughter see so this is not just philosophy it's very practical stuff here we're talking about fake versus genuine what happens when you make a fake that is so good that you can't distinguish it from something genuine does it stop being fake at that point fiction versus nonfiction a lot of times fiction has more truth in it than nonfiction have you noticed that good fiction always has a lot of truth in it and a lot of nonfiction doesn't or it has shallow truth cowardice versus bravery these seem like opposites but are they really most people who do brave stuff they do it despite the fear they have the line between some act of bravery and cowardice is very very thin a lot thinner than most people think a lot of people get in their mind that well well that person he's brave he's a brave person and that person's a coward well of course sometimes it's very clear like that some people are very fearful and therefore cowardly but a lot of what we would call brave people that we idolize really you know they're just like hairs with the way from having been a coward the difference is very small and a lot of people could be brave about one thing but then cowardly in some other thing so it's not like you're brave across the board in all situations there are certain areas in life where you'll find it easy to be brave and other areas in life where you'll find it very difficult to be brave you'll be a coward in those areas those will be like your weak spots but see what if someone gets it in their mind that all have a coward I have a coward and they keep telling themselves that story all the time and they start to believe in it they build an identity out of being coward based on a couple of cherry-picked you know situations from their life how about slave versus master you can't have a slave without a master and you can't have a master without a slave in a certain sense and this is this is sort of the whole idea of things going full circle a master a slave master is enslaved by owning slaves he's enslaved to that paradigm see he's enslaved to being a slave master now of course being a slave master is better than being a slave but you're still not free as a slave master how about superficial versus profound this is very relative abstract versus concrete general versus specific growth versus decay growth and decay always follow one another people keep chasing never-ending growth never-ending profits never-ending excitement never-ending happiness never-ending personal growth it doesn't happen whatever goes up must come down as the saying goes how about versus calm you can transcend this duality to an absolute calm calm with the capital C by awakening about arrogance versus humility a lot of times the most humble people are the ones who were extremely arrogant earlier in their life so really what happened is that their humility is not in opposition to their arrogance it's actually the consequence the culmination of arrogance is humility because you act very arrogantly especially when you're young in your 20s and 30s and then you become wiser you discover deeper truths and you use self-reflect and you see your arrogance with the airiness with which you behaved and you you got humbled by your own arrogance it becomes disgusting to you you can't stand it anymore but then you become humble you get sick of your own arrogance how about the duality of violence versus peace war versus peace a lot of people get hung up on this and uh and a lot of liberals and progressives get hung up on this because liberals tend to get this idea that well peace is good vile is bad war is bad all war is bad all war is wrong there shouldn't be war speaking of shouldn't shouldn't be war there shouldn't be any war without realizing that actually it's only possible to have peace through violence and through war so you can transcend this duality and you can realize that there is only peace as an absolute peace with a capital P and what that means is that even when war is going on your collection enough to realize that that war that violence is actually leading to an ultimate greater peace that's part of the whole long-term design of the universe is that every act is ultimately leading towards greater greater good and greater peace greater love greater unity greater consciousness see but most people aren't you stuck in the tug of war to realize the function of war and violence they just want it to end but what they're doing in that situation is they're just they're mistaking peace with a lowercase P for peace with an uppercase P you can't just have total peace without any war violence can't have that there's a reason why war happens and violence happens because it should happen you need to surrender your notion that it shouldn't happen now that doesn't mean that you can't take actions to limit war and violence so I'm not saying you know go nuts and start bombing everyone that's not what I'm saying I'm just saying that if bombing happens when it does happen since it is happening it is happening and therefore it should be happening and you need to realize that you can realize what is the role that that bombing is playing the larger scheme of everything that's something that many liberals and progressives just can't stomach that it's it's beyond them because they're they're stuck on this relative duality personal versus impersonal is the universe personal or impersonal it's it's so both it's so much both it's so impersonal and yet it's also so deeply personal that's what makes it so interesting that's the paradox so you'll discover that when you awaken innocent versus guilty oh this is this is hornet's nest people start arguing about where guilt and blame should go and who's really innocent that becomes a dualistic trap past versus future have you noticed that the past or that the future always becomes the past and the past has always been a future at some point until it happened and then it became the past confused versus clear capitalism versus socialism versus communism oh man people are getting so confused about these labels these political labels