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[Music] welcome to understanding duality part three existential dualities finally we've reached the end of our list we've reached the most important part after part 1 and part 2 which I assume you watched go watch those if you haven't now we're ready to really dig into the most important stuff and we're gonna jump right in this is the realm of metaphysics and spirituality this is the most important stuff that you need to understand in order to understand all of life how humanity works and what reality is and really you also need to understand this to have a proper understanding of the foundations of science we're gonna be talking a lot about absolutes here and transcending relative into absolute and so try to keep an open mind and try to stay with me because we are going to be talking about things which are very paradoxical and counterintuitive and now we're going beyond what the ordinary human mind is capable of understanding and yet at the same time you can still understand it but you need to approach it from higher realms of consciousness so let's begin first on our list is the duality between subjective and objective or subject and object this is a very tricky duality that is at the very heart of science and materialist metaphysics and just the conventional dualistic way of seeing the world so conventionally we're born and then we start to think like well there's me and there's the rest of the world I am the subject the rest of the world is the object and I can have my own subjective personal experiences but then there's like objective facts the objective universe out there which is separate from me the subject and then let's go about doing science and then when we start doing science of course we run into this problem of like well is is this evidence that we have for some scientific theory is this evidence subjective evidence or is it objective evidence and then of course within science we like to privileged the objective over the subjective somehow if it's a subjective piece of evidence than somehow that's not really true or valid because it must be objective of course not realizing that all objective evidence or any notion of objectivity whatsoever that you might have and any objective objects even you know take a physical object like a chair or a table it is only accessible to you as a subjective experience and so ultimately if you want to get technical the only thing that there is is subjective experience there's no such thing as objectivity in the way that science or mainstream culture holds it as so in fact objectivity is couched within subjectivity in this sense this makes the entire enterprise of acquiring knowledge and figuring out how reality works very very tricky and very counterintuitive and twisted in unexpected ways so for example a hundred years ago with the development of quantum mechanics what good physicists realized the ones who were actually working on quantum mechanics and had an open mind and who were visionaries people like Niels Bohr and Schrodinger Einstein plunk and others what they realized is that wait a minute the way we were doing physics before and science as a whole before where we were assuming that our measurements of the universe can be separated from ourselves and our instruments as if there's like a physical object out there and I can just measure how long it is using a ruler and it doesn't matter whether I'm a human or what kind of instrumentation I'm using or consciousness doesn't play any role to this know what they discovered is it's all instrument intimately entangled and interconnected and most people today a hundred years later still don't understand most scientists today still don't understand just how radical quantum mechanics is if you want to understand that more depth go check out my multiple part series called quantum mechanics debunks materialism where I go to a lot of depth about the details of that it's a little tricky but basically what they discovered is that when you're making a measurement of a molecule or an atom or some some type of particle the very fact that you're measuring it itself affects the object that you're measuring such that you can't even say that there's a you and an object or a measuring device and an object there are literally one it's all entangled and that was of course a radical and very important discovery that still hasn't percolated through mainstream culture people don't realize the significance but in particular the metaphysical ramifications and the epidermal logical ramifications of this discovery but the the but the hope folks who are working on it they they understood it was extremely radical extremely radical so what happens as you're going deeper into personal development and ultimately spirituality is that you start to realize that the line between subjects and objects literally starts to disappear where once you thought it was unquestionable such that literally a physical object that you're looking at a table a car a cat or your parents somebody you love another person a clerk at the grocery store you look at them and you actually are so conscious now beyond ordinary human consciousness you're now entering a non-dual state of consciousness where you literally perceive that person's face or that physical object as being not just an object but also simultaneously a subject so in a sense every physical object in the universe is self-illuminated self-knowing self-aware awareness is not localized within a human being or a human brain or within yourself awareness is omnipresent and it's literally everywhere and everything such that you weren't looking at the table you are the table now of course it might not feel to you that way right now if you're only beginning this journey that's because you haven't done enough concentration work and you have shifted your state of consciousness enough to realize this it's a very radical shift requires quite a bit of concentration work to be able to access it and so ultimately what you realize with spirituality and the reason we call it spirituality at all and why we call it spirit is that the entire universe is one subject it's a subject of itself the subject and object are one you can't split them apart and this is quite counterintuitive because you might wonder well how could there be a subject without an object or how can there be an object than a subject well it turns out it can you can transcend subject and object into an absolute third kind like we talked about in parts 1 & 2 which is absolute subjectivity absolute subjectivity so that's absolute with capital a subjectivity with a capital S and when you realize that you realize holy everything is spirit everything is God everything is a subject the subject was never located inside of a body the subject was the entire room the whole time everywhere you go is the subject you are the subject there is only one subject in the entire universe and that subject is God that subject is looking through every being every human being every animal every bacteria every sentient and non-sentient creature across the entire universe and if there are multiple universes it's looking through multiple universes there's only one subject and you are that subject in this human form that you're in right now and that's what you realize and there you have transcended the subject and object with a lowercase s and a lowercase o next on my list we have the duality of of esoteric versus exoteric this relates to how we understand religion so when we talk about religion in common parlance mainstream parlance usually people when they hear the word religion they think of exoteric forms of spirituality which just means that it's sort of a materialistic externalized version of spirituality where God is some bearded man sitting up in the clouds there's an actual physical heaven you can go to after you die there's a physical hell there's a physical devil there's a physical good and evil the Bible is inerrant and absolutely true and you must read the Bible because it contains the truth all this sort of stuff so it's a very externalized gross form of spirituality and of course it turns a lot of rationally minded people off because you have to be pretty naive to literally believe in things like Noah's Ark and certain other mythical type [Music] stories that you can read in various kinds of holy books you have to be pretty naive to take those literally but what people don't realize that there's the esoteric version of spirituality or religion which is actually the kernel that is responsible for the existence of an exoteric so what people don't understand is that you can't have an exoteric religion without an esoteric one first and so that's how every religion began every exoteric religion including Islam Christianity Judaism Buddhism Hinduism and so forth they all began as esoteric esoteric means going inside as Jesus said find the kingdom of heaven within that means it's inside of you it's something you are God is not out there in the clouds you are God that's mysticism that's as esoteric but of course these two are intimately connected together and so it's not so easy to actually separate the esoteric from the exoteric and so various kinds of pathologies result when people don't understand this distinction and all so they're unable to to transcend it and to realize that it's not like one is right and the other is wrong it's just that you have to you have to put the exoteric practices of religion into proper context and so ultimately when you do transcend the subjective objective duality that is present within exoteric religion you discover esoteric with a capital e true religion religion of the capital r and that religion looks almost nothing like what you imagined religion to be all those negative qualities that you attributed to religion like dogma and fundamentalism and violence and bigotry and ethnocentrism and racism and tribalism and versus them thinking and morality and all these sorts of negative things that you attributed to religion of the lowercase R you discover that a true religion is the opposite of all those things and then you really discover what people like Jesus or the Buddha or Muhammad taught and it's the opposite of what you think they taught and the only way you can realize that is by actually transcending transcending these dualities next on the list is the duality of metaphysics versus epistemology this is huge I've posted some videos about this on my blog where I talked about how a metaphysics and epistemology are connected it's very important to understand if you're if you're doing any kind of philosophy or intellectual activities if you're doing any kind of serious science this is so crucial to understand and yet nobody really understands it so what is the relationship between metaphysics and epistemology as it turns out they're deeply and intimately connected and so what you can realize is that epistemology or the pursuit of knowledge is intimately connected with being metaphysics is the question of being and then if a small Jesus question of how do we know anything well these are into connected as it turns out you can't separate them at all the way that Western philosophy tries to do sometimes and so what you discover is that actually metaphysics is absolute and that it's more fundamental than epistemology and so literally the distinction between knowing and being gets transcended such that you discover being with a capital B or metaphysics with capital m and you discover that it's actually by being things that you're able to know them at all there's a lot more I could say about that but we have to keep going because there's so many other items I need to cover on this list but that's that's a super profile that's a life-changing a career-changing insight if you have that if you understand what I just said there but don't think that you'll grasp it in just a few minutes this dis of study and and practice to be able to transcend the duality of metaphysics and epistemology into metaphysics with capital Emma now when I know something I don't just know it with the mind I actually become it like physically so I don't just know a chair I am the chair I don't just know God I am God and of course so are you next on the list is chaos versus order or disorder versus order oftentimes these are pitted against each other and oftentimes religious people they will put order up on a pedestal while demonizing and devaluing chaos or disorder but actually these two are just like the yin and the yang they're completely interrelated and you can't have one without the other and so you can transcend this duality to discover order with a capital o everything in the universe is exquisitely ordered including all the disorder and all the chaos you can't just have order with a lowercase o that excludes disorder and chaos you need to transcend that and realize that there's a delicate interplay between the two for example one of the most important scientific developments in Western science in the last hundred years was a development of chaos theory and chaos theory which I'm gonna have a vote on in the future dedicated episode because a complex and advanced topic what science has discovered in the 1960's and 1970's is that there's like a whole new branch of science the science of of complex nonlinear phenomena and what they discovered is that in fact most phenomena that science studies is chaotic and chaos doesn't mean complete randomness no no no what chaos means is that actually there is a delicate order but it's unpredictable even though it follows very strict physical laws and rules and yet it's still chaotic and some of the most interesting phenomena in the universe are chaotic phenomena for example like like the way the human brain works it's a chaotic system or the way that weather patterns work it's a chaotic system and it's quite difficult to predict and that allows it to be creative and new and fresh and not just some rigid mechanical system even though it still is a mechanical system but at the same time there's a certain eerie spookiness within the chaos within the chaos there's sort of a deeper layer of order and that's something we'll talk about in the future next on list is destruction versus creation people like to pit these against each other and of course creation tends to be elevated as the good one and destruction as the bad or the evil one but of course you can't have creation without destruction these are intimately connected and people just don't understand the profundity of this connection see to create a new life an old life has to die has to create space the only way there can be a new generation of human beings for example created is if an old generation is destroyed otherwise there's going to be too many human beings and of course if you create too many human beings that lease a destruction of lots of human beings overpopulation leads to destruction you see so there's always this delicate balance you need to create but then you also need to have an outlet for all your creation to them get cleared out so that a new space is created you create emptiness so to speak through destruction which then allows for new creation so it's the circle of life and even if you know let's say you're you're painting on a canvas or you're you're writing with a pencil let's say you know it's very nice to have an eraser so that you can erase what you've written or it's nice to have some sort of whitewash where you can whitewash your old paint away so that you can repaint something that you painted see that's that's very useful for example within a computer program if you're using something like Adobe Photoshop or whatever software you use to create stuff there's an undo button that's one of the most useful functions in the software is the undo button it lets you destroy the thing you just created which ultimately leads to a greater creation in the ultimate end you see how much worse would creations be on a computer if the undo button was destroyed see but some people they yes so hell-bent on destroying destruction they see you see the paradox here it's it's totally hypocritical because people who value creation really what they do is then they hate destruction and by hating destruction they want to destroy destruction so of course they're hypocrites but they're not aware of this but even if they got their way and they were able to destroy destruction what would that mean that would actually weaken creation because their notion of creation is creation with a cat with a lowercase C and you can transcend this duality by realizing creation with a upper see which is the whole of creation which of course encompasses both creation and destruction together into an absolute creation is an absolute so when we say that God is a creator what we mean is of course that God is both a creator and a destroyer at once God is a creator with a capital C got that good moving on love versus hate as a duality I think we've touched on this in the past but let me touch on it again because this one is so counter intuitive it it really throws people for a loop love versus hate you might wonder Leo why does God allow hatred in the world why didn't God just make everybody loving and if God allows hatred doesn't that mean that God actually hates and that God isn't all loving why does God allow racism and genocide and murder and dictators and corruption all this evil well it's because the way you that you're conceiving of love and hate is in there lowercase forms you're thinking of love as a lowercase L love which is a very selfish form of love so what you mean when you say love is you mean love that's good for me it's like I want to love the stuff that's easy to love so I will love rainbows and butterflies and unicorns I will