or for that matter conservative versus liberal this duality it's a totally relative duality what does it really mean to be conservative or liberal I mean people who were liberals 50 years ago are now conservatives legal versus illegal this of course all relative countries have very different léo systems we make them up out of thin air criminal versus non criminal criminal versus police terrorist versus non terrorist these are all very tricky dichotomies you know criminal versus police when you create this dichotomy it makes it seem as though the police can never be criminal but we have to realize that the police can also be criminals so you know in many third-world countries the police are more criminal than the criminals are that they're supposed to be policing so that that's exactly what that yin-yang symbol is showing you you know in the white there's a dot of black and you gotta be mindful of that otherwise what's gonna happen you're gonna be you're gonna be running the police department not realizing that there's a giant cancer corruption growing in your Police Department terrorist vs. non terrorist people get this idea that it's very easy to classify what a terrorist is but you know as we discovered after the Iraq war and with all the fiasco with Guantanamo Bay and imprisoning and extraordinary rendition all this kind of shady stuff that the u.s. was doing all these enemy combatants that were classified as terrorists so they could be tortured and and interrogated in cruel ways a lot of them it turns out you know years later we see the reports leaking a lot of them like we're not even close to terrorists they were just like random guys that were picked up in Iraq or somewhere else you know that we're mistaken for a terrorist you know just like an innocent mistake and he was just like a guy walking down the street and then he gets into some you know a Guantanamo prison gets gets tortured like he has no information to give you but he's just classified as a terrorist he gets no due process doesn't see a judge for decades can't defend himself eats thinking about it's a horrific situation but a lot of people they just say well the government called him a terrorist so he must be a terrorist and then what qualifies the terrorists you got to be a Muslim to be a terrorist mmm does a white guy shooting up a school or a church does that count as a terrorist many white guys think no terrorists must be Muslims see so this notion of terrorism gets linked with nationalism these categories become very very black and white very overly generalized and lead to all sorts of delusions and bad policy hero versus villain you know my favorite movies is where the hero and the villain aren't very clear [ __ ] with your mind because it's very easy to write a story or a movie or you have just a clear hero clear villain but that's not how it works in real life in real life you've got that white but it's got a spot of black and you've got that black but it's got a spot of white so if you really want to write a good story as a writer you got to really understand this psychological stuff you know if you watch actualize that org for five years and you learn everything I talk about and you do the practices and you're a writer you want to write stories you're gonna you're gonna be a [ __ ] genius at writing stories cuz you're going to know all the emotional buttons to push and you're gonna be able to write characters that are just like so psychologically true so psychologically true because you're gonna for example understand that you need to give your villain some redeeming loving qualities you need to show how your villain when you're when your villain is doing evil in whatever story you're writing write it in such a way such that the audience realizes that the evil he's doing is actually being done out of love from his perspective that's how you write a good villain and and then with the hero the hero you got to give him some weaknesses he can't be a superhero strong he has to have legitimate weaknesses and aspects of darkness that pull him away from his heroism into villainy that's how you write a a realistic and emotionally resonant hero and then when you get them fighting with each other weren't conflicting with each other dad you had this interesting interplay that's how a great story is is made see you got to really understand human psychology it's a right good story in fact one of the reasons I got into studying human psychology is because I wanted to be a writer I wanted to write science fiction when I was younger and I was really interesting like how do I make a good film and I didn't want just to make he's just evil like I really wanted my villain to be relatable and I wanted the audience to have empathy for the villain in fact I wanted the villain to end up being like the the main part the shining part of the whole story not the hero so that's a little tangent for you journey versus destination a lot of people chase destinations without realising that the journey and the destination are holding the same ruler versus ruled ugly versus beautiful that of course can be transcended to beauty with a capital B where you see everything as beauty there's no such thing as ugliness there's only beauty when you get to the absolute art versus non art discord versus harmony masturbation versus sex this one's funny people get hung up about masturbating and fab nofap and all this but when you become truly conscious what you realize when you realize non-duality when you realize oneness is actually you realize that all of this is just God's masturbatorium God is just masturbating that's all God is doing cuz God is one so there's nobody else here but you you are God so anyone you're having sex with is you masturbating so what you're doing is you're using their body to masturbate there's no difference between masturbation and sex not really not if you take a high-enough perspective on it student versus teacher well the best teachers are usually great students and also if you want to learn a lot if you want to be a really good student try being a teacher teaching is one of the best ways to study child versus parent or child versus adult we create these cat korie's but you know what a lot of adults are more immature than some children and of course every adult is itself a child name me one adult who is not a child at the same time every adult was a child and still is a child to some other adult which is why your mom still treats you as a child even when you're growing up because she still sees you as a child from her perspective you know it's all relative and then of course children become parents children have other children just shows you how interesting the interplay is it's really profound when you start to contemplate this and I recommend that you contemplate all these dualities for yourself don't just take my word for it really think about it there's there's a lot here there's a reason I made this long list healthy versus unhealthy personal development versus or sorry product development versus marketing product development not person the moment so what I mean by this is you know in certain companies they will separate the product development department from the marketing department so like the product whatever pertinents we're making some phone some gadget some iPod or whatever okay so we're making this iPod that's done in the product development department the engineers do that and then we have the marketing department who's creating the marketing campaign for the iPod and they don't communicate with each other they're separated in two different buildings around the world they don't talk to each other and then you got a terrible product and marketing campaign both to have a really successful product launch you need to integrate from the very beginning the product development with the marketing a lot of newbie business people they they spend all their time on product development zero time on marketing and then they develop a product the product might be great but then the marketing sucks so the product never actually gains traction nobody knows about it nobody buys it it goes out of business because you didn't pay attention to how the product would be marketed you got to design your product in such a way that it will market itself that takes work so the best product developers are often the best marketers you see oftentimes by studying marketing you can learn what kind of product you should be developing like what kind of features do people want what kind of features are actually marketable and then sometimes you have the opposite problem which is where marketing dictates to the product development people what they should be developing and so then what you get is you get a sort of a a very marketing cheap salesy type of product which is trying to appeal to everybody and it doesn't really have a heart or a soul that a great inventor or designer or engineer or artist would have put in to developing that product so there has to be a delicate balance between those two if you want to get it right a lot of times notice within academia and universities they create different majors different sub schools different departments mm-hmm like you've got the engineering department which is separate from the computer science departments separate from the biology departments separate from the humanities separate from the arts they're all in different buildings they don't talk to each other they criticize and look down upon [ __ ] so these CAD but these are all artificial dualities there's no real separation between the humanities and the sciences and the arts this is a fiction there's no real separation between biology and chemistry this is a fiction and this creates bad science because most of the interesting science especially nowadays is happening at the intersection point between the hard sciences and the soft sciences and the arts and the sciences and mathematics and physics and chemically it's all in-between in the cracks is where you find the really juicy stuff how about uncivilized versus civilized well that's very relative Europeans have considered most other nations around the world and peoples around the world very uncivilized and yet you go to the Amazon you discover some some tribe of the Amazon that doesn't barely wear any clothes and and yet they have very sophisticated spiritual wisdom teachings traditions that are more sophisticated for example in the Amazon you'll find very sophisticated spiritual psychological development through the use of ayahuasca for example stuff that in America in the West Western psychologists and psychotherapists can't even comprehend the degree of wisdom that might be present in some shaman who's doing ayahuasca and yet they considered the shaman to be the uncivilized one how funny is that how about spirituality versus politics or church versus state you could make the argument that it's important to separate Church versus you know church from state that is true that was an important development within our politics but at the same time you also can't separate spirituality from politics when your politics is divorced completely from all spirituality what you get is you get a sort of technocracy and a sort of corporatist evil just materialism run amok so actually you do need spirituality to inform politics just in the right way not as an organized religion per se but you do need spiritual wisdom within politics or it's it's going to be really bad and in fact in the future we're gonna see a trend where more and more politicians are more open about their spiritual not about their religion but about their spirituality and how that shapes their vision their goals their values and their leadership ability in fact some of the best political leaders were deeply spiritual practitioners like Gandhi would be a great example of that and we're gonna see more of that in the future it's really difficult to get that balance right because politics tends to be very dirty and but at the same time is precisely because politics is so dirty that it's so deeply in need of consciousness and spiritual wisdom and spiritual