love money when it comes my way I will love sex when it comes my way I will love when people love me so you know very selfish form love but then anything that happens in reality that doesn't suit my agenda or that impinges upon my survival needs that I hate that's bad stuff if some dictator comes to power or someone enslaves me or whatever then that's all bad I gotta hate that but see that's what you're doing you're hating but God is all loving love as an absolute God is absolute love love is not something God does love is something that God is and of course you are God but you're not conscious that you're God so you've separated yourself from God and you did this because you are incapable of loving everything about yourself see you hate yourself you hate your face you hate your belly you hate that that mole on your back you hate that hair that you have somewhere you hate this and that you hate everything if you look how much stuff you hate of the world that's why you judge and you constantly criticize see you're incapable of being all loving love is an absolute love with a capital L if you want more information on that go check out my in-depth episode called what is love where I go into a lot more detail so it's possible to transcend hate and love into love as an absolute love with a capital L this is the very being of God love is synonymous with truth and you can become directly conscious that you are loved and that's a hell of an insight transforms your entire life if you can transcend this duality in fact this is perhaps one of the most important aspects of non-duality is to realize not just that your emptiness but that emptiness is identical with love and that love is an absolute and that everything that happens happens out of love including all the hate so what this means when you transcend the duality of love IRS's hate into absolute love is you realize that all the murder and rape and slavery and corruption and genocide that has ever happened has happened out of pure love it's such a twisted mindfuck that completely reorients your attitude towards other people in the world because what it does it demonstrates to you that all of your judgments are utter delusion and lack of lack of sight so when you become so conscious that you become conscious of an infinite number of causes that lead to the creation of everything that has ever occurred then you become conscious that all of it happened out of love and that all of it including all the bad stuff had to be there see God is so loving that it even loves hate that's how big it's love is so if you really want to put your love to the test and to see whether you're capable of absolute love don't love the easy stuff test yourself by trying to love the hard stuff find a person that you really hate and try to realize that that person is not separate from you but actually that you are that person literally physically metaphysically existentially you are that person because you're all of creation and so you can't hate anything because you are everything otherwise you're hating yourself which is idiocy and delusion see so to really be totally conscious of God is to be conscious of yourself as God is to be conscious that you are loved that you are everything by this point you've transcended all these dualities and and at this point your heart completely melts all of your judgments disappear they become utterly untenable because what you realize also is that love is just not some wishful thinking it's not just some hippy new-age notion now oh yeah that's nice it's nice to love bad people no no what I'm telling that's not what I'm telling you I'm not just saying it's nice to love that people I'm saying you are all the bad people that you hate and that literally you are creating them as God so to hate them is falsehood and complete delusion and it drives you crazy and it makes you suffer you see but anyways let's move on next on the list alone versus together as a duality seems like these are opposites right either you're alone or you're with other people but not so fast as it turns out this can be transcendent you can discover that because everything is precisely non-dual all dualities merge the distinction between self and other also must collapse which means that there's only one being or thing in the entire universe which is the universe itself universe is right there in the word uni one verse word one word all of creation is one word one thing one object so when you realize this you discover that God is absolutely alone alone with a capital A this is a stark realization where you discover that all of your friends and your family and all human beings that you've ever known those you loved and also those that you've hated have all been you the entire time figments of your own imagination in the same way that in a dream when you're sleeping at night all the people you encounter in the dream are actually your own mind just fragments of your own mind and then you wake up from the dream and you realize like oh yeah I just I I dreamt up the whole thing it was all me well that's the case with your mother your father your family your friends and everybody you hate it's all you and you're totally alone which is why even when you're with your friends you get the sense sometimes that you're with people but you still feel alone and no matter how much time you spend with people no matter how intimate you get with your intimate partner how much how much deep sex you have how many experiences you share together how close you get in the end you still feel alone that's because the ultimate truth is that you are completely all alone and that's something that you've been denying your whole life that's something that is difficult to face you need to face it at some point in your life and it's not easy to face is emotionally difficult to face that you are all alone you are so all alone that when you realize that you're all alone you won't even be able to like call your mom and ask her hey am i all alone because you're so all alone and you're so conscious now that you realize that by picking up the phone and calling your mother actually you're just asking yourself am i all alone and the only answer of course when you're conscious is that yes of course I'm all alone so if I asked my mom am i all alone and she says no no I have I have I have your back I'm here I don't worry I'll support you but that's me talking to myself because I am my mom so I am all alone and so that's that's you know that's hard to stomach are some people but at the same time if you do stomach it and transcend it what you realize is that it's beautiful to be all alone God is all alone God is playing with itself God is masturbating to itself all the time everything God does everything that happens in the universe is just God's self masturbation that's all it is if you're going to work if you're if you're having sex with somebody if you're running a business if you're hanging out with your friends all of that is just you can think of it in a very sort of abstract high-level way as being God masturbating to itself pretending pretending to play all these different roles to entertain itself and to experience itself in its fullness so part of God's fullness is that it can split itself and splinter itself into an infinite number of fragments and then also it can reunite them through communion and through communication so that's literally what's happening right now see who we are in communion right now I am God communicating to God I am shooting this episode for myself that's one way to look at it simultaneous other way to look at it is that you are God communicating with yourself right now creating and imagining me and you created this episode to teach yourself these valuable insights about your own self your own true nature you see and so right now we are we've fragmented ourselves you've kind of created a fragment of you I've created the fragment of me and now though as we're becoming conscious of these fragments that we created now we are unifying them together and we're transcending and we're realizing that now we're in communion and we do that through communication we got through intimacy through bonding through sex and so forth see so there you go that answers that the next duality is uniformity versus diversity often these are pitted against each other in our politics today you see a lot of people either pro diversity or anti diversity and then they bicker back and forth with each other what hardly anybody realizes is what the structure of reality is doing at all what is sort of the purpose of this reality to be this way that it is well if you transcend diversity and uniformity ultimately you discover diversity with a capital D so the genius of God's design of reality of your own design so don't hold God is something separate you designed it this way the reason you designed this reality this way is because you wanted to ensure maximum possible diversity infinite diversity so that's one way to think of reality is just infinite diversity so think of some design you know think of a bunch of different designs that God could have used to create the world and you might wonder well how would he choose which one to go with and and then what you discover is that he chose the one you chose the one which maximizes the diversity of everything maximum diversity because what you want to do as God is to fully experience every possibility of yourself so every way you could be you want to be and you are and that results in the multiplicity and diversity of the animal life on this planet and the human beings you know think about all the diversity and human beings that we have people with different personalities different quirks different psychology different genetics different heights and different sexes and genders and like all sorts of weird stuff you know there's enormous diversity in humanity alone but then you look at the animal kingdom look at the diversity between cats and dogs and dinosaurs and beetles and insects and dragonflies and birds and bacteria and viruses just it's just a multiplicity there's too many to count there's billions of them trillions of them you couldn't classify them all we're discovering new species still scientists are discovering new species every week we're discovering new species and we will be for centuries to come because new species are literally getting created every month and every year there's not a fixed number of species on this planet and that's just one planet out of billions of solar systems out of billions of galaxies in one universe and there's probably billions more universes beyond our own so you see it's infinite diversity so to understand this is very important because in order to love all of this diversity you need to have a very big heart because part of the problem is that we get so identified with being one particular thing like this particularly 'men or a black person or a white person or a Buddhist or a Christian or a nationalist or a globalist or whatever you're identified with we get so stuck on that that we close our hearts down and we're not able to embrace all the infinite diversity that exists and so the point of spirituality is to open your heart and your mind and and those go hand in hand you can't you can't do one really without the other open your heart and your mind become so conscious that you embrace all of yourself and all of this beautiful diversity and then you discover what true love is true love is not it's not just you being able to accept and tolerate diversity it's literally you being the the physical being of you spread through all of the infinite life forms and creations of the universe you being all that is synonymous with absolute love so absolute love is equivalent to absolute diversity and so it's not really possible to love fully without really appreciating the diversity of life and the diversity of humanity and it's only by being able to appreciate this diversity that then you are at peace and you are able to let people be themselves without having to change them or criticize them or judge them demonize them or murder them ultimately see most most murders that happened by human beings happen because the person doing the murdering is not appreciating the the full diversity of him or herself because if he did then he would not need to murder anybody see next on the list is the duality of dumb versus intelligent these are often pitted against each other as opposites with of course intelligence elevated on a pedestal and being dumb is stigmatized and seen as being very negative and bad and we strive to not be dumb to not look dumb to be more intelligent than we really are of course intelligence is an absolute I've talked about that in my episode called what is intelligence go look at that it's pretty profound insight that you can realize so intelligence with the capital eyes and absolute so you can become conscious that even all the quote-unquote dumb stuff in the world he's actually thereby an infinitely intelligent design so you know if you take some sort of dumb animal like a donkey you might think well why did God create this dumb but then you look at it from a higher elevation higher perspective and you realize that yes the donkey is dumb compared to let's say a human but it's serving us function perfectly and even those dumb human beings who are dumb relative to more intelligent human beings they are serving their function perfectly in the whole you got to understand this you got to really zoom out and take the absolute perspective and so there really isn't anything dumb in the universe the universe is absolutely intelligent infinitely intelligent and this is hard for many people to understand it sounds crazy because you attribute intelligence to just being something that your brain has that's not what intelligences intelligence is omnipresent and it's it's a facet of the absolute so intelligence is everywhere in your body in that rock in that chair and that tree is all intelligence but when I talk about intelligence that's a very different notion than IQ being able to pass some tests or even being able to do some logical reasoning these are very very narrow notions of intelligence our science and our psychology departments and our psychology experts they don't really fully understand the significance of what intelligence is because fundamentally they assume that the universe is dumb they assume that matter is dumb and therefore they are not open enough to app to discover absolute intelligence and the reason that it's possible for the universe to be intelligent is because it's a mind it's not a dumb machine it's not some molecules bouncing around in a box it's a mind it's consciousness one of the characteristics of consciousness is intelligence and consciousness of course is omnipresent but we'll get to consciousness in a in a moment let's move on to the duality of freedom versus limitation these are so often pitted against each other freedom I'm for free to maximum freedom but what you don't understand is that these are two sides of one coin especially the libertarian types and certain conservatives who love to tout themselves as champions of freedom they have such a dualistic notion of freedom that it's silly here's the key thing that they don't understand if you have maximum freedom what that means is that you're free to do anything which now that means that you can create limitations so for example if we create a government that allows total freedom absolute freedom to every individual you might think well that would be the ideal situation right wrong because what you're not understanding is how it's gonna circle back around and work as such if you give everybody in a society infinite freedom then what's gonna happen is that there's gonna be a free-for-all battle because everyone's free to do whatever they want so you're gonna have just a clash of agendas everyone's gonna be fighting everybody else because hey everyone's doing whatever they want you know like I can come and take a on your front lawn that's freedom I could come and and slit your throat in the middle of the night that's freedom I can be a terrorist that's freedom I can build a nuclear bomb and blow it up on your front lawn that's freedom that's what freedom means total freedom so if you give every individual total freedom certain of those individuals the strongest ones they will come out on top and they create all sorts of limitations so for example if you give everybody in this country total freedom the most powerful people will use that freedom to enslave the rest of the people thereby creating limitation upon everybody else you see and so what started out as freedom for everybody sounds like a utopia now has turned into a nightmare hell scenario where 99% of the population is enslaved that's profound contemplate that one right there that will with your mind but that's still just a tip of the iceberg of how deep this issue of freedom limitation goes so you can actually transcend freedom and limitation to realize freedom as an absolute freedom with a capital F this is the freedom of God so what this means and this is what God is this is the very structure of God is absolute freedom it's infinite degrees of freedom so that means that God is free to do absolutely anything with no restrictions whatsoever god is not constrained by logical or physical laws not constrained by time by energy by by anything there are no restrictions to God it has literally absolute freedom so therefore because it's absolutely free it of course now creates an infinite number of limitations because if you're totally free that means that you're free to create limitation because if you exclude limitation from freedom then you're not actually free you see if God couldn't limit itself it wouldn't