leaders at the same time when you combine spirituality and politics you get a really nasty combination such that the politics can end up dragging the spirituality into the mud so you got to be very firmly rooted in your spirituality has to be very genuine and authentic in order for you then to be also a good political leader very few people can pull that off and that's because they're they're not practicing spirituality on deep enough level it's just mostly dogma and beliefs that's not gonna cut it so if we're talking about dogma and beliefs in organized religion then yes it's very important to have a separation of church and state important versus unimportant that's very relative significant versus insignificant mother versus father what if you are raised by two fathers two gay men gay couple they adopt you and they raise you do you think that's gonna affect your understanding of the word mother and father that category for you you will have a different sense of that category than traditionally raised people about democracy versus tyranny it might seem that these are two totally opposite things but not necessarily a lot of tyranny can come out of democracy Hitler was democratically elected see a lot of times unconscious ethnocentric people will elect a highly ethnocentric authoritarian leader who then becomes a tyrant but he's lefted democratically and then even in a democracy you could still have a sort of tyranny of the masses where the majority can oppress the minority which is why minority rights protecting my only right is so important sober versus intoxicated this one's very interesting because sometimes people say well Leo was did you have a real awakening or was it a psychedelic trip that you did and I look at that and I say well what's the difference what's the difference you're making this category of being conscious without a psychedelic or with psychedelic whether you're intoxicated or not it's still you're still having some kind of awakening now of course there are important differences I'm not saying that they're indistinguishable but all I'm just saying that the boundary is not so easily set as you think it's possible to have a deeper awakening intoxicated than sober see most people don't think that way most people think very simplistic like well if it's intoxicated that it can't be a real enlightenment it can't be real wisdom it can't be real insight it can't be real truth man uh-huh I've access deeper truths than you will ever access sober while I was intoxicated so just keep that in mind and not just me many many other people you've got to be intoxicated in the right way beginning versus end have you noticed that every mmm end is some new beginning and every beginning has an end need versus want that's very tricky these change so much your knees and your wants what you need what you feel you need a billionaire might feel like he needs a yacht and you might say well he doesn't really need it well to him it seems like he needs it and as long as it feels that way to him it'll it'll be a need not just a want most of the stuff in life that you need you don't actually need you want it then again you need to satisfy your wants it's sort of programmed into you do you need to live or do you want to live think about that is there a need for you to be alive or is it something you want there's no need so in that sense what do you need at all you might say well you need water and air well only if you need to be alive but you don't need to be alive so if you want to be alive then you want water and you want air see how we can play with these it's very fluid pain versus pleasure people hold these opposites when really they're not it's actually possible to enjoy pain and pleasure can get so pleasureful and so so much too much too cloying to the point where it gets nauseating too much pleasure and it's possible to transcend living your life between these poles of chasing pleasure and avoiding pain does that tug of war never ends you're always stuck bouncing back and forth yo-yoing between those two and that in itself becomes painful and then become quite frustrating so it's possible to transcend that such that you're in sort of a state of joy which transcends both pleasure and pain individual versus group or individualism versus collectivism I see people talking about this in the political context as if like individualism is good and collectivism is bad or vice-versa no there needs to be a very delicate balance between these two you can't have a society that totally values individualism and nothing no collectivism or vice-versa it's very important to strike a delicate balance between those two because actually the importance of collectivism is that when you get the collectivism right when you get the right collective it actually empowers individualism that's what people to understand who are harsh individualist s' that's what a lot of like libertarians and conservatives don't understand about socialism for example if we get socialism done right it'll actually enable individualism because right now under the current system in America for example your individualism is crippled by the economic conditions under which you're in so the capitalist system actually makes it less possible for the majority of people to be individuals and to be free that's the paradox and irony of it but of course if the collectivism becomes too much then you get the sort of Borg collective scenario where it's sort of like I guess a little bit like Communist China where you know the government is is censoring everything and dictating everything you do you know implanting chips into children so that they can monitor them this source of stuff that's happening in China and you know that that is problematic that does actually hurt individualism so there's an important role for both of these forces and really what you do is through non-duality and spirituality you transcend them both and you realize how important both of them are you need to allow people to be individuals but at the same time individuals also need to recognize