actually be free so sometimes people ask Leo why would God put himself into a human body which is so limited you know as a human I can't just like go flying through walls and using Jedi force powers to you know to force choke people and stuff like this I can't lift physical objects with telepathy I can't do all this stuff why am I so limited if God is so unlimited why don't have these freedoms these powers you don't understand it's actually precisely because God has infinite freedom that it also chooses to limit itself and to experience life from all the limited forms so to be a human being is to be limited in certain specific ways that's literally what makes a human being certain limitations you have two hands two feet a mouth a nose you can speak you can think this these are the limitations and also simultaneously abilities of a human a human can't fly we don't have wings you might say well wouldn't be better if humans did have wings why didn't God create a human with wings because you see the God is not interested in creating some ultra super human that has all capabilities God is more interested in experiencing living through life from all the possible limitations that there are like God is interested in being a human and then being a donkey and then being a cat and then being an ant and then being a bacteria and experiencing life from all these different perspectives God is interested in not just being strong but also being weak because God doesn't differentiate and put preference on being strong as being better than being weak you see to God it's all the same God is an embrace of everything it doesn't discriminate and it doesn't pick and choose based on your subjective criteria that you use it as a human being you see so you might think that limitation is this terrible curse and it sometimes does seem that way from the relative perspective but ultimately it's just literally what God is God is infinite freedom which of course entails an infinite limitation if you were absolutely free can you see how you can't have a form you actually can't have a physical form because any physical form that you have will still be limited even if we take a human being and we give him horns and wings and 25 legs and arms and a brain as ten times bigger even if you give him all that he's still gonna be very very limited they're still gonna be a bunch of stuff he can't do given his physiology given his form so to have absolute freedom what that means is for lessness so be careful what you wish for if you want absolute freedom what you're talking about is becoming completely formless which is basically death that's what you'll get when you die you'll get infinite freedom that's what you had before you were born you were infinitely free then you as God you precipitated yourself and gave yourself limitations what then here's life in a rose you get all these limitations you're living in some particular country on some particular planet in some particular universe within some particular dimension during some particular era in history and so you're experiencing a very small sliver of the entire infinite spectrum of possibility and therefore you're limited so appreciate your limitedness because actually absolute freedom is is quite terrifying when you experience it it's quite terrifying it's very empty there's nothing there it's gonna feel like death to your ego next duality is part versus whole people think of these as opposites but actually every part in reality is simultaneously also a whole which brings us to the notion of whole Lon's which will require an entire separate episode to explain but I'll touch on it here so what a whole lawn is it's it's a thing which is both apart and a whole simultaneously and this is everything in the universe is a whole on so for example a carbon atom you might think that's a part but actually as a whole because a carbon atom contains parts it contains protons neutrons electrons you might say well but a but a proton that's a whole no it's a part I mean I mean it is a whole but it contains parts he's a whole line so it contains parts you can break it apart even further and so on but as we move up the chain for example that carbon atom is present within some moly some molecule which is a whole but also has parts which is present within some protein a protein is a is a whole lawn which is a whole which is made up a bunch of parts like carbon atoms and other atoms and then these proteins can make up an animal like an ant a creature so a creature is hold on or a hole which is made out of parts cells and molecules and proteins and so forth and then ants they make up an ant colony an ant colony is a whole which is made up of parts different ants and other things like the earth out of which the ants build their colony and then that's all part of the larger unit called the rainforest let's say which meta parts you know the rain fourth made up of trees and so forth and animals and then that's part of something larger the planet and the plan is part of something larger the solar system part of something larger the galaxy part of something larger the galaxy cluster a part of something larger the entire universe and so forth see so everything point to anything take your finger right now point to anything in the room anything you point to is going to be a hole on or both apart and the hole and ultimately when you become fully conscious of non-duality you're going to transcend the the duality of part and whole and you're going to realize wholeness with a capital W wholeness is an absolute in which you become conscious that all there really is is one universe all of creation the entire cosmos and and that of course includes any multiverses all of it it's just one unit because there can't be any boundaries separating things and this is when you discover of course that you are all alone it's all alone it exists by itself there is no opposite reality the universe existence God you cannot have an opposite because an opposite implies to and in fact there's only one which moves us on to the next duality which is one versus many you might wonder Leo how do you know that there's only one reality what if there more that's because you're thinking dualistic aliy you have a duality that you're not conscious of yet which is the duality between oneness and many nests there is no difference between one and many everything can be subdivided an infinite number of times your mind is the one that's doing the subdivision and the one that's counting so if you want you could look at this hand as one object one hand but at the same time you can also look at it as five fingers at the same time you can zoom in further and you can look at it as billions of cells at the same time you can zoom in on each cell and look at it further and say well this hand is actually trillions of molecules and so forth so how so so what's the actual count here who says how many of anything there are here you do you do so are there are trillion molecules here or is there one hand is there any difference between the two see it's all the same oneness and many nough circles back around it goes full circle such that what God is is an infinite number of men enos --is so God is billions and trillions of atoms and molecules and cells and creatures and beings and humans and aliens and planets and galaxies and universes and realities dimensions is all of them at once so it's one and many simultaneously and when you realize that you transcend the duality of one versus many to oneness with a capital o and that's when you realize you're alone miss next is the duality of mundane versus divine these two seem like opposites when you start doing psychedelics or you start experiencing some mystical experiences through yoga through meditation through concentration practice through self inquiry common thing that happens with newbies is that they get this divine mystical experience it's a mystical experience that happens it usually lasts for only a few seconds or a few minutes when it first starts it takes you by surprise and it's amazing because you you realize that everything in the room is divine you realize your body is divine the air is divine everything is pure radiant self-illuminated self-aware divinity whereas before you just thought of it as some dumb physical universe now you realize the divinity of your own self and the physical world but then you lose that experience and you're back sort of in the mundane grind of life where you have to go take care of your kids and you gotta do your laundry and all the sorts of stuff and it seems like man I just want to get back to that divine place where I'm in that mystical union and so you might want to try some more psychedelics or some more yoga or whatever to get back there but then as you keep doing more psychedelics more yoga and you become more and more conscious of the non-dual nature of everything what you eventually realize is that the divine is not some magical realm that you escape to to escape the grind of everyday life is that literally the mundane and the divine are one and so you don't need to go anywhere to experience divinity divinity is right here right now just become conscious of it become conscious of it and so when you do that that's sort of the fruition or the culmination of your spiritual path is that you walk down the road and all you see is divinity everything you see is divine it radiates with divinity and you're conscious of it all the time that's sort of your ultimate goal with the spiritual path and that's divinity with a capital WOD divinity with a capital D and so we have we have this very interesting split that happens between people who do spiritual practices and those who don't those who don't get stuck in the mundane grind of life and then of hating their life and being depressed and miserable and then they they curse they curse god it's a god how could God have created such a terrible mundane existence is so dreary and boring and so lame and so terrible full of misery and suffering why couldn't it be magical and radiant and divine why couldn't it be heavenly well that's a pipe dream or so such people tell themselves but then those who actually do the spiritual practices and they do them a lot eventually they break through they discovered infinity everywhere and to them they're walking around and they're there looking at the exactly the same stuff that the ordinary person is looking at but they are conscious of the divinity of everything whereas the ordinary mundane person takes everything for granted even all the good stuff that he has in his life he takes completely for granted and can't see the divinity of it so he's constantly bitter and bitching and moaning about everything criticizing and judging and hating and that's a consequence of not having enough cautions to see the divinity of it all you can start though by by maybe taking some mushrooms or some LSD and getting a little taste of divinity getting that little taste of divinity is is your first real introduction into spirituality when you realize that it's real and it's not just a theory or a belief or some wishful thinking but that is real next on the list is imminent versus transcendent this is closely related to the one I just mentioned so within Christianity there's this debate that sometimes happens amongst theologians is God imminent or transcendent and what that means is is God in the world or is God beyond and outside the world and of course the answer is both both God is both simultaneously you can't separate immanent and transcendent nor can you separate mundane and divine because you can't separate subject and object and you can't separate God from its creation God is the creation the way God creates is by being a chair a couch a dog your annoying neighbor or somebody you hate on television your political opponent that's how God creates next is holy versus unholy a lot of Orthodox religious people get this wrong they try to pursue holiness with a lowercase H holiness as opposite of unholiness what they don't realize is that holy is actually an absolute there is holy with a capital H which means that you realize that everything is holy you know an Orthodox religious person is very careful to look out for sinful behavior and so he's very careful not to you know like go to a brothel a priest doesn't want to go to a brothel and if he goes to a brothel then he's gonna think that he's gone to some unholy place but of course what is this brothel but a creation of God and all those in the brothel what are they but God so the mistake the priest is making when he's going to the brothel is that he's not realizing the brothel is holy holy with a capital H and if he realized that he could go to the brothel enjoy himself and actually he could convert if he wanted to some of those into uh into religious seekers and help them awaken but he can't do that because he himself is not truly awakened to the holiness of everything it's not that God created some things which are holy and some things which are unholy it's all holy you just need to have the right vision to see it it's a very common mistake of religious people this of course leads to moralization this leads to the whole divide between good versus evil so it's very problematic it also leads to a lot of deaths and war and genocide because once people get in their mind that something is holy with a lowercase H as opposed to unholy then you know they they wage a holy war against the unholy stuff you know Muslims wage a holy war against Christians Christians wage a holy war against Muslims but both Christians and Muslims are creations of God they're both holy with a capital H they're both not realizing it some of them are but many of them are not next we have unconscious versus conscious these are often pitted against each other and you have to be very careful because you know I use the word consciousness a lot and also unconsciousness a lot as I teach my material and there's two ways in which I use those words sometimes when I say consciousness I'm talking about caution with a lowercase C as opposite of unconsciousness but also sometimes when I'm talking about consciousness I'm talking about consciousness as an absolute conscious of the capital C this is the consciousness that has no opposite so when you actually awake him what you'll discover is that all of reality is one thing consciousness it's a field of infinite consciousness that's what everything is you are that field and this field has no opposite so there actually never was such a thing as unconsciousness it's a total mind and so one of the problems for example within psychology within therapy especially because it stems from people like Sigmund Freud and other early psychologists who really didn't have non-dual awareness so they created various kinds of duality is one of the most dangerous of which is this duality between consciousness and unconsciousness there is no such thing there is no such thing as the unconscious mind really that's an abstraction all there is is consciousness there's degrees of consciousness consciousness can do various things consciousness can pretend that it's unconscious so what we call unconsciousness is actually consciousness being and acting as though it's unconscious in the same way that you might have an actor playing dead on screen that doesn't mean he's dead he's playing dead tricky very very tricky then we have the duality of knowing versus not knowing these are often pitted against each other not knowing is demonized and everyone tries to avoid admitting that they don't know everyone tries to it and everyone tries to be in a position of knowing but actually not knowing is a more powerful position in a certain sense than knowing and they're deeply intimately related in order to know something you first have to not know it you know or maybe you don't so you can transcend knowing versus not knowing to realize and we could label this in different ways you could realize knowing with a capital K or you could realize not knowing with a capital N or you could realize mystery with a capital M what you realize is that actually it's not possible to know anything precisely because you're being everything so there's a sort of a collapse of the duality between epistemology and metaphysics like I said before and so what you realize that literally you don't know what anything is so in a sense when you awaken you become totally conscious but at the same time as you have infinite omniscient godlike consciousness you don't know anything because knowing is a conceptual thing and being is prior to knowing and so what you're left with is this irreducible mystery mystery with a capital M mystery is an irreducible aspect of reality you cannot demystify reality and if you try you're going to be deluded which is one of the mistakes that rationalists and materialists make is they try to demystify reality through reason logic and science and that cannot work it's always partial and it's always untenable there's always more mystery and even the stuff that you think you've unraveled the mystery of you actually haven't all you've done is you've tricked yourself into thinking that you know something that you actually don't know it's quite a mindfuck especially if you're really attached to knowledge especially if you're an academic scientist intellectual philosopher theologian yeah you've got a real big problem with knowing and not knowing you've created a duality out of these two next on a list is meaningless versus meaningful these seem like opposites people want to have a meaningful life people are pursuing meaning but what they don't realize is that they create meaning so ultimately what you can become conscious of is that everything as an absolute is meaningless meaningless with a capital M but the trick