that they must sacrifice for the collective good for society it's not just about you the way that libertarians I think like well if I just get what I want and you know I'm left alone and I'm doing good then that's all that like matters and that any any sort of collectivism well that's a man that's infringing on my rights you know taxation that's infringing on my rights to keep all of my income you're taking my income at the point of a gun but you live in a society dude you live in a [ __ ] society you're a tribal ape creature and the only reason you're alive and that you were even born is because you're part of this collective whether you like it or not the problem is that libertarians don't accept that they're in a collective they don't fathom this and that being in a collective means certain sacrifices have to be made you don't just get individualism to the hilt primary versus secondary as a duality fought feeling emotion we already talked about that a bit inclusion versus exclusion theists versus atheist this one I've talked about this one at length in the past so I'll just briefly touch on it most theists and atheists think that the spectrum just has two ends to it and that's it they don't recognize there's sort of a meta level and meta meta meta levels that incorporates both and you can transcend both theism and atheism they're really not opposites at all most theists and atheists have a lot in common a lot more than they're willing to admit and they both have a lot of delusions that they're not willing to admit consistent versus inconsistent moderate versus extreme what is extreme extreme is completely relative attraction versus repulsion these are defined in terms of each other contraction versus expansion dominant versus submissive you need both for that relationship to work gross versus subtle popular versus unpopular main stream versus niche what's mainstream today used to be niche ten years ago and vice-versa status quo versus change again in politics people love to get hung up on this they either defend the status quo or they want change without realizing the importance that both forces play it's important to preserve the status quo in a certain way and it's important also to get healthy change it's possible to get dysfunctional and unhealthy status quo and also dysfunctional and unhealthy change so it's not enough to just say that you're for change what kind of change are you talking about and it's not enough to denounce the status quo because you're gonna recognize all the foundation that the status quo gives you that you wouldn't otherwise have all the luxuries and freedoms you have given the status quo I've given the infrastructure built by society you know you gotta respect that to a certain degree incremental change versus revolutionary change people argue about this should we change government a little bit or a lot and then the revolutionaries they criticize the incrementalist s-- because the incrementalist are viewed as just being too you know too lukewarm to moderate and the revolutionaries they don't realize the importance of incremental change you can't just revolutionize everything it's gonna be unstable and it's gonna collapse but also they're right in a certain sense because the moderates an incrementalist you know they're a little too conservative and in certain times you need revolutionary change you need a big change sometimes in your life or in your government in order to move up to the next level so how do you find that balance well it's tricky it's not black-and-white stable versus unstable temporary versus eternal this is one of those absolutes you can transcend this to eternal with a capital e where you realize that everything is eternal it exists outside of time this very moment exists outside of time it's an absolute addition vs. subtraction for example isn't it interesting how you can add a negative number to a positive number or you can like you can subtract two negative numbers and then that like gives you a positive number it's kind of weird how the rules of that work when you start to work with like double negatives mixing and matching positives and negatives in your addition and then you know you learn those rules in elementary school I'm so so like your your adding and subtracting positives and negatives and it can work in counterintuitive ways we're like negatives can add up into a positive how about work versus play do you think of your work as separate from your play or is your to work your play see what determines whether something is work forces play have you noticed sometimes you're playing a game it's a fun game but then you start to grind on that game and now it feels like work and then sometimes you're working but it's if you're so engrossed in it you're so excited by it and you're so passionate about it like you're following your life purpose let's say and now it starts to feel like you're playing and you're not working like if you're maybe doing music you're playing with music or you're playing with paint on the canvas if you're an artist or you're playing with words if you're a writer and then your work becomes play how do you turn work into play and how do you prevent play from becoming work not so easy content versus context this one's tricky a lot of content becomes the context for yet more content context is usually a self content of some kind so sort of like content is nested within context but then you can have multiple nestings multiple contexts within each other multiple sets of content closed versus open local versus global minimum versus maximum buyer versus seller lender versus borrower entrance versus exit every entrance is an exit unless of it's a one-way door and then it only is an exit or an entrance like versus dislike ignorance versus wisdom emotional versus rational this is a really tricky duality that people get stuck on they either think of themselves as being emotional or rational they side with one or the other but that realizing that the two interplay with each other a lot of rational people don't realize that their rationality itself is underpinned by emotional needs and attitudes and that all their logic and reason is actually infested and motivated by unconscious emotions which will be a rude awakening for them to discover because it'll it'll burst that entire rationalist bubble that they're operating under usually these are staged orange people functional versus dysfunctional very relative employee versus employer sexual versus non-sexual what makes a thing sexual it's kind of a gray area you know people have weird sexual fetishes our feet sexual or non-sexual for some people their sexual leader versus follower you can't have a leader without followers you can't have a follower that leader victim versus abuser usually these two you know as they say it takes two to tango usually these two kind of work in tandem with each other if you get victimized a lot it's because you're playing a victim a lot and then you're playing into this into this role of victim abuser and likewise if you're an abuser and you tend to seek out victims to relate to creating these dysfunctional relationships and a lot of times the victim him or herself is an abuser also in a different way in a different scenario so while they're complaining about being a victim they themselves are abusing somebody else predator-prey friend versus enemy us versus them people versus corporations this is an interesting one especially in the context of politics we didn't talk about all the corporations are the evil ones that of course corporations do do a lot of evil selfish stuff that benefits only them but then again don't treat corporations as though they're separate from people who creates these corporations who runs these corporations a corporation is made out of its people so to really understand the politics of corporations you've all felt you have to you have to really understand that corporations are people because they're made out of people in a sense and they have a similar psychology and dynamics to people because they're mad at people private versus public it's another thorny duality for for politics like we tend to think of like there's the private realm and there's the public realm and they're separate but of course they're not separate your private life will bleed over into your public life and your public life will bleed into your private life how people think of you publicly will affect how you deal with your family and your children and your wife or your husband and how you deal with your family your children your wife and your husband will show up publicly and people will judge you for that a lot of people who are public celebrities and so forth they try to kind of like live double lives they have a public life and have a private life and they're separate and they act differently publicly than they do privately but then that becomes difficult to maintain and yet at the same time you also need to maintain some distance you can't just you know reveal your credit card number to everybody and like show pictures of your naked children to people and in public you know you got to have some boundaries so how do you strike this balance well it's tricky the whole point of life is that the devil is in the details what life is is reality sorting out all of this and working with these boundaries you see is that it's a dialectical dynamic activity of drawing these boundaries so your mind is constantly doing it but it's always happening in reality as well stuff like predator and prey you know they're they're always fighting with each other chasing and running away and doing that and who's gonna win well you have to actually have kind of a clashing of opposites to see who wins the tug-of-war you don't know ahead of time competition versus cooperation this is an interesting duality oftentimes you compete with those people that you cooperate with the most for example if if you're working in some office you've got 20 people on your team and you guys are working together on some project you're supposed to all be cooperating yet at the same time there's a lot of competition within that cooperation precisely because those people working with you are the ones who are going to be now considered for the next promotion and there's only so many of those promotions you're not and not everyone's gonna get one so you're trying to cooperate and compete at the same time that's tricky how do you balance that safety versus danger that's very tricky to balance as well for example with with with things like gun gun control or even with controlling drugs and psychedelics you know there's certain dangers with psychedelics you can't just give it to everybody that would be dangerous at the same time you don't want to overemphasize the danger of psychedelics the way that it's been demonized in our culture to the point where many people who suffer from PTSD depression anxiety ADHD and so forth who would benefit enormous Lee and could heal themselves through psychedelics they can't because people just naively think that they're dangerous because the dangers are completely overblown so it's not the case that psychedelics don't have any danger they do it's just it's been overblown mediocre versus excellent implicit versus explicit culture versus cults very interesting what's considered a cult and what's considered mainstream culture a lot of times that difference is very thin as we see in our politics right now a lot of our politics is dominated by by cult psychology cults of personality which have become mainstream in a certain sense ordinary versus extraordinary and of course you can transcend that to experience the absolute which is extraordinary the capital E when everything becomes extraordinary nothing is ordinary to you anymore and lastly serious vs playful a lot of times comedians will actually use humor and be playful about the most serious things precisely because that's where you need humor the most is when something serious happens it's sort of a psychological coping mechanism sometimes something is so serious like have you ever experienced a trauma so bad situation