with it is that it goes full circle so when you realize meaninglessness most people think like oh no leo but if everything is meaningless that's terrible that's awful that sounds like nihilism it sounds like depression it sounds like suicide it sounds like that's gonna destroy civilization no you don't realize yet how total and absolute meaninglessness is meaningless is so absolute in total that your judgment of meaninglessness as being bad is itself a mean that you're creating so you're not actually there yet you're not at absolute meaninglessness you're imagining what it is but you haven't actually become conscious of it when you totally become conscious of absolute meaninglessness what you discovers at a ghost full circle and it's the most meaningful discovery you could possibly be that's the that's the twisted irony of it there is nothing more meaningful than to discover that the entire universe is totally meaningless and when you realize this then you realize that you have infinite freedom to create whatever kind of meetings you want because you realize that all meanings are fabrications so you can still participate in the creation of meaning but now you can do it consciously you can create your own life purpose whichever kind you want whatever you find meaningful you can still pursue but this time you're doing it consciously rather than expecting Society or some sort of external authority figure to tell you what is or isn't meaningful and also what you realize is that being is way more meaningful than meaning this is one of the paradoxes of awakening is that you lose all meaning but at the same time you can say in a metaphorical figurative sense that actually for the very first time your life now suddenly feels meaning meaningful spirituality is so meaningful precisely because it's totally meaningless and this is what a lot of religious people don't understand religious people are busy chasing meaning and purpose in their life and this actually paradoxically is the chief obstacle to them discovering meaninglessness and just surrendering to it and therefore discovering God so if you want to discover God destroy all meaning and all that will be left is God pure God is the Godhead but how many religious people want to do that they don't they're in denial about it because really it's the ego that creates meaning the devil creates meaning not the Godhead the God huh the Godhead just is it doesn't need meaning the ego needs meaning as a function of survival I think I've discussed that elsewhere I have some older episodes about meaning and purpose go check those out next on the list is life versus death and clip-ons the big life people hold these as opposites but of course you should know from from The Lion King from the circle of life how life and death are intimately connected and you can't have one without the other and also well let me explain that one a little more um because some people might not still know might not even get that what do I mean by this well look I mean for you to live you need to kill a lot of vegans and vegetarians are in denial about this but you're a killing machine you're killing all the time even if you're eating plants you're killing all the time a human being cannot live no organism can be alive without creating death no matter how careful you are no matter how compassionate and loving you are no matter how socially responsible you are no matter what you eat you're gonna have to kill to live even if it's just as a result of walking down the street to pick up your groceries let's say that in the future some company invents some sort of like chemical formula you can just kind of sit out of a straw and you can replace all your food with this there are some companies that already doing this let's say so let's say a company does do this you might say believe if somebody saw six sips this chemical out of this straw for his whole life then he's not gonna kill anybody and that contradicts what you just said so we can solve this problem with science and technology is what I'm telling you and what I'm telling you is no you can't because see when you get in your car to drive to pick up your sippy cup of chemicals you are gonna drive over ants you are gonna slam into butterflies and dragonflies and fruit flies and other moths and other creatures as you're driving on your way to pick up to pick up your chemical see so to be alive you have to kill kill by the thousands and by the millions so every human being was ever lived he's responsible for the death of tens of thousands if not millions of creatures and life-forms even if you put yourself into a bubble and you never drive a car and you try to completely isolate yourself and be totally harmless to the world even for you to live the bacteria that is present by the millions within you that will kill you if you don't kill it first is this battle of life versus death is constantly being waged inside your body inside your sinuses in your stomach you have viruses that your body is fighting off all the time funguses and and so forth so you can't be alive without killing millions of things this is this is just a fact of life and it must be this way because of the non dual nature of life and then of course you can transcend the duality of life versus death to discover life with a capital F or life or the capital L and what that means is a couple of things first of all you discover that death is just an idea it's a concept there's no such thing as death and of course this is this is when you awaken you will discover immortality this way there's only life also what you'll discover is that contrary to what material science tells us life is not limited to biological entities life is not a property of creatures life is omnipresent the entire universe is alive so there's no distinction between life and death or living and non-living which sort of helps you to resolve that sticky problem within science about what is the origin of life well of course there was no clear line that molecules crossed to go from nonliving molecules to living molecules there was no such a line it was just I mean they got more and more complex until eventually we started calling them alive but they were alive from the very beginning that's life with a capital L sounds crazy I know but you gotta wake into that to understand it mortal and immortal are pitted as opposites of course you can transcend this duality to realize immortality with a capital I immortality is when you realize that reality has no opposite in that you are all of reality so of course you're immortal and you can't die you've been alive for ever and you will be alive forever your true nature cannot die and that is ultimately how you gain liberation and freedom from suffering is by realizing your own immortality you realize that you are the entire universe who just happens right now to be living through a human form but you're gonna live through all forms so it's that's no big deal there's an infinite number of forms you live through and even if you become formless it still doesn't matter because your true nature is formless then of course that brings us to the very big one the big duality of real versus unreal these seem like opposites but actually you can transcend these to discover reality with a capital R which is reality that has no opposite so the truth is that there is nothing unreal everything that is is real now you may say Oh Ilya Bora what about Santa Claus Santa Claus is unreal no Santa Claus is real otherwise it wouldn't be in your experience right now it's just that you have to be very clear about what Santa Claus is so Santa Claus is real but it's real as something in your mind something you're imagining or some bearded man you know sitting in a mall wearing a costume that's Santa Claus that's what Santa Claus is now that's real but of course the problem is that your mind imagines that what Santa Claus really means is it means some actual mythical figure who lives in the North Pole and actually delivers presents to people no that's a myth so a myth is real in the sense that it's a myth so the only problems that you're getting lost in concepts that's the only problem so unreal only exists as a concept you see and of course we should broaden this out this category of real and unreal it can be it can be talked about in different labels so you could have a duality of reality versus fantasy or reality versus imagination or reality versus dreams or reality versus hallucination or even reality versus a video game or reality versus fiction so all of this is part of the duality that I'm calling real versus unreal so in our culture and within science and within philosophy even and even within religion we make a distinction between real and unreal stuff fantasy and reality dreams and waking life but actually there is no such duality you could transcend this which is why I call reality a hallucination which is why gurus call reality just a dream it is because you can't distinguish the two so right now I'm sitting here and I'm hallucinating a body and I'm hallucinating that I'm talking to you and you're sitting over there hallucinating listening to me that's what's happening you've hallucinating your entire life you're hallucinating that you were born tah-dah the word hallucination is a beautiful word I love this word because the technical definition of hallucination is an appearance without any substance to it and so that's exactly what's happening so this body is an appearance with no substance behind it all we have are appearances which is the same thing as saying reality is identical to hallucination you know when you become really conscious you can play a video game like a Super Mario or maybe a more sophisticated one what's popular today you know these 3d video games Legend of Zelda we're here running around in this beautiful 3d open-world now and all this right elder scrolls Skyrim whatever you like these open-world RPGs are really popular these days and you're in it and you're like you're playing it and you're loving it and it's ah this beautiful immersive world and in video games what are we talking about immersion you know a huge selling point of video games is immersion and of course that's why we need photorealistic graphics and all this sort of stuff and VR goggles and you're so immersed in this new VR simulation to the point where what you start to lose yourself to it and you can't distinguish it from reality anymore people think well that's just because the graphics are getting so good no no you don't understand it's much more profound than that literally there is no difference between this physical reality here and the one in your video game it's the exact same reality but you have to be conscious enough to realize that that is a video game what a video game me means is pixels but those pixels are still real all the characters are still real Mario is a real thing it's just not like a human all right so don't confuse it that way but literally you can't tell a video game from reality in fact in the future what this what this means is that we'll actually be able to create video games which are so sophisticated and complex and self-involved that the characters in the video games will not be able to know whether they're inside of a video game or inside of reality how's that for a mindfuck so you see Mario when Mario was running around the screen in a certain sense you might say that he doesn't know that what he's doing isn't reality to him it seems real you of course Mario is not sophisticated enough to have this sort of reasoning or cognition but in the future you can actually imagine a sort of a supercomputer which actually gives Mario sort of cognition to the point where Mario actually starts to believe that Mario world and his own body are actually real and not a video game and the reason that will be able to happen is because there is no distinction between reality and a video game so in a certain sense he won't be wrong but in another sense he will be deluded in the same way that you're deluded in that you think you're real what actually you're not so that will be an really interesting I look forward to the days when we have video games where our video game protagonists will be able to awaken to the fact that they're inside of a video game and I want to see us some some screen screen captures of the look on their face when Mario awakens to the fact that actually he's God that'll be awesome but I might take a while to get there not in our lifetime so don't don't hold your breath the next duality is being versus non being these seem like opposites actually what you can discover is that being is an absolute being with a capital B there no there is nothing but being everything that's happening right now is being everything that's ever happened in your life is being even all falsehood and delusion and what you might call hallucination is still being untruth is still being you can't speak it on truth without it being to to make a lie it has to be that uh but this is being with the capital B it's an absolute you can well let's move on to the next item here the next two ality actual versus potential or actual versus virtual these seem like opposites but actually they're not you can transcend actual versus potential to discover that you have actual with a capital A everything is actual everything potential becomes actual and everything actual in a sense was potential and what God is is just infinite potential which of course is indistinct from infinite actualization so everything that God could be God becomes and in a certain sense because there is no difference between actual and potential here we are if you want a real mindfuck imagine this imagine that see you're sitting here right now and you're thinking that well okay this is actual my body is actual this room is actual but flip that around and try to think of it and try to see it as this room is potential it's not actual your body is potential now you might say Billy oh no it's not potential it's actually here but how would you know the difference between actual and potential really think about that don't don't be so quick to say that I I can easily tell them apart you can't tell them apart actually potential are identical this is all potential everything that's ever happening is potential in a certain sense you might say that none of it exists really or it exists as potential which is the same thing that as saying that it's actual same thing for the duality between actual and conceptual these might seem separate and different but all concepts are actual you can't have a concept that's not actual even a concept of like energy yes energy is conceptual but at the same time that concept is actual next we have the duality of self versus other or self versus world I've already touched on this but there's a lot that could be said about this because this is this is the perhaps one of the most fundamental dualities that you hold it's the duality that is responsible for running your entire life is the distinction you make between yourself and everything else in fact this distinction is how you were born you were not born biologically or physically you were born the moment that a distinction between you and not you occurred see I said in the past I think I said in the last part part 2 of this series that what a duality is it's a division within consciousness so when we make a division like if we cut a an apple in half simultaneously we're creating two parts that's what a division is a division always creates two parts now of course you can have multiple divisions creating more than two parts but each cut each division is making two parts so the very first division that you made to come into existence is the division between me and not me me and world me and another person the only way that you exist as a self as an ego that you imagine yourself to be is because you tell yourself that you're that and not the rest of the world if you told yourself that you were the rest of the world and you remove that would remove the division between world and self literally you would become the whole world you see but you can't even fathom what I'm saying right now in your present state of consciousness unless maybe you're already enlightened because you are so certain that you're real you're so certain that your actual you're so certain that division between self and other and self and world is actually real but you have to realize like we said earlier that the duality between actual and real is itself untenable and must collapse so when you realize this you'll die when you realize that there's no difference between self and the world you'll die which is precisely why you're going to do everything in your power not to realize it so even though I'm telling you all this and you're understanding it intellectually you're not actually going to realize it if you realize that you'd be dead and then you'd be awake and then you'd be immortal and then you'd be God and then you'd be absolute and then you'd be infinite but of course your entire life is predicated upon you not being that your whole life is devoted to you being finite and limited and your particular self that's all that you've been doing in your whole life so are you gonna give that up simply because you watched one of my videos of course not you're terrified of doing what I'm telling you to do it is totally terrifying because you think it's going to destroy your entire life because you think that death is actually real you see how this duality works your entire sense of reality and self and life is completely corrupted by these dualistic divisions that you've made and that's as it should be because if you didn't have those you couldn't be alive so as it should be but also realize that it's possible to transcend that if you want that's what Awakening is about so yeah it's a very very tricky stuff I mean like work this is this is some of the most advanced and subtle things that could ever be communicated to a human being from one human being to another I'm making it sound kind of easy I'm being kind of flippant I'm going through it kind of fast and I'm kind of smiling through it because you know once you get on the other side of it and you understand it you have a lot of familiarity with it like I have at this point then you know it just becomes it becomes totally normal to you and there's nothing there's nothing weird about it nothing crazy about it but when you're first hearing it for the you know for the first time or even for the hundredth time before you've actually done any practices or had any direct experiences of it it sounds like lunacy and it sounds dangerous and crazy and like yeah people don't realize how radical this work is and how radical awakening is and how radical non-duality is people think that all non-duality is just oh just some interesting theory I I listen to on YouTube no no no hadou ality is is it's the end of your life it's the end of your life it's the end of the it's the end of the world in stand of reality as you realize that all those things were conceptual the entire time alright let's take a quick intermission right here I got to catch my breath and we'll be back to wrap it all up the next duality on our list is one that we've already kind of spoiled by talking about us so much which is the duality between self and God so of course because the duality between self and other and self and world is untenable and must collapse also the duality between god and worlds must collapse and so you can see how if god is the world and you are the world then you are God and this is something I've talked about quite a lot so I don't want to elaborate it on much more here but of course the thing you have to understand about God is that there's sort of two versions of God there's God with a lowercase G and there's God with an uppercase G God is an absolute God is the absolute most religious people or most people ever who talk about God talk about God with a lowercase G not the actual God but some idea of God some image of God or some story that they have about God or a belief in God but not the actual thing and they don't know that there is an actual thing because they've replaced it with a belief but in fact you can transcend the duality between self and God to realize that self is God self with a capital S the self is God which leads us to the next two ality of selfish versus selfless this can be transcended to selfless with a capital S or the self with a capital S the self of the capital S is the same thing as selflessness with a capital S so usually people think of these things as opposite but what you discover when you become totally selfless free of ego is that what remains is emptiness or nothingness or absolute subjectivity and that absolute subjectivity is the non self self it's the self which is prior to there's a human biographical biological physical self that you conventionally think that you are so if you surrender that identity to your physical and psychological being if you surrender that then what you discover is that you're the entire universe and the entire universe is that that self and it's totally selfless so God is totally selfless and this is where love comes from absolute love with the capital L is that absolute love with capital L is just total absolute selflessness and of course by being absolutely selfless you become all the individual selves that populate the earth and all the other planets and universes that are out there the next to alley is meditation versus life when we start meditating we have this duality it's like when I'm meditating for 30 minutes a day or 60 minutes a day that's my meditation practice I'm sitting on the cushion I'm putting a lot of effort into it I'm concentrating meditating and good okay but then when my timer rings and I'm not on the cushion anymore now I'm back to ordinary life and it's like the opposite of meditation but then of course as you practice meditation more and more and more ultimately you get to a point especially after a few awakenings where your entire life becomes one seamless constant meditation and then you live that way and that's what mindfulness practices your trying to be mindful all the time not just doing some during some formal sit or do it during some formal retreat so it's okay if right now for you meditation is just this limited confined thing that you do formally but just realize that over over the years and decades it will start to spill over into everyday life such that you can't distinguish them anymore and in fact you're gonna stop using any formal techniques after a certain point and all that meditation will mean for you is just sitting and being or not even sitting just being no matter what you're doing you could be walking talking eating looking at a TV doing your work and sort of in the background you'll be meditating that's when you get really good the next duality is existence versus non-existence this is a tricky one that confuses a lot of people a lot of cosmologists and astrophysicists and scientists and PhDs they don't understand they don't understand that existence and non-existence is a duality so actually you can transcend these two to discover that what there is truly is existence with a capital E as an absolute so existence actually has no opposite conventionally it seems to us that there is an opposite to non-existence you might say Malia what are you talking about like Santa Claus doesn't exist so isn't that evidence of non-existence no actually it's not because Santa Claus exists as Santa Claus as that fictional character that's what it is that's not non-existence that's existence a unicorn exists as that magical mystical animal whether you're imagining it or you draw on a piece of paper that's what a unicorn is that's existence now you want to a Leo but the real unicorn it doesn't exist but that to exists your image of a real unicorn or a real Santa Claus that exists it's just not what you think it is so you're getting lost and concepts and so what you need to realize ultimately by transcending this duality is that there is no opposite to existence if something is even if it's a falsehood or a delusion it still exists you just need to not be deluded by it and to understand what it is accurately this trips a lot of people up and so the reason that you're able to attain immortality through Awakening is because you realize that with poedel non-duality by the transcending of all these divisions that your own mind created we were able to realize that actually there is just existence as an absolute with no opposite and so therefore you literally cannot die or go anywhere because it's just existence forever its eternal existence as an absolute and of course that's why God can't be destroyed because God just is existence existence can't go anywhere because it just exists when I when I talk about existence I'm talking about existence in its pure form existence without any content so a lot of people confuse the content of existence for existence itself but actually these are two distinct things there is existence which is independent of all form forms can exist within it or it can just be empty existence with no form now most people call that non-existence but actually it's still existence it's just empty of form so that's what trips people up next to ality is true versus false hood seems like totally opposite right but no they're deeply related in fact you can transcend these two to realize truth with a capital T of course absolute truth which is it's identical with God identical with love identical with selflessness identical with everything so what truth is is just absolutely everything that is and when you become conscious of what truth is you'll realize that falsehood doesn't exist and never has existed because falsehood isn't true in a sense to tell a falsehood it still has to happen within the domain of truth or within the domain of existence as I've talked about before so really there is no such thing that's falsehood there's only pure truth pure truth is consciousness or awareness and there is nothing opposite of truth has an absolute this is a real mind that a lot of people just don't understand because you're not able to understand this using rationality or conventional thinking you need to become deeply awoken to realize this the next duality is a really important one which is the duality between duality and non-duality this is really tricky because you probably have been wondering Leo will you talk about non duality but isn't that you creating a duality between duality and non-duality and my answer yes I'm sorry my answer of course is yes of course you need to understand that this is inescapable when I am communicating this is inescapable because like I told you in the very beginning of this series all human communication and thought is dualistic which does not exclude my own communication and thought so I'm not being a hypocrite here I have acknowledging that all of my own communication is dualistic even when I'm talking about non duality my communication to you is still dualistic and that can't be avoided so actually there's two duality - uh sorry there's two there's two versions of non duality so this this is uh this is going to get even trickier now try to stay with me there's two versions of non-duality there's non-duality with the lowercase n and non-duality with an uppercase n as an absolute so actual absolute non-duality the thing that I'm pointing to but the thing that I cannot say and no human being will ever be able to say no money no matter how much they speak or write or think that non-duality with a capital n that I'm pointing to that thing is the whole purpose of this communication and yet that thing will never be part of this communication in a certain sentence you see it cannot be communicated to you because if it could you would become awoke and you can't become awoke until you're awoke so the problem here is that you need to transcend language thought and symbols and so on the one hand we need to transcend language thought and symbols but on the other hand we have to use something to communicate it has to be language thought or symbols so you need to be conscious enough to realize that what I'm talking about non-duality and you're thinking about non duality that is still duality you still haven't really grasped what is being pointed to that transcendental absolute cannot be put into words so that's ok that's not a problem per se you just need to be very very mindful of that and you to do practices and you need to grasp that true ultimate absolute non duality with the capital n for yourself see and also you need to be careful that as you're practicing non duality who don't turn non duality into a theory into an ideology into a philosophy or into a doctrine that you cling to which is opposed to duality so newbies who spend a few years studying on new ally and practicing it they commonly fall into this trap of pursuing non-duality with a lowercase n which means that they are like striving to be super non-dual but at the same time as they're doing that they're also demonizing and judging and criticizing and trying to move away from duality as though duality is bad wrong deluded false and so forth and somehow separate from God but of course what you need to realize is that even duality is part of God even though it's not absolutely true it's still relatively true and part of all of creation in the same way that delusion and illusion are part of the creation so this becomes a problem because if you demonize delusion illusion and duality you're gonna still be stuck in self-hatred and you're not gonna do a full embrace of everything you you're not gonna really transcend it's the same thing as chasing holiness with the lowercase H or chasing goodness with a lowercase G you're not transcending the two and embracing everything and that becomes a very big problem so this is a very important point if you want to get to the highest levels now you might wonder what Billy oh I'm confused now it sounds that sometimes it sounds as though you're saying that reality is of course non dual and then at other times it sounds like you're saying that reality is dualistic so what are you really saying here that's right I have some videos where I stress and say that reality is non dual I have other videos where I talk about the dialectical nature of reality and how the world of form always has these polar opposites that are in tension with each other so which one is it it's both you see you can't distinguish them really you can't separate them it's both look at the yin-yang symbol again look at how it is you've got the white you've got the black you've got a dot of white in the black you've got a dot of black and the white and you've got the entire thing all coming together seamlessly the absolute so so it's very useful to be able to have like these lenses that you can put on and off as you're looking at the world you need to have a lens we're able to look at the world do dualistic aliy and to appreciate and to study deeply the the polar opposites and how they interplay with each other and the various kinds of distinctions and categories that we can create so this is the realm of the of the relative you can't just dismiss that and then at the same time you need to have another lens which is the non dual lens that you can put on and you can look at all dualities and all the distinctions in all categories and see it has all just part of oneness the next duality that were brought to here is relative versus absolute and this is also very tricky we say that there's a relative truth there's an absolute truth which one is ultimate well of course the ultimate is the absolute absolute with a capital A when you are in absolute consciousness it has no opposite and you're in total consciousness you might say and so that is like the ultimate truth and it's in fact such an ultimate truth that you even completely forget there was a relative truth it's so absolute it eclipses relativity but when you're sort of functioning in everyday life using conventional language within human society and culture dealing with science and politics and religion and sociology and your family and business and all this stuff this is the realm of the relative and so again you need to have sort of two lenses that you can use to look at the world in a relative way in an absolute way and not try to exclude one or the other so a mistake that people make is that they become conscious of the absolute and then what they do is they think oh well only the absolute is true and the relative world is all false and it's all illusion and I want to stay far away from it but if you do that you've created a new division see now you're dividing relative from the absolute true absolute the true embodiment of the absolute is that you yes you're fully conscious of the absolute but at the same time you also embrace all the relative stuff so that's a very sophisticated a sort of a nuanced approach to this also understand that there is the absolute with a lowercase a and an absolute with the uppercase a the absolute with an uppercase a cannot be communicated to you you need to have a mystical experience of that whereas the absolute with a lowercase a is what I'm talking about whenever I'm talking and what you're thinking whenever you're thinking about the absolute so you can't actually think about the absolute with an uppercase a whenever you're thinking about the absolute that's a lowercase a it's tricky it's still confusing contemplate back the next duality is division vs. unity some people are focused on dividing the world some people are focused on unifying the world the problem though is that most people who try to unify the world are doing it in a lowercase you sort of way you can transcend this duality to unity with an uppercase u which means it's a unity that embraces division not divides itself from division you see the hypocrisy and contradiction of trying to unify people but then excluding those who want division see those who want division most unifiers will try to exclude those people from their Unity Party so it will be like the Unity Party against some other party and this is all happening within the relative domain this is not yet unity within an uppercase u unity with an uppercase you realize is that we unify by also accepting that there will be division and that's okay and in fact that's absolutely necessary and reality cannot be otherwise another duality is saying versus insane people think that all that person is crazy that person has insane beliefs and ideas they're not normal and rational like me but how do you determine what is sane and what it's not and what it's not saying if you understand what I'm teaching you here then you should realize that that boundary between the two is not going to be sharp if you investigate a deeper and deeper you're gonna realize that the two actually bleed together and there's no way to really distinguish them who gets to say what is saying or what is insane you do so if you say that some belief is sane how do you know that you're not insane and just saying that from your insanity you don't and you can't and that's the nature of reality is that you can't distinguish sanity from insanity the things that we call sane are really just convention you believe it's sane because it's practical for your survival it works for whatever you need it to do and other people around with you around you generally agree and don't call you insane for it that's really what we mean when we say something