so bad that you just say you start to laugh because if you took it any more seriously it would be tragic it would be suicidal and I'm gonna end on on two dualities here which one serious one or one playful one so the first one is the serious one masculine versus feminine or man versus woman I touched on this already but it really bears going into a little bit deeper because we're seeing a trend now culturally especially with young males where they're sort of reacting against feminism against femininity and there's a sort of desire for hyper masculinity and macho Ness the sort of red pill culture this MOG men going their own way this mocktail culture pickup culture gender norms are being questioned homosexuality is becoming normalized but yet people still resist it especially more conservative parts of the country and though in the world still resist it still deny it and you know common sense people say Leo what are you talking about I mean isn't it obvious there's a man there's a woman you can clearly tell them apart is this really a category that the mind creates I mean is the mind really creating a dick with balls and a vagina is that what the mind is creating of course not of course the mind is not actually creating the physical organs in that way that you think that simplistic way but what you're doing is you're creating these categories of man versus woman and part of the reason that we're having this sort of backlash against social justice warriors is because they're blurring the boundary post-modernism is blurring the three between what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman homosexuality does that - which is why there's homophobia because really homophobia what that's about is it's about not accepting your own feminine side trying to act macho when really you have some feminine side in you that you're denying and repressing and creating a shadow out of so his man and woman is male and female is this a mental construct the answer is yes it is gender roles are categories that you're constructing using your mind now of course it's not just you personally using your mind it's the entire culture and also all the ramifications and repercussions and significance that comes with this and it has huge enormous significance and it's precisely because the significance is so large and it's so practical and useful that you consider it so real when it's actually not real so um first of all you can have biological organs that people are born with which is just a weird combination of stuff it's not just your standard set of parts that a man and a woman has it's some weird combination so how do you classify those people are they men are they women what set of criteria are you gonna use can you see how it's relative in that sense so you can see in that edge case how those edge cases are precisely what breaks down the duality and you should expect that such education exists because otherwise you get this very simplistic notion of thinking like well only humans can be born with either one penis or with one vagina and that's it that's the only way they can be born with it's just not medically that's false so you gotta count for those edge cases but even if we ignore those educators and we just look at anatomical man and anatomical women let's say they the men have X and y chromosomes and the women just have the the X chromosomes and you're just gonna judicata that way that's still that's still a mental construction because your notion of man and woman goes way way way beyond any kind of sense of chromosomes in fact what you're doing is you're using the notion of chromosomes and biology or physiology to backwards rationalize your concepts and categories of man and woman you have very rich categories of man and woman with a lot of ancillary associations so when I say man you think of certain things and not other things you think of beards and you think of strength than you think of you know fast cars and a lot of associations and when you think of women you think of a lot of other sorts of associations so you got to understand that you're a category this duality it's not just as simple as like oh well it's one thing or it's another thing it's like no there's there it brings with it so many assumptions and it interconnects with the rest of your view of the world and who you are your personal identity right this is all very deep and it's all wired into your emotions as well so it's not just like some dry thought of like well we're just gonna we're gonna create a formula for identifying a man versus a woman yes you can create a formula which will be maybe 98% accurate and identifying a man versus a woman like you could train a computer to do that a computer could take photographs of the below the waist of a man and a woman and be very accurate identifying which was a man which is a woman but um but this tells you nothing about the fact that these are some sort of real or absolute categories that are mind independent because when we say man or woman it's mostly all the association's you have with that that matter not your at your ability to identify one versus the other and we're not saying here don't make the mistake of thinking that what I'm saying here is that it's impossible to distinguish a man versus a woman or it's impossible to distinguish for example safety versus danger where it's impossible to distinguish of mediocre film from an excellent film that's not what I'm saying you can distinguish these things just recognize that you are the one who is doing the distinguishing and also recognize what role does this play in how you then interact with life what significance do you attach to the distinction for example I can easily distinguish most men for most women as can some red pill mocktail guy but there's a very big difference between my understanding of men and women and my integration of masculine or feminine versus some MOC Thao guy because the mocktail guy will think of like a woman and then he'll have a bunch of associations women always cheat they're their [ __ ] they're [ __ ] they're there over feminizing young men there destroy society they're feminists feminism is wrong I've got some emotions about that as this guy this red pill guy I've got some I've got some insecurities about that that I'm hiding I've got a shadow I'm repressing I've got various political views there shouldn't be a woman president there shouldn't like there shouldn't be women in the military and women are weak they're the weaker sex and you know I need women force F for sex see it's not all negative of course your relationship is conflicted and and fragmented as this red pill mocked out guy because see on the one hand you hate women and you demonize women and judge them on the other hand you still need them because you've got your sexual needs so what do you do on the one hand you're criticizing women on the other hand you're going downloading porn and watching women and jerking off to them and getting your you know your sexual needs met that way you think that's not creating a problem in your minds there that you're gonna have to recognize reconcile later in your life it is it absolutely is so with spiritual practice as you become more conscious what you're gonna do is you're gonna transcend and incorporate or integrate masculine or feminine man and woman you're gonna stop identifying as a man or a woman and you're gonna realize that these are just two forces and that your your above and beyond that you are the absolute which includes everything and just to finally nail this point home one of my favorite video games is morrowind I love love love that gave so much and one of the sort of pieces of lore within morale it's got a very rich and deep lore that I haven't even really studied much but um part of it that I do know is they have this character called vivec and if you're if you're sort of a gamer nerd you know vivec then you know vivec is multi-coloured he's divided in half he's actually not a he it's sort of like a he-she it's it's a mixture of male and female which is very interesting and vivec also in this in the lore there he's supposed to be kind of awakened enlightened in this null state which is very interesting and so what it shows is that he is like a god a deity whose incorporated the male and the female aspects into himself or into herself as a powerful image but you know where they got that from they didn't make it up of course they got it from Hinduism in Hinduism they have a deity called and this is a tongue-twister of a name our Don our Ishwara our Donna Roush vara and this deity is half male half female and it sort of represents the pinnacle of non-duality when you become fully conscious of the absolute you transcend the male and the female unifying them both not excluding either one not blending them together into a into a muddled mess so it's not like you become indistinct the distinction is still there it's just sort of like half and half and they're well integrated together and they function harmoniously rather than a fragmented neurotic way daddy is the highest ideal and that is exactly what you will become if you go all the way with your spiritual work and you fully actualize the absolute you will transcend masculine and feminine and when you do you will discover a joy and a strength which is so much more powerful than any kind of red pill hyper masculine long town nonsense that you've been studying or learning or any kind of pick up nonsense that you've been studying and learning this will be a power that transcends mortal power you will become a god integrating it all and that's when you will finally be at peace and that's when you will finally be able to love and that's when you will finally understand everything and that's when everything will make sense to you and that's when you will transcend all this crazy dualistic back-and-forth tug-of-war nonsense that you've been engaged in your entire life this is what you're looking for is you're looking for the ultimate integration you're looking for the ultimate unity and we'll talk a little bit more about that in part two when we really get to the deep existential dualities we still haven't gotten to them yet this is still the beginning of this series finally though I want to end on a funny note which is the duality of cat versus dog most people think that there's a cat and there's a dog and you can't have both well I would challenge that I would challenge that well the way that Nickelodeon did with the cartoon cat dog it's a funny cartoon I used to watch when I was back in the 90s late 90s this cartoon came out funny cartoon about cat and cat dog seriously though you know human beings will be able to genetically engineer animals we're already starting to genetically engineer even human embryos it's already happening so it's only a matter of time before we start to generate means from your animals and you better believe that some scientists will figure out a way to take the genes of a cat and the genes the dog blend them together in some weird way and come up with some sort of hybrid so the reason I'm telling you that it's not just some interesting science fiction fact I'm telling you that to show you how your categories are not as solid as you think they are and I'm also telling you this so that you prepare yourself mentally and psychologically prepare yourself for the radical changes that are coming in the future our technology is accelerating crazy [ __ ] is gonna be happening in the next hundred years prepare yourself prepare your children for weird stuff that's gonna be happening wouldn't be mixing man and machine man and animal and man and plants and all sorts of stuff is gonna be mixing man and woman like [ __ ] is gonna get mixed up in the future we're moving towards greater integration so you need to start to appreciate that open your mind to that and not get so stuck in your own categories alright that's it for part one make sure you stay tuned for part two that's going to be the culmination that's going to be the whole point of part one where we'll be talking about scientific and existential dualities see you then you