is sane and of course as you see by studying different cultures during different eras and studying different peoples and different religious movements and scientific intellectual developments and philosophical debates you see that people have and calling other people insane since the dawn of time you know there there are many scientists who think other scientists are insane so there's no safety here don't think that by being a scientist or by being a rationalist removing a mathematician or by being anything that's somehow you're gonna save yourself from the possibility of insanity you won't all you're doing is you're sure you're surrounding yourself with social conventions that's all it is that's all it is so in fact by trying to create the distinction between sanity and insanity actually you're behaving in an insane manner because you're making that up and yet now you're confusing your own mental fabrications with ultimate reality or with truth and that's just not the case and so the reason that a lot of people struggle with psychedelics is they take some LSD some mushrooms some DMT or whatever else and one of the things these psychedelics can reveal to you which is very threatening and scary and shocking is they can blur the line between sanity and insanity where you can't tell the two apart anymore and this freaks a lot of people out in fact this is one of the most freakiest kind of trips you can have is where you go down this sort of insane rabbit hole where literally you start to have thoughts and ideas which become so indistinguishable from physical reality that you literally can't tell whether you're sane or insane anymore and this is very very scary because in the in the moment when you're in this trip it can feel like you're stuck in this sort of insane thought spiral that never ends forever and during that time it's it's scary it's freaky and all you want is just get to get back to a same place but at the same time you realize there is no same place to get back to which only makes you feel even worse and so you just go down this infinite rabbit hole of insanity until the trip wears off and then you're kind of back to normal and then you recollect yourself I'll recollect yourself but but man that can be a very bad trip so I've had some of those as you could probably tell and on the one hand it's bad on the other hand it's actually great because it it's important for you to to face this truth and most people just have never faced this truth it's a very shocking truth with with very serious ramifications it undermines all of science all the philosophy all of culture everything you believe it undermines it so it's it's crazy but at the same time it's true this will mean bye-bye mind this is the definition of mind right here and so see a lot of people who do psychedelics they don't have any kind of theoretical foundation they haven't heard these sorts of clear lectures like I'm giving to you explaining all this stuff in all this excruciating detail they haven't study any of this so they just pop some mushrooms or LSD at a party somewhere in a terrible setting at a rave or something loud music blaring and then they have these crazy insights like sanity versus insanity can't be distinguished and then and then that totally freaks them out and then they blame the psychedelic for it as if the psychedelic did something wrong no all the psychedelic did was show you the truth but of course as a Terence Mckenna says it's not enough just to discover the truth the real trick is facing the truth can you stomach the truth the truth is a very radical thing also these trips give you a real profound compassion and empathy for people who have mental instabilities who suffer from quote-unquote insanity who are in this a insane asylums hmm who have these sorts of neurological brain disorders that that doesn't make their mind function quite normally you empathize with them like that so that's a very terrible way to live if you're stuck in that and you can't break free of it imagine that your whole life is just one bad trip where you can't distinguish reality from fiction and you're confusing the two all the time and your mind is is taking down these insane vortexes that you can't break out of yeah that's so that's a very hellish existence the next duality is matter versus spirit people tend to hold these as opposites a lot of times people hear me talking about spirituality and instantly they they recoil in this a level spirituality that's all fluffy stuff matter is what's real without realizing that true spirit is the transcendence of the distinction between matter and spirit and so when you transcend the two you get spirit with a capital S everything is spirit atoms and molecules and trees and cars and minds human beings all of it is spirit this is spirit right here right now you can be conscious of it or you cannot if you're a materialist then you're not conscious of it and so to you it seems like spirit is absurd impossible hocus pocus superstition wishful thinking where really you're just not conscious of the obvious because you haven't done the spiritual practices and you also haven't questioned and deconstructed your materialist paradigm you know one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century with quantum mechanics was the discovery that there is no such thing as matter matter doesn't exist science itself has debunked the notion of matter Einstein showed that matter and energy are interchangeable so there's no distinction between matter and energy but even even beyond that when you look with quantum mechanics into what is matter what is an atom you discover there is no particle there there's no such thing as discrete particles all particles entire universe are all entangled into one quantum field it's an infinite quantum field and quantum physicists use quantum field equations to talk about these fields will this feel that they're talking about is just consciousness or spirit it's one field they just don't realize what they're really studying yet of course some of them do but men next we have the duality of form versus formless these seem like opposites but actually you transcend these two when you get really really awoke and you realize that form and formlessness are actually identical so the transcendence of form and formlessness really has no name you could call it form with a capital F or you call it formlessness with a capital F but really the two are just literally identical that's probably one of the highest and deepest forms of awakening when you have moderate forms of awakening you still have a semblance of a duality between form and formlessness and you tend to prefer one over the other a lot of people when they start to awaken they start to identify with formlessness and they start to exclude or denounce form as though form is somehow bad or unnecessary or separate from them but then if they have deeper awakenings they realize oh no wait a minute that was a mistake because I'm still creating a subtle duality between form and formlessness actually they're literally identical so I can't denounce or criticise form I can't move away from form I can't escape form form is formlessness so there's nowhere to escape there's also a duality between shiva and shakhty this is similar to form and formlessness shiva is another way to say formlessness and shakti is energy or form and so in the in the Hindu and various yogic traditions there's there's this mythology that they have about how Shiva is at play with Shakti and the two are coming together she was supposed to be the masculine shock he's supposed to be the Anna the feminine and their inter playing with each other and so that's a beautiful little metaphor that you can use so everything that's happening around me right now including my body and the sounds that I'm making this is all the Shakti and all of it is occurring with an emptiness which is Shiva but at the same time shiva and shakhty are actually identical because form and formlessness are actually identical so while all of this form is going on this is actually all completely formless but you got to become conscious of that it's not enough to just talk about it another duality is something versus nothing people hold these opposites actually they're the same it's impossible this thing to distinguish something from nothing when you transcend that you realize nothingness with a capital n nothing is with a capital n is not separate from somethingness but actually identical to something is it's at Absolute and this is what you awaken to with enlightenment and of course nothing is identical to everything that's not there duality here that trips people up nothing and everything r1 and also there's the duality of zero versus infinity these are held as opposites when actually they're identical zero is infinity infinity is zero how can this be because when something is infinite is completely boundless and therefore formless and therefore nothing because everything within it cancels out sort of like all the positive numbers cancel out all the negative numbers and you're set up with zero and zero is also unbounded it stretches out forever everywhere it's omnipresent it's everywhere and it's nowhere and that's exactly infinity there's also a duality created between the finite and the infinite so here you got to be careful again and you got to distinguish between infinite with a lowercase I and infinite with an uppercase I so infinite as an absolute is uppercase I infinity with an uppercase eyes and absolute that's God does not separate itself from the finite so what God is is an infinity an absolute infinity which includes within it every finite possibility you see and that's the transcendence of finite and infinite then we also have something related to that which is limited versus unlimited that's a common duality but if something is unlimited must it not include also limits because if a thing is unlimited but it excludes limitation then it's no longer unlimited is it it's limited in that it can't produce limitation this is a whole trick of God so God is unlimited with a cap of capital u unlimited with a capital u means that it's unlimited in that it allows infinite limitation it's sort of like that example of of freedom and limitation that we talked about unlimited it just means infinite freedom next we have the duality of enlightened versus unenlightened people who are unenlightened think that enlightenment is some separate thing from unenlightened but when you become enlightened because enlightenment is an absolute enlightenment with a capital e you realize that actually there is no difference between enlightenment and on enlightenment which is why sometimes teachers tell you that you're already enlightened and yet while there's a certain truth to that it's also very misleading for those who are unenlightened so if you're unenlightened I actually highly recommend that you make a firm distinction between being unenlightened and being enlightened otherwise you'll trick yourself thinking that you're enlightened when actually you're unenlightened there is a difference between someone who's genuinely enlightened and someone who isn't but after you become enlightened you'll realize that you in a certain sense always were enlightened it's a mindfuck it's a paradox you have to distinguish between enlightenment as we talked about it and as you imagine it seven light meant and actual enlightenment with a capital e that thing actual enlightenment we can't talk about it that's something you only experience during your moment of enlightenment you can't preview it you can't imagine it and nothing you imagine about it is even close to what it is that's what makes this work so tricky if if it wasn't for that this would work would be very very easy and we wouldn't need all this explanation and people wouldn't get so confused and deluded the next duality is no God versus God and also we're gonna lump in here the devil versus God and also we'll lump in the devil versus angels people hold all these as total polar opposites but in fact they're all the same so no God and God is the same as sort of saying atheism versus theism well you can transcend atheism and theism to realize that what there is is actual God God with a capital G which is not the same God as the theists imagines actually God with a capital G is very similar to two to the atheists conception of God which is just nothingness emptiness but it's still not the same as atheism and then you have the devil versus God so people hold these as opposites but actually how could the devil be separate from God because God created everything therefore God must have created the devil if the devil created himself that means the devil is God as well from that perspective you see so either you admit that the devil crated himself in which case he's God or you admit that he didn't create himself in which case God created him in which case because God is his own creation God is not separate from his creation God must be the devil so really the devil is just a facet of God that's what we mean by that word go check out my episode what is the devil it's one of my most important episodes so you can transcend the devil and God to God with an uppercase G God with an uppercase G includes the devil within it and that's very very important for you to understand same thing with angels the devil according to mythology is just a fallen angel the devil is an angel and also we should address here the the duality between gods and God or polytheism and monotheism these are often presented as opposites and often time atheists will use other cultures which were polytheistic has some sort of argument against monotheism because suppose it like Leo will how can you tell whether monotheism is true or polytheism true doesn't this show that your belief in God is somehow um relative just something that you know you happen to pick up from your monotheistic culture oh no no God is not a belief you got to understand unless it is if it's a belief then of course you're right but if God you're talking about the actual God with capital G it's not a belief and so really polytheism is not in conflict with monotheism at all so you can have multiple gods that's not a problem it's just that you got to realize that ultimately they're all unified together under the Godhead under formlessness and this is exactly what you see in Hinduism for example they have many different gods and avatars but then there is the ultimate which is Shiva which connects them all or Brahman connects them all see and that's not a contradiction because the very nature of God is to incarnate itself into various forms so there might be multiple gods out there I don't know I haven't encountered all the possible gods that might exist but what I am conscious of is God as an absolute which would incorporate all those see so polytheism doesn't shake you and even the existence of other lesser gods doesn't shake you when you are conscious that you are God and that God is an absolute and that God is infinite including all forms so if there is some superhuman intelligence some artificial AI to some aliens constructed in some universe or in some galaxy far away across the universe you might almost call that a God but of course it's not the God it's a lesser God you might say it's a lesser intelligence it's still not absolute which is why the existence of aliens also doesn't shake non-duality it doesn't matter if there are aliens it doesn't it matter how smart they are or how technologically sophisticated they are or how godlike they are because they are still not absolute because they're formed and they're limited in some fashion if they weren't then they would be the absolute they be ultimate God which is of course what I am and what you are already you can become conscious that next is a duality between temporal and eternal this can be transcended to discover eternity with a capital e actual eternity this very moment the now right now is an absolute it's absolutely eternal which means it exists outside of time or another way to say it is that exists forever for trillions of years this very moment right now that's happening it has existed for an infinite number of years which makes it eternal and it makes it immortal that's a very radical state of consciousness to become conscious that you need to become conscious of what absolute now is and right now you're not conscious of it because ordinary human consciousness is temporal its dualistic and temporal but time is just a concept time is relative time is not absolute as Einstein demonstrated next we have the division and duality between samsara and Nirvana Buddhist terms which some of you might be familiar with samsara is the formed world the mundane world of stuff Nirvana is sort of the heaven realm where you are liberated and free of suffering and people sometimes when they get into spirituality in Buddhism they hold these as opposites and at the point of enlightenment and Buddhism is to escape into Nirvana but of course this is misunderstanding you can't escape into Nirvana because Nirvana is identical to samsara form is formlessness so there is sort of Nirvana with a lowercase n which is Nirvana as someplace that you escape to but if there's a place that you can escape to that means there's a place you are escaping from which means that there's two places that means - that means duality that means you're not actually non-dual that means you're non duality is incomplete so to truly attain nirvana is to realize that Nirvana is everywhere and that you can't escape Nirvana because there's only one place here now this is Nirvana if you can't realize Nirvana now you never will and then closely related to that is the duality between heaven and hell people think that these are opposites in fact heaven is an absolute heaven with a capital H heaven is here right now heaven is nirvana heaven is ever-present you can't escape heaven you can't go elsewhere to heaven because heaven is everywhere but the problem is that you're creating a hell within your own mind so even though you are in heaven you don't realize you're in heaven because your ego creates its own hell that's what the devil does the devil is a fallen angel which creates its own hell right in the middle of God see because the devil is not separate from God the devil needs to imagine that it's separate from God by creating a separation where within his own mind by imagining it and therefore he creates his own hell crystal clear alright we've gone to the end of the list that is over 250 dualities for you explained reconciled and transcended so there you go now let's issue some concluding room ARC's to wrap all of this together what is the significance of all this well hopefully you're starting to see it hopefully you're thinking through these examples and you're seeing just how radical it is the stuff that I'm saying I'm saying very radical stuff here if this isn't shocking to you if this isn't threatening to you if this isn't triggering emotions of anger and sadness in you then you're not getting it you're not getting it yet this is heavy heavy heavy stuff this is all the stuff they didn't teach you in school all the stuff that science and philosophy doesn't understand this is all the stuff that mainstream culture doesn't teach you and the reason it doesn't is precisely because it's so radical it's so twisted it's so paradoxical and it requires lengthy explanations and it's very nuanced and sophisticated and subtle as you can see you can easily fall into various kinds of traps for example between duality and non-duality or samsara and Nirvana and so forth so you know yeah it took it took hours how many hours did it take to explain all this a lot and you still don't really understand what I talked about here we're still just scratching the surface of all the ramifications of non-duality so what I want you to understand is that the world is not made out of atoms the way you've been taught the world is made out of dualities an atom is one instance of a duality if you say that only I will not atoms maybe it's man of quarks well a quark is also a duality not only if not not quarks just made out of energy energy is also due out no no Lily it's made out of strings super strings that's also do well no Leo its made out of something else some quantum foam stuff that's also a duality anything that you say reality is that's a duality so what I'm telling you here is prior to more fundamental than and transcends any kind of scientific explanation of reality that you can give now you might say but Leo aren't dualities mental and not physical that's the duality you have to grasp something here which transcends language and thought I'm asking a lot of you to understand this it takes a lot to be able to understand what I'm saying here it's tricky stuff you have to actually work through it you can't be sloppy about thinking about this stuff the mistake you're making if you're struggling to understand any of this is you're trying to ground reality into some dualistic category such as physical or non-physical body or mind matter or energy life or death real or not real existence or nonexistence and that is your fundamental error that will never work because what's your assuming tacitly assuming is that reality has a ground and what I'm telling you is that reality has no ground that's what non duality means it's the collapse of all grouts leading to the absolute which is what the Buddhists call the Zen Buddhists call the groundless ground groundless with the capital G ground with a capital G the groundless ground is the realization that reality has no ground and that is the ground you get it it's beyond words and beyond thoughts and beyond symbols now you might say well Leo aren't you contradicting yourself all the time you're speaking and dualities everywhere every video of yours I watch you're speaking dualities yes of course I speak in dualities that's my point it's impossible to not speak in dualities as long as your speaking speech is dualistic all speech contradicts itself when taken far enough non-duality cannot be spoken or written and if you do speak a write about it it will always devolve into contradictions and paradoxes it must because it's all inclusive and it's infinite and unlimited so you can't formalize it all attempts at formalizing reality at mapping it at modelling it ultimately must fail because all maps and formalizations all equations all symbols all systems all images all ideas all philosophies all doctrines all books are finite things occurring within infinite reality so all of those tools that you're trying to use are too small the problem is that you're not realizing just how vast reality is it's absolutely infinite and you need to directly realize that rather than attempting to encapsulated into some system some symbol or some formalization or some equation which is why science will always fail as it is done today because science right now is mostly done through equations and all equations are finite and limited so you're never gonna have a true unified theory of everything it's always gonna be a finite theory that doesn't mean it's wrong or bad it just means it's partial and not complete you can have partial theories which are practical and useful and that you know they they understand some very narrow facet of of reality but they don't understand the whole thing you have to really appreciate that there's a big difference between understanding one part of reality in isolation versus understanding the totality of it to understand the totality of it you can't use the same methods and equations and language even that you used for understanding a little part of it there are two different kinds of thing so understand that any time that you speak or write non-duality instantly you've turned into duality and of course therefore don't expect my speaking to be non dual my speaking is dualistic and I'm honest about that I told you from the very beginning many many episodes ago I told you that everything I say is ultimately false because what I do with actualize that already as I create maps and models and theories various kinds of simplifications and that really my teachings are pragmatic don't expect my teachings to be the absolute truth my teachings are trying to guide you towards a personal realization of the absolute truth and I do claim that that's possible but my teachings are not themselves apps of the truth nor will they ever be nor have I ever been from the very beginning from my very first video nor have I ever been under the impression that anything I say is absolute truth never have I been under that impression because I realized back when I was still in university that that's not possible so I've never even attempted to do that with my work for the last 20 years I've known that even long before I became a woke I understood that the truth cannot be spoken so there's a very interesting paradox here is that anything that your mind will say will be dualistic including any refutation or affirmation of duality or non duality you got that so for example if I say that reality is dual is that true or false it's false technically speaking if I say that reality is non dual is that true or false it's also false technically speaking at the same time there was a hint of truth in both of those statements but yet we can't really say anything about what reality is because the nature of reality is such that is everything and therefore you can't pin it down to any one thing therefore anytime you say that reality is anyway technically you're wrong so if you say reality is big you're wrong because reality is also small if you say reality is red you're wrong because it's also blue if you say reality is human you're wrong because it's also not human if you say reality is alive you're also wrong because it's also not alive see are you getting that so anytime that I say that reality is some way you need to understand that I'm pointing to something I might be getting at some partial truth but I'm not telling you the whole truth it's a partial truth and that's okay partial truths are valuable and useful you just have to understand that they're partial you'd be surprised at how many people confuse partial truths with total truths so the whole trick here is not to exclude anything accidentally because some people get stuck on this idea that there is a god and other people get stuck on this idea that there isn't a god and some people get stuck on the idea that life is unfair and other people get stuck on the idea that life is good and it's all fair in the end who's right well it's all of that and more and none it's everything see the mistake is believing that you can say reality is blank you can't say that the truth then you could say is that reality is blank and leave it a blank because that's what it is that blank signifies nothing and everything you could fill that blank in with whatever you want that's the nature of reality it gives you total freedom it's like a it's like a variable that is allowed to be anything that it wants to be I eat like a universal variable so one thing you should take away from everything in this series is that from now on do not let anyone ever again fool you with dualistic categories people will try to fool you because they themselves are fooled and operating from duality so your teacher or your professor or some book that you're reading or some guru you're listening to or some political person commentator that you listen to they will try to frame reality in some sort of dualistic fashion using their categories without being conscious that they created these categories and they will try to foist these categories upon you they will try to get you to accept these categories as absolute truths and I want you to be wise enough to realize that they are deluded and not to buy into their categories because reality cannot be categorized because it is infinite at the same time this is very very important I am NOT saying that various categorization schemes are useless and are bad I'm not saying that in fact to navigate life effectively you need to be able to wisely create categories that are functional in various kinds of domains so it's not about rejecting all categories again it's about being aware of the trickeries of how categories work and being skillful at navigating them being skillful at drawing them and redrawing them constructing them and deconstructing them you see so again anything that you think I'm saying which is exclusionary is you misunderstanding what I'm saying so if I'm bad-mouthing science I'm not saying we need to exclude science I'm saying we need to go beyond science if I'm bad-mouthing categories I'm saying to abandon category I'm saying we got to go beyond categories if I'm if I'm bad-mouthing some political ideology that I don't agree with I'm not saying that it's it it has no function or that shouldn't exist I'm saying that we got to go beyond it and it's partial all divisions are limited partial and temporary all divisions are creations which must ultimately collapse back into source which is emptiness or the groundless ground let's quickly go over one more time what the absolutes are let's sort of unify all the loot absolutes together that we mentioned throughout this whole list we had all of these terms and I'll be speaking right now are gonna be uppercase letters so for example truth with an uppercase T that's an absolute actual with an uppercase a is an absolute existence being consciousness goodness love intelligence beauty fairness power order mind selflessness the self wisdom unlimited unity oneness wholeness infinity absolute of course non duality heaven life creation enlightenment spirit God happiness peace perfection divinity eternity immortality and mystery all of these are absolutes but the trick is that any ideas that you have about what these are are not the absolute they're just ideas relative ideas but what you can do is you can do practices like meditation self inquiry psychedelics yoga and so forth to become conscious of the actual absolutes which I cannot communicate to you here other than in this dualistic relative fashion which I'm doing got it good but you still are probably wondering but leo there's so many of these absolutes how many of them are there shouldn't there only be one absolute are you saying there's only one but then what these they all seem different you know what what does love have to do with infinity and what does that have to do with with Eternity and so forth well of course when you ask the question how many absolutes are there you're bringing in you're sneaking in an implicit duality of one versus many because you're asking the question is there one absolute or than many absolutes and the answer is oneness is identical to many Ness as we've mentioned up above so the absolute is tricky in this sense and that it is one the absolute is one but at the same time it's also many it's a whole that contains many parts or a good way to think of it it's like a diamond with many facets to it and so when you're doing psychedelic trips or you're doing yoga or whatever you're become conscious various aspects of the things that I said you're never going to become conscious of everything that I said all at once it's way too much way too much you're gonna be glimpsing facets kind of like looking at a diamond and only seeing one or two or three facets at once but not the whole thing and you have to kind of like spin it around look at it from every angle to get a full sense of what it is you see and a good metaphor that they have in the Hindu traditions and in Buddhism as well I think is the the blind men and the elephant parable where you have an elephant and you have these five blind men and each blind man is it's feeling some different part of the elephant one of them is feeling the foot another one is feeling the tail another feeling the tusks another Fela is feeling that the snout or at the nose another one is feeling the side and each one explains what he's feeling but he can't see because he's blindfolded so the one groping the tale says it's like a rope the one groping delay says it's like a tree trunk the one feeling the side of the elephant says it's like a wall the one feeling the Tusk says it's like some pointy thing and the one feeling the nose says it's like a snake so who is correct well of course they all are in a sense because they're describing a part of one whole elephant it's one elephant but they're scribing different parts to really understand an elephant you got to really like exam and all the different parts closely and it would be a mistake for you to carve up the elephant in two parts like you know get a butcher knife kill the elephant and then cut up every part of the elephant because you don't have the full elephant at that point you split it up into into divisions you fragmented it that might be useful if you want to learn about each individual part but if you want to understand the whole elephant in its totality you got to stand far back and get a good overall view of the whole thing and that's what we're doing here so you might wonder at this point well leo but what's the point of all this philosophy the point is that your mind and your culture has fragmented reality just like carving up an elephant with a butcher knife and now it's time to put all these pieces back together and no one is gonna do it but you your culture your society your family your friends they're not gonna do it for you science is not gonna do it for you your guru is not gonna do it for you only you can do it because ultimately you are the one who created all these divisions not somebody else but you you need to take responsibility for all the dividing that you've done and you need to repent for your devilish division divisionary ways and you need to awaken to unity with a capital u so your job in this life is to embrace all of yourself all of yourself not some parts that you like all of yourself especially those parts of yourself that you hate those parts of the world that you hate those parts that you don't believe are you you need to especially embrace those and become conscious that they're you so the trick though is that you need to do this unification without actually destroying the forms and the opposites because it's possible to do a simplistic naive sloppy unification wherein you reject division you reject evil and hatred because you think that everybody should just love each other there should be peace and no war and there should be happiness and no sadness and there should be good politicians but not bad politicians and there should be unification but not division but if you do it that way then you fail to actually unify the divisions because a true absolute unifications means that you accept division your tolerance of it because your nature is division you see also it's very important that as you're doing this unification that you don't remove distinctions unification is not a lack of distinction you can have infinite distinctions and unify them all so I'm not saying that you become some simple-minded fool who can't tell the difference between a man and a woman a cat and a dog a a murder and some charity work or your right hand and your left hand yeah you can still distinguish all these things but at the same time you can realize that all of them are part of the full bouquet and diversity of your self and you could embrace them all without hating them you can even embrace hatred without hating the hater such that when you see people on TV who are hateful and racists and terrorists and dictators and corrupt politicians you look at them and you say that's me that's what reality is that's truth that's God now also it doesn't mean that you can't stop them or vote against them in an election or that you have to condone their actions and support their actions by contributing money to them you can stop them so if there's some politician you don't like you can vote against him that's okay the point is that you don't hate him and the point is that you understand why he is the way he is and that you understand that he is you you see your unification needs to be so all-encompassing that you even embrace division and evil that's how deep your love needs to go you need to love indiscriminately which does not mean that you will by devilry and that you tolerate people doing evil stuff around you and that you become a do a doormat for Devils that is not what I'm saying get that out of your stupid mind awakening doesn't make you stupid and simple-minded awakening actually makes you a more sophisticated and careful thinker it increases your capacity to make distinctions but at the same time it frees you of all distinctions and it makes you aware of unity that's true non duality let's do an exercise right now for unification of duality think of any duality where you favor one side over another side so for example masculine versus feminine maybe you favor one over the other capitalism versus socialism maybe you favor one over the other people versus corporations science versus religion logic versus emotions good versus evil and so forth find one example right now where you have a preference for one over the other and where you tend to discredit judge hate and demonize the other poll for example you might think that masculinity is good and that femininity is bad feminism has been ruining men and setting men back and so forth so you find that example for yourself good now unify them together realize that one is intimately related to the other one is defined in terms of the other and that actually both of them are you your true nature includes both so if you hate feminism then you need to acknowledge that actually feminism is you you created feminism there's nothing wrong with feminism it shouldn't not exist because it does feminism is true because it exists and you need to embrace it as part of yourself now does that mean that you need to go put on lipstick if you're a man and high heels and walk around outdoors and high heels no you can still distinguish masculine from feminine you could still act feminine I mean you can still act masculine if you want to that's fine people have preferences there I'm not saying that you need to be a half-man half-woman hybrid or some you know someone who doesn't act masculine when it feels right for you if you're a man I'm just saying you need to you need to realize the deeper unity between these things acknowledge the value and importance of that inferior marginalized half that you've been hating judging and rejecting that's difficult to do I'm asking your mind to do something he doesn't want to do because we get our attachments you know to one pole or another pole like we're really attached to capitalism or socialism or to science or to religion to the exclusion of the other one but this is where real growth happens is when you learn to do this unification this is how you transcend hatred this is how you transcend having a shadow this is how you transcend pathologies within spirituality and personal development is by doing these sorts of unifications so remember this exercise is not something you just do once this is something you can keep doing for months every single day you can find some new thing some new duality and you can unify together using this exercise so I highly recommend that you spend some time really working with this in your journal in your commonplace book this is something you'll you want to keep returning to again and again because this is this is actually a part of shadow work and I'll talk about shadow work in the future because I know you guys want that episode but here's the beginning of shadow work right here to integrate your shadow unify all dualities the key mistake of spiral dynamic stage blue religion and morality is that the ego is so eager at that level of development to grasp the absolute truth that in fact it turns the truth into an absolute belief clinging to some relative human categories so the whole tragedy of dogmatic religious people whether they're Buddha Hindus Jews Christians or Muslims is is that they have mistaken their beliefs in the absolute for the actual absolute and it's precisely that clinging to their belief which is keeping them from actual izing God Christ Shiva Allah Yahweh or whatever else you see with this clinging it leads to absolute istic behavior authoritarian tribal devilish behavior and it leads to an int a fundamental inability to understand evil and of course if you are not able to understand evil that means that you will commit evil so the the tragedy is that those people in the world who are most passionate about eradicating evil are precisely the source of the majority of the evil in the world tada wishes why spoil dynamic stage Bleu is so dangerous and so problematic and right now upwards of 70% of the entire population on earth is spiral dynamics stage blue or lower that's a big problem that's where a lot of evil comes from so of course we can't demonize them for being at stage blue they're not wrong for being a stage blue it can't be helped it's just evolution its development it has it's how it has to be but but at the same time we do want to help them to evolve upward out of blue we need to help the rest of the world evolve out of blue otherwise there's going to be a lot of evil and a lot of devilry and the entire world might ultimately collapse so from now on when you think about the world I want you to be hyper aware of the dualities and you're thinking I want you to question every category and attempt to deconstruct it at least as an intellectual exercise just to begin with ask yourself some of the following questions when you're trying to deconstruct a category what is this category grounded in for example the category of masculine versus feminine what's it actually grounded in what's its substance what's its reality notice that whatever you grounded in will itself be another duality in category so you're gonna want to ask then about that one what's that one grounded in and what's that one grounded in and so you keep going down the chain until you get to the very bottom until you realize that it's grounded in nothing and that's correct it's grounded in nothing also ask yourself this question how does this category contain aspects of its opposite for example with masculine versus feminine you might say leo the masculine doesn't contain any aspects of the feminine but of course it does they're deeply interrelated because the more masculine you are for example the more attracted you are to feminine and females so isn't it ironic that some of the most masculine men who oftentimes have a hatred for femininity and for feminism on some ideological level at the same time they're actually in love and get sexually excited by the most feminine females and you see how how twisted and fucked-up that is also ask yourself this question how are both sides of this category good with an uppercase G so for example if you think that feminism is bad and evil and so forth ask yourself but how is it good how is it good in the larger scheme of things and what you might discover that is you might discover well you know if I have a daughter in the future it's gonna be good that there was a feminist movement that gave her equal rights so she can like open a bank account have her own credit card so that she can drive her own car so that she's not wearing some burqa like they do in Saudi Arabia so that she can get a divorce if she's married to some who abuses her because our legal system gives her the right to do that whereas for example in in certain countries like in Saudi Arabia you know a woman she can get raped and she can't even report it to the police or to the court system because they're had her their culture and their and their law is so backwards that actually they will blame the woman for the rape and they will say well if she got raped then she's actually she's she's like the frivolous one she used the indecent one and so she deserves punishment for the fact that she got raped you see so isn't it nice that we have a feminist movement here in in America or in Europe that has done away with some of those really crude archaic gender differences within society isn't that nice if you have a daughter see that changes in your perspective a lot or if you want to go even more radical consider this in the next lifetime after this lifetime is over you have a 50/50 chance of being born as a woman so wouldn't it be nice if you're born as a woman the there is such a thing as feminism see so try that another question you can ask yourself is how am i clinging to this category you should be able to go inside of yourself introspect and feel an emotional attachment or clinginess to whatever pull of this duality that you're clinging to so if you're a male you're gonna have this sort of need this need to argue with me Leo Leo I got a bunch of arguments for why feminism is evil and bad and all of your arguments are wrong and Leo you're you're bad you're deluded you're stupid and you're social just we're all let's see that's what I mean that's a clinging that you have feel that rather than being carried away with it feel it and observe that clinginess realize that that's not healthy it's not true that's your attachment and that's your ego that's your delusion that you got to work through and lastly ask yourself the question how am i trying to ground all of reality into some kind of duality what is the most fundamental duality for you is it a duality between self and world between God and the devil between matter and mind and you just keep insisting that matter is what's true Leo it's matter everything's matter or Leo everything is rational or Leo everything is everything is just a energy that's how your grounding reality look at that very very carefully in conclusion I just want to stress that you will not transcend duality through thought you cannot access the absolute through thought now that doesn't mean that it's not useful to think about this stuff you got to start somewhere you can't just go from hearing this lecture and then jumping straight into full God realization of the absolute like that like it's not gonna happen you got to start to think about this stuff because thinking is all you know how to do at this point so yeah so think about it contemplate it's all gonna be really good it's gonna be part of a deconstruction process you're loosening up your mind you're opening yourself up and then you can do meditation concentration yoga psychedelics to to really access the absolute so you're going to need both this is extremely tricky stuff extremely tricky stuff if you're a psychedelic user and you like to trip I recommend that you spend a lot of time contemplating these dualities prior to your trips and then when you go into your trip try to actually work on one of these dualities pick one to focus on maybe the one of like devil versus God or saying versus insane although that one's tricky mmm good versus bad or or you know matter versus energy pick one that appeals to you that you're most fascinated by and then try to work with that and contemplate it while you're in the middle of your trip and what you should discover that your trips become so much more profound and you they become much more practical and you can grow so much from them and then also you have now a road map for hundreds of trips into the future how many trips you want to do you wanna do 100 trips where every trip you dedicate to one of these dualities I have 250 dualities for you here that's 250 trips worth at least and actually some of these dualities are so profound that you'll need to trip multiple times on each one like for example the duality between self and other or self and God that one you can do 10 20 30 trips just on that duality to really fully plumb the depths of of what that really means and if you do that you'll be one highly woke if you succeed in that of course be careful it won't be easy to transcend all these dualities will be a the work of your lifetime it is the reason that you're here on this earth is to understand this stuff to understand yourself as God so there you go but the question is did you actually fathom the depth of what was said here in this series be careful well don't assume that you did this is very advanced stuff I don't know anything more advanced than this this is a very profound topic it's not enough to just talk about it you really gotta experience it you have to really do some serious deconstruction on yourself conceptual understanding will not be enough but it's a good place to start so let's start there as always don't believe what I said verify for yourself don't treat me it as any kind of authority figure nothing I say hinges on my authority it all hinges on direct experience so my claim is very empirical my claim is that if you explore these dualities for yourself you will find that they will collapse and many of the things that I said here will seem very true for you that's my claim I could be wrong so verify for yourself you know hey maybe I'm wrong maybe I'm deluded maybe I'm crazy you don't know from your point of view you don't know don't trust me verify do the research do your own experiments and be a good scientist be a good philosopher and that is the end all right but of course as we've talked about the end is always a new beginning so there's much more to come please click that like button for me come also check out actualize that org look at my blog I'm posting new stuff there all the time check out the life purpose course check out the forum ask your questions there I spent a lot of my energy and time on the forum answering people's questions so they make good use of it and the last thing that I'll tell you is that yes these are very long-winded episodes multiple parts but you will be rewarded for sticking through it this work takes dedication this is not something you do by just browsing through YouTube randomly watching a video here or watching a video they're screwing around this really takes serious work this is radical and cutting-edge stuff and I know that at times it can seem impractical and very abstract and philosophical but there's a there's a method to the madness there's a deeper wisdom here that I'm trying to guide you towards and you have to have a certain kind of vision and faith that it's gonna pay off the work the time that you spend studying taking notes just even listening to videos maybe listening to them multiple times contemplating for yourself all of this is a lot of work yes the distraction from your business and from your family for whatever stupid stuff you do every day but on the other hand what else is there to do in life you got something better to do you got somewhere else to be that's more important than this who else is talking to you like this who else is teaching you these things who else is explaining this stuff at this level of depth to you this is rare stuff so don't take it for granted remember that our goal here is to build a massive skyscraper we're not just building a simple little three-story house we're building a massive skyscraper with your personal development and your spirituality so that's what your life is going to be is gonna be a massive skyscraper and that's gonna take a big investment a bigger one than building a three-story house and that's gonna require time to really dig and lay a proper foundation which is gonna be able to bear the weight of this massive structure you're gonna build on top of it in this work so don't get discouraged console yourself and your toughest times when you feel depressed when you feel lazy when you feel like you're not getting the results that you've been expecting that it's taking longer than you thought when you're struggling when you're frustrated when you've got some emotional issue that you're struggling with and just keep reminding yourself that you're doing all this for some very large vision in the end you know we're not working towards something small here we're not just working towards a million dollars we're not just working to some relationship well we're working towards omniscience of the entire universe we're working towards immortality we're working towards total God realization we're working towards sainthood we're working towards infinite love we're working towards infinite understanding this is what we're working towards so yeah it's gonna take some work it's gonna take some time be patient hold the vision learn how to motivate yourself pace yourself build momentum over time invest in the practices gradually it's a lot of stuff it's very easy to get overwhelmed because I share so much I can see how this would be so overwhelming for most newcomers so you're gonna have to break it up into piece by piece and eat the elephant one piece at a time as they say um and of course understand that everything that I've talked about so far is still just the tip of the iceberg there's so much more which is why you should stick around there's many new topics that are coming stuff that I haven't ever said before so don't just think that I'm a broken record and that all I talk about is duality and non-duality know there's a ton of other stuff you'll be amazed and shocked by all the practical and useful stuff that I'll have for you in the future so make sure you